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Jan. 11, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:11
Uprising! Bojo Dumped In UK As Farmers Dump Manure On Dutch Government!

As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally had his stiff white knuckles pried from power yesterday, the rest of Europe - starting with Holland - is erupting in massive protests. Is this the beginning of the end for Europe's Covid-lockdowning, Ukraine-obsessed, WEF-hob-nobbing elite? Mises Institute President Jeff Deist joins today's Liberty Report.

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Great Minds Join Us 00:01:24
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
I'm Daniel McAdams, the host today, because Dr. Paul is away for the day.
But thankfully I'm not alone.
I don't like being alone.
And so I've got my good friend Jeff Deist joining us today.
Jeff was my colleague in Dr. Paul's Capitol Hill office, as most of you know.
He ended up as Dr. Paul's chief of staff in our very last couple of years there on the Hill.
And he went on to now being the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, our great big brother organization.
And we do a lot of things with Mises and we love Mises.
Jeff, thanks a lot for joining us today on the Liberty Report.
Thank you, Daniel.
Great to see you.
It's great to have you back on the show.
It's always great to have you on the show.
We don't do it often enough.
And before we move into our discussion, there's a heck of a lot of news this morning.
I do want to tell our viewers right off the bat, aside from the fact that Jeff is always a great conversationalist, we wanted to have him on because we wanted to announce that he is our first announced speaker for our September conference in Washington, D.C., The Anatomy of a Police State.
You're not going to want to miss it.
Jeff's going to be there.
A lot of other great speakers that we'll talk about.
It's going to be a great event.
Go to RompaulInstitute.org, or I'll put in some in the description how you can get your tickets.
We've sold one out of three tickets, Jeff.
Now that I mention your name, I don't know.
Ukraine's Impact on Global Politics 00:11:33
It's going to be rough.
By the end of the hour, people are going to be putting them on eBay.
But we're glad to have you.
Well, the big news this morning as I got up, and I was so shocked, right, after these last couple of days of the London wall falling, was that Boris Johnson finally, as I put in the description, had his cold, dead fingers pried from power.
What's your take on what's happening in the UK, Jeff?
Well, it's interesting.
He's such a perfect representative of that class.
And I guess if we lack a better term, we'll just use neoliberal class.
Back in the day, in the 1990s, he was rumored to frequent LewRockwell.com.
He was rumored to be kind of a post-Thatcherite libertarian of sorts.
And I suspect that the real reason he's gone is that he hasn't been neoliberal enough for everybody.
I mean, not too long ago, we were told that Boris's coalition depended upon him being kind of a Thatcherite, not a Trump populist.
That populism would actually steer a lot of people away from the Tories.
And that if he were more globalist in his approach, more European in his approach, less Brexit in his approach, that this would ultimately result in a stronger conservative wing in parliament and that this would ensure his success as Prime Minister.
It's actually gone the other way.
And now we see him ousted.
He's going to remain Prime Minister, apparently, but he's resigning as leader of the party.
So, you know, this is just politics as usual.
This is a pretty unprincipled guy, in my view.
And that's politics.
If you want to play that game, I don't have any big crocodile tears for this guy.
Yeah, and I do remember those days when Lou Rockwell was enthused about Boris Johnson.
There might be a libertarian streak in him.
And maybe there was for a while, but he found out that, you know, the grass is certainly greener on the neoliberal side.
But indeed, he did distance himself from Trump.
You know, he wasn't alone in that.
He cozied up to Macron.
He cozied up to Biden, in fact.
And basically all of the things over the past two years, and this is one of the reasons why I think it's so interesting.
Over the past couple of years, he's embraced everything we hate.
We meaning the pro-freedom people, pro-liberty people.
He loved the COVID lockdowns.
He thought it was fantastic.
But he didn't like them for himself.
He loved to have his parties.
He loved, there are pictures of his staff falling down drunk in the afternoon in his backyard.
I have no problem with that.
I wish all government employees were drunk every day, all day.
However, the hypocrisy, I think, hit.
And then the Ukraine thing hit.
And again, it was the same thing.
He took the absolute wrong side in terms of if you're a non-interventionist or if you believe in liberty.
And he pushed it to the very last second.
The only thing that will make me resign is if I feel I can't help Ukraine enough as being prime minister.
So it's just, you know, Jeff, I don't want to sound too giddy here, but it seems like all of the things that we've hated over the last two years have been embodied in Johnson.
And watching him fall, I cannot suppress a smile and a laugh.
Yeah, again, I think he embodies a big blind spot for people who believe in liberty.
And that is the difference between what I would call, I guess, political globalism and market globalism.
He's very much a political globalist.
And as you said, he became much more favorable to the EU and to Macron and to just the people who want to see Europe centralized, who want to see basically governance centralized.
He's part of that class.
There's a class of people all across Europe, all across the West.
They all went to the same kinds of schools, Ivy League schools, Wharton, Cambridge, Oxford, Sorbonne.
They all travel in the same kind of circles.
They all view this project in which they're involved as the idea of a global government and having the same kinds of rules everywhere across the West, the same kinds of people running the show everywhere across the West.
And, you know, we're seeing the fallout from that.
The fallout from that is things like Brexit, phenomena like Trump.
We're seeing this with the Dutch farmers now.
We're seeing this with Vladimir Putin and his demonization as someone who won't go along with this global program.
So it feels like, and I certainly hope it's true, that the political globalists are starting to be thoroughly challenged all across the world.
And that's why it's certainly delightful to see, you mentioned the Dutch farmers, to see them pull up to parliament buildings and basically fire a bunch of manure into government offices.
We know they're all full of crap, and now we know they're literally full of crap.
So that is a delightful sight.
But before we go into the farm protests, because I think this is related and it's spreading like a virus, I shouldn't use that word.
But a big part of what's happening, I think, is, as you point out, and we both read this article in The Hill, which actually, interestingly enough, reflects what Dr. Paul wrote over the weekend for his column: that the sanctions, the European and American sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine affair seem to have boomeranged.
And I think as that sinks in, that has contributed to the swift decline in popularity among European and American politicians.
What is your take on it?
The Mises Institute, of course, focuses on economics.
I'm sure you have a very important take.
Well, sanctions are always a bad idea.
They're always an act of war.
They always hurt the poorest people in the countries involved the most.
And we're seeing all kinds of backfiring.
We're seeing all kinds of unintended consequences from these sanctions.
I mean, it's a strange kind of warfare when we now have Gazprom announcing record profits.
So the Soviet, the Russian government is going to hit them with a windfall profits tax, which struck me as weird because they're state-run.
I don't really understand how you tax a state-run oil company, but nonetheless, so their profits are up.
The Russian ruble is the best performing currency of 2022.
So again, unintended consequences.
Here in the United States, we're seeing rising gas prices, we're seeing rising food prices because, of course, the Ukraine, among other things, is one of the big producers of fertilizer and wheat for the world.
So I was recently listening to the head of Goya Foods on one of the financial talking head shows, and he was saying, you know, in America, we're going to pay for this in the form of higher prices for food, but we're still going to eat.
But in the developing world, in Africa, for example, shortages of wheat and fertilizer could absolutely cause famine, absolute calamity.
So again, another unintended consequence.
All across Europe, especially in Germany, they're facing huge increases in natural gas prices.
And as a result, I don't know if this can be rectified before winter this fall, but there's a possibility that people, less affluent people, will be unable to heat their homes or will be spending a huge percentage of their income on heating their homes this winter across Europe.
So this is a big mess.
And it all ends up with Putin, I think, for all of his aggression.
He might end up with even having central Ukraine, which is mineral rich.
And so the former Soviet Union, Russia, which is already the most, from a natural resource perspective, perhaps the wealthiest place on earth, might get even a little bit wealthier as a result of him taking Ukraine.
So the whole thing, the West played this badly, I think.
And so now other people who might want to challenge our hegemonic power are going to look at this and say, you know, Biden and the Americans aren't very strong.
Look at their sanctions.
Putin might come out of this stronger.
So instead of doing what we should have done, which was said, look, you know, NATO is defunct.
It's no longer required in a post-Cold War world.
And a border skirmish between Russia and the neighboring Ukraine is none of our business.
We did what we always do, which is try to make Uncle Sam the boss of the world.
And it's not working out.
Yeah, this time it has absolutely failed, and it's very obvious that it's failed.
And the world, it seems as if the world has changed.
You know, the financialism that we have operated under, of course, in the U.S. and the EU for so long seems to have fallen.
And you're seeing the rise of a resources-based economy, maybe even resources-backed currency.
We've heard a lot of talk about that.
And, you know, you mentioned about how this could have been avoided.
And, you know, if you mention this, you're blaming America.
But, you know, there's a great little skit, a great little thing with Ambassador Stephen Walt and Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador, Professor Stephen Walton, the former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.
We've talked about it on the show, and you may have seen that little clip, Jeff, where Walt, who is a realist, who's sort of the dean of the realist school, said, So hang on a minute.
If we knew all along that Ukraine wasn't going to get in, NATO, and you all did and you're admitting it now, why not just tell Ukraine and Russia, look, you're never getting in and avoid this?
You mean you lied all this time?
And McFaul said, was laughing uproariously.
Of course we lied.
We always lie.
Why are you so naive?
So, you know, a joke among the elites about the elites lying has cost the lives and destruction of, you know, in terms of square miles, a good chunk of Europe.
And I think that really sort of speaks volumes about the moral corruption, as Dr. Paul would say, the moral bankruptcy of the ruling elite.
And maybe that's what we're seeing right now.
We're seeing the destruction of that corrupt moral elite.
Well, I don't want to see Biden or Max Boot or Hillary Clinton or Mona Sharon or any of these other insane, crazed neoconservatives talking about Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukrainian nation.
I mean, I'm for Ukrainian sovereignty.
I'm for a Ukrainian nation.
To the extent they view themselves as a separate and distinct people from Russia linguistically, culturally, ethnically.
Of course, that's muddied by some of the forced immigration that the former Soviet Union caused.
You know, I absolutely want them to be their own nation if that's what they choose to be.
And I think it's deeply unfortunate that this war is going on to settle it.
But for these Western foreign policy types to start talking about a nation or talking about sovereignty when that's the exact thing they deny virtually any other Western nation, when they want global governance, when they want things decided and centralized in Brussels or the IMF or the UN, I mean, it's just absolutely laughable.
Leave the poor Ukrainians alone.
Don't try to suck them into NATO or any of these other schemes.
And, you know, the idea that now the Finns have to be in NATO, everybody has to be in NATO.
There's only one thing that comes of this, and that's a new Cold War.
And I'll tell you what, with our financial problems here at home, if you look at polls, Daniel, Americans don't even mention Ukraine in the top 10 of their concerns about going into the midterms.
Yeah, it's not a winner.
It's not a winner at all.
You know, absolutely not a winner.
And it's funny you mention that because when it comes time to forcibly change borders to the benefit of the global empire, well, that's fine.
Saw This Happen 00:04:59
Remember, we talked, there was talk among the foreign policy establishment in D.C. for a long time about the partition of Syria.
That's the only way we can do this, is partition it.
But when it comes to Ukraine, where these elites have a different interest, we have to maintain the borders and the sovereignty.
Well, borders change all the time and borders should reflect political realities.
Most of the problems in the 20th century were because borders that were drawn by then British Empire didn't reflect political realities.
So, yeah, they're hypocrites.
We shouldn't be shocked about it.
But let's talk for a second about some of these protests, Jeff.
The Dutch farmers, as we say, they are playing for keeps.
They shut down the airport.
They've shut down motorways.
They've sprayed manure at politicians.
And really, the Dutch government is showing its true colors.
Now, they showed it during the COVID protests, where you saw these brutal Dutch police beating up people.
But we also saw it, I think it was yesterday, when literally, and it is on tape, it is on video, a Dutch police officer pulled out a gun and shot a tractor.
But that tractor was being driven by a 16-year-old Dutch teenage farmer.
The bullet, if you look at where it hit, it missed his head by just a couple of inches.
This was a completely unprovoked act of police aggression.
We saw the other video, and I'm sure you saw this, Jeff, of this police van rolls up, and all of these people dressed in casual civilian clothes rush out and start acting like they're turning the protests violent.
Well, to their credit, the Dutch people realize this whole thing is a scam, the little January 6th action, and they chase them back into the van and they run off.
So we see this in Holland.
The Italian farmers have started protesting.
Poland, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere.
And one of the things that they're saying that it is, is, you know, the World Economic Forum is demanding that you use less fertilizer and the prices must rise because we need a new green world order where we just sit around eating bugs all day.
And they're not having this.
And so they're protesting against this.
This seems like sort of a catalyzing moment, maybe, Jeff.
I don't know how you feel about it.
Yes, it is catalyzing.
And the images on TV and YouTube are not good.
Even the female Dutch cops are about 6'5.
And they're all throwing haymakers on these poor farmers.
But it's interesting.
I mean, in a sense, the Boris Yeltsins of the world are causing these problems because we're increasingly ruled.
And I don't just mean in the governmental sense, because there's representative or geographic representation for most Western nations in their parliaments or whatever.
But we're increasingly ruled by a media and an academic and a government and an administrative class which is full of people like Boris Johnson who are so divorced from any reality on the ground.
They have no sense of the land itself or where food comes from or all the unpleasant things that might occur to make a tasty T-bone or ham appear on your table.
And so, you know, just these people, when it comes to green energy, when it comes to eating less meat, when it comes to putting less nitrogen in the ground or using less fertilizer, I mean, these are true believers.
They think that you can just command and control an economy, you know, along with their wishes.
And farmers tend to be people who are very realistic, who see the day-to-day reality of animal husbandry and all these other things.
You know, I heard a school counselor tell me at my son's school that the kids who came there, this was in a rural part of the country, that they don't know anything about the birds and the bees because they don't grow up on farms.
And so I think that the LGBT movement is less strong on farms because the trans thing, you know, it's just remarkable how divorced these legislative types can be as to what actually sustains them, the food and energy that they rely on every day.
And so, you know, again, these aren't ideological things.
The questions in the 21st century tend to be more along elite versus populist lines, or who decides, or where is this decided?
Is it centralized or localized and regionalized?
And I think you've got to go with the farmers here.
I think they're in the right.
Yeah, well, I don't think it's going to be Klaus Schwab or people like Bill Gates who are going to be sitting around crunching on bugs.
They want the rest of us to do it.
And you mentioned the media, and we had a great piece on the Rompol Institute.
We reprinted it from the Postal, which I would recommend people have a look at this magazine, by Michael Mikhail Krupa, who's a Polish intellectual.
And he wrote a good piece about how in Poland, the opposition to most of this stuff is coming from the right, from the conservatives, and particularly from Catholic conservatives, opposition to this Ukrainian fiasco and all the totalitarians.
Act of Getting Together 00:03:13
But it's being stopped by the media and by the academia.
And I didn't research this, but I mean to.
And I wonder how much organizations like USAID and all these U.S. government organizations or the EU or Brussels are funding a lot of these outlets and making sure they get what they pay for.
So we'll keep an eye on this, Jeff.
And it's rather interesting to see this happen.
And I don't want anyone to get hurt, but I hope it does continue because you're right.
I think the farmers do have a lot to say, and they live in a different world than the elites do.
But before we close, I wanted to talk just a little bit about conferences.
And we've always looked up to the Mises Institute because you have great events, you have varied events from big get-togethers to small get-togethers to Mises University, which I'm planning on attending this year.
I'm super excited about it.
I've never gone.
I've never seen your campus.
Very academic, but very topical.
For us, we've tried to emulate with our limited resources what you've done so successfully there.
But for us, the act of getting together is almost more important.
Of course, great speakers make for a good event, that's for sure.
But the act of getting together, getting people together, and I just wonder how you feel about this, the role of conferences of bringing people together in terms of the struggle for freedom and liberty and non-interventionism.
Well, I think one of the biggest tools of the state is demoralization.
And that's certainly been occurring in spades across the West since COVID, especially.
So I think getting together is very important.
I think finding like-minded people is very important.
And what we've seen, especially in the digital age, is that there are whole brand new ways to network and coordinate and coalesce.
And so I do think it's important that people get together and that they know that they're not crazy, that we're under a regime of gaslighting, and that things that used to be considered common sense and basic economics are now considered extreme or fringe.
That shouldn't be the case.
We are the mainstream, and we ought to start acting like it.
And I guarantee you, if you come to an RPI conference, there'll be an energy and enthusiasm, at least in my experience, that you want to be part of.
And the one in Washington, D.C. in particular, which I think is the beginning of September, maybe the first Saturday in September over Labor Day.
It's going to be fantastic.
I'm so pleased to be invited.
Yeah, it's going to be great to have you, Jeff.
And I really thank you for the gift of your time and being there.
And I will indeed include in our description how you can get your tickets for that event.
Jeff, it's been so great having you on the show.
We really appreciate your insights.
Thanks a lot.
Is there anything else you want to tell our viewers on how they can find Mises Institute material?
They probably know it already, but let's go ahead and let them know.
Well, just head over to Mises.org or follow us on Twitter.
We'd love to be involved with you.
Yeah, you can get an entire education for free there.
So don't waste your time in front of the TV or with your head in your phone.
I want to thank all of our viewers.
Thanks for tuning in to today's Liberty Report.
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