'George Who??' 'Woke' NYC Set To 'Cancel' George Washington Statues!
Santayana is credited with saying "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." New York City is considering sending a good chunk of US history down the "memory hole" by destroying statues of George Washington. Also today: Sen. Rand Paul says "no way" to more Ukraine aid; vows to block any fast-track. Meanwhile Ukraine is holding a US citizen Gonzalo Lira in prison for having a different opinion about the war and Ukraine's spokesperson threatens to "hunt down" others like Lira.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Good.
Are we going to do good things today?
I hope so.
We're going to try.
Every once in a while, we get a good one.
Yeah, yeah.
See, I think we can stay in business, which is not one of these paying businesses, but for the business of our special interest, it looks like we'll never run out of ammunition and things that we need to talk about.
Not that it hasn't been around for a long time, and sometimes the conditions of chaos and wicked governments have lasted forever and ever, but sometimes it gets worse than ever.
And I would say there's a real challenge out there right now of what's going on, the challenge to our republic, which has become very much weakened.
And the one goal of the enemy, which I put in the category of the cultural Marxists, they do want to destroy what we have, and they want to usher in their salvation through the dictatorship that they believe.
I think they believe it's good for them.
They claim it's going to be good for the people.
But, you know, logic tells you they should know better.
The people usually suffer the most.
And I think their goal is to create the chaos.
So one of the figureheads for our republic and for America, and generally admired and called the father of our Constitution and all these things, of course, this was our first president, George Washington.
He was not as libertarian as we would have liked, but he took on and led the charges against a very authoritarian government.
And for that, he was recognized.
He turned down becoming a king, and he understood that and retired after four terms and set a good precedent until later on, until this past century.
But he now is the target.
You know, you have to target this whole notion.
Trump has been pretty good at mentioning this.
We don't have a country if you don't have borders.
If anybody could walk in and steal everybody's property and get rewarded for it, if you try to stop them, you get arrested.
That's what's going on in this country.
But the other thing is to show that we don't have a country is to destroy history.
You've got to attack history.
The Marxists and Soviets, they were all very much aware of that.
You had to destroy history.
But I don't know how many times people would say it's successful, maybe temporary success, and they convert some people, but sometimes that rallies the remnant.
That might be what's going on now, because even though the attack on our heroes of the past has been very, very persistent, it hasn't been, you know, attacks on George Washington.
It has been noted that, you know, it'll probably come to that.
Maybe this is a bad sign that they're feeling their oats right now.
So I'm not totally surprised.
It's disappointing that they feel this threatened and they're this desirous of having the dictatorship that they foresee.
So they now, New York City leading the charge for liberty, once again, they think that the best thing they could do for their cause is to tear down the monuments.
And you know, there were some monuments torn down in our history that I don't think many of us complained about.
Lenin and Stalin we weren't defending that, but it's a little bit different.
I think George Washington was a little bit better than Lenin and Stalin.
But right now, though, one of the last sacred symbols of our republic is George Washington.
So it'd be a shame if that happens.
I hope people say there's a limit.
Don't do it.
We're going to have a large demonstration, you know, arguing the case that you should not do it and that you should be more looking for the champions of liberty and trying to pick up where the founders left off, pick up on this whole notion of a true republic and the protection of personal liberty.
Well, you know, I put in the description the famous phrase that's attributed to George Santiana, which is those who did not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
And with that in mind, I would make the case to leave the Lenin and Stalin statues up to remind people, this is what happens.
You know, these are the people who did this, who took away your freedoms.
Don't forget them.
And I think, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Let's put up this first clip.
This is what we're talking about.
This is Fox News reporting on this.
New York City, which has no other problems, Dr. Paul.
Everything's fine.
Their budget's great.
No immigration problems.
Everything's going fine.
So they're trying to figure out what to do.
What are we going to do?
Well, here's what they come up with.
New York City to consider removing statues of George Washington and create a reparations task force amid budget cuts.
So they have no money, but they're talking about reparations and ripping down some statues.
Put on the next one.
Here's what they're talking about.
Here's the rationale for it.
The items included in the New York City's Council agenda for Tuesday.
The Council's Cultural Affairs Committee will hold a public hearing on a measure to remove works of art on city property that, quote, depict a person who owned enslaved persons or directly benefited economically from slavery.
Now, I don't think there's literally a single person in the United States who would say, hey, that slavery was pretty good.
We should try it again.
Literally no one.
But the idea that you rip down the statues, you know, they started with Confederate statues.
No one said anything because they don't want to be accused of, but it's the idea, like you started out saying, destroying your own history is kind of like a cultural and historic suicide.
Yeah, it's insane.
It's insane, political insanity.
You know, this southern reparation things is very annoying, and that's, you know, still a popular idea in California, where there were never slaves out there, but they still have to have people currently enslaved to pay for this imaginary theme that they have, the reparation.
So they're talking about reparation.
Well, what they're saying is we need to tear down Washington's statue because he associated himself with slavery.
So that's Washington was guilty, you know, according to them.
And they need to compensate those people who supported Washington.
Well, who are you going to round up?
Eventually, Washington did speak out against it, and things were shifting.
It was a different time.
They've just shifted the slavery bit because there's enslavements all the time.
Our country is built on slaves, and people don't realize it.
But the real slaves are the people who think they're getting the best deal out of Washington.
And that's the poor and the middle class.
And that's so often caused by government actions, wars overseas, printing money, and all these problems that we have today.
So They don't see that, but they want to further enslave the local people for this mysterious connection between George Washington and his tremendous support for slavery, which, you know, I think, you know, things were changing.
That was the, you know, the introduction.
The Republic, the American Republic was the introduction to foreseeing, you know, what the system could bring about if people emphasize personal liberty over dictatorship.
But that's not the argument on this thing.
This is just, you know, a big grandstand stunt.
And it will be sad because if there's no gathering together and saying, you know, this doesn't make any sense.
I mean, why?
And the New York people, they have all these problems and they go broke and they created the problems.
So they come crawling and they blame somebody else and said, well, the federal government needs to go and rob somebody else because we screwed up here, ruined our city.
But somebody has to take care of it.
They've done that before, you know.
Bail them out.
I mean, it's pretty ironic.
I'm sure you remember back in the late 90s, I think it was, when the Taliban first took over in Afghanistan.
And remember, they blew up those Buddhist statues.
And everyone was outraged.
That was actually, again, ironically, that was used to make the case against the Taliban.
That's when, during the Clinton administration, they started really gearing up for war against Afghanistan.
And that was the cause of Bellai.
Look, they were destroying their own history, how terrible it is.
It's just ironic that we're doing the same thing now with our own history, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Yeah, and we've been on the participating side, our government, because, you know, the great tragedy of the Mideast wars in Iraq, especially that we spent so much time trying to stop, that it was still annoying to me.
I mean, the deaths were a big, big issue, and all our spending money and Americans being lost.
But it still bothered me a lot because I sort of been fascinated about history.
And the more I read about it, the more fascinated I become about early history.
When did decency have its first notice?
You know, when did they first talk about that?
So it's when they tore up all the old things.
I mean, they were various religions, but they were thousands of years old.
And they just came in and you know whose bombs and money and who started the dumb war.
You know, we were over there.
It was part of our empire building.
And we admitted, our president said, we have to remake the Middle East.
They remade it all right, but not for the better.
Loot the museums, yeah, you're right.
Well, let's move on to something more optimistic because I'm starting to get a little bit low and I don't like that.
Let's put on that next one.
Here's someone we know and like very much.
A good American patriot in my view.
Put up that next clip.
Senator Rand Paul.
Here he is.
And he came out with a tweet today that sounds pretty good.
He said, today I'm putting congressional leadership and the president on notice that I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding.
I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more U.S. aid to Ukraine.
And, you know, us coming from the house side, we'd say, well, what are you going to do about that?
But as you know, it's a little different in the sandwich.
Yeah, and the important word here that he used, he didn't say, I'm going to stop it forever.
Yeah.
Expediting it.
Because they can move things very quickly.
They can do it within hours.
After 9-11, they were doing things very, very quickly because there was an emergency.
They want to expedite it, but he could stop that.
And it might take several days, but it gets the attention that it needs.
Why would anybody do this to stop the legislation?
And that's one place where you emphasize, you de-emphasize the issue of absolute majoritarianism and democracy.
You have to get a majority vote to do this of the people and all this.
And I think the results that we're seeing in our cities and all the problems we have is a result of a misconception of what democracy is all about.
Because all you have to do is control 51% and you can do anything you want to the minorities.
It never seems to dawn on them that if you make the majority sacred, then there is no protection for the minority.
The minority is supposed to be protected by the rule of law, which we've sort of lost a bit of our rule of law and respect for the Constitution.
We know that because that's the last argument that they want to use, be seen used on the House floor.
Yeah.
And I mean, this is a very important tool.
As you say, it won't prevent it forever.
But, you know, we've talked a lot about the action in the House and that there's opposition building in the House.
The American people certainly are putting pressure on their members of Congress, especially their House members, against this.
But this is kind of like the other shoe to drop in the Senate for Senator Paul to say this, because the other side, the neocon side who wants to fund this, they are relying on having the sense of urgency.
Don't stop.
Don't think.
Just pass the money.
We have to do it immediately.
So I think Senator Paul pushing the pause button for as long as he can is going to allow people to catch their breath, you know, stop having the fevers and passing out and, you know, just thinking about is this a smart idea?
Who are we funding?
Considering how much we've already given, will there be any difference made if we give more?
Are we just flushing this money down the toilet?
So sometimes a pause and one senator having that power to cause a pause is very good.
And I've noticed that Senator JD Vance is also moving up on that issue, like he's picking up that issue as well.
So it's a very, very good and important effort on the part of Senator Paul.
You know, The Hill had an article on this that we had looked at.
And I want to read a sentence or two from that.
This article says, the impasse in the House is holding up action in the Senate, giving Paul leverage to threaten Ukraine funding, you know, just what we've been talking about.
Then it goes on to say, President Biden has requested $24 billion.
We've heard about that.
This is the catch, because it's well-meaning.
For security, we like security.
Secure our liberties, that we can take care of ourselves, and we don't have a meddling government.
Security and humanitarianism.
Cautious Collection of Information00:13:11
Well, the proof is out.
The evidence is there.
It's overwhelming if they would want to look at history.
No, you've got to get rid of George Washington.
You don't want to look at history.
But just think of what America said.
The example is set.
The freest country in the world, the most prosperous country in the world, and the greatest amount of justice at one time.
So, yes, then they say, no, humanitarianism is something only the knowledgeable, the people who get control of the government by hook or by crook, they divvy up the loot and they make sure that people are well treated.
Yeah, like the people, when people get homeless and there's trouble and it's not, and it has anything to do with their fault or the government, what they do, humanitarianism meaning that we're going to spend $25,000 per tent and then put up the people that we made homeless and put them all in tents.
It was all created by stupid laws and really conceding to the principle of open borders, which means the invasion is okay.
We approve the invasion.
And if you resist the invasion, you're the criminal.
Let them come in, let them steal, let them rob, let them burn up the businesses.
And if you resist, you might be sent to jail for resisting.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think there's more evidence mounting for why this is not a great idea.
And a lot of it's coming from conservative outlets, whether I think it's very healthy.
You know, the argument has always been we have to fund their democracy and their liberty and help them protect themselves.
But more and more that's coming out.
In fact, I just saw a couple of days ago, another opposition party leader was arrested in Ukraine.
So that's how you win an election.
I mean, I guess Biden is learning from Zelensky.
Just arrest the opposition and then you have a good chance at the election.
But here's something from Breitbart, which came out, I think, today.
You know, as we know, it's a right-wing outfit.
Exclusive American citizen journalist sitting in Ukraine prison.
State Department confirms as Biden begs for billions more to protect Ukrainian freedom.
And here's a little bit more on it if you go to the next one.
His name is Gonzalo Lira.
He's an American citizen.
Here's what the Breitbart article says.
While lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington debate sending billions more in military aid to Ukraine, an American citizen journalist, Gonzalo Lira, is languishing in a Ukrainian prison on allegations of spreading Russian propaganda, throwing into question the status of free speech in the supposed democracy the Biden administration argues is worthy of more taxpayer dollars.
You know, this is a good example.
And you said we should get a good message out of this.
Because remember over these last several years how we tried to explain why lockdowns were very bad, especially the people who wrote the laws never followed the laws, followed the rules anyway.
And it was the hypocrisy that really aggravated the average voter, whether they're Republican or a Democrat.
People, you know, regardless of political parties, seem to universally despise the hypocrites, which means they don't like to be lied to, is what they're saying.
And this is what they're doing right now.
It's pure hypocrisy for us to do this and, you know, claim that we're making the world safe for democracy and Ukrainian freedom.
At the same time, they no more care about that than a man in the moon.
It's all propaganda.
But what about the people and leadership in this country, the people who want to continue this process?
That's why I think one good thing that seems to be happening is that we lament and we're cautious about the speed and the collection of information on every one of us because the main reason because the government's involved in that.
But this speed and collection of information can be beneficial because some of the things that transpire now can transpire in 24 hours where the people read and hear about it.
It used to be, you know, if you didn't have this technology, it might take a year or two for the people to really look how long it took the Russian people to decide that the Soviet communism wasn't a good idea.
Yeah.
But today, hopefully I'm trying to look on this positively that this speed of information might wake people up about what they're really doing when they're attacking the Washington Monument and this sort of thing.
Well, the thing about holding Gonzalo Lira for having the wrong views.
Now, I watched a couple of his podcasts.
He was not some rabid pro-Putin guy.
He was simply putting out interesting information from on the scene in Kharkov about what's happening.
And he had a different view.
He didn't have Ukrainian flags all over his, but he certainly wasn't a Russian propagandist.
I would view him as pretty objective, leaning toward the pro-Russia side.
They snatched him out of his apartment and threw him in jail.
He came out and said how much he had been tortured.
They snatched him and put him back in.
And the State Department doesn't care.
Let's put him on the next clip.
This is from that same Breitbart article.
A State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News in a statement Tuesday, we are aware of the detention of Mr. Lira in Ukraine.
We take our role in assisting U.S. citizens abroad seriously and are providing all appropriate assistance.
We are monitoring the situation but have no further comment at this time.
Meaning they're doing nothing essentially is what's happening.
And the Americans hands off.
They wash their hands of this because other people do the dirty work and encouragement and we send them money to do this.
But what about the example of Assange?
Isn't he a journalist?
And look how we've treated him.
But we didn't march in with a gun and arrest him and put him in a court trial here.
We're not even an American citizen.
We go around and our empire took charge of that.
And there is still this effort made to try to get people to say, you know, maybe he isn't a threat to the world.
He's a threat to the authoritarians, the dictator.
That's who they were facing.
In that same way.
So when they do this to a journalist like they're doing to this person, that is strictly because they're intimidated and they're frightened of the truth.
And that's why they have to silence people like that.
But like I say, information spreads quickly.
And maybe you can take that and say, hey, they're up to no good.
And this should feed into the fires of why we shouldn't send one nickel.
Yeah.
Well, here's something that is a real twist on this.
So there's a man that dresses as a woman who was the official spokesperson of the Ukraine military.
Apparently this person is a sergeant in the Ukrainian military.
And this person put out a video clip.
We're going to watch it in a second.
Implying very strongly that Gonzalo Lira would be killed.
But also, this person, Cyrillio, his name is, said, we will hunt you down, everyone else like him.
This is a threat.
Let's play this.
A good, what, 35 seconds of this clip?
This seems like it's fake.
Believe it or not, it's not fake.
Russia hates the truth that their obsessive focus on a Ukrainian volunteer is simply allowing the light of the Ukrainian nation's honesty to shine brightly.
Next week, the teeth of the Russian devils will gnash ever harder, and their rabid mouths will foam in uncontrollable frenzy as the world will see a favorite Kremlin propagandist pay for their crimes.
And this puppet of Putin is only the first.
Russia's war criminal propagandists will all be hunted down and justice will be served as we in Ukraine are led on this mission by faith and God.
You know what my first thought is, is this is Ukraine.
But Ukraine doesn't really exist.
Do you think extreme to say this is an American mouthpiece?
You know, the people who want to take the side of NATO and America, Ukraine, you know, in a way, that's an exaggeration, but Ukraine really doesn't exist.
Yeah, it seems like it.
They have an American spokesperson saying, we're going to hunt you down.
We're going to take care of Gonzalo Lira.
Don't you worry.
We're going to kill him.
We're going to hunt down the rest of you as well.
And she said it with.
Oh, boy, she was.
I want to go with she.
I'd go with he probably on this one, but you're the expert, not me.
But this got the attention of JD Vance, Senator Vance.
He had an exchange with this person, and he is furious.
He said, I'd like the Biden administration to explain who this crazy Ukrainian spokesperson is and whether they stand by Ukraine's clear attack on free speech.
He went on to say they can hire any kind of weirdo they want, but they shouldn't do it with our tax money.
He actually sent a letter to Biden with a series of questions about this person, whether this person's hired by the U.S., whether it works for U.S. intelligence or what have you.
But, you know, the important thing is her emotions because she was in charge of this and she really believed in it.
It came from her heart.
She was about as far away from journalism as you could possibly get or a sense of fairness.
She was out to get them.
And the rest of us, really.
Oh, you know, and Jack Pasobiak, the right-wing journalist from Human Events, he was put on their kill list yesterday.
And, you know, who else is on that kill list is Rand Paul.
So it's not funny at all.
And they've already killed Daria Dugina and another Russian journalist.
So these are our wonderful democracy people.
But let's do one last thing because it's kind of in the same kind of vein of what Senator Paul was trying to do, saying, hang on a minute, things are not exactly as they seem.
You remember just a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Paul, a marketplace was hit by a missile.
There were a lot of civilian casualties.
Immediately, Zelensky, as you shouldn't be surprised, blamed the Russians.
The Russians are shelling civilians.
They're killing civilians.
Well, now that all the furor has died down and the Russians have the blame and no one's looking, well, they did a little investigation a few weeks later and said, well, it kind of really wasn't the Russians.
It was Ukrainians who bombed him.
The truth coming out or more propaganda.
Yeah, yeah, who knows?
So, no, I thought that this can't necessarily hurt our arguments because we can use it and said, they're admitting it, and you shouldn't fall for it, even though they might have had that burst of information and convinced a lot of people, and it's hard to unconvince them once you convince them of who did what.
But it's still, I think the evidence is there that they said, you know, we messed up, we said the wrong thing.
So our point ought to be, be careful what you read.
And, you know, the information is coming up quickly, but the false information can come out quickly too.
And that's a contest that's going on.
And that is why people are just searching and begging for an ability to find people who will just tell them the truth.
Yeah.
Well, massacres are very convenient for propagandists because they motivate people's emotions and cause them to do things.
Do something about this.
And we remember back when we were talking about Syria, and there was, well, Assad gassed his own people in Ghouta.
We've got to do something.
Of course, Trump, whatever, did lobbs some missiles over there, but turns out later it wasn't Assad at all.
It was our moderate rebels.
And so this calls into question a lot of things in Ukraine, like, remember the Buka massacre, quote unquote, that had some very suspicious components.
But you need to have that kind of event to congeal people's anger and frustration and disgust.
And now, I'm not claiming that Ukraine hit this marketplace on purpose.
They didn't.
But it was an errant missile.
But remember the old saying, don't let a crisis go to waste.
So they grabbed onto that and used it to blame Russia.
And if part of their goal is confusion, this adds to that confusion and getting people all mixed up.
But that's one thing that our argument for a non-interventionist foreign policy really is pretty neat.
We don't get involved in these kind of discussions.
We might be more interested in invasions where the border means nothing and people come in and illegally use our stuff and become a tax burden.
This is an invasion.
And I keep thinking, you know, for years and years, decades, I can remember all the way back to World War II.
We had to worry about the invasion.
Invasions Without Borders00:04:57
I remember the air raid warnings that we had to go through when the lights went off during World War II.
Always they could be coming, they could be coming.
But it turns out they're here.
And it's philosophic.
It's this cultural Marxist philosophic movement that people fall for.
And they have so much control over this that if you resist it at all, anything on this crazy multi-sexualism and all this stuff, you don't go wrong with it.
You're the bigot, and you're the one that doesn't care about civil liberties.
And yet civil liberty solves all those kind of problems that you have if you just believed in voluntarism.
That's right.
So simple, as you always say.
Well, I'm going to close out if you're ready.
Why don't we go ahead, all of us skip ahead of that last photograph that we have to put up?
Because I do want to say, Dr. Paul, we had an unbelievable response.
If we can get that last. There we go.
We had an unbelievable response.
Yesterday we launched our fundraiser.
We don't do it very often, but we've got to keep the lights on here.
We don't try not to pester people.
And we want to give them back something for their donations to the Ron Paul Institute, which puts on the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Here you are checking out a draft copy of your book, a proof copy of your book, a few weeks ago.
Well, we announced yesterday that this book will be a premium, a thank you, you might say, to people who will donate to the Ron Paul Institute a tax-deductible donation.
I was looking in this morning, I couldn't believe how many, and I'm starting to worry about our supplies.
So we will offer this book for a donation of $50, a soft cover for a donation of $100, a signed by Dr. Paul, not by me, signed by Dr. Paul, a soft cover, and a forever book, a hardcover book, signed by Dr. Paul for a tax-deductible, to the extent of the law, donation to the Ron Paul Institute.
I will put some info in the description on how you can make your donation, get your book just in time for Christmas.
I will say, please be patient.
We aren't Amazon.
We don't have 24-hour delivery service.
We're doing our best to pack these in.
So please be patient.
It's going to take a few days to fulfill these orders.
Very good.
And once again, I would like to express my deep appreciation for all our viewers because we do this program and put out these efforts for several reasons.
I do it because I don't know what I'd do if I didn't do it because I've been doing this in one way or another a long time ago.
And when I was doing it before I was ever even a candidate, way back in the 50s and the 60s and early 70s, that I did it because of an intense interest.
And as time went on, because I started with the idea that who cares?
I'm an OB doctor.
I deliver babies.
And this is sort of my hobby, is trying to understand the world.
But I became fascinated in it.
And therefore my activities, it's done for a selfish reason, because I enjoy doing it.
So that's a benefit.
And also in hopes that it will improve the conditions of the world.
And that remains to be seen because the world's in a mess.
And I argue the case that nothing happens to start improving things and getting rid of the nonsense is it can't happen until we deal with the debt.
People say, oh, dwell on the debt.
You know, we've had that said.
Well, I remember that even back when Goldwater made his name by talking about the deficit way back in the 50s.
Well, I'll tell you what, the debt is a big deal.
It's bigger than ever.
It's still growing.
Liquidation of debt and malinvestment and the liquidation of all this over-regulation, it's a big adjustment.
But not if you do the right thing.
The right thing is, I've already mentioned one of my favorite words, and that is, let's quit having thousands of bureaucrats and an army that defends an empire real busy saying we're going to solve all these problems.
No, I think a few things like volunteerism is a good idea.
Don't have any associations unless both sides volunteer on it.
You know, sound money is sound money.
The most important measuring rod is the unit of account.
And up until 1971, we had a definition of it.
Now we don't.
So there's several, and it's not complicated.
I'm convinced, and I had evidence of this.
We could get young teenagers during the presidential campaign come in or get hold of me and be very understanding of what's going on because it isn't complicated.
Success and Hopefulness00:00:24
And the goal, of course, is wonderful.
It's allow you to have your own life.
And wars are less, and there's much more prosperity.
So the arguments are there.
And therefore, when we have success, we're very hopeful.