As Confidence In Military Plummets, DC Swamp Calls For A Draft
As new data comes out from Gallup showing a deep American crisis in confidence in the US military, a new op-ed in the Pentagon-friendly Military.com is calling for a "limited" military draft to fill the growing gaps between projected force needs and recruitment. Are they trying to grease the skids for an upcoming military conflict with Russia and China? Also today, MSNBC thug calls for new "PATRIOT Act" against MSNBC's political enemies.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Very well.
Thank you.
We're going to be talking about serious stuff today.
Not that we don't every day.
What we try to make is we try not to depress people.
So the best way not to depress people is don't become depressed yourself.
Sometimes you have to work at this and be distracted from our duty to present the political truths as we see it.
We have other ways of trying to relax.
But today we're going to follow up on a report we did last week.
We started talking about, you know, the whispers and the noise about reinstituting slavery.
What?
Slavery?
Yeah, you know, I think there's two forms of major forms of slavery in this country.
When the government makes the assumption that they own every penny you earn and you're allowed to keep the amount that they want you to keep under their conditions, I call that as close to economic slavery as you can get.
But that's not the one I want to talk about.
It was a different type of slavery that's been around for, you know, thousands of years, probably.
And I have a family story that was told that my grandfather left Germany when he was 14 and came over here by himself.
And the whispers in the family was he was escaping the draft.
Maybe that's where I got some of those instincts.
But this whole thing about reinstituting the draft, I think is a form of slavery.
And I made some major decisions in my life on what training I would have and what I would do.
Always back into my mind, I would be drafted.
And so when I got drafted, it seems like, well, I knew it was coming, even though there was a period of time, you know, in the 70s after people got sick of the Vietnam War, the people were reacting.
And for a couple years, we didn't have the draft.
We didn't even have the registration until 1979 and 1980.
The effort was made to renew the registration, which I always thought was foolish and made no sense whatsoever.
Why would you do it unless you want to enslave these people?
And it really is one of the most discriminatory events of our government.
They worry about equity and fairness and civil liberties.
But how can you have it without, you know, you don't need 10 million people in the military.
You need to pick and choose.
And up until now, it's always been that when they've had drafts, the minority suffered the most for various reasons.
They suffered the most.
But right now, they're talking about it again because of the market saying to young people, what do you want to get into the military?
You know, there's been a decrease in enthusiasm for the military.
Interesting enough, there's records now that surprisingly, even the support coming from the hawkish type of Republican Party has been greatly reduced.
It went down like 20 points in the last couple years.
So that is telling us something that there's something wrong, and it is in Vietnam going on right now.
And even the tragedy of the Mideast wars going on and even the tragedy of us being involved in precipitating and pursuing war In Syria and in Ukraine, that's not it.
There's something else going on.
And of course, we want to talk about that.
But we came across an article that talks a lot about it, a military person who comes up with the decision.
It disappeared in military.com.
We need a limited military draft.
Oh, no sweat.
It's limited.
They're not going to draft you, Daniel, so don't worry.
They'll be offensive.
I couldn't say that at one time, and my instincts were correct, you know.
But I survived it, and that was in 1963, you know, and that was not exactly a great decade for common sense.
And because of the Cuban crisis, that was actually the motivation for the government to come and get me.
And then also the Vietnam War was still raging, you know, for the whole 60s period.
So this is bad news for the concept of liberty.
It does, I think, it should be attacked on basic principle of whose life is it anyway.
And make sure that people at least hear the principles.
It's not your life if the government has total economic control of every penny you earn and what you can do at certain times and set up all the rules.
And that family members and individuals and everybody is vulnerable, the whole system is vulnerable to people being susceptible to the government coming and saying, we need you.
We need you to go.
And this is in spite of all the technology that we have.
Somebody could sit at a desk someplace and probably drop a bomb any place in the world and pinpoint it.
And yet they still need thousands and thousands of troops.
They spend it.
This article is, you know, they mention how much money they spend just recruiting one individual.
So let's hope that we can contribute something to this argument.
But it's unnecessary, it's unfair, it's not equitable, and we oppose it.
Yeah.
Well, I think, let's put on that first clip, because here's the article we noticed this morning.
And I think the reason we're talking about it, we've talked about the draft a lot.
You've done so much work on the selective service and draft and registration.
I think the reason why it's worth talking about this article is because in many ways it's a very reasonable article, especially if you don't understand the philosophy of freedom and of liberty.
The author of the article is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Joe Plensler, and I don't doubt that he has noble interests in mind when he makes this argument.
But he makes some very, very, very clever points to make his case.
It's not just a call to patriotism and a call to Americans to serve.
It actually makes some very practical points.
And that's why I think we need to try to dissect it because I think there's a danger.
Let's put on that next clip because this is some of his rationale in writing this article.
He talks about since 1775, our nation has used a combination of volunteers and draftees to meet our national defense needs.
He said today the military needs only about 160,000 youth from an eligible population of 30 million to meet its recruitment needs.
And then he says, but after two decades of war, both of which ended unsuccessfully, and low unemployment, many experts believe an all-volunteer force has reached a breaking point.
So the problem is they're not able to recruit Dr. Paul as they have been.
We've talked a lot about the recruiting gaps.
He mentions, interestingly enough, that two decades of unsuccessful war, i.e. Losing consistently from 2000 after 9-11 until now has been a problem.
But this is interesting because here's what he's saying.
Now, if we go to the next one, here is his modest proposal.
He says, instead of an either-or, essentially is what he's saying, I propose a both-and solution.
Here's what he says: We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year and then have the selective service draft the delta between the military needs and the total number recruited.
So in month number 12, the recruiters go on break and the drafters come into their office and they draft the gap out of that pool of selective service registrants.
Yeah, I've always made fun of this whole thing about the registration.
And when they argued that registration after the Vietnam War, you know, in the 70s, because for about almost nine years there was no registration.
I said, why are you doing it?
The government knows who you are and where you are because they get notices from the government.
You haven't registered yet.
And they had ways of knowing.
But he gives a hint in this article of this, and he goes on to say, the registration and the draft reduces the much decried civilian military gap by subjecting all of American youth.
So it's sort of a psychological thing.
They don't need it.
And this is not just that everybody's registered now, but now they want to be subject to the draft.
But they're pretending that if the people who are anti-draft and the other people who are for it and all this, if they just come together, you know, of having a voluntary or a mandatory draft, this would work out.
But to me, it reminds me of the compromise that I've seen in politics is both sides give up.
Okay, let's just talk about conservatives and liberals.
Conservatives concede some of their good stuff and the liberals concede some of their good stuff.
And they come together and nobody wins when they do that because they become moderates and they do it by endorsing the other people's faults.
And this is more like this.
They're going to come together, punish everybody, and this is how you're going to finally have a draft because we can be protected.
And there is no way that I can be convinced that the draft is going to make us feel more protected under that system of government.
What we need are some policy changes because our aggression around the world with our empire doesn't have a lot to do with the military with guns patrolling streets.
It's economic nonsense and control, a lot of things like this, coups, a lot of things in secret.
That's where the real problem is.
It's the problem of interventionist foreign policy and all this is a distraction from those issues.
Yeah, and the other reason we're bringing it up is that we have this gap and the Biden administration is without a doubt with support of Republicans, as you would say, is pursuing a conflict with Russia and China simultaneously.
There's going to be a real need.
And so here's more of the rationale of this Lieutenant Colonel.
And again, I say it's going to resonate with a lot of people.
Do this next one because it's all practical.
It's all about, actually go back one.
It's all about practical.
Here's what he said.
Here's what his model, the hybrid model, if you can rewind just one, please.
He said, okay, it's going to alleviate the incredible pressure on recruiters.
It's going to lower the cost of finding new troops and significantly, this is the one part that's interesting, Dr. Paul, significantly reduce the much decried civilian military gap by subjecting all of America's youth, rich and poor, to the possibility of service in the draft.
So he's saying, we're going to get rid of the poverty draft.
We're going to have rich kids going to, as well as poor kids, and that'll make it more even.
We're going to save a lot of money.
And not only that, If you put the next one on, it's going to save money.
It's going to ease up our recruiters.
It's going to even up the gap between the rich and the poor.
And it might also have the added effect of increasing public pressure to prevent open-ended wars led by unaccountable senior leaders.
So you have all of this, but wait, there's more, one more, and you mentioned it earlier on, Dr. Paul.
It's going to do all those wonderful things.
And it's going to, the establishment of an all-volunteer force also drove the military to expend an incredible amount of resources in terms of manpower and dollars to build a recruiting machine.
So it's going to save all this money of the recruiting machine, considering it costs, as you mentioned earlier, $15,000 to recruit each new member, and the overall cost each year exceeds $2 billion for recruiting, save money, prevent wars, do all these wonderful things.
I don't know, Dr. Paul.
He's doing a hard sell here.
You know, along with what you were just saying here, it would increase public pressure to prevent open-ended wars led by unaccountable senior leaders.
You know, they said the draft is going to prevent those kind of wars, which doesn't make any sense.
Because what do they not talk about?
What we talk about here about 90% of the time when we're on foreign policy, mind our own business, come home, you know, and defend this country.
But no, they have all this.
This is fancy, and like you say, his strategy of what, and he knows to whom he's speaking, you know, the American people.
Oh, this sounds pretty good.
This sounds good.
It's a compromise.
Yeah, you can still be patriotic.
Matter of fact, he wants people to feel more patriotic because they've worked out of that disagreement, you know, and coming together to defend this country.
Yet it's the conflicts in the country.
Why are we involved in the Middle East right now in Ukraine?
It has to do not because we don't have a draft.
It's because we've drafted the American people to work and slave and coffee up a lot of money for us to build weapons to enrich the military-industrial complex.
That's the part they don't want to touch.
Not once does he mention that kind of material.
In fact, as you were saying that, I was writing that exact same thing down because, yeah, the problem is it doesn't defend this country at all.
You know, it defends other countries and it defends the military-industrial complex.
So the bottom line is, as you say, Dr. Paul, we have to change our foreign policy before we can close these gaps.
There really, there is no one, there are few people, let's put it that way, that if our country were really under threat, they wouldn't step up to defend this country.
But when is the last time the Americans have had to defend America?
You know, we're blessed in many ways by our particular geography.
It's very unlikely that Mexico will invade us or Canada.
So we have that protection, so we don't need to have all of this military.
So anyway, it's an interesting topic.
You know, I want to re-mention this about the cost.
Decline In Military Confidence00:07:19
It's $15,000 to get one recruit into the military.
We have to fool them a little bit and offer and bribe them and all these other things.
And the total is over $2 billion.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Total.
I mean, that's a hunk of change.
Less so now than it used to be.
I remember that great scene from Fahrenheit 9-11, the Michael Moore film, where there was an inner-city black kid playing basketball.
And these two white recruiters came up and said, Hey, what do you like to do?
And the kid said, I like to play basketball.
They said, You could do that in the military.
Good luck with that guy.
I hope he didn't sign up.
But here's a related story, our second story of the day.
And this came out of Gallup.
If we can put this next one on, I think this is via anti-war.com.
I want to give them credit if they had it up first.
Go forward one.
There we go.
This is a new Gallup survey.
Confidence in the U.S. military is the lowest in over two decades.
Americans' confidence in the military has plummeted.
Do the next one if you can.
Here are the numbers.
Now, when it started falling, you can't see here because it's interactive, but that's about 2020.
So the end of the Trump era or the first Trump era, maybe.
And then you see a precipitous decline in the Biden era, quite significant after 2021.
So the confidence in the military, they say, has gone down the lowest it's been since the end of the Cold War.
And this is among Republicans.
If you put the next one on, this will tell you it's Republicans and Democrats.
But the Gallup write-up of the survey says throughout nearly all the past 48 years, Republicans have been the most likely to express confidence in the military.
And they remain so today.
But the rate has declined by over 20 percentage points in three years from 91 to 68.
And a similar decline has occurred among independent voters.
A smaller but still decline has occurred among Democrat voters.
So a real decline in our confidence in the military.
What do you think about that?
Well, I think we're in denial, or the people are in denial, about maybe thinking about an issue that the average citizen now is thinking about all the time, and that's wokeism.
You know, now that the military has gone woke, you know, there's a lot of people that don't feel excited about that.
Oh, no, how could anybody be anti-military because of that?
Maybe it's not working well, but it's so well-intentioned.
Well, if they'll stop drinking beer, I'll tell you what, they'll respond to it and put pressure on sporting events or the whole works.
So they're in denial that this has anything to do with it.
But what if that was a major part or any part of it?
You would think that, but you can't say it.
I mean, the worst thing you could do now is if you want to become a general, you come out, you're a lieutenant and colonel, and you want to become general, I think you'd lose your chances.
Which is amazing to me is how much full authority they have over whether it's promotion and business or medicine or science, sports, and so many things.
It's just that this polygenerism has done, how they've destroyed women's sports, and you're not allowed to even say it.
You're not allowed to have a discussion.
And it's the power of what they've gained by this.
And it's ideological, but I'll tell you what, the only answer is ideological.
And I think the ideological of a little bit of common sense is coming alive again.
Yeah.
And, you know, looking for the reasons of this, our good friend Kelly Vlajos has a piece that she wrote in Responsible Statecraft.
And she points out that, you know, there's a tendency to oversimplify it on ideological terms.
And she writes that the left claims that racism and other intolerance in the ranks has caused Americans to turn against the military.
And the right says the woke politics are the reason that there's increasingly alienation from the military.
But she says, beware of partisan narratives that appear to speak for everyone and explain trends so neatly.
Never is anything that simple.
So I think her point is that there's something bigger going on here.
There's a little bit of truth maybe to both of those, especially the woke.
But there's something else going on, which is a hesitation.
We lost in Afghanistan.
We lost in Iraq.
We blew up Libya.
We just don't seem to be wearing the white hats anymore.
And we don't seem to be able to win any wars anymore.
And Biden has drug us into this war in Ukraine to a tune of about $150 billion with the possibility of Americans going.
And I think that might be the reason the military is being used as a cudgel, you know, and I think Americans are tired of it.
You know, I think Americans are convinced rather easily of not wanting to think about our mistakes.
And we have a lot of mistakes in foreign policy, a lot of interventions that we make that nobody cares about because they don't see body bags of Americans.
We changed our tune.
We don't have troops in Vietnam.
We don't have, well, we have troops around the world, but it isn't in this fighting that goes on.
But when you look at the empire, I mean, there's a lot of violence going on and the power that we have and the wealth that we have, which is shrinking like crazy.
As the power shrinks economically, it also shrinks in support of our military.
But we're involved in the financial field.
We have the reserve currency of the world.
And we can throw our weight around.
We can cut people off.
We can put on sanctions.
I've always argued that if we had some of these boycotts placed against us, what if China would ever do that to us, and had 20 ships in the Gulf of Mexico to prove that this free lane?
They have a right to be there.
That would be different.
But we're an empire on decline.
And of course, what's up for Grey Opposition is what's going to replace it?
You see, I don't think they can stop the decline of the empire.
It happens throughout all history.
All the empires disappear.
And it's always overextension overseas and over-authoritarianism to do this, taxes or whatever.
And people finally get disgusted with it.
And the big question is, what will replace it?
And I think that's where we have advanced with civilization over the last several hundred years.
I mean, there's so much technology that has been advanced, but it's so often used for the military and used for the power of the dictators, where the technology should be used for promoting a free society.
New Patriot Act Concerns00:10:43
And that is the challenge.
And that's where I hope I'm right, that there is progress being made in those areas.
Yeah.
Well, the last thing we want to talk about is something I noticed last week.
They had this guy in MSNBC, and he was going on, I think he's ex-military, whatever.
And he's going on about how we need a new Patriot Act because there's too many racists and too many right-wingers.
Put the next one on.
We saw this via Zero Heads this morning.
They wrote it up.
It did happen last week, but it's MSNBC, surprise, surprise.
And here's the article called Deep State MSNBC Goon, appropriate, calls for a new Patriot Act against domestic terrorists.
And we've been following this for years, Dr. Paul, about how there's a real effort to label Americans domestic terrorists, how they abused January 6th, and in fact may have inspired it and pushed it along to create this class of American terrorists, quote unquote, that they can deal with.
Well, this article is kind of interesting because it was originally published in Armageddon Pros.
And they start out by showing a clip from none other than John Brennan, who really is one of the most evil people in the world.
I think he was the head of the CIA.
He's the head of the fake news Russia Gate stuff and Russia collusion stuff.
And he's just an all-around bad guy.
But here's him right after January 6th, 2021, where he is laying down the gauntlet.
Here are the bad guys that we need to deal with now that Biden's in power.
Let's cue that first clip up and hear what he has to say.
First one, actually.
The first clip is from Twitter.
There we go.
But because of this growth in polarization in the United States and domestic violence in white supremacist groups.
So I know looking forward that the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas,
where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.
And unfortunately, I yeah, so even libertarians.
So here's Brennan laying down the gauntlet.
And we've seen this has been the theme during the Biden presidency: that we have got to crack down on these domestic terrorists.
And if they don't exist, by golly, we've got to create them.
And I think that's what Brennan is saying.
Now, this is not the crux of the article, but that's how he lays it up.
That's how he cues it up.
And I just, ironically, there's a lot of problems.
And the system, the way it's working now, we're encouraging because we subsidize violence and we eliminate the responsibility of the government to take care of the violent activities and arrest people that are doing these things.
But here, what are we doing?
We're doing exactly the opposite.
We don't punish them, and yet we allow them to use this as an effort.
We need more.
We need more of this thing.
And what we have is we don't have the right kind of local police.
These are national, international police that want to tell us, and now they want a new Patriot Act.
But you know what I was thinking about when I saw this?
This goon calls for the new Patriot Act against domestic terrorists.
And I thought, yeah, new Patriot Act, old tyranny.
The tyrannies have been around.
The authoritarians have been around.
And they call it a new name because it sounds good.
I remember that day so well when that passed.
I think it was within a week after 9-11.
And that, in my mind, was a bad sign.
And here it is.
We're still talking about it.
And yet, there are a lot of people who know and understand it.
But we're at the moment outnumbered where the information is coming.
I don't think we're outnumbered by total numbers of people and citizens, but they don't have the knowledge.
But when you look at the educational system, the media, the whole works, yes, the noise coming out here, this is to be a good patriot.
You got to hug, like one member told me when we were sitting voting for the Patriot.
I said, Why are you voting against, voting for this?
Because I knew he didn't really believe in it.
He says, How am I going to ever go home and explain it to my people at home?
I voted at the height of 9-11 that I voted against the Patriot Act.
And that's how politics works.
That's so symbolic of the way it works to propagandize, to get support back home and raise money.
Yeah, I stood up against the bad people.
Now they just adapt rather easily to who exactly they're going to target, even if they have to go after the libertarians.
Yeah.
Well, let's look at the follow-up then because two years after Brennan said that, and this is last week on MSNBC, they bring on this appropriately, they call him a deep state goon.
Not MSNBC doesn't, but this article does.
We need the other clip, actually.
Paul Rykhoff, deep state goon.
Now, here he is literally taking what John Brennan said earlier and weaponizing it and saying, okay, here's what we need to do.
We need a new Patriot Act to get rid of these people.
Let's go ahead and listen.
I think it's queued up right.
Let's listen to what he has to say on MSNBC.
Well, I think that there's a core point here, which is a lot of Americans are up for grabs.
I wouldn't dismiss it as just something that only people on the right or watching Fox News can latch on to.
I mean, we're in a battle for hearts and minds.
And there are people who are on the fence.
You've got to have leaders and messages and messengers and programs that get to those people, that bring them over into community organizing and into nonprofit organizations and away from the Patriot Front and the Oath Keepers.
And I think the parallels with 9-11 are important.
We've talked about this before.
After 9-11, the laws didn't work.
Like they made massive changes to respond to a new threat.
And I think we have to face the fact that many of our structures, laws, and policies may not work.
After 9-11, we created the Department of Homeland Security.
There was the Patriot Act.
There was massive change in our entire society to face the number one threat, or at least what was communicated as the number one threat.
I think we need the same kind of tectonic shift.
It's got to be much more than see something, say something, but maybe our laws need to change to respond to the fact that someone like Mike Flynn, the former national security director, is openly calling for violence consistently.
Yeah.
So, you know, when it happened, when the Patriot Act happened, you say you warned him, no, it's only going to go after terrorists.
He said, well, they're going to widen that definition.
But his description, his first few minutes, I thought, well, none of those words are bad.
You know, it's philosophic.
It's up for grabs.
And we have to be there and we have to present our case for what patriotism is all about.
And that's the whole thing is they use our language because every one of them, did you, I think you did know this, but everybody that's in Congress took an oath to obey the Constitution.
That's right, that's right.
And they don't do a very good job of that.
But, of course, when I hear those words or say something similar, what I'm thinking is, yes, it's up for grabs.
It is philosophic, but it has to be the message of liberty, and people have to have a little bit of understanding what liberty is all about.
And that involves, you know, tolerance of other people, no use of violence to have your own way, and no lying, cheating, or stealing.
And those are so radical for some of these people because that's about all they use to promote their wonderful patriotic society that they're looking for.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to end up, Dr. Paul, with a reminder, a daily reminder, get those tickets, put the next one up if you can.
This is our conference on September 2nd at the Dulles Airport near, not in D.C. Which Way America?
These are things that we are going to be talking about.
In fact, we're going to have a special guest tomorrow, I'll say, and he's going to be one of the main speakers at our conference.
So you won't want to miss tomorrow's program.
Get your tickets.
There is a link in the comments and in the description.
Get those tickets before they're gone.
Look forward to seeing you on September 2nd.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And once again, I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today because we feel very dedicated toward promoting the cause of liberty, especially that if one seeks peace and prosperity, there's some answers there.
And there's a lot of words that go out there where the opposition uses the same word.
And I was just mentioning to Daniel, I said, you know, the words don't mean a whole lot unless you can believe them.
And why should we be into any trouble?
Because, you know, everybody in Congress takes the same oath of office.
But what has happened, of course, is a distortion of language.
Language has been distorted.
And this is where the big problem is.
And nobody really challenges at the heart of things when they talk about philosophic changes.
They turn it into a monster is what happens is, you know, the bigger the government, the more they think gets along.
Now, today we spend the time trying to warn people, you know, that the draft is likely to come.
You know, that's just more authoritarianism.
And also this payment of people in dangerous military danger.
I wonder why they're trying to already start paying people for hostilities.
So there are plans being laid for expectation.
It's just not preparation necessary because quite frankly, with all the technology we have today, we don't need 50,000 or 100,000 people out there marching just to make the example say, we are the boss and you are the slaves.
You will do what we want.
Why Drafts Signal Slavery00:00:42
And that's what they are.
There's been a lot of talk recently about slavery, but never about the slavery made through taxation and through this authoritarian approach that there's always seems to be a draft and there always seems to be registration.
And that is exactly the opposite of a free society.
And that is a form of slavery.
And that is what we want to prevent.
And that is why that is what motivated our revolution and the writing of the Constitution.
Unfortunately, we need some renewal of those ideas, but we need to have some understanding of exactly what it means.