SecDef Austin: 'Non Interventionists Are The Real Enemy!'
Speaking at the Reagan Library over the weekend, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (a former executive in the military-industrial complex) blamed chaos, bloodshed, and terrorism worldwide on Americans who oppose the US global military empire. Non-interventionists are the real enemy, said Austin. Also today: Shipping woes in the Middle East may lead to war explosion. Finally: They lost the J6 deposition tapes? Incompetence or something more sinister?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Back to me, back in the studio.
Great to be back in the studio with you.
You didn't have any trouble with the geography or getting here.
I almost felt like that.
Yeah, it's been a while.
It's been a while.
Well, we're glad to see you because our secret people.
Depend on you.
Depend on you.
And we're going to talk about something.
We had a chance to talk about this a little bit over the window.
This was happening.
And it really struck a chord with both of us about the same time because we're going to talk about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
And guess what?
He does not like non-intervention people who don't want to go to war.
And he likes to be, I'm sure he believes in authoritarianism.
The Congress shouldn't be there messing up and appropriating money and things like that.
But his blame was the defense head calls out those who advocate isolationism.
And that was one thing that I worked on throughout the years.
And one thing that some people gave me credit, somebody else must decide if it's true or not, that I helped contribute to switching the word by libertarians and conservatives.
And yeah, we have to be isolationists.
We have to steer a clear this.
But it dawned on me that it's a negative term because they use it like you don't care.
When we think about it, if you want to really isolate somebody, you have to follow these neocons.
They isolate us from everybody else.
And we're witnessing this now.
And at the same time, the isolationists is exactly opposite of what our Constitution demands and what freedom demands, and that is freedom to trade, freedom to travel, and all these things.
That means there's going to be a lot more mixing of traveling at all.
But it has one rule.
It always has to have a rule.
No violence.
Everything has to be voluntary.
And that non-interventionism, I think, is obviously so far superior to all this intervention.
But he came down pretty hard on us.
He just thinks it's terrible.
We were just going to destroy our defense and destroy our country.
And this is, and they get away with it because it's restated and reiterated by the mainstream media.
They go along with this, except for the neocons.
Whoa, boy, the neocons, we may be, the people who want to back off a little bit may be having an effect because the neocons are sure talking nervously about we have to quit this.
So there's a healthy argument up there in Washington about more money for Ukraine and all these other things, the Middle East, and more so than ever before that I remember, at least in recent years.
So that to me is good.
There's some real progress there.
The big thing is, whether or not the people who are the ones who want to stay out of the wars and interference and going around the world will be construed as being unpatriotic.
People love to be patriotic, and that's a big job for us.
And of course, I'm sure most non-interventionists feel very patriotic about defending the principles of freedom.
Absolutely.
Let's put on that first clip, please.
This is from the AP.
We talked about it over the weekend.
We had an email exchange, and you wrote about it in your column this week.
Defense Head calls out those who advocate isolationism and an American retreat from responsibility.
Now, we're going to have to talk about that word responsibility because it's used a lot.
And I read your column earlier today, and I would say if I summarized your column, I would actually use the great words of an old cartoon strip called POGO, which is that Lloyd Austin has seen the enemy and the enemy is us.
And that's exactly what he's saying.
And I, you know, and at first, you'd say, well, this doesn't seem very nice.
But in fact, and you touch on this, I think, in your piece today, it's kind of a good sign that he's frustrated.
He's angry at non-interventionists.
He calls them isolationists, but at non-interventionists.
And I think why it's a good sign, Dr. Paul, that he's because I think it shows that he's frustrated.
And I think it shows if things were going well, he wouldn't have said this.
He would have had no reason to single out the people who were opposed to all of these interventions if the interventions were going well.
If Ukraine was swimming along and the Russians were about to have a Maidan of their own, he wouldn't be talking about it.
If this mess in Israel hadn't completely devolved into a bloodbath that has a good chunk of Biden's voting base furious with him, he wouldn't be upset.
He wouldn't be concerned.
And the fact is that there is a growing tide of opposition to this overseas adventurism, and I think that's why Lloyd Austin brought it up because he's getting nervous.
They're starting to concern themselves, and so they need to point inward at the internal enemy.
You know, in a way, the discussion that we want to have and continuously push the argument about bankruptcy.
You know, it's hard to spend the money if you don't have it or you have to seal it or you have to print it and that causes all of our problems.
But this has led to gridlock.
The gridlock that we have there is really there's people changing their minds about intervention, but they're also changing their minds or becoming more realistic that it doesn't last forever.
You just can't print money forever without suffering the consequences.
And so Austin even emphasizes this.
You guys need to pass the budget.
You need to pass the budget because, and he said, and he uses it in his promotion.
We need more war spending.
You know, he was very, very pointed on why we needed more war spending.
And he does talk about, you know, that's, we have to be concerned about national security, you know, be a good patriot.
And I guess they had a pretty neat conference out there in California at Reagan Rance.
And Reagan at least had a little bit different attitude, but non-interventionism has not seen the light like it should.
But anyway, it was at the Reagan Ranch, and they talked about how well the meeting went because they didn't use the words, but what they were saying, there was good discussion between the politicians and the lobbyists.
And you know, the lobbyists were there.
They probably paid the bills and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, they paid the bill with the money we took from the people here and gave it to them to build weapons we don't need.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Reagan doesn't get a pass because he's the one who hired all these neocons.
Before that, they were out in oblivion somewhere.
Right.
And they were able to get hired by Reagan.
But with that said, Reagan distinguished himself from today's neocons by the fact that he was willing to talk to people.
I mean, we've talked about it on the show many times.
He met with Gorbachev and Reykjavik at a time where it was intense personal, political Vulnerability on his part.
The neocons were furious that he met with Gorbachev to try to figure out how we can end this nuclear threat.
So he took a lot of personal risks for diplomacy's sake to speak with people.
But if you look at today's coterie of neocons, you have someone like Blinken.
He goes over to Netanyahu and says, hey, can you please stop killing so many people?
Netanyahu says, no.
And so Blinken says, okay, all right, sorry to bother you.
I'm going to go home now.
So that's basically how it's been working.
But interestingly enough, and I highlighted this, so we have a brain meld here.
Go to the next clip.
The audience was interesting that he was talking to, and maybe that explains the message.
The United States must reject calls to turn away from global interests and become more isolationist.
Austin told, quote, an audience of lawmakers, corporate and defense leaders, and government officials.
Market Wins Out00:09:55
So basically, he's telling his customers, because as everyone knows, he was on the board of Raytheon.
He's eyeball deep in the military-industrial complex.
He's telling his future colleagues, because you better believe as soon as he gets out of this office, he's going to put his snout right back in the trough.
He's saying, hey, guys, we've got some problems.
We've got these stupid isolationists around.
Don't worry, we can manage them.
We'll take care of them.
We're going to keep the money flowing.
But he did recognize that there were some economic problems and we have to work to keep up full employment and keep the money flowing and keep everybody doing well.
But he was claiming that it will create tens of thousands of new jobs and well distributed.
They'll be in at least 30 states.
And that's good.
That's good for politicians and good to get votes.
You know, the lobbyists like that term.
You know, okay, spread it out, equal distribution.
And they precisely mention an amount of $50 billion for that little jobs program.
But you know, this idea of a jobs program, somebody said, you know, some people believe still that war produces high employment.
And I say, well, there's a little bit of truth to that because we were in a depression.
And the depression really didn't end in World War II because people were very depressed and they were poor, but there wasn't unemployment.
They, you know, drafted millions of people, you know, to go.
And many of them lost their lives.
So they say, well, that's employment.
And they don't distinguish the two.
You know, if you, sure, you can have unemployment, but you know what?
It's very easy to argue, case that is, you just make slaves of them.
Because I use the term, and I think legitimately, that when you have a draft, which we had most of our recent history, 100 years or so, we've used the draft for World I and World II and Korea.
So there are people who didn't want to go.
And they were drafted.
They'd say, oh, we're creating jobs.
But they claim, oh, no, we're just, we're talking about jobs in military plants.
Yeah.
And then, of course, the people who end up paying with the inflation and the taxes, somebody's paying for those jobs.
It'd be better off just to leave people alone.
Yeah, you talk about we're creating jobs in the military industry.
And it's interesting, you don't hear a lot of people on the left, who used to, but talk about, well, you're also taking a huge amount of natural resources and putting them to use in destructive means.
You know, we know that the Pentagon is the biggest polluter on earth.
You're further empowering the Pentagon to destroy the environment.
You know, that's the other thing.
And the weapons that are made in these jobs program are wreaking havoc worldwide.
They're killing people and creating new enemies for the U.S. worldwide.
People who want to kill us because our weapons killed their families.
Something that you says over and over so many times.
And so no one seems to put that into consideration.
You know, it's really, I mean, it's almost like Thomas Friedman, I guess, wrote once that it'd probably be better just to have people digging holes and filling them in if we're going to waste the money.
That's employment, right?
That's employment.
It would be a lot less bad for the environment, bad for people, and bad for our place in the world.
But the boss of all this is the marketplace and people.
No matter how determined they are and how much they lie to themselves and lie to the public, that they're doing the Lord's work and we're going to have full employment and prosperity.
And deficits aren't as my biggest worries as you guys think.
And so they keep promoting this.
But eventually the market wins out.
The market wins out that it runs out of steam.
But then the real challenge comes: who's going to win the philosophic argument about why was there a recession?
Why was there a depression?
Why are people unemployed?
Why are people more hateful toward each other now?
Why is there more conflict domestically?
And why are we talking about, well, we need a 50 billion more dollars to go over and get involved in another skirmish someplace?
On and on.
They never back off, it seems, until it gets so bad.
Then the market reacts.
And the one episode when I personally paid attention to was in the 60s and early 70s when the Vietnam War became so terrible.
We complain a lot about what's going on now, but it was worse then because more Americans were being killed.
I mean, they quit counting the body bags because it was so depressing.
They lied about it and everything else, but a lot of lives were lost.
And this is something that finally limits it, and the people wake up.
Maybe that's what's happening in Ukraine right now.
Maybe both sides are tired of all the carnage, you know.
And of course, the one that is stirring up right now with us being very much involved is the Middle East.
What should we do with those people in Gaza?
We can't let them exist.
I mean, they're not a people, so we have to get rid of them.
And that is, you know, going to require money and all this.
So eventually, though, something has to give.
And it's just that the message of liberty is a powerful message.
Unfortunately, the difficulty in spreading that message when you're running against a Super Santa Claus has said, don't listen to those guys.
What we're going to do is send you a check.
Like they just did a month ago, again, ever since COVID.
They've been sending checks after check.
Then they wonder, oh, inflation came.
Interest rates started going.
We didn't really know where does that stuff come from?
Well, I'm going to do just another clip from this article.
If you skip the next one and go to the one that starts with our competitors, and you touched on this early on in your discussion, Dr. Paul, in your opening.
Skip ahead one, two.
Yeah, okay.
So here's Lloyd Austin complaining about our democratic process.
He says he's talking about the money for the wars.
He says, our competitors don't have to operate under continuing resolutions.
Doing so erodes our security and ability to compete.
So having a discussion and a dispute about the budget among our elected representatives in Congress infuriates Lloyd Austin.
That shouldn't be happening.
Funding for these wars should be automatic.
There shouldn't be any opposition.
And these wars are all for our democracy, though.
But how really will that system work when who gets hit the most?
The people they're claiming they're helping.
The low-income, middle-income.
They're the ones who end up with the inflation tax.
They pay most of the bills and then the suffering that goes on too.
But the whole thing is, is the far left and the big spenders grab the moral high ground.
We will take care of you and we care about people.
And then the other ones, they're unpatriotic.
And they don't care about America.
They don't care about the troops.
The troops need to be busy.
They need to be busy and travel and do this sort of thing.
But the truth is on our side.
Time is on our side.
The tragedy is it's a shame that we can't move it along a little faster.
And the circumstances are such that we still have the tools to do this.
We still have an ability to speak out, even with the mounting evidence of the censoring of people that are telling the truth.
But there's also a number of people who are sick and tired of that, are tired of it as well.
So the battle is worth fighting, you know, to get people to understand why peace and prosperity is a much more positive effort than all this authoritarianism.
There's just one other part of this article, and I think it was an AP article we mentioned about Austin, that I wanted to bring to your attention because you touched on it in your column today, but I found a really great chart.
Charts are always better because it's just visual, you know.
But here's what Austin said in the article.
He said, those who try to pull up the drawbridge undermine the security that has led to decades of prosperity.
Now look at this chart, Dr. Paul.
These are our decades of prosperity.
That red line is our annual interest payment on our debt, and the white line is our annual defense spending.
This is the amazing prosperity that Lloyd Austin is talking about.
If you look at this, you're the expert on these things, Dr. Paul, and I'm not.
But when I look at that chart, that does not look like prosperity.
That is a very important chart because you're talking about something that they've lose control of.
Even though they can artificially lower interest rates and cause bubbles to form, eventually, though, interest rates go up.
Even if they, it's sort of like price controls.
If the government says, well, you can't charge more than 3% interest, it will be done.
And the market dictates that that red line is going up.
And nobody's getting anything from it except the people who were in the banking business, you know, are able to gather up the income from the interest rate.
Overall, as much rigging of the interest rates occur, real interest rates are controlled by the market.
And boy, that one really shows it.
And that's not going to be easily reversed.
Well, I'm sure Austin's friends love that chart, though, because it's money for them.
I want to touch on something really quick, too, because it's something we're keeping our eye on.
If we can do the next one, this is something that we've read a lot about, but it's increasing.
Emergency Appropriation Debate00:04:13
Three commercial ships hit by missiles in Houthi attack, Houthi attack on Red Sea.
U.S. warship downs three drones.
Now, the Houthis in Yemen are very upset with what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
They don't have a huge military, but they have some missiles.
They have some drones.
And they're using them.
And they also control a very strategic area.
I should have put a map in here, but there's a very, very narrow area of the Red Sea that the Yemeni coast is near, and they control that area.
And they've done a couple of, they've taken over a couple of ships, one owned by an Israeli, and now they are firing missiles.
So they're threatening commercial shipping in that entrance to the Red Sea.
The U.S. is very concerned about it, and this looks like it's heating up.
Thank goodness for intervention.
We wouldn't have this activity here.
Where would the motivation come for building more weapons?
Boy, it's so terrible.
But they do it without any concerns.
And we often kid ourselves about how much of it is ignorance, how much of it is pure hatred, and they know exactly what they're doing, and they don't care about the downside of this.
And there's probably various reasons.
Sometimes it's just political power.
But there is a lot of ignorance.
There's a lot of ignorance, and the politics of it all.
Well, we have an emergency now.
There's always an emergency.
So often, when they would pass finally a continuing resolution or pass the budget, I said, yeah, it doesn't mean a thing.
It's six months.
Sometimes in three months, they have an emergency.
And then there's an emergency appropriation.
And it could be, you know, it could be food stamps for children or it could be more money to fight another war that we just had our ships shot at and Americans are killed.
But why do we, we ask and say, why are we over there?
Why do we expose ourselves?
And then when it happens, boy, we need to do something about it because Iran does this.
And they're the ones who are, they're the biggest terrorists ever in the history of mankind.
So they say this to Iranians.
But so there's members of Congress who appear like decent people, but they don't say decent things.
They get up there and how infirm they are about we should start right now to bomb Iran.
Yeah, yeah.
Because they have caused all the troubles in the world and nobody will want to even talk about the history of how much we've been involved in Iran.
How many missiles and nuclear weapons do we have surrounding Iran?
And then they say, oh, well, that's to keep the peace.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that's the whole reason that Biden has sent these ships over there.
Biden's not in charge.
You know, actually, there's a good piece that I would recommend to our viewers.
It's one of the lead pieces on anti-war.com today.
It's from Huffington Post about Brett McGurrick.
And I remember his name from a long time ago.
He was big with Obama.
He was one of the people who were behind this whole Arab Spring thing, the idea of supporting ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Hey, that's a good idea, Brett.
But people like Brett McGurk are the ones that run things.
They're no dummies.
They're evil, but they're not stupid, Dr. Paul.
And one of the things I think they're doing is they're making sure these ships are there.
They want to get these ships hit because not until one of our ships gets hit, like the Gulf of Tonkin, but actually hit maybe, then they will finally get their war on Iran, and that's what they want.
And technically, they'll say, well, the Congress voted for it.
And in a way, the Congress has to bear up to it, but should we always go back as well?
If you are going to have any type of an elective type of system, the people have elected a lot of these people, but that is an argument against pure democracy.
It doesn't work either.
You just get the lobbyists working and buying these seats and getting them in.
And occasionally you get a few weirdos.
Yeah, a few weirdos.
That's a good way of putting it.
Well, I guess we'll move on then to our last one.
Tapes and Justice Revealed00:06:56
And this is something that's happened a few days ago.
But it was funny.
You sent me an email a few days ago and said, how is this possible?
Did this really happen?
Put on this next clip.
This is pretty funny.
It's funny in a sick way.
But go to the next one if you can.
January 6th committee tapes have disappeared, House Republican says.
So the Republicans took over Congress.
They went and looked in all the records of the January 6th Committee, which is going to expose the great insurrection and did no such thing.
And he wanted to look back at some of the depositions.
They're all gone.
They've all been erased.
He said, what the heck's going on?
Why'd you erase these things?
And just to reassure our viewers that they bent the rules, violated their oath of office, and it worked.
And here, the debate with Thompson from the Democrat, we find out when they were presenting the case, they should turn this over.
He's all going to find them.
I'll live their law.
But they looked up the information.
According to House Rules, you have to preserve any data and information and documents that are used in an official proceeding, which they did.
They, the J6 Democrats, actually aired portions of these tapes on their televised hearings, which means they had to keep them, but they're not available.
And, you know, when you think about the documents that all the presidents and the vice presidents seem to have borrowed and taken out and all the emphasis that they put on there, but the one that was really bad was Trump.
He has to go to jail for it.
Of course.
So they and then that they have, they worry about that.
But here, this whole thing, no tapes, because they had these hearings and they should be available for the, the people decided maybe the Republicans ought to look into this thing.
So they, well, we ought to start by looking and seeing what they have and be able to study these tapes.
But no, they're not available.
It'd be interesting to see this happen, why this happened.
But, you know, right now with the Department of Justice, they can just flaunt it.
Go fly a kite.
They're not going to do it.
And then who knows what?
What about the trials that occurred after January 6th?
That is crazy.
That was a kangaroo court.
And that is one of the worst examples of a justice system on what they did at those hearings.
They're still going on.
There's still people there been in prison all this time.
Well, they're still arresting people.
There was someone arrested just last week.
I mean, every week someone new gets arrested for this.
You know, they're not done yet.
This so-called justice.
But, you know, Benny Thompson, who is the chair of Homeland Security, I think, for Under the Democrats, he's not a smart guy, and he's kind of thuggish.
We remember him when we were in the House.
And he's the one that said, hey, I didn't think we had to preserve him.
What's the problem here?
But you can only imagine that probably the night of the elections in 2022, that night when they felt they were going to lose the House, I'm sure they had a tape-burning party or whatever the digital equivalent of doing that is.
They probably called up Hillary and said, hey, we need some experts in how to bleach these tapes.
Get rid of this, whatever they call bleach bit.
Get rid of this.
We got to get rid of the evidence immediately.
And that must have been what happened.
Yeah, it reminds me of a little story about that.
The first time I ran for office was 1974, I think.
And that was Watergate year and what was going on.
I remember doing some visits of the people who possibly could support me and this sort of thing.
And the big issue was when it was discovered the tapes were available.
And that was the big change.
You know, the tapes are available.
It'll crucify Nixon.
But the businessman that I was visiting, he says, that is so bad.
How can they be so dumb?
Why didn't he immediately burn them?
So that's what they were doing.
They probably learned the lesson.
Burn them.
But that to me, you know, the Department of Justice and that whole system.
And so much evidence is coming out that should indict them.
And yet, right now, if you went by just the news on the mainstream media, I would say people say, yeah, they both do it.
But Trump is really bad.
He's about 50, 75 times worse than anything the Democrats ever did.
But they do both do it.
But I'll tell you what, I don't think the Republicans ever got around to doing what the Democrats have done with taking over the Justice Department, the CIA, the FBI.
What are they ever going to do about that?
That's pretty bad.
Well, look, I mean, Speaker Johnson has got a limited amount of time to get these appropriate bills passed.
So what do they do?
They waste a whole week getting me to George Santos last week.
You know, you have very little time.
Why are you fooling around with kicking Republican out of the House?
Why don't you just pass the bills and do your job?
And that just goes to show they're not going to do anything.
You know, the one that might come back to Higham on that is the fact that they've never expelled anybody that had not been charged with a crime.
Yeah, yeah.
It sets a bad precedent.
But that's next year.
We might not be here next year.
Who knows?
Yeah, we're blown up.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and I just want to thank everybody.
I apologize for being away for a while.
I've been a bit ill.
I'm trying to get back in the swing of things.
I appreciate everyone's patience.
I'm certainly grateful that you are watching the Liberty Report.
Hope you'll keep doing so.
Dr. Paul, over to you.
Very good.
And I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today.
And from the tone of my voice, I do get frustrated at times with all the nonsense going on and the distortion and talking about what is patriotic and what is not patriotic and really lying to the people.
I think it narrows down to that.
And there's a lot of that then.
But we just kicked somebody out for lying too much.
And I thought he was just a jokester, so I was misled.
But in the scheme of things, he was probably less dangerous than the people who do the official lying into war.
If you compared the two, there's no comparison because there was something wrong with the individual sort of wearing, lying, a badge of courage or something.
But it is such a shame that we put up with all of that and the same type of people go back in.
No Comparison00:01:56
Even though right now, it's pretty hard to argue the case.
Well, there's absolutely no comparison between the two because one is so much worse than the other.
And there may be some truth to that.
But when you compare, if you compare the whole Congress together and you say, well, which party will bring the troops on?
Which party will close down the Fed?
Which party will balance the budget?
Oh, well, we didn't, well, we are not ready for that.
You know, so you can't do that.
But eventually it'll happen if we do our job and get the message out because people have to understand the difference is tremendous.
If people endorse authoritarianism, that means you subsidize authoritarianism and you end up with a Congress being run by the lobbyists.
And that's the Department of Education, the Department of Medical, the Medical Department.
All these people, you know, control what is going on.
So that's where our problem is.
But the message of non-intervention implies one other thing, and that is nonviolence.
Yes, we believe in change.
We don't believe in sitting at home and being isolationist.
We believe in spreading the message, but everything has to be voluntary.
You can't shove it down somebody's throat because it's illegal to use force to spread your ideas, and that's not the way ideas would be spread.
The authoritarians have license because they believe in it, and then they get control of the finances and the FBI and the CIA, and they can cancel you and do these things like that.
So, but the issue of liberty versus authoritarianism is not that complex.
And it's when the American people say, I want to live in a free country, that's when things will change.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.