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Jan. 11, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:13
Trump Time? POTUS 45-Endorsed Candidates Clean Up In Primaries

In Arizona, Michigan, and elsewhere, Trump-backed candidates like US Senate hopeful Blake Masters pulled off victories in yesterday’s primaries. Is this the shape of things to come? Also today, more fallout from Pelosi’s perverse Taiwan junket and Russia accuses US of direct involvement in Ukraine war.

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Election Night Reflections 00:10:51
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 this morning.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing well, doing well.
Good, good.
So we did things a little differently yesterday.
We were on a different, what they call platform.
And somebody else, you know, we've had a setup that worked but not as well as we thought.
We put it up on Rumble and it looked like we're going to be there.
And how did it go technologically?
Did we work it out pretty well?
Well, our fine engineer in the back was twisting and turning the knobs and no smoke poured out.
So he got us rolling through this.
And we actually got very great numbers.
So we're grateful to the Rumble people for featuring us prominently.
And we got up there.
And, you know, people that want to watch us on YouTube, that's fine too.
And in fact, our numbers on YouTube weren't any worse than they usually are.
So it's a win-win.
And, you know, hopefully we're very cautiously optimistic.
Maybe one step in the direction of the free market.
Yes, exactly.
Maybe free speech, too.
Not have too much censorship.
Yes.
So there were other things going on yesterday.
There was a little election here and there.
But, you know, the first thought that came to my mind, and I have a partial answer to it, and that is, how'd Trump do?
He's not on the ballot, but he really was on the ballot.
And just with my casual looking at the results, it looks like Trump came out pretty well in Arizona.
But, you know, I was watching TV, not extensively, but a little bit here and there last night to get some results.
And there would be a result, and they would give results.
But they were very vague on, oh, this person is a Trump supporter.
I have to admit, that's an important political issue.
But today you could figure it out.
But it seemed like they didn't mention, oh, this is the Trump supporter because these stations I was looking at weren't Trump supporters.
So they just sort of, so last night it was still a little vague and now the election returns are clearing up.
But Trump did, he came out pretty well in Arizona.
Especially in the big races in Arizona and elsewhere he came out really strong.
The reason they don't want, what they don't get about Trump in a way, and we've had a lot of problems with Trump, that's a different issue.
What they don't get about Trump is the more the elite try to ignore him.
It's kind of like with another candidate I remember.
The more the elite try to ignore the person and try to downplay that person's success, the more the grassroots are feeling support for it.
I think that's what we're seeing here.
But the first big victory for the Trump-supported candidate, we can have a picture, we can put it up here, Blake Masters in Arizona.
He is a senatorial candidate.
He's come out big.
He won.
He beat two challengers in the primary side.
He will be facing Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, and this is viewed as one of the most probable Republican pickups.
Kelly is unpopular.
I can vouch personally because I met him with my son.
He's a pretty unpleasant fellow.
That's another story.
But Blake Masters, overtly endorsed by Trump and successful last night.
Wonderful.
You know, Trump is always in the mix.
There's no doubt about it.
And I think the Democrats go at it the wrong way.
I hate to give advice to them because they might take it.
It might be worthwhile advice.
But I think that their biggest mistake is in spite of their tremendous victory in the last election.
I think where they get into trouble is I would say 90% of everything they do, including the Republicans who go against Trump, they do it out of hatred.
He gets personalized, it's hatred, he precipitates it, he sort of invites some of that.
He likes a little fight here and there.
But it can't be just hatred.
I think that finally gets to be pretty boring, especially with the people that like him.
And then all of a sudden the fact that now the pieces are falling together, that a lot of things Trump stood for and how things were going before, far from what we would like to see.
But when you, in politics, it's usually a comparison.
It seems like Trump probably had a better policy with China, and he probably had a better policy with the oil industry, and it probably was not laissez-faire capitalism.
But there's a big difference, and I think just turning it into hate won't work.
So I don't think I'm going to have an influence on the Democratic Party, so I'm not going to worry about the advice that they all of a sudden talk about the issues.
Honestly, that would be such a leap that we'd be dumbfounded if that happened.
Yeah.
Well, another big place, I think, at least, is Michigan.
And this is sort of near and dear to my heart in a way.
And we can put up that next clip.
This is Tudor Dixon.
And she was victorious.
She was a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan.
And this is near and dear to my heart because, you know, Michigan, if you remember Dr. Paul, under COVID, they had a horrible Whitmer, horrible governor, shut the whole state down, was really a Stalinist in many ways, just an awful, awful person.
So it would be a really, I'm not a Republican, I'm not a political person, but nevertheless, I love revenge.
And her winnings, I want to hurt the bad guys.
So Tudor, her victory in the primaries is great news, and I would love to see her.
She's probably bad on a lot of things, but I would love to see her win just as revenge for evil people like Whitmer.
Well, you know, time moves quickly, and we're into the middle of the second half of, you know, this Congress, and that's going to come around fast.
Here we are in August, so we're going to see a lot more primary races and things unfold.
But it seems like if the Republicans don't do very, very well, in spite of all the hatred thrown at them, something's wrong, something's wrong with their approach, or they haven't approached it right.
One thing that has aggravated me to know, Ann, is they still use it, and the Republicans never corrected.
Trump wanted to overthrow the election.
Well, in a way, the election, maybe they, why should asking for a recount be overthrowing election?
Why don't you say, no, we don't want to overthrow the election.
We want an honest count.
And we have a right to it.
We have a right to have recounts and double check.
That's where they ran into a lot of problems.
But eventually it was, the Democrats were very shrewd and shifting it to overthrowing the duly elected president of the United States.
It was going to be a coup right out in front of us.
So that's how they got away with that.
It's almost like what were they so afraid of, right?
Now Trump could have handled it better.
He's blustering and all this stuff.
But it's like, you know, you were protesting too much.
But here's another one in Michigan, and this is an interesting one, too.
Because we're also looking at this, obviously, for the elections coming up.
believe it or not, just a couple of months, the congressional elections, but also 2024.
This is John Gibbs.
He's running for the 3rd District of Michigan.
Now, he defeated a sitting representative, Peter Meyer, in the primaries.
And Meyer is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump.
So this, I'm sure, is a particularly sweet victory for Trump.
Here is a representative who voted to impeach him.
Republican voting to impeach him, saying he's not fit for office.
He's defeated in the primary by Mr. Gibbs here.
So I'm sure that Trump feels that that is a particularly sweet victory and potentially a harbinger of things to come.
Check it out.
Not only good with revenge.
Well, here's a good quote from an article we saw on Zero Hedge, giving them full credit.
This is a veteran Republican strategist, Mike Makoviak, and here's what he had to say.
And I think it's a pretty good summary.
He said, Trump's endorsed candidates had a good night.
His endorsement record in GOP primaries remains very strong.
Sometimes he rides the wave and endorses obvious winners late.
Sometimes he creates the wave.
The more he wins, the more he is feared by GOP candidates.
And I think that's key right there.
Yeah, I think there's going to be a shift in attitude.
You know, if you wanted to, there were some technical things in the election and counting votes and how the college, Electoral College worked, which you could make some cases, and some good libertarian thought persons have pointed that out.
But that isn't what these guys were doing.
They were playing pure politics and they were joining the hate crowd.
You know, Trump said this to me and I don't like him.
You know, it's all the thing.
I think their motivations were wrong because they did not approach it on principle.
Well, here's one thing that really caught my attention.
You may have seen a couple weeks ago, I think it was, Turning Point USA, which is young conservatives.
They had their big rally down in Florida and they did a straw poll down there.
And for what it's worth, I think it's interesting to see how Trump is being viewed by young, very conservative Americans.
And let's put this up because it's pretty dramatic when you look at it, just this poll, this next picture, if you can.
Here it is.
If Donald Trump did run and the 2024 Republican presidential primary offers the following choices, for whom would you vote?
Donald Trump, 78.7%, Ron DeSantis, 19.
And the others are barely also rans, including your favorite Dr. Paul, Mike Pompeo, only 0.5%.
So young Republicans, young conservatives don't like any of them.
But I was a little surprised because I view DeSantis as younger, more energized, more good-looking guy, whatever.
But he was trounced by Trump in DeSantis' own state among TPUSA attendees.
That might be a powerful message out there.
The direction that we're going.
Pelosi's Weak Position 00:09:13
Well, speaking of the direction we're going, unfortunately, again, it's toward war.
We talked about Pelosi yesterday.
We're going to do a little bit of an update.
She went in, she spent the night.
She got an award from the president of Taiwan.
Some kind of weird-sounding award, but who am I to judge?
The Clouds in the Sky Award or something.
She made a couple statements, hopped on a jet, tried to avoid the Chinese missiles flying overhead, and took off.
And you'd say, well, that was great.
We owned the Chinese.
We showed them.
But at the end of the day, you really, I mean, what was the whole point of the thing?
It ratcheted up.
And this struggle between fully understanding, you know, first I look at it, I say, it's pure stupidity.
Or do they have an ulterior motive?
But, you know, it isn't, they've often talked over the years, and I always wonder why they had to have A full amount of power to fight two wars at one time, you know, East and West, and be prepared.
So they're always preparing.
And right now, you know, at the same time, the antagonism is toward Russia as usual.
And now it's really building up.
Now, as I recall, I don't think Trump was anything like this where he really tried to provoke.
And when you think about it, and people hate him for it, it's risky even saying, trying to be objective.
But, you know, the Nixon deal of opening up, you can say, well, that's horrible, that's horrible.
And yet, how many years ago that's been?
It's been a long time.
And there's been billions and billions of dollars worth of trade between both.
And then I think what happened on there is the Chinese became too capitalistic and they were beating out of America.
And we were so foolish as to continue to destroy our own economy by print, print, print.
The money filters into our people.
The goods and services come cheaper from China.
So we spend our money overseas, change the balance of trade, and the Chinese didn't go looking for a war.
I mean, they don't, just a fraction of what we spend.
I mean, it takes nine big countries to even come close to what we spend on defense.
It has nothing to do with defense.
It has to do with subsidizing the militarism of what we follow in this country.
And, you know, as a perfect example of what you always say, there's only a uniparty in Washington, especially when it comes to war and foreign policy.
Your favorite, well, I won't say, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and 25 other Republican senators issued a statement yesterday.
Now, they didn't say, hey, take it easy, Pelosi.
You know, what do we need this war for?
No.
They sent a statement saying, good job, Nancy, you really own the Chinese.
And here's what the statement says.
We support Speaker of the House of Representative Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan.
For decades, members of the U.S. Congress, including previous speakers of the House, traveled to Taiwan.
Now, that is disingenuous.
And I can't believe that someone as astute as McConnell, evil but astute, doesn't know this.
Yes, 25 years ago, Gingrich did go to Taiwan as Speaker of the House.
And it was very, very criticized back then.
However, there's a little detail that's very important.
He made an official trip to China first.
He first landed on Chinese soil, had an official trip, an official visit with China as China.
And then from that, he went to Taiwan.
So he paid his respects in Beijing first, and then he did a side trip to Taiwan.
That's not what Pelosi did.
Pelosi put her thumb in their eyes and hit Taiwan first without going to China at all.
You could say, well, we can go over where we want.
We're America.
Okay.
But as we are learning from all of these mistakes from Iraq and Afghanistan, there are consequences to doing stupid things.
You know, this is turning out to be another example.
I complain about too much bipartisanship.
You know, they come back and the hawks, the militant Republican hawks might give lip service to a little complaint here and there, but they're not really upset about this stuff because they know this isn't a road to peace.
They know that it did exactly what it did.
They have to know what that was.
This was a pure antagonism.
And I heard them, you know, the very conventional, hawkish commentators on Fox, they would say, you can't look weak.
Yeah.
Nancy Pelosi's tough.
And she stood down the communists and all that.
At the same time, some of the general things that maintain peace, like a median divide, and it's been honored between Taiwan and the Chinese itself, China mainland, that's worked.
But now, they said, that line's gone.
And they erased it just like that because that tells you who's really strong.
But Dancy Pelosi stood up to him, you know, this whole thing.
So they think that that's the best thing in the world to do, to stand up to him.
But now the Chinese have taken this one other step.
They're literally sending their missiles over.
They honored that.
They did.
They weren't doing that.
They figured maybe when Trump was in, they wouldn't dare try something on him.
Maybe, maybe.
So I think that I think this whole thing, once again, is it pure stupidity or do they like conflict?
But once again, we can usually bring in the military-industrial complex having a lot of influence on our foreign policy.
And that's such a great point.
We can't be seen to look weak.
Well, guess what?
You fought a 20-year war against barefooted people in a ragtag army and you lost, right?
Tell me that's not looking weak.
You could argue that case with Vietnam.
Yeah, you're right, you're right.
That's how you look weak by getting into stupid wars.
I want to do a little juxtaposition here because the next clip is Pelosi herself, and here's her brilliant speech when she got there.
If you can put that on that next clip, not the video clip, just a picture, if you can.
We're going to skip the video because it's just too bad.
Do you have that quote?
Today the world faces a choice.
Go back one if you can.
Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy, Pelosi said during her trip.
America's determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains ironclad.
And you hear this a lot, basically from all of Washington.
And unfortunately, you hear it a lot, Dr. Paul, in libertarian circles.
We have got to promote liberty worldwide or else.
But juxtapose that between someone we both respect a great deal, and that's David Stockman.
Now he has a great piece that we just, he allowed us to reprint on RonPaulInstitute.org.
And here's Pelosi on one hand.
We've got to defend democracy everywhere.
And here's a sane person and a very smart person, David Stockman, almost as if a retort to Pelosi, if we can put that next one up.
This is from his article.
It's a great piece here.
He's talking about, you know, Hong Kong going back to China early on.
So he says, so yes, Hong Kong residents may not be as free as they were five years ago, and certainly much less so than they were before the city-states reversion to China in 97.
But so what?
That's the way the cookie of world history crumbles.
America's security does not depend upon upholding freedom in every distant precinct of planet Earth, no matter how loudly the hegemonists, the neocons, and warfare state lobbyists insist.
That is such a great point.
But what she said is essentially a declaration of war.
This is by firm because here she is in a very, very powerful position and saying it's ironclad, and that means we don't need a vote in the Congress.
We don't even need the president's blessing.
And we have a CIA that can stir up a lot of trouble when they want to and get things going.
But that to me is so strong.
So she looks like she's canceled out any threat that she's weak.
She spent that whole trip.
And I think weakness is people who capitulate when there's pressure put on you by bad people.
And I better go along with this.
And they call that a position of strength.
But I think standing up to the nonsense.
And, you know, especially when the majority is bearing down on you that they capitulate.
But she's been on two sides of this issue.
Pushing NATO's Limits 00:06:35
She's not always been this super, super hawk.
It depends on her mood, I guess.
Depends on who's president, right?
If a Republican's in there, she's a dove.
Well, the last one, speaking of war, we just want to do this real quick one.
We noticed this on antiwar.com.
While we are paying attention to Pelosi and all sorts of things, Ukraine is not going well for us, for the stupid U.S. policy.
And put up that next clip.
Russia accuses U.S. of direct involvement in Ukraine war.
And they've made a very specific threat to the U.S. If you become directly involved, you're going to be targets.
And that's just natural in a state of war.
But the U.S. keeps pushing, and when there's no Russian response, they push further, as they have done with NATO expansion for this past decade, until finally it doesn't work anymore.
But here's the background of Russia's determination that the U.S. is involved.
Vadim Savitsky, deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence, told the Telegraph that Ukrainian officials consulted with U.S. officials before launching high Mars strikes and that the U.S. has veto power over the attacks.
And so Igor Konshenkov, spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that this cooperation, quote, proves that contrary to assurances by the White House and the Pentagon, Washington is directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine.
That's pretty serious, and they keep pushing it until there's a snapback.
Yeah, and you know, this is ratcheting up once again, you know, and the Russians are speaking back at us.
And I think they're slow.
I think they're more tolerant than they should be.
What about the sanctions?
Can you imagine what we would do if anybody put the sanctions on us, that we couldn't import oil or something like that?
We do that to ourselves.
Have to have the enemy do it.
As we throw our weight around and as we dispose of leaders we don't like, as we use as a, you know, the CIA to get rid of the dictators we don't like or participate, I bet we're king of the coups.
Yeah.
You know, we've helped in more coups because it's an empire we have.
We have 150 countries to deal with and take care of.
And I think sanctions are like blockades.
But that hasn't been touched.
But right now, this looks like it got the Russians' attention even more so, and they're speaking back on there.
But, you know, all this activity, to look for, to aggravate it, whether it had been in the Middle East, whether it was in Syria, whether it's in Ukraine, does it help the American people in any way whatsoever?
Does it help the people, say, in Ukraine or wherever they are?
The people of Ukraine, even though they have to pick sides and they have their differences, that is hardly beneficial to them.
Because once Ukraine permits themselves to be taken over by NATO and they beg and plead it, this jeopardizes their people.
How many people have they lost already?
And it's not all the Ukrainians' fault.
It's our fault too.
But they were drawn into it and they accepted, oh yeah, we like NATO over working with the Russians.
Instead of thinking, well, maybe there's a way to negotiate.
Maybe we can have self-determination.
Maybe the eastern part of Ukraine could have been there.
There's all kinds of options that theoretically the human race ought to be able to work out through negotiations.
And right now, you know, provoking this aggravation with China.
I mean, it's probably not on the verge of a nuclear exchange with China, but it could be.
Now that the missiles are going over, I mean, there's nothing perfect about missiles going over another country that you have such rocky relationship.
So what happens if a missile goes down?
You know, when we target, when we target people, our dictator, and we want to kill them, which is way overboard as far as the way I think you should run the world.
And oh, we missed, and we kill a family.
Yeah.
And we'll send them money.
Yeah.
A couple bucks.
Is there any wonder people get annoyed with this?
So that to me is such a shame.
And it isn't just the Russians right now.
Now they've decided that, well, we like this stuff really well.
The military-industrial complex, they're going to be so proud of us.
We need two of them.
We want two people, big powers.
I mean, yes, we have more weaponry than the two of them together, but it is still to a point where that isn't the final answer.
It's a determination.
If they think we're messing around with their homeland, there's a different attitude than when you just have a lot of bombs.
Yeah, well, we had a lot more weapons than the Taliban, too.
Here's just the final thing.
And this, you know, you took a little bit of heat way early in the conflict because you wrote, it seems like Washington wants to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian.
And they said, oh, how can you say that?
Well, here's Lindsey Graham essentially saying that.
He said, quote, as long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.
Is that something to cheer on?
You know, that sounds pretty sick.
It's almost like bragging how smart we are to intimidate them, make themselves slaves to war.
They become enslaved to what we want to do.
You would think that they would see the profiteering that goes on.
So what a pity.
Well, let's put it the last link, just as a reminder again, to get your tickets for the Ron Paul Institute's Washington Conference, Labor Day weekend, anatomy of a police state.
I was just chatting with John Anisha Whitehead earlier today about John's speech.
It's going to be a great speech.
He's going to give a great overview of what the police state really is.
And he always has some great insights at the Rutherford Institute.
So John is going to be there.
Doug McGregor and many other great speakers, Jeff Dice from Mises Institute.
It's going to be a great event.
You're going to meet a lot of great people.
Go to RonPaulInstitute.org and you will see a link in the upper right side where you can get a ticket.
Great Speech Ahead 00:02:31
We keep the prices low because we want to get together.
So do that.
We're less than a month away, Dr. Paul.
Less than a month away, and we want to see everyone there.
Very good.
You know, we're going to keep plugging away at the issues that we talk about so often, especially on this program, and that is the working for peace and prosperity.
It seems to be very complex.
You have the Chinese doing this, and we have our dignitaries and our bureaucrats doing things that are completely different.
We have a military-industrial complex, and we have the Russians to deal with, and there's no perfection anywhere along, so the tools that have to be used should make sense.
And I happen to think it makes sense to talk to people before you start dropping atomic bombs on people or risking, you know, a nuclear exchange.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
And the rules of a society that can get along together is really not too complex.
And the results are so much better.
But the trouble is the people who get in power are driven by special interests, money, and power that they get put in power in a way that is not always honest.
And I think it's, you say, well, yeah, these are bad people.
We've got to do something about it.
But the bad people do get in our government, as in all governments.
But what we should do is to put some responsibility on the people because governments do reflect the people.
And right now, all these threats and everything, the average person now doesn't even know about this and they don't care.
They have to, just how we had trouble getting the attention of people of all the things that were going wrong with the lockdowns with COVID.
Now it's turning out that every country except the United States are reimbursing people who have been injured and sickened and died from some of the treatment that they either got or denied for their COVID.
But that is not complex.
It just takes some decency.
It takes alertness.
That's why to have a free society, the people have to be alert.
They have to know what they believe in.
And they have to stand on principle, not foolishly, but with a direct effort to try the best in the world to bring about peace and prosperity.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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