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Jan. 2, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:57
What WON'T Happen in 2024!

Many podcasts and prognosticators are busy today making predictions of what to expect in 2024. We are taking a different approach. Today we bring you a few things you can bet will NOT happen in the new year.

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Time Text
People Vote, Democracy Falters 00:03:07
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy 2024, Dr. Paul.
How was your break?
It was good.
We had a lot of activity at the house.
I bet.
I drove by actually a couple times and I saw a lot of cars out there.
You decide you didn't have a parking place.
Well, anyway, we're back in business.
It looks like they're not going to put us out of business because what we work for is shrinking the size and scope of the government and improve the amount of personal liberty people have.
And although we've been doing this for a few years, I can't, it's hard to measure where the successes are.
But people do encourage us.
They say, keep doing it.
Because it is true that you have to plant a lot of seeds before you have a forest.
And just think of how the opposition has planted so many trees for the last hundred years or so to destroy the republic that we have.
And so we're going to do a little thing here to talk about a lot of people are saying what they know is going to happen.
I thought what we are sort of unhappy about won't happen this year.
And it was easy to find a little list on this.
So we'll talk a little bit about what not to expect.
But on some of these things, let's hope we're wrong because we want them to happen.
You know, for instance, auditing Fed.
They're not going to do it.
But if they did, we'd be very, very happy about it.
But the one thing that I want to make a point about which I think that we're not going to see much change, but I wish they would.
And that is the distortion and destruction of the word republic versus the promotion of the word democracy.
And I find it a bit ironic that they're trying to treat Trump in an ugly, fair, deceitful manner.
And all of a sudden, it undermines their definition of democracy.
And they say, oh, I mean, millions of people won't get to vote for him if one people, one person or one governor, somebody can kick him off the ballot.
But I think that's part of the whole thing because libertarians and constitutionalists, the founding fathers, knew the dangers of democracy.
So in many ways, a lot of the things, the frustrations we have is that you satisfy the masses as they gang up together and get a 51%.
And, you know, I often thought about even the Constitution when it was written.
Just think that, you know, they had their democracy back then, and they went strictly by the majority vote because there was a discussion about slavery.
And, you know, if they were more keyed in on personal liberty, it might not have ended up so badly.
But anyway, I think the whole thing on democracy is a farce.
Elections And Personal Liberty 00:13:24
It's misleading.
It sounds wonderful.
But I don't think anything's going to change.
I think there's going to be all talk of democracy.
And even those who destroy their definition of democracy, just allowing people to vote, that's not going to change.
But it might wake up some people and say, it's about time we paid more attention to how these elections are really being run.
That's a good point.
You know, words are so important and they're so abused and they're so overused that I think that's a very good one.
You know, this is one of the occasions we always strive to be right.
And if I'm ever wrong, I feel really terrible.
This is one day I think that we're happy to be wrong if we're going to be wrong.
We're happy to see that return to normalcy.
But the one thing that I have, I have just a couple that I think won't happen, there's a lot, but one of the short list is that we won't, unfortunately, right size and right purpose the U.S. military.
We know we talked about it on the show.
We've passed a massive, massive spending bill.
There's all kinds of money in it for things that are completely unrelated to the defense of this nation.
And it continues to grow.
And this is an example.
And I think hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about this this week.
Colonel McGregor sent me this article over this morning, and it is an important article.
And I haven't completely digested it.
But it's just a symbol of what is not going to happen.
Now, put this up if you can, this first one.
This is from the New York Times.
New spin on a revolving door.
Pentagon officials turned venture capitalists.
And you see here, here's Espy, who was the SECDEF under Trump.
And I just have one clip from it, and this tells you what I'm talking about on this one, Dr. Paul.
If you can go to that next clip, he says, retiring generals and departing top Pentagon officials once migrated regularly to the big established weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Now they are increasingly flocking to venture capital firms that have collectively pumped billions of dollars into Silicon Valley style startups, offering the Pentagon new warfighting tools like autonomous killer drones, hypersonic jets, and space surveillance equipment.
So to me, what this looks like, Dr. Paul, is that they are becoming a moving target and hard to put your finger on.
They're burying themselves in these little startups everywhere, and they're going to start sucking more money in.
So when we keep talking about Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and how evil they are, they're going to be beside the point because it's going to be hard to point your finger at these hundreds or maybe even thousands of startups.
So it is like a cancer that's metastasizing and spreading throughout the body.
So I think with that, it's probably not a good sign.
Right.
You know, one thing that our viewers might choose to criticize us on is that you're not making a point.
Won't it be a big difference on who wins?
And I hope I'm right on what I'm thinking now.
I hope there is a victory that is much more attuned to shrinking government, and that would be good.
But the other side of this point is, you know, when you look at the big issue, the issue you just talked about, the military-industrial complex and what we're doing overseas, spending money and all this, you know, the Republicans haven't, they don't have a good record.
They haven't done that well.
But this year, there's hope.
You know, I've been more emphatic in the past about never, it doesn't make any difference at all.
So I'm hoping this year I can say, well, maybe there could be a difference.
But the truth is, is some of these things, like, is the budget really going to shrink in size?
It's not going to happen.
And, you know, are we really going to bring our troops home?
But it's something that I think is very important for us to realize.
And I think I believe our viewers would understand there are probably some Republicans, some libertarians, and some independents and some true believers.
I think it's, because that's what we emphasize.
We emphasize the whole effort to have a system of government, you know, on economic policy.
We have a specific type of economic policy based on property rights and volunteerism, which is completely different.
And neither of the other sides approach it in that type of view.
It's always which group are we going to satisfy.
I remember one of the early days of voting on the Congress, it was some, I can't remember what it was, but it was this.
It was too crew.
But a lot of times on the table where you say, oh, what are we going to vote?
The last minute, they're going to, what's this vote about?
And they would have help down there, and they would list the companies or you know, oh, this group believes it's a yes vote.
These companies and these special interests don't believe so.
So that was that was, then they say, oh, yeah, we have that group in time.
You know, and that was, I thought it was pretty well ingrained, that whole system.
Find your donors.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think on the previous one I was saying, you know, losing the Ukraine war, which is what NATO has done, which is what the U.S. has done, is in the process of doing.
They put everything they had into it, and they've not defeated Russia and Ukraine.
It's actually, for the rest of us normal people, we think it's terrible.
I mean, it exposes them as paper tigers, all sorts of big, bad things happening.
But for the people like Esper and the others, it's actually a good thing.
Losing this is a good thing because for them, they're spending it to, we have got to invest even more in new kinds of weapons.
And that's why we're starting these new kinds of funds, these new kinds of companies that are going to explore all sorts of new types of things that you have to pour even more money.
And so the loss in Ukraine, the defeat of all of these snazzy weapons that we were supposed to have been able to defeat Russia with, the end of all that is actually good news for the military-industrial complex.
I think the only bright spot is that we can't let them win.
We have to try to win the argument.
There you go.
You know, the issue of plagiarism has come up.
And it'd be nice to think that, oh, there's an election and that was so egregious.
You know, how bad?
Won't the politician quickly make sure that they don't even come close to it?
Well, I think plagiarism is going to stick around.
They might become more sophisticated, but they basically steal ideas and especially in the political sense that they don't come up with anything new.
But I think it will be tolerated.
That's where the real crime is.
And what happened, you know, when the president of the Harvard College came out, oh, she didn't do the right thing on her dissertation.
And I thought, oh, she screwed up.
She should have been more cautious about it.
But it turns out, well, she has 50 things now that she does.
So it's a system.
But that's only part of it.
I think the other part is they have boards of directors to curtail people that get off the base off base, and they don't follow their oath of office or common sense.
So they take it to the board, and the board says, essentially, the way I read it, she can do anything she wants because we hand-picked her and we trained her in the whole system.
So I predict they won't clean it.
They'll make an effort to clean it up.
There may be some improvements, but that whole system is not, it has to be dismantled.
And it's not going to be dismantled.
But in a way, whether you're the president of Harvard or whether you're a chairman of a committee in the Congress, they're serving in the same function, and that is propagandizing and getting rewards if you're an obedient servant to the military.
Well, I do think, though, ultimately on the university stuff, the market, what you would say, the market will win and ultimately is winning.
I saw a piece, I think it was in Newsweek.
I just can't recall where I read it, but talking about how a university degree now is so devalued because it's been so cheapened by the wokeness and all this garbage that's gone into it.
So there will emerge some good competition.
There already is emerging good competition, young people learning trades and doing things of that nature.
So I think ultimately the market will survive.
We'll win.
Yeah.
Well, that's a good one.
One other thing that I think is going to continue, and we're not going to clean out the prisoners that we shouldn't have in there and sort it out and find the ones that should be there and put them in their place.
When you think of the hoodlums and what's going on in our streets and how they beat up people and kill people, and one murderer the other day, I think he had been in and out of prison seven times in the last couple days, you know.
And then he goes out and they kill somebody.
That to me.
But there's a lot of people still this attitude about victimless crimes because they want to mold society.
So that brought together both the conservatives and liberals.
They go along with it.
They put them in prison.
But they never hurt anybody except themselves.
So I think the victimless crime issue is not going to gain much steam.
The only thing they'll do is when we run out of money and can't maintain them, we're sort of getting close to that, where we have to release prisoners.
But we should at least wish we could make a better effort in putting violent people in prison.
But that they need more help, so they really need special attention and the finances to take care of themselves.
Yeah.
Well, the other one that I had, and we could make a lot, and I did invite our viewers to add some in the comments because we're only going to be able to touch the surface.
But if you put the next one up, here's an example of the next one that I would say, which is we will not see a return to electoral normalcy in 2024.
We had hoped after the fiasco of 2020 that things would go back to normal.
Well, they didn't in 22, and they're not going to in 24.
This is a column from our good friend Jonathan Turley on his website today.
Destroying democracy to save it.
Maine shows the danger of zealots in our legal system.
And even, in fact, Dr. Paul, and this is, of course, is the decision by Shenna Bellows, a person who was not elected to anything, who unilaterally, and we put the next one on, actually, this is from the article.
She unilaterally decided, she declared Trump an insurrectionist and decided herself that he was ineligible to be president.
And then Turley says she joined an ennoble list of Democratic officials in states such as Colorado who claimed to safeguard democracy by denying its exercise to millions of Americans.
That kind of goes to what you were saying in your opener, Dr. Paul.
And Turley continues, yet the most striking aspect of this poorly crafted decision was not its litany of conclusory findings, but rather Bellows's implausible suggestion that she struggled over the decision.
Bellows was a natural choice for challengers who have been searching for any officials or courts willing to embrace this dangerous theory under the 14th Amendment that they can unilaterally bar candidates deemed rebellious or insurrectionist.
And I would just assert that it's not going to go back to normal.
We had the impeachments of Trump.
We've had the indictments of Trump.
We've had everything thrown at him to try to keep him from being able to run.
And now we're having unilaterally decisions made by unelected people who say, no, you can't be on the ballot.
Even if the Supreme Court rules that this has gone too far, you cannot do this.
They're still going to be tinkering with the elections.
It's not going to be so.
And the one positive thing there, in spite of that concern that we should have, is that the market started to work because the more they tried to punish Trump, the more popular he became.
And even now the Democrats, why are we doing this?
We're making a martyr out of this sort of thing.
But Bellows was, when you saw her on television talking about how it was like, I am the most important person in the world.
She was giddy.
She was just, really, I've conquered the world.
So it'd be a shame to see it happen.
There's going to continue with this kind of problem.
Because I think the debate and the contest between nihilism and natural law is going to continue.
And nihilism is buried into our system.
And it's justified not only by plagiarism, but politically speaking.
And it's been known throughout history that politicians have an obligation to lie to people.
Scare them, you know.
And this sort of thing.
Systematic Attack on Privacy 00:04:12
So I think that's going to continue, even though I think there's going to be more and more people recognize it.
And there was a time when natural law was an automatic.
You didn't have to say, you didn't have to get a question.
What are you talking about?
Natural law.
Well, it's pretty easy.
It's been around for a long time.
Yeah.
Well, I'm basically reached the limit of what I had, Dr. Paul.
So if you don't mind, I'm just going to close out with just a couple of thoughts.
And one is that I thought about all of you during the break.
It was nice to have a break, but I miss looking down here and seeing all your comments as you're on the live chat and as you're commenting on the shows.
And that's the reason Dr. Paul and I get up every morning and do our best to try to reflect on what's happening out there and how we can try to put it together in a digestible form.
So you're watching the show keeps us here.
And I hope that we can grow the channel in 2024.
We rely on you.
And I want to thank every one of you who participated in the Ron Paul Institute end of year fundraising drive.
We did very well.
We're very happy.
We can always use more, however.
But thanks to you, we're in pretty good shape.
So over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, and the one thing that's going on now that is going to continue, unfortunately, because they're very creative in doing what I'm going to complain about, and that invade our privacy, you know, control of speech.
And that was something that was very well known at the founding of this country, and it was a model.
And yet it has now, you know, deteriorated and spying on us.
And the technology is such that they can spy more easily.
And, you know, it's just like almost anything.
There are so much mechanical things and weaponries and engines that can be used in nuclear energy.
It can be used for peace or can be used for war.
And that's what this technology is because, you know, I never claim I'm a technology person when it comes to internet.
But boy, I love it, this ability to get something.
But my job is to sort it out and make sure I know where my sources are coming.
But it was one thing that I mentioned as I was leaving Congress for the last time was to make the point that the most important thing we protect, there's a lot of people saying, well, no, it's the Second Amendment.
That's pretty important too.
They're all important.
Liberty is important.
But I made the point about the First Amendment and expressing ourselves, that if we can't do that, and we're going to be put in jail.
And if you can't even run for office and one clerk can say, oh, we don't like what you're doing, we're going to exclude you.
You're not being allowed here.
Sounds like a third world nation.
So that, and that's what we'll become if we don't change things.
So I have a lot of confidence in people, you know, finding information and changing their views.
And to me, that would be the very important thing to do.
But right now there is a systematic attack on our personal privacy and our ability to express ourselves.
And we've heard so much about that on the internet.
It comes and goes, but it's still pretty bad.
And I think that even the things that we do use and we can't get away from using a telephone.
You know, that everything is recorded.
So only the people waking up and saying enough is enough when we want to make sure this stops.
Because protecting liberty, to me, is essential because that is what people need in order to make their own personal decision.
If you want to carry through a system of voluntarism, you have to have correspondence talking to people and getting along with people, people with regulations and taxation and all these controls and recordings of everything you do.
So I don't think it should be difficult to understand what personal liberty is all about.
Mind your own business and the government should certainly get out of minding our business and I think the world would be a lot better place.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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