WWIII? Russia Announces Partial Mobilization For Ukraine War
Russian president Vladimir Putin announced this morning that Russia would partially mobilize its military forces in the ongoing Ukraine conflict, stating that it is NATO that is pulling the strings and sending the weapons to Kiev. The Russia/NATO proxy war has been long ongoing...but will the conflict take a turn to a direct clash? Also today, Pentagon announces a review of its psychological warfare conduct as scores of fake social identities are revealed.
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I am doing fine.
Let's talk about peace and prosperity.
Not much of that.
Let's talk about our government who's there to protect us and provide everything we need, make us safe and secure and happy.
And they're falling short of that.
Matter of fact, the job gets bigger.
The more they do for us, the more they pretend to do it, the more we need some help.
And of course, the help comes from people acting in a voluntary manner and believing what individual liberty is all about.
And we would obviously be a real challenge to the number of people who are employed by the government.
And that is the reason that it's not going to change much.
Not only employed by the government, but a lot of people make money from the government.
You know, literally, you know, when you build weapons and sell weapons for wars you don't need, they still are very strong lobbyists in Washington.
But, you know, today, the markets are anticipating everything about what Powell's going to do.
Is he going to raise interest rates three-quarters point or four point?
And they're just holding their own pins and needles of that.
And then when I pick this up and I said, Putin announces partial mobilization, I think 300,000 in Ukraine war escalation.
And he says, if we need nukes, we'll use nukes.
And on and on, you know, and the troops are there, the tanks are there, the weapons are there, and we've supplied a few weapons ourselves.
I think we made a couple bucks out of this.
But that doesn't seem to affect the markets.
You know, there was a time when this would really, really stir things up, especially in the precious metals market.
But that will come.
But right now, it's just that, you know, let's ignore the important things.
So there's not many, there's not a whole lot of this.
They mention it, but the significance of this and what's going on here.
And now, you know, Putin gave that talk yesterday, I guess it was.
And he laid it on the line, and he's not going to back down.
And he probably has a few problems to deal with.
But it looks like it's escalating.
I would think in one hedge article in the title, use the word escalation.
I would say that's accurate.
There's escalation going on now.
Great danger going on right now.
Easily explainable.
And you know, there's going to be an election, you know, a referendum in eastern Ukraine.
And people are going to decide which way they want to go.
So the basic principle sounds pretty good.
Self-determination.
But this is a long way from the type of self-determination that I would like to see.
But anyway, they play on that, and there's an argument that people should have self-determination, but also it's disappointing to know that the two sides that are arguing over this both have nuclear weapons and they threaten each other.
So I would think those kind of events are of much greater danger than what's going on, as bad as it is with the Fed and the interest rates and the control of the economy, which is very bad.
But they really come together, the economic control and that foreign policy controls.
The same people are doing the same thing.
One is to do bad things and how are you going to finance it?
Well, you can steal from people, you can tax them, but that gets old hat, so we'll just print it.
And now we face a crisis.
Yeah, let's put up that first clip because this is the big announcement that came this morning.
Putin announces partial mobilization in Ukraine, war escalation, says the West wants to destroy Russia.
A couple of things that are happening that kind of can be taken together, I think, to understand what this means.
The first of all is the, and we mentioned this in the show yesterday, the four scheduled referendums that will take place over the weekend in four regions of eastern Ukraine as to whether they wish to rejoin Russia.
And we broke it down yesterday, what that means legally.
It means, of course, if they are joined into Russia, then any attack on those territories will be an attack on Russia.
So it has a legal implication that's important.
The other thing, and I think that Fed partially decision today, although this decision was probably taken quite a bit, quite a while ago to do this partial mobilization, the 300,000 fighters that were announced are about 10%, no, about 10% of the full available reserves to Russia.
They have, I think, 3 million reserves that they can pull.
So it's an incremental escalation in that respect.
The Russian defense minister also gave some specifics, but the point that he made, and I think it's a valid one, is that basically we're not at war with Ukraine here.
We are actually at war with NATO because all of the command and control in Kiev is dominated by NATO.
There are NATO fighters here.
All the weapons are being sent by NATO.
So this is a de facto war between the U.S. and NATO, not the U.S. and Ukraine.
So it's time to realize that and understand it.
So I think that's pretty important.
I did notice an analysis from a gentleman we spoke about yesterday.
He's from a Hungarian think tank, Zoltan Koskovich.
And we put up that.
I just want to go over a couple of points, Dr. Baul, before I hand it over to you, because I think he has a good, pretty sober analysis of this.
He said the most important things about Putin's speech and the executive orders, his and Shoiju, who's the defense minister, Russia will recognize a referenda being held in the breakaway republics.
Russia is at war with NATO in Ukraine.
Partial mobilization of reservists.
300,000 conflict veterans will be mobilized and do the next.
And these are important too because the reservists that are called up will have the status of serving under contract.
That means they can be deployed outside of Russia and also they will be given the proper compensation that they would have as regular officers.
The nuclear threat verbatim, and this is what he said.
I think it's being a little bit distorted in the West.
But he said, if Russia's territorial integrity and her people are threatened, we will use all available means.
And I think Zoltan points out, this is nothing new.
It's basically essentially what we would say anyway.
And his conclusion is, and I think it's a good one, this is a calculated escalation.
So far, a relatively minor escalation, but it opens the door for further rounds of mobilization up to about 2 million men, roughly the number of reservists who have combat experience.
And just do the last one really quick to get through this, just to kind of break it down.
He said this will tilt the balance Russia's way again in a few weeks.
The West will have to decide whether it wishes to join the Russians on the escalation ladder or they can fold.
Escalation dominance is on Russia's side in this conflict that cannot be changed.
We're several further steps away from this war going beyond the territory of Ukraine.
In principle, the West can call this raise by Putin without fearing that the war spreads to us.
But we are nearing the rational limits.
So we can respond to the escalation slightly, but we're getting to the point where it's going to spill over.
Well, you know, he's absolutely right on pointing to NATO.
And of course, that's what we've been talking about for a long time.
But if you get more precise on it, who's NATO?
You know, after the war, I think, you know, Western Europe, all of Europe had a reason to believe that they should be prepared, especially immediately after the war ended.
And there was this preparation, and of course, we were involved.
And the direction of that, you know, didn't go exactly as we intended or claimed it was going to go, that we would not provoke Russia.
You know, our policies would be peace.
And even when the end of the Cold War came, things seemed to improve a bit.
But I think they avoid, Russia avoids provocation when they talk about NATO, because I think, you know, say for most people, and especially in America, people, their eyes are going to glaze over.
And they say, you know, but if they say, United States, you know, did this or that.
But it took more than the United States.
It took the Europeans being not too smart in what they've done and not standing on their own two feet and not defending.
They sort of threw everything on and depended on finances and weaponry and everything else, which is starting to break.
And there's less support for this war.
But we're the ones who have been, and the evidence is so strong and clear that we do have, I guess, what word can you use if you don't want to be so blunt?
Like we own an empire and we'll do almost anything.
Empires lie, cheat, and steal in order to maintain an empire.
And that's what we're doing there, and that's what we started there.
And it's not going to end without us participating in it.
But so often, when we protect our empire, it ends badly after, what, how many years?
10 years, 20 years, and spending a lot of money.
Well, eventually it ends.
It's going to end because even if the world is trusting us militarily and trusting us in many ways economically, and they trust our dollar, that will come to an end.
And the world will be quite a bit different place, probably not in the too distant future, probably not today, but the stage is set for this.
This is a sort of, they're hauling out the dynamite, and the dynamite is sitting over there, and we could wake up some morning and find out that somebody set the dynamite off.
Oh, that was an accident.
We didn't really mean to do that.
And so the danger is there.
You know, it's not to approve or disapprove of what's happening, but we do have to face some serious facts.
We've talked about it on the show continuously.
But starting in 2014 with the U.S. back to Q, and then for the subsequent eight years, the U.S. and NATO were shipping in weapons, were training Ukrainian military, and they were all training to do one thing, which is defeat Russia.
There is no country on earth that would not respond in some way or the other to the fact that their neighbors were being armed and trained by hostile powers overseas with the intent of overthrowing that country's government.
No country would react differently.
No country would just ignore it and let it go.
Now, it's been eight years, and you might say for the U.S. side, well, maybe it's important enough.
Why would you do something like this?
Why would you try to do this?
Well, if it was important enough to our national interest, critical national interest, it might make sense for us to do what we did.
If we really were facing an existential threat from Russia, it might make sense to do what we did over the past eight years in arming and training Ukraine.
But I would argue very forcefully that it absolutely meant nothing zero to our national interest, whether the eastern part of Ukraine would rather join Russia, would rather join Uganda or whatever.
It doesn't mean anything.
So we're basically on the precipice of World War III, and we're staring over for no appreciable benefit to our own security, on the contrary.
And I think that's the point to be made, is it is very important to us, but not because it's to provide security for us.
It's destroying our security and doing exactly the opposite.
It's what's going on domestically and economically.
You know, we talk about the culture in Marxists, how they control everything and what social media is doing, how the streets are rioting.
And then policy, yes, we're trying to work out all the mistakes made with debt and inflation.
And yet we come along and we end up with a president that passes a few laws by executive orders.
He didn't pass laws.
He just had executive orders that made the crisis that much worse, especially in energy.
So that to me, so at home we undermine it.
And people say, you know, Marxism, culture of Marxism, and what's going to happen, what will happen?
They recognize it's closer to home.
But that's exactly, I think, what we're doing here.
So often, you say, well, does that mean you think they do it deliberately?
Sometimes I think yes, or they just blind themselves to the consequences.
I think more or less that's what you were alluding to.
They're just blinded to what they're doing.
And if they can get away with lying and innuendos and propagandas, keep this thing going, pretending it's always for national security purposes.
I mean, how many times do they need to, you know, which was pretty bad when the Speaker of the House went to China to talk about our national security and our Constitution and our liberties and all that stuff.
That sort of gives me a sick feeling.
I don't believe her.
No, I know.
I don't think many people do, actually.
Well, let's look at a couple of reactions.
And here's someone that we both know and like, Dave DeCamp over at antiwar.com.
His comment on the escalation, the partial mobilization, he said, this was always going to be the result of the U.S. policy of shipping billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine and discouraging peace talks at every turn.
I hope they're happy.
That's a good reaction.
Well, here's President Biden's reaction.
Let's put on that next one.
It's a good laugher.
Biden says Putin is shamelessly violating the UN Charter with the Ukraine invasion.
And Jack Posobiak over at Human Events says the peace-loving United States would never violate the UN Charter.
You know, of course, as vice president, he oversaw the violation of the UN Charter how many times?
Friends of Putin00:04:12
Syria, Libya, etc., etc.
And here's another one.
Here's a British defense minister, Ben Wallace.
This shows the level of disconnect with reality.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace, no threats and propaganda can hide the fact that Ukraine has won the war.
The international community has united and Russia has become a global outcast.
Well, let's look at this next picture from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization just last week.
It does not look like they're global pariahs.
You have the leaders of Turkey, Iran, India, Russia.
You have basically world leaders representing the majority of the population of the world getting together.
So basically, he's lying in a way that's so obvious that it's not even funny.
My modest advice would be they don't look like really bad, bad people, but we don't have to identify and say we're going to agree with them.
But they look like they could be reasonable in a discussion.
And that was the whole thing about the lockdown, what was going on with COVID.
The people that wanted to give us false science, they won't even let the people who had probably the real science, but they wouldn't even allow the debate.
And this is sort of what's going on here.
There's people that a full debate might be helpful, but when the people who have the money and the power, it's hard to confront them.
And I just amazed at how Europe rolls over for this stuff.
I wonder what's really happening at the grassroots.
I think our grassroots people were starting to see it break.
They blindly, oh, yes, national security.
And those Russians, we've got to stop them.
It isn't even 10 years yet.
It's 10 months.
It's gone going.
And people are sick and tired of the spending.
And then what they're seeing, though, is we're broke.
And every time they talk about helping Ukraine, they talk about a million, a billion, a trillion, and it just keeps going and going and going.
Where?
Oh, at the sacrifice of our home.
Oh, no, it's okay.
We'll just print the money.
And if your grocery bills might go up a little bit, but you have to ignore that.
That just is what you should expect if we have to defend our national security.
And you look at what's happening to Europe as we get closer to winter.
And the first snows actually fell in Ukraine a couple of days ago.
So winter is approaching.
They've literally committed economic suicide.
You know, the U.S. has got to be laughing about this.
They've taken themselves out of the game by basically sanctioning themselves.
They can't buy any oil.
They have to keep their thermostats at 66 degrees during the winter.
That's not a lot of fun.
I think some Swiss officials said, you guys should shower together because you've got to conserve.
That's a little bit weird.
Some of their reasons for conserving get pretty far out of how they're going to save the energy.
But we're seeing more and more protests.
And there was a protest in Germany.
But of course, I think it was the Chancellor of Germany who said, these are all friends of Putin.
I think there's some danger if you want to start talking that way, because when you start getting hundreds of thousands or millions, that means there are that many friends of Putin there, you're going to have a problem.
But they always want to discount this.
But when people, you know, our good friend Gerald Celente, you know, we always repeat this, but it's great.
He says, you know, when you've lost everything and you've got nothing less to lose, you lose it.
And I think that's going to happen in Europe.
There's going to be a lot of social unrest.
They're going to have to figure out something because what they've done so far is having the opposite effect.
They're going to have to find a way to step back, to walk back what they've done.
You know, we talk, our government and officials here in the West talks a lot about how bad Putin is.
But when it comes back here, Putin doesn't follow that same thing.
You know, the American people are doing their job of, you know, this Biden guy, you know, he's having a problem.
Pentagon's Psychological Operations00:06:15
I have never, maybe they do it, but I don't see it or read about it.
But Putin doesn't do that.
But I think, but what I'm going to say, he knows about it.
He knows who his opposition is.
And in spite of the fact that the corrections are made rather quickly when diplomacy becomes pretty vague or complex.
And all of a sudden, I don't know what happened the other day in the middle of the speech that Biden was given.
They were making corrections.
And they were going along.
And we'll talk to Whitehawk, see what they think about what he just said.
In fact, Senator Paul did an interview, and I didn't watch the interview.
I just read a little bit about it.
And he said, basically, Biden doesn't know what he's saying half the time.
So even he's pointing, it's obvious to the rest of the world that we've got someone in charge who is not in charge.
We know this with the China-Taiwan thing.
He said four times we're going to defend them.
Four times the White House has said, no, he doesn't really mean it.
So, well, let's move on.
We're going to keep an eye on this and see what happens.
What I hope happens is that the U.S. realizes this is not in our interest and we need to step back, stop sending all this money and weapons.
And I hope the Republicans wake up and realize this is not our war.
We don't need World War III over Ukraine's borders.
And I hope to see an awakening.
But this next story is something that we continue to cover.
And it really is the relationship between social media and the U.S. government.
And let's put up this next couple.
This is from Stars and Stripes.
Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations.
And this was brought about by the fact that there was a study done by Stanford, and they found that at least 150 fake personas on social media were traced back most likely to the Pentagon.
So basically, the Pentagon Psychological Operations Group is creating fake identities on social media and then posting U.S. propaganda or U.S. psychological operations.
They say it's geared toward foreigners, but obviously everyone reads it and doesn't realize that this is the government doing it.
Yeah, you know, I may do this too often, comparing things what happens here versus in the economy as well as in foreign policy.
But truth was not allowed to come out, you know, over the COVID thing, and they were excluded and punished for this.
And that is what happens here.
If anybody wants to tell the truth, you know, they go secret on it, and, you know, they keep lying.
It's propaganda, it's psychological treatment and all this stuff.
And I keep thinking, well, why is it that the people don't understand this?
And I decided that there's nothing new under the gun because the gun is what really counts.
So they can do whatever they want.
But the similarity that I think is very easy to draw is the relationship, even though we're still trying to figure out exactly the relationship, the relationship of our government with the social media, and in particular Facebook.
You know, that has to finally break, but I don't know.
You know, they'll probably still argue, well, this is necessary.
But I'm wondering what the odds are that the Pentagon's really wanting to know what's going on.
You know, they're arguing that we have to check into this now and find out who's doing this.
It's hopefully, let's hope that people really want it.
But it's not likely to have an effect on policy very soon.
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned COVID.
And one of the things I noticed in the, there's a couple of articles about it, is one of these fake personas was created, you know, so it's an artificial persona.
It's a U.S. government, but it's pretending to be something else to refute rumors that COVID-19 had some relationship to Fort Dietrich, you know, so that it may have had U.S. origins.
I don't know anything about that either way, but the fact that the U.S. government jumps into the game clandestinely to try to discredit that, it does make you wonder what other things they try to discredit that we don't even know they're involved in.
And it raises the question, do we want to live in a world like this where our government pretends to be somebody else on social media to mess with our own minds and manipulate us into thinking the way that they want us to think?
You know, the Soviet system, you know, finally broke down for economic reasons.
You know, it just didn't work and people realized it.
And it just sort of disappeared.
It wasn't like there had to be nukes dropped and tanks rolling and have a civil war going on.
It just disappeared because it was of total failure.
But the lies were told to try to prop that up for a long time.
And that's what I think we do on all our foreign policy as well.
We keep doing this, but eventually, and too slowly, that is the problem.
I keep arguing, you know, if they wake up after 10 years of slaughter and wasteful spending, why don't you wake up before it starts?
And why don't we look to COVID?
Why don't we look to the doctors who prove themselves to be much more scientific?
And you might even have somebody sometime in the Senate to suggest that Fauci is not a real scientist.
No kidding.
Well, I want to do one quote from this article, and I'm going to skip ahead to, if you can do that one in 2020, officers at Facebook, if you can put that one up.
I think it's two ahead of where we were.
It's the second to last.
Yeah, there we go.
Thank you.
And I'm putting this up, Dr. Paul, because exactly what we've been talking about, the relationship between Facebook, social media, and the U.S. government.
So this is from the Stars and Stripes article.
In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military.
That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook's director for global threat disruption, that's weird, spoke to Christopher Miller, then assistant director of special operations, which oversees influence operations policy.
Facebook Warns Pentagon00:03:32
And this is the part.
So Twitter and Facebook contacted this guy from the Pentagon, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries.
His point, one person said, was, guys, you got caught.
That's a problem.
So, no, it's not a problem that you're manipulating and using our platforms to bamboozle everyone.
It's that you got caught.
You know, that's sort of happens when people finally get caught when they're ruining our economy.
We caught you.
We found out where you had that printing press where you were counterfeiting the money.
You got caught.
And that's when people become distraught.
And right now, that is the whole thing.
They're not distraught over Ukraine.
That would be my opinion.
I think they're coming together on it because they're distraught with what is being denied here at home.
They'll send more money to Ukraine.
At the same time, the gasoline prices are still going up and there's still a major problem.
And there's a significant amount of price inflation.
So that is going to be with us for a while.
Yeah, it is.
Well, I'm going to close it out, and I'm going to remind our viewers again.
Let's put up that last clip.
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Very good.
You know, I'm going to mention something again that we talked about yesterday, and that is who's running the show.
Is it Facebook that is coming up with these ideas and they go to the government and say, I'm a good American citizen, and we have information you better look into.
Or is it the government that knows exactly what they're doing and whether the government's involved in the war against COVID or the war against the Russians?
They're in charge.
They say, hey, Facebook, you know, we can not be such supporting friends of yours and help finance you and protect you, but we need some information.
And, you know, our CIA is not all that efficient and all, so we want you to take over.
And all of a sudden it gets confusing.
Who's directing the orders?
And I think this recent change has been that Facebook said, look, we'll look around.
And if we find anything suspicious, we'll just report it to you like a good citizen would do it.
And then because they don't want the government to initiate it and then get into a problem, so Facebook reports the information to the government, then they go and get a subpoena.
It's legal.
They get a subpoena and then they go ahead and check it out and they think they're covering their bases.
But I tell you what, I think they're one in the same when it comes to political power and economic power.
Private Property Matters00:02:01
It's very hard to separate the two.
Can you separate good monetary policy from the financiers that run the Federal Reserve?
It just can't be done.
It's a system of interventionism, whether it's intervention in our personal beliefs and habits, whether it's intervention in economic matters or intervention in other people's affairs.
It just doesn't work because all it does is bring out the differences.
And that is the reason that people should resort to voluntarism and cooperation and setting examples.
That's the only way we can improve things in the world.
There's been different stages in the history of the world where there was more of that.
I think there was a consequence, far from perfect, but at the time of our revolution, that there was a lot more for that.
And right now, back then, people run the country, when they wanted to come to this country, they did it in a decent, honest way, and they wanted to do it to have an opportunity.
Today, that has changed a bit because the system is based on political and financial power, and people are coming for various reasons.
And the most difficult thing about all the mess we have with the immigration is the fact that they ignore totally the principle of private property.
Private property, if you understood private property in a libertarian society, we would not have an immigration problem.
Let me tell you, it would be taken care of.
And it will not and would not necessarily have anything to do with canceling generosity and humanitarian efforts because it's been proven that the American people are very generous.
But under these conditions we have today, the generosity and humanitarian approach cannot be satisfied by just printing more money.
It's insanity.
And we have to keep plugging away at what it is like and what it could be like living in a society that promotes peace and prosperity.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.