All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 16, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
14:30
1) Daniel McAdams - Opening Remarks, "Fraying Threads in the Digital Void"

RPI Director opens the Sept. 2nd Ron Paul Institute Conference in Washington DC and presents the themes to be discussed.

|

Time Text
10th Year Anniversary 00:09:13
Well it's great to see all of you.
Welcome to our seventh Ron Paul Institute Washington conference.
I can't believe we've done seven of these.
When we started doing this in 2016, we didn't think it would be successful.
We didn't think people would come out.
But looking around, we're grateful that you have.
I just want to go through, I was just joking with Josh and Jennifer over here that I never really get to do a speech at our own events because I'm too busy worrying and making sure everything's going okay.
So I just have a couple of comments rather than a speech.
But I have to start with some of the stuff that we have to do and that I enjoy doing, which is the people that need to be thanked.
And first I want to thank our speakers.
We have, I think you will agree, a great lineup of speakers this time.
I'm a little selfish because I always ask people to speak that I really want to hear what they have to say at that point in time.
And some people may think, well, you announced your speakers kind of late.
I wish I had known before.
I never really know exactly what the thing is that we need to concentrate on until closer to the event.
And then this is it.
This is the thing.
And so when I had the this is it, I immediately thought of basically all these people who are going to be speaking.
So that's why I'm grateful.
Our speakers, as you know, if you've been here, they give their own time freely.
They are volunteers here.
They use the expertise that they've developed over the course of their careers and they freely give it to us to help educate us.
And so we're very grateful to the speakers.
And if we can just give them a round of applause.
And if I can ask, how many of you are here at a Ron Paul Institute conference for the first time?
That's great.
That's great.
Dr. Paul and I talked about that after the Houston conference because we did the same thing.
And it was a percentage that we were surprised, a higher percentage.
And that's really great because it helps us feel encouraged that we're growing our movement.
I also want to thank the sponsors of today's event.
And you'll see them at the tables that are reserved.
These are the individuals who step up to the plate when we start organizing these events.
And sometimes it's six months or longer.
And it takes a lot of our time and resources.
And so they provide the resources to help us get things together.
And they help us cover the costs of this conference.
As you know, the costs of doing an event like this are much higher than just the ticket prices.
And so we have gold sponsors and silver sponsors who, in exchange for helping us get things going, they can partake in some extra events.
So some of you may in the future want to think about that.
We have a reception before and after for the gold and a reception after for the silver sponsors.
So that might be something to think about and we definitely appreciate that.
Now once again for the seventh time, I want to thank my family who are here again.
My little kids who started with me are now big kids.
My son has a job now and he's taken some time off to help get things going.
And so I'm grateful to them.
My daughter's running the store.
I think she started when she was 14.
She's running the store and my wife of course is doing all the name tags.
People say, well, you know, why don't you just hire people?
Well, I trust my family and I know they know how to do it and they do a good job.
So I really, I'm grateful to them most definitely.
I also want to point out that this year, thank you.
I also want to point out that we have a new project.
This is our fourth now, but we have the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, which takes place a day before the Ron Paul Institute, Washington, D.C. conference.
And we have two tables over here.
We have our largest Ron Paul Scholars class ever.
We have 15 Ron Paul scholars who we've invited in.
We've done a seminar yesterday with them, and it was absolutely terrific.
It's an unbelievably great group of young people.
It gives me so much courage, and it encourages me to see young people that are so bright, and they have such great heads on their shoulder.
And so let's give a round of applause to the Ron Paul Stollers.
And we're grateful to those who have sponsored these students.
And that's certainly something that we would appreciate.
If you're interested, next time the scholars, sponsors get to sit in on the event, and hopefully, I think they learn a little bit too and enjoy it.
So, that might be a nice opportunity.
The other thing I want to recognize is Adam Dick, my colleague over there.
Adam is absolutely diligent in making sure that everything works perfectly with the hotel and the room.
He's been my colleague at the Ron Paul Institute for these past 10 years.
This is our 10th year, and before that, for many years, working for Dr. Paul on the Hill.
So I want to thank Adam Dick for his help in doing this.
And we have another celebrity in the audience, and that's Chris Rossini down here who does the Friday show with Dr. Paul.
And every year, I feel this more strongly, which is how much I appreciate all of you coming out.
We have busy lives.
I was just talking to Chris earlier about how inflation is killing us.
And it's hard to do these things, and it's hard for all of you to give up the time.
It's a holiday weekend.
Dr. Paul and I literally could not go on without knowing that you're here.
You are the remnant.
You are the ones that are carrying the Ron Paul message forward.
And having you here is such a delight for us.
It keeps us going.
So I want to have a round of applause for all of you.
So a little bit about Ron Paul Institute.
Most of you know already, but this is our 10th year, which is pretty amazing.
They didn't expect us to last a year.
You cannot survive for a year or two doing foreign policy and civil liberties.
No one wants to hear about that.
Besides, if you're not neocons and you don't like interventionism, no one's going to give you any money.
So that's what they said.
And so we said, okay, well, we don't need a big, fancy building.
Our headquarters is in a steel shack down in Clute, Texas.
We don't need a huge staff.
We don't need someone making us espresso and giving us petticoats in the morning, like I'm sure a lot of these Beltway think tanks are.
We do a lot more with a lot less because we're very careful about how we spend your money, because the only way that we can go forward is with your donations.
And that is how we survive.
As you know, we're the educational home of the Ron Paul movement.
You know, we focus on civil liberties and foreign policy, but we are the educational arm of the Ron Paul Revolution, and that's what we will continue to do.
As you know, Dr. Paul and I on Monday through Thursday do the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
We started in 2015.
It's hard to imagine that we've done it for this long.
We were very grateful last year when we were stressed out about YouTube canceling us that the people from Rumble said, hey, why don't you move your show over here?
Do an exclusive with us.
You're not going to get canceled.
And so we have had a great contract with Rumble to do our show over there, and we're grateful to them.
I think last year we had a combined viewership and listenership of about 25 million.
Is that right, Chris?
Something in that neighborhood.
And I think this year we're going to definitely break 30 million.
We've kind of doubled every year.
So, you know, that's not Tucker Carlson interviewing Donald Trump, okay?
But, hey, if 30 million people watch our show and listen to what we have to say, that's great.
And I'm really happy for that.
And now we publish the Ron Paul Institute website, ronpaulinstitute.org.
We publish three or four articles a day.
Many of them are original articles, but the others are carefully curated to have two or three things to read each day that are important, that we think are important for you to read.
We also do media appearances to spread the message.
Dr. Paul, of course, is on the media all the time.
So we're constantly growing, and it's because of all of you.
Now, a couple of things that I do want to say, the title of my talk, and it's not really a talk, it's just a couple of comments because I literally have five minutes.
Fraying Threads in the Digital Void 00:05:16
Fraying Threads in the Digital Void.
And I did this on purpose because there are two articles that I've read over the past couple of months that have really resonated with me because I think many of you feel this, and I've talked to some of you already, that we're at the crossroads.
We're at the crux of something very monumental.
We're talking about a tectonic shift in the world right now.
And I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it, what is really happening.
And two articles that I've read recently, I think, are a good place to start.
Now, one of them is written by someone who, if you read the Institute website, I republish rather often.
And his name is William Scriver.
He has a substack called I Metatronic, and it's definitely worth reading.
But he writes about, this is the article called The Summer of Fraying Threads.
And his main point is this, and I'll just read it as it is.
The empire's proxy war in Ukraine is a lost cause, and Russia will emerge from it exceedingly stronger than when it began.
Now, you're not allowed to say that anywhere in public, but certainly not in the Beltway where we are, not technically, but as you know what I mean.
But this is a fact, and this will change the world as we know it.
The rise of the global south, the alliances that have been formed as a result of this very, very ill-thought-out war against Russia that the neocons of the left and the right have launched, and they launched it in 2012 or 2014 with the coup in Ukraine.
It's changed the world.
It's exposed the Western alliance and NATO as a paper tiger.
The House of Cards is falling down and the world has changed.
And ironically, it's our aggressive and interventionist foreign policy that has actually caused the rest of the world to align against the United States.
Imagine Saudi Arabia and Iran making friends again.
The Middle East coming together in an alliance against the United States.
Everywhere we send Victoria Newland, they hate us even more.
They hate us even more.
There's a coup in Africa.
Hey, let's send Vicki down there.
She gets down there, no one wants to talk to her.
So they hate us even more.
And the ripples from this will continue.
It's a world-changing event.
And some of the speakers today will talk about it in more detail than I have time to do right now.
But there are things like de-dollarization, which is accelerating.
It's accelerating because we're forcing it to accelerate, because the sanctions game is up.
Sanctions don't work anymore, because they just will start new alliances.
The failure of diplomacy, we talked about it yesterday in the scholars' seminar, how we don't send diplomats to go over and bring people together.
For example, you probably saw recently Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, who was interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
And I've known Viktor for a number of years.
I used to work for him.
But he points out that the ambassador that the Americans have sent over there does nothing but hector them and yell at them and tell them, you better fall in line and do what we say or else.
And this is the case everywhere in the world.
So diplomacy has failed.
So that's one thing that is very important and we're going to explore it today, which is this tectonic shift in global alliances.
And the other is the rise of digital totalitarianism.
And the other article, and I'm sure some of you read him, I hope you don't.
You do.
If you don't, you should.
Is C.J. Hopkins.
And he's a left-leaning satirist who has done incredible work on the rise of digital totalitarianism.
Now, Hopkins lives in Germany, and he was recently convicted for a tweet.
And he faces 60 days in jail or a 3,600 Euro fine.
And it was simply a tweet showing the mask that we were forced to wear for a couple of years with a very faint Nazi symbol in it.
The point is obvious.
It was not praising Nazis.
It was attacking the idea of a totalitarianism.
So the digital gulag, the digital totalitarianism that we're facing is something we've been struggling with for a few years, which is the impulse to disappear people who have wrong thoughts.
And I think that's all of us here, in fact, are in that category.
And we saw it in Twitter and Facebook on social media.
But now it's worse.
This is a new phase because people like C.J. Hopkins is going to jail in Germany.
And it will happen here next.
We live in a world right now in the United States where the head of the ruling party is seeking to jail the head of the opposition party.
And this is regardless of how you feel about either of these individuals.
But this is something that we never thought would happen in this country.
And this is what we're facing right now.
The head of the ruling party is going to jail the head of the opposition party.
It's beyond Banana Republic.
And it's the new totalitarianism.
First they'll come for Trump and we yeah, many people hate Trump.
But we're next.
C.J. Hopkins is next and we're all next.
Export Selection