This week marks one year since the end of the 20 year US war on Afghanistan. Former US Gen. David Petraeus argues in The Atlantic that the withdrawal was a mistake. Is he right? Also today: SecDef and First Lady are jabbed to the hilt...yet they still got Covid! Does that just mean the vaccine is working?
Get your tickets for the Ron Paul Institute's Sept. 3rd Washington Conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anatomy-of-a-police-state-tickets-366089773367
This week marks one year since the end of the 20 year US war on Afghanistan. Former US Gen. David Petraeus argues in The Atlantic that the withdrawal was a mistake. Is he right? Also today: SecDef and First Lady are jabbed to the hilt...yet they still got Covid! Does that just mean the vaccine is working?
Get your tickets for the Ron Paul Institute's Sept. 3rd Washington Conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anatomy-of-a-police-state-tickets-366089773367
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?
Very good.
I understand there's an anniversary of sorts today.
Is it one year?
Yesterday, yeah.
Join one year when they left Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, you know, and that was a little messy.
But, you know, that does bring up, we don't have it on our schedule to discuss it, but I think Colonel McGregor knew something about that and had worked with a different way of getting out.
I don't think he was staying forever.
Unfortunately, Trump put him in like with three days left in his presidency.
That's a little bit of a double.
I know we were involved in that, but it didn't work.
But it really, that episode, I hope it has helped McGregor because he's identified now with something different than the status quo of the military industrial complex.
But anyway, there was an article on anti-war, and it was entitled In Rebuke of the Dishonorable David Petraeus.
They didn't say character wise that he was anything very special.
He compared to Trump, which is something to do.
I keep thinking, well, you know, he makes Trump look pretty good.
Yeah, really.
No kidding.
Okay, but it's a year, and Petraeus is defending himself.
He thinks we should have never left, and we should continue it.
And that's always been my argument.
How long do you want to stay?
And well, we can't lose face.
Do you want those people that died?
What, 2,000 people died?
Americans died?
Oh, you don't want them to have died in vain.
Yeah, well, 20 years, that's a long time.
Yeah, but it's because the WIMPs wouldn't fight to win the war.
Like, did they really understand what Afghanistan was all about?
If there's ever been one country that has been talked about, and general population knows a little bit about how the Afghans and the Taliban and the tribal system has worked, nobody ever conquers them.
So that's one thing.
But anyway, we went in and we were really proud.
Americans were proud of what we did during the Cold War where we enticed, we played games and enticed the Russians to come in.
And the Russians went in and they got smart faster.
They got out after a few years.
They lost a lot of people and we were behind the scenes fighting them.
So what did we do?
I guess the military industrial complex, the insiders, they probably looked at this and said, well, now it's ours.
So let's go in and secure it.
So we'll send our people in there.
Not their accountants and the manufacturers, but the military.
They sent them in.
And things have not worked out very well.
Like we saw the people leaving in Vietnam on the helicopter, the single helicopter.
Now you see the huge cargo plane.
Hundreds of people.
It sort of really was tragic when you think about it.
Just chasing.
What were they going to do?
What if the dog catches the car?
But anyway, I don't see too many lessons learned.
Let's hope there is, and let's emphasize the best we can of why bad policies gets worse.
And there is another policy, and it's really complicated.
It's called non-intervention.
One word.
Understand that and understand how that's applied to the Constitution and lo and behold, not the 2,000 people that were lost in Afghanistan, but the many other thousand and millions of other people that have died in the Middle East in this century.
It's a tragedy that could have been avoided.
Yeah, and you're right about lessons not being learned because as soon as they stumble out of Afghanistan, now they're going ahead and stumbling into war with China and Russia over nothing, over the same level of nothingness, lack of importance to U.S. strategic interests.
But, you know, there's this whole risk-free, there's nothing more risk-free than Petraeus saying, oh, yeah, well, we should have stayed, you know, but it's sort of hard to stomach after 20 years.
We can put up that first clip because this is a piece by Sean McCarver in antiwar.com, and it's a critique of an article that Petraeus published in, of course, The Atlantic, saying that we should never have left.
But Shane McArbor points out, 2,324 American service members killed, $2.3 trillion, and over 20 years later, convicted criminal and adulterer.
David Petraeus concludes, quote, in essence from the beginning through to the end, but especially at the end, American commitment was lacking.
It was lacking, Dr. Paul.
20 years of fighting, dying, blowing up the country, displacing people, destroying the economy.
Our commitment was lacking.
We're slackers.
You know, what's interesting, the way military people who don't have their heart in defending the Constitution and non-intervention, that it boiled down from what I read there, and we've heard this before, it's technology and him instituting a sort of a military technology.
It was called counterinsurgency.
And I read it and I have sort of an idea of what they're talking about, but it seems to be so irrelevant.
I mean, do you think the success of the World War II after that, after we got involved in that, do you think they were talking about counterinsurgency?
And matter of fact, compared to the nonsense that has gone ever since, not that you can defend everything that ever went on with World War II, but at least the attitudes were a little bit different.
There was a goal to win and get out, and then we'll deal with what we want after that.
Well, let's put on this next clip because Shane McCarver has, I think, a great line, and it's one of those things that jump out at you because he gets it right here.
He gets it perfectly.
This is why it failed.
This is why U.S. interventionism will always fail, why it will always backfire, will always end in disaster.
I'm going to read this quote.
With little knowledge of the history or intricacies of the areas in which they were deployed, American forces sought to work with the people that seemed the friendliest to their operation without knowing the historical implications of giving one tribe or family more power over the other.
Petraeus repeatedly mentioned in his supposed success, mentioned his supposed success in Iraq, but failed to mention the collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014 in the face of a NISIS assault.
And I think there's so much wisdom in this sentence.
The U.S. went over there.
It sent troops.
It had no understanding of the language, the history, the complexities of Afghan society.
Or for that, you could substitute any place that the U.S. has intervened in the past, you know, forever.
You go in there like a bull in a China shop, you turn things over, and then you look around and society is disintegrated, and chaos and war ensue, and you're somehow surprised that they all didn't join the fight with the Americans and fix their country.
This is the naivete, the incompetence of the global chessboard players, the people who want to intervene everywhere.
And we see the results everywhere it's tried.
There's a quote from this article that I found a little bit fascinating because it almost wasn't, it was surreal.
I'm surprised at it, even though we shouldn't be surprised at any of the things.
This is Petraeus, they go on to say, Petraeus goes on to argue that Americans should have given the Afghan government's military more Russian-made helicopters that the Afghans were able to maintain to support their troops.
I guess they were left over for when the Russians were down there or something.
But that was a big deal.
And his ability to perpetuate counterinsurgency.
We'd have won the war.
Just let us stay a little bit more.
We could give up another thousand people.
Who cares?
But he came up with this dopey doctrine, and when it failed, he didn't want to accept the fact that it failed.
So he kept saying, you just didn't try it hard enough.
You didn't try it hard enough, you know.
But there's another measure by which to judge the wisdom of the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan.
And The Economist of all places actually captured it well.
If we can put on this next clip, there's a piece that came out, I believe, yesterday.
Violence in Afghanistan has dropped under the Taliban.
Love them, hate them, it doesn't matter.
Things have gotten more or less more back to normal in Afghanistan.
And here's a chart from this economist article, if you put it on next.
Overall, when you look at reported acts of violence after Kabul fell, quote unquote, to the Taliban, you see a general decrease and a positive trend of decreasing violence in the country.
That in and of itself would say it's the right thing to do.
Now, the departure was less than orderly, and we know that.
But I think we would argue that was inevitable from the beginning.
And it was the fault not of us leaving, but of us having stayed so long.
Never talk about that.
You never talk about it.
It was a participation by both parties, Republican, Democrat presidents, and over 20 years, you know, there's a lot of blame to go along.
But that is the point.
Who sent them there?
You know, coming home, it was sloppy and bad, and it made no sense, and things got worse.
But, you know, I saw that quote.
They were saying, well, at least there's less violence, but unfortunately there's more poverty.
And that was a solution.
Well, I have a little trouble with that because, you know, there still is a strong central government, a social dictatorship in a way.
So I would say there is, if you add up everything, there's more state violence.
Because it's an authoritarian government, you can't get them more authoritarian.
So there's more state violence.
And then the poverty is obviously getting worse and will get worse.
Ours will too.
But the other thing that I would add is a decrease of liberty.
As bad as we were being there, we weren't creating a free society.
We were fighting to make them good Democrats.
We need to spread democracy and peace and democracy.
It always gets me.
We're going over there to fight this war to show about democracy and protect our Constitution.
Well, how in the world did our Constitution get protected over the last 20 years?
Protect the Constitution and liberty and democracy.
And, you know, those words still, you put them out there, you know, if you look at the major stations, and maybe there's one or two stations that will modify that a little bit.
But everybody said, well, that's a good goal.
These are good people.
That's their good intentions.
Yeah, good intentions.
Well, you know, the chaotic departure from Afghanistan was really, if you want to blame someone, you would blame the fact that Washington, again, believed its own lies.
Remember, they were saying, oh, the Afghan government's going to hold.
The military's not going to fold.
You know, within 25 minutes, the whole thing fell apart.
Either they're completely incompetent, our entire intelligence community, for which we pay billions of dollars, is completely incompetent, or they just flat-out lied, or some combination of the two.
But that's where the blame should lie.
But you mentioned the poverty.
If we can put up this next clip, this is also, this is from our friend Dave DeCamp, an anti-war.
Good piece out there today.
One year after Taliban takeover, U.S. refuses to release Afghan funds.
Now, anywhere else, this would simply be called theft.
We're holding $7 billion of Afghan bank reserves.
We took the money, we stole it fair and square, but we refused to return it even in the face of poverty right now in Afghanistan, even in the fact that they are struggling to eat.
And here's a quote from the article, put the next one up.
This is the insanity of it.
Earlier this year, President Biden said he would make half of the $7 billion in Central Bank Reserves available for families of 9-11 victims, even though the people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the attacks.
You know, we obviously have plenty of sympathy for 9-11 victims, but Afghanistan didn't do it.
Neither did Saddam Hussein, neither did Elmer Fudd.
These were all made up.
So stealing the money from these people to pay for the victims of 9-11 makes no sense.
It reminds me of, oh, sorry, go ahead.
No, I said that didn't make up for it.
Yeah, I was just going to say we also steal 80% of Syria's oil.
So we're basically a global kleptocracy.
Well, you know, I doubt very much if we've returned a little bit to Iran, but I bet we haven't returned at all.
But that was the whole thing.
That was a big issue when I think it was under Obama.
He sent some of this money back.
Who knows what his motivations were because they weren't, he had not been identified with us at all.
So he returned some.
But the hysteria on the military right and the military industrial complex, what are you doing?
And they never once said, well, we stole it from them.
We're trying to get along with them.
But they never mentioned that because I think most American people, if they've heard the honest explanation on that, and that this is going to be done to try to work for a world of peace rather than just perpetuating a war for 20 years.
And that's gone on.
Vaccine Coincidences and Controversies00:08:47
Actually, that fight's gone on long and still there.
Some days it perks up and looks a little bit better than other days.
Not so good.
Well, our next segment, I guess we would call it COVID weirdness and vaccine corruption.
And let's put on this first clip.
This is, I think, this photo should be in the Wikipedia page when COVID is all said and done.
Goofy U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wearing some kind of god-awful outfit with 38 masks on and a face shield.
Well, here's the news from yesterday.
Thanks to our friend Jordan Schafftel for his analysis.
Keep it up, please.
Lloyd Austin got his booster in October of 2021.
Then he got COVID in January 2022.
After that, he had another booster, shot number four.
He got COVID again today.
Works like a charm.
So here he is, four shots and two COVIDs later.
Works like a charm.
And here's the next one.
Just heard about this this morning.
Just in quadruple vaccinated Joe Biden infected with COVID.
The person who retweeted said, safe and effective.
So, and we talked about Joe Biden himself.
We talked about the actual manufacturer, the Pfizer CEO.
Over and over again, we're seeing people that got all their shots and they're getting COVID one, two, three, four times, who knows how many times.
It's really not a very good ad campaign for the shots.
But it's so weird that they're able to, at least so far, they're making the attempt and say, thank goodness I took the dumb shot.
And one of these days, especially now that some lawsuits are appearing, you know, and people are suing, and it's being recognized more outside of the United States that there's been injury, but more and more of that.
And these same people say, well, it did me a lot of good.
You know, I would have been sicker.
At the same time, they continue to do the same thing and taking these shots.
At the same time, even the establishment is breaking down.
Or matter of fact, if they're true lawsuits, it doesn't mean so much the establishment is giving up on it as much as the people.
The juries would more represent the people knowing a far lot more than what the government is telling us.
So they're ruling in favor of the victims.
And we'll put that down as a little positive.
Yeah, so I mean, we talked about Borla yesterday where he said these vaccines are 100% effective.
And we're seeing a lot of that.
It's funny, you had mentioned people being grateful that they got the shot, even though they also got the virus.
Here's a little compilation that's been making the rounds on Twitter.
If we can put up, skip that statement from Joe Biden and just go to that next one, this collection.
And it's going to be a little hard to read, perhaps.
But these are people, Elizabeth Warren, Albert Borla, Barack Obama, Mayor Lightfoot, Gavin Newsome.
They literally, Dr. Paul, are all saying the same thing.
This can't be a coincidence.
Here's Barack Obama just tested positive for COVID.
Got to scratch your throat a couple days, feeling quite fine, otherwise.
Michelle and I are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted.
Gavin Newsom, grateful to be vaccinated.
Mayor Lightfoot, I credit being vaccinated and boosted.
Albert Borla, thankful we received four doses.
Elizabeth Warren, grateful for the protection.
Representative Welch, grateful for the protection, etc.
Hillary Clinton, I'm grateful than ever for the protection.
They are literally writing the same lines.
How is it possible that such a massive coincidence of people getting the shots, then getting COVID, then writing the exact same sentence about how they're grateful that they got the shots?
It's good democracy because it looks now like even if you're part of the insiders, if you don't do what we tell you, you can get canceled too, you know.
You won't belong here.
So we'll do it and we'll keep everybody together, totally naive and killing themselves.
And just think of all the nonsense about how much they have put through the young people and they continue to do it.
So the other thing is, there's hundreds of thousands of RNA victims' deaths, millions of injuries now.
And it's getting higher all the time.
And then the stupidity of it all on getting these vaccines.
What was the story about one vaccine that they advised and they got approval?
Yeah.
Oh, the Comber Nati, yeah, yeah.
But the claim now, by people who I think are probably more knowledgeable, said it never existed.
It still doesn't exist.
It never will exist, yet it's been approved.
And I wonder who made that one.
That was interesting because Jordan Schachtle has written about this a lot, and we both noticed this, the Lulink to it today, that the FDA approved version is Comer Nati.
The emergency use, of course, is just a Pfizer bio and tech jab.
And he has proven, Schachtle has it, they've never manufactured the one that has actually been approved.
They just continue to manufacture the formula, the recipe of the original one.
I don't know exactly what it means.
Some people speculate that they might remove some of their immunity from lawsuits if they use an approved one or that the government could be liable.
I don't know the details, but some people speculate that's what it is.
I don't understand it.
It's one of the mysteries.
I sort of understand that some people are involved in making decisions that they don't have a moral right to be involved in.
And this should be done in the marketplace by doctor-patient relationships and working it out.
But now it's government-run medicine is what it is, and it's really run by the pharmaceutical companies, and it has nothing to do with medicine.
You know, that's absent from it now.
So I think that is worse than ever.
There's probably been combinations, but I would say that this is the worst.
But we see glimpses of this.
These people that we follow are talking about it.
You know, this whole idea, I think we've won a minor victory so far on natural immunity.
You're almost allowed to say it.
You know, we don't have to worry about being canceled because you and I have talked recently about natural immunity.
But there for a while, all you had to do was mention it and then get punished.
Now, that has to be about anti-intellectual as you can get.
That's why they shouldn't be in this business.
Yes, it's imperfect when it's left to the marketplace, but there are rules.
You know, there are rules when you mess up and people suffer from their false promises and all, that they're going to be liable in court.
So, what's the first thing the drug companies have done over decades now is get themselves exempted from the liability, and the Democrats and Republicans go and defend that stuff and eliminate a vehicle which is part of the marketplace.
The same way with contracts, you know, if you, the voluntary contract and many issues of medicine or whatever, education, everything, they shouldn't be permitted.
You know, you should be able to do these things, but oh no, that violates the state law or the Supreme Court or something.
You can't do that.
And then you say, we will dictate what they are going to learn and their courses and everything else.
And that's really where the ideological battle is.
It's been in the educational system from kindergarten all the way up.
I think it's incestuous.
It's all the way up because I've seen kids in kindergarten come reciting things that made no sense, but it came from their teachers.
And look at what they come out of our universities.
Just because they, you know, oh, I went to the university and I have a teacher certificate.
Now that's their license to spread a message which is contradictory to what this country is all about.
And the thing we've always said is there might be a certain person in a certain category where the shot might make a lot of sense.
But now, as you've always said, but once you've destroyed the doctor-patient relationship and you pursue a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, you're going to do a lot more harm than good rather than letting the doctor and the patient themselves try to figure out what's the best course of action for that individual person.
Anatomy of a Police State00:03:11
And I'm going to kick it back to you, but in the same vein of this sort of weird coincidence, let's put up this next clip because we've seen this all around as well.
Happy, this is a tweet, happy one-year anniversary of them reassuring you that doesn't mean they don't work.
And they're a collection of different mainstream media articles, and they basically all say the same thing and say the same quote.
Why breakthrough COVID-19 infections don't mean the vaccine isn't working.
And you've got Wall Street Journal, you've got Washington Post, you've got CNN, you've got NPR, all literally saying the same thing, just a collection of mainstream media articles with the same quotes.
Do you ever get the feeling you're being gaslit by the mainstream and by the elites, you know?
There's a short paragraph here that I want to read, and it's from the article in Naomi, Naomi Wolfe, and that has to do with who gets sick and are they really protected by having the vaccine, which they're not.
And if you have the boosters, you might be in worse shape.
But Alan Root is a libertarian, but he's on the radio, and he talks about his wedding.
He says, Root had pointed out that of 200 guests at his wedding eight months earlier, 26 of those who had been seriously ill or injured and seven had died.
That's serious business.
And all of these were vaccinated.
Wow.
Root also had said that among his friends and family who had been at his wedding, who were unvaccinated, wow, none of his knowledge had gotten sick or died.
Now, you'd think there would be a motivation who's seeking scientific truth and good scientific medicine, you know, might investigate that and have a real good study of this.
But, you know, the billions and billions of dollars that are stolen from patients and the cost of medicine going up doing just nothing more than studies for propaganda purposes and to subsidize the drug companies.
But this is the kind of stuff that should have been investigated.
But I happen to think, you know, that he's doing his very best to tell the exact truth on that.
Yeah, yeah.
Thanks to Naomi Wolf for mentioning that.
Well, I'm going to close out if we're ready, Dr. Paul, with a reminder that we are exploring this and other aspects of the police state.
We can put up that last clip again to remind you.
In our upcoming conference, Anatomy of a Police State, COVID Tyranny, the Destruction of Our Privacy, the Police State, Economic Aspects of the Police State.
It's all going to be discussed on September 3rd at our sixth, I would say annual, but we missed a year, Dr. Paul, as you recall, when they laughed at us for wanting to have a conference in 2020.
Our sixth Washington conference, Anatomy of a Police State.
There is a link in the description to click on and get your tickets.
Get them while they're hot.
Get them while they're left.
We've got a few left, and we want to see you on September 3rd.
Dr. Paul?
Very good.
Anatomy of a Police State00:02:41
And I'm sure the subject of the FBI may come up at that conference, too.
And it's been around.
And somebody mentioned it on a radio program the other day, sort of a conservative libertarian, but it's knowledge that's been around.
And that is, you know, the FBI was started, you know, around World War II.
And what they did, it was, you know, this fellow called Joey J. Edgar Hoover.
And if you look at his history and what he did, how powerful, you know, he is almost making these guys look like amateurs.
And he knew immediately what he could do with it.
And he was a blackmailer.
But back then, there were some things that could be used for blackmailing a lot faster than what they have today.
But it was a bad idea at the beginning, and yet it's nothing more has happened.
It's gotten much worse.
But once again, it's the principle, and that is, who should be really responsible for our safety?
And there's no place in the Constitution that says, well, the responsibility falls on the government, the federal government, the state government, the local government.
They'll make you safe and secure.
The whole thing is, if that is the purpose, they can't do that without total destruction of liberty because they have to know exactly what the people are doing and where they are and where to send the policemen to protect you.
It's total nonsense.
What you have to do is release the creative energy and the desire and the principles of responsibility, and individuals should be responsible.
But in a way, the undermining of that system also coincides with the propaganda that say good people have no right to own guns.
Only rich people that live in closed communities and government agents, IRS agents, now we have 87,000 more of them, they're the ones who should wield the guns.
So it always seems to be popular when they can find a clip on TV and showed how a property owner stood up and did something, which almost always they end up getting into more trouble than the criminals.
But I think there will be more and more of that.
People deciding I'm standing up for my life, you know, and my liberties, because the system that we've had here for these many years, endorsed and run by both Republican and Democrat, is not very good and we're not very safe and we're also very broke.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.