Part of the "magic" of the two Ron Paul Republican presidential campaigns was the broad appeal of his message to the younger generation. Kentucky attorney and state senate candidate TJ Roberts is part of the next wave of young liberty activists seeking to correct the rudderless ship of state. What are the issues that animate the next generation of liberty activists?
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TJ Roberts: Kentucky's Rising Star
00:05:18
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| Like this. | |
| He's way ahead of so many. | |
| He's way ahead of where I was in politics at that age. | |
| But he has been involved a good bit. | |
| And so we're going to talk with this special guest because he's running for office and he's had a lot of experience. | |
| His name is TJ Roberts and he's a native of Boone County, Kentucky. | |
| You know, we have a couple of friends in Kentucky. | |
| We do, you know, and I imagine he's met them. | |
| So that'd be good. | |
| But TJ's been very much involved. | |
| He's been involved in some of our activities and he's been involved. | |
| To me, the most important thing that he's been involved in is the study and the understanding and the desire to promote liberty. | |
| You know, that's the position that I think somebody should have because the rest can be minor details and you work out what you should do. | |
| So that's one reason that we're very interested in TJ. | |
| And he's having a primary coming up as he's running for state rep. And I imagine this will be very exciting for him and the rest because that's the way things get started. | |
| So TJ, we're excited about having you on our program today. | |
| Welcome to the program. | |
| Thank you for having me on, Dr. Paul, and thank you, Mr. McAdams, for the invite. | |
| Great. | |
| Well, good. | |
| He, you know, Daniel, what I understand about TJ, he has a law degree, you know, and but he seems to be exceptional. | |
| He has a law degree, but instead of the law telling him how to avoid the Constitution, he actually thinks it's important to know the Constitution. | |
| So that to me is, you know, a great sign for what he's doing. | |
| But he's already done some things. | |
| You know, at the height of COVID, he gets involved in suing the governor. | |
| Well, that had to be a joke. | |
| How could the guy like this? | |
| Nobody knew him, and he takes on us in the midst of COVID, but he wins. | |
| So this is what, you know, like Trump says, I like winners. | |
| So we like winners. | |
| And TJ, it's good to have you with us, Daniel. | |
| Yeah, let's start off on that because that's great. | |
| Back in 2020, we were in the dumps here for a good year or two years, depressed, couldn't figure out what to do. | |
| A lot of people just kind of put their heads down and went along with it. | |
| They didn't want to make waves. | |
| But TJ, you saw things differently. | |
| You wanted to fight. | |
| And I think that's something that's admirable. | |
| Why don't you tell us about this fight? | |
| Tell us about the lawsuit and how you won it. | |
| Yeah, absolutely, Mr. McAdams. | |
| So just a little bit of background. | |
| I've been a born-again Christian since I was 13 years old. | |
| I was born and bred in Northern Kentucky, brought up largely through the Ron Paul, the Tea Party movements. | |
| I've been involved in the fight for freedom and the fight to actually uphold the Constitution for a long time from 2016, being involved with students for Rand Paul or Young Americans for Liberty, getting champions like Felicia Rayburn, Savannah Maddox, and Steve Doan elected along with their legislative priorities. | |
| And then we see 2020 come in, and that is when it's abundantly clear that this is about an existential threat to freedom as we know it. | |
| And it really came to fruition, not just with the closing of businesses, not just with the closing of mass gatherings. | |
| I was fighting against those, but then on Good Friday, Kentucky Governor Andy Bashir makes clear that the mass gathering ban will apply to Christians who attend church on Easter Sunday. | |
| And if you attend church, you will receive a prosecution notice on your windshield, and you will be ordered by the government to either have two weeks of what was essentially house arrest or face up to a year in jail for violating his orders. | |
| I went to church anyway. | |
| I received that prosecution notice, and the very next day I retained an attorney, and we filed a federal lawsuit, which is stylized as Roberts versus Nice. | |
| And that led to a Sixth Circuit decision striking down the governor's church ban on religious liberty grounds. | |
| It further also struck down the governor's interstate travel ban as well. | |
| And on top of that, there was also another lawsuit that I was involved with, in which I decided to step up my involvement and organize a protest against Governor Bashir's lockdowns. | |
| He threatened to prosecute us for violating the mass gathering ban by protesting him. | |
| All the while, he's participating in a Black Lives Matter rally. | |
| We sue him over that on viewpoint discrimination grounds, and we win that one as well. | |
| And we're seeing that it just set the precedent to show that the Constitution still does apply in an emergency. | |
| And it really is an honor because now I'm an attorney and I'm actually taking the fight. | |
| I work for the individual who represented me, Chris Weist, and we're currently taking on the government in many other areas as well in federal court. | |
| Boy, that sounds like a pretty good resume already. | |
| No, that is great. | |
| I want to ask a little bit about selling the message. | |
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Foreign Policy Shifts
00:09:11
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| And we all, I think, understand what the message is. | |
| And I've always been impressed, more so after I did these presidential contests and was on the road and went to colleges because I was in a shock. | |
| I said, where do these people come from? | |
| You know, I was just amazed. | |
| And it was the young people coming. | |
| And I just was so impressed with that. | |
| But when I would compare that to, sometimes I refer to it, and I shouldn't do it because there are some good people in the Chamber of Commerce, but I think they're symbolic of working a little bit too close to government. | |
| And generally, they didn't support me. | |
| But the division is there. | |
| But I also know that if I'm talking to a crowd and they're mostly young people, and then I spot, oh, there's a bunch of older people here. | |
| So I include the young at heart and people with open minds. | |
| And I imagine by now you have already found, because you have been a member of that group. | |
| And just give me a little bit of an insight. | |
| Why you think we're able to appeal to the young people? | |
| Because, you know, the young people right now, their image is this crazy stuff on TV or our computers and the silly stuff like that. | |
| But you've mentioned your Christian beliefs. | |
| I think that has something to do with it. | |
| But I imagine by now you have been impressed with other young people and the willingness to listen. | |
| And it seems to me, I've come up with a conclusion that younger people seem to have a more open mind than if somebody's been working with the political parties for the last 35 years. | |
| Dr. Paul, you're absolutely right. | |
| And younger people, I actually think that the insanity that is being pushed on us is a large part of why you see later millennials and Generation Z rising up. | |
| You have this woke nonsense being pushed down our throats. | |
| I mean, Generation Z, we're on the front line of a war against our American identity. | |
| All the while, the people in the well-entrenched political establishment want us to go and fight and die for an empire that hates us. | |
| And we're sick of it. | |
| I mean, the three Kentucky representatives that I mentioned, Steve Dones, Savannah Max, Felicia Rayburn, these guys are millennials. | |
| They are young. | |
| They're incredibly, they have an incredibly bright future, but we're seeing it nationwide where people in Generation Z, myself included, are rising up to run for office. | |
| But you have individuals in North Dakota like Matt Heilman, Brandon Pritchard, Chris Lonsdale. | |
| You have Cole Christensen. | |
| You have Austin Smith in Arizona. | |
| You have Mazzie Boyd in Missouri, or you have Carolina Amnesty in Florida. | |
| You have a bunch of people in Generation Z. You have these young people rising up who are sick of it. | |
| And a lot of them, it's because they are, they're deeply ingrained in principle because we have been gaslit and lied to so much that we truly crave the truth. | |
| And that's the thing is I've talked about my activism a lot, but it's all because of principle. | |
| I've been reading the works of Ludwig von Mises. | |
| Dr. Paul, I've been reading your book since I was probably 12 years old. | |
| And now we're at a point where I've attended Mises University in 2017, 2018. | |
| I was part of the inaugural class of Ron Paul Institute Summer Scholars in 2019. | |
| Young people have been lied to so much that the truth just appeals to them. | |
| And they're finally, it's just bouncing back because ultimately, I think that the, I think that the establishment, I think that the elites have overplayed their hand. | |
| And we're seeing it start to bounce back with the young people and the young at heart. | |
| Great statement. | |
| Yeah, that's a great point. | |
| You know, and we've talked about it on the show before, TJ, which is that polling definitely suggests that the younger generation is taking a different view on our interventionist foreign policy. | |
| Support for a continued U.S. involvement in the Middle East among young people is very low. | |
| It's just historically low. | |
| And I think the same is true for U.S. involvement in Ukraine. | |
| So we are seeing that shift now. | |
| They're sort of jettisoning off this old boomer mentality that we want to run the world. | |
| But now you mentioned the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, and you were in our first class. | |
| And I probably should have started with this because this is how we met you. | |
| You're in the inaugural class. | |
| We didn't know how it was going to go, what we were doing, what was going to happen. | |
| I think we've now had four or five classes. | |
| I'm biased, but I love the program. | |
| Tell our viewers who aren't familiar with it, what it was all about and what your experiences were at the seminar. | |
| Yeah, so the Ron Paul Institute Summer Scholars Seminar was essentially a weekend PhD program in peace and prosperity. | |
| It exposed us to leading voices in foreign policy, specifically looking at the non-interventionist roots of American foreign policy and why that is the correct answer. | |
| It brought us, it brought people together to just really do a deep dive into returning to the foreign policy of the founding fathers to jettison the old guard of the neoconservative movement. | |
| And ultimately, I think it was a discourse on courage as well, because the reality is the moment you show that you have non-interventionist leanings, you lose out on any chance that the establishment is going to bring you into their fold. | |
| Politics is not going to be comfortable for you, but at least you are going to be telling the truth. | |
| And I mean, that's one of the best parts about the Ron Paul Institute Summer Scholars Program is it was truth even when inconvenient and truth even when it took the utmost courage to be to tell the truth. | |
| And it's an incredible program. | |
| And if foreign policy is one of your issues, I mean, one of my top issues that I intend to fight for when I'm in Frankfurt is defend the guard. | |
| It's one of the few things that state legislators can do to fight for a non-interventionist foreign policy. | |
| It currently has more than 10 co-sponsors in Kentucky already, mostly young Americans brought up in the Ron Paul movement. | |
| And it's, I mean, it's an essential thing. | |
| We have to make sure that our activists and our politicians are deeply rooted in principle and understand the importance of foreign policy. | |
| Can you tell us a little bit about it? | |
| Because I know our friends over at anti-war.com are very big on it. | |
| You've mentioned it several times. | |
| For people that aren't familiar, tell us what Defend the Guard is all about. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| So the majority of individuals who are deployed in these undeclared wars are not members of the Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force. | |
| They are members of the state National Guards, which the National Guard is one, America's oldest branch of the military. | |
| It was designed specifically to defend the homeland. | |
| These individuals signed up to defend the homeland, but now they are being sent into foreign wars that are completely undeclared. | |
| There's no declaration of war from Congress. | |
| What Defend the Guard is, is it's a means by which state governments can reclaim their authority over the National Guard by simply enacting a law that states that unless Congress declares war, their National Guardsmen cannot be deployed into foreign territories for combat purposes. | |
| It's essential legislation. | |
| It is carried in states where it's being carried. | |
| It's largely being carried by veterans who understand that our foreign policy has gotten out of control. | |
| It's crucial. | |
| It's one of the top priorities that state governments should be addressing. | |
| Very good. | |
| You know, this whole idea of truth, and you brought it up, but we talk a lot about that. | |
| And I think it's so key, probably a principle from the beginning of time. | |
| You know, the first recordings of history, this subject existed. | |
| And now we're at a crisis point because TJ, you explain and say, and the people you're close to that the young people are looking at that and they understand this and they're sick and tired of not hearing the truth. | |
| And I did a little pamphlet, a little booklet to try to explain my thoughts on this. | |
| And I see what's going on is there's a major contest going on between those who know and understand and want to always move toward the truth versus those who now have deified the whole principles of nihilism, that you can't know the truth, so why even try? | |
| And yet I think as bad as it seems that we're getting to a climatic understanding of these two things. | |
|
Struggle For Truth
00:06:11
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| You know, when I was campaigning a lot, I would, you know, and I would try to explain to especially the young people, it's the young people they register and draft and send off to war. | |
| And it's just horrible. | |
| The young people don't start the wars. | |
| I mock at it by saying, you know, we don't have our wars because a group of 18 to 25 year old young people in the United States get together and they find that same number of young people in some other country 6,000 miles away. | |
| And the young people get back together and say, oh, let's have a war. | |
| It sounds like a lot of fun. | |
| I mean, but the young people have been too complacent. | |
| We've all been too complacent because we live in a society where, you know, the adults are doing all the pushing and there's financial things. | |
| So I am really, really excited about what's the transition and the defining of this message. | |
| And TJ, I think you're an real exception on being able to describe this. | |
| So I compliment you about your efforts, and I know you have a great future in promoting this cause. | |
| Thank you, Dr. Paul. | |
| And yeah, I mean, truly, this race, it's a golden opportunity to make sure that we send a message about what direction the young generation is going in. | |
| My district is deep red. | |
| It's 75% Republican on a bad gear. | |
| What that means, like the primary decides this race. | |
| I managed, believe it or not, to get the incumbent to endorse me. | |
| The incumbent is one of the good ones. | |
| He was involved in 2022 in taking out the political establishment in the Republican Party. | |
| He's running for state Senate now. | |
| His name's Steve Rawlings. | |
| My opponent used to hold this seat. | |
| He's the individual that the incumbent took out by a two to one margin, in large part because my opponent donated to Hillary Clinton while claiming to be a Republican. | |
| I mean, the contrast is astounding. | |
| I mean, you have myself, which really represents the new right, the America First pro-liberty movement that has an absolute adherence to the United States Constitution and an understanding that the mere role of government is to protect the rights of the people and nothing else, | |
| versus my opponent who largely comes from the old guard, who comes from the Nick Haley, Dick Cheney, Nikki Haley, Dick Cheney type of wing of the party, who donated to Hillary Clinton, who, by the way, was just on Monday censured by my local party because of these donations, because of his votes to raise taxes, to fund abortion, and also and his donor history, along with his most recent attacks on the Boone County Republican Party to begin with. | |
| I mean, it's astounding. | |
| Well, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on, TJ, is selfish, because we needed a good story, a good news story, and it's therapy for me, to be honest with you. | |
| You know, I mean, especially Dr. Paul's two Republican campaigns, they were high profile. | |
| They focused people's attention. | |
| They got worldwide attention. | |
| They're part of history, an important part of history. | |
| But they're finite, you know, and so when they're over, people do return to their lives. | |
| And because it's not capturing the headlines like it did, there's a tendency, I think, to forget that sub-rosa, these little streams and rivulets of liberty, continue to flow. | |
| And they're still flowing. | |
| The liberty movement is still alive. | |
| The media now would like to ignore it, and it is ignoring it to a degree. | |
| But people like you and a lot of the young people that you mentioned, which I was surprised to hear so many names, they're the ones that are making sure that it is still flowing. | |
| And so that's a good news story for us and for me that we need. | |
| Very good. | |
| And TJ, we're going to finish up here, but I'll give you a chance in a minute to put out an address and how we can guide some more people to you. | |
| But, you know, there's a saying that I've used frequently, and that is that truth is treason in an empire of lies. | |
| So we, in fighting for our liberties, we have to understand that there's a group of people out there that believe in tyranny and they want to promote it. | |
| So we have to fight this because we hear it all the time. | |
| Some people have a little demonstration. | |
| They're terrorists. | |
| They're playing treason. | |
| Yeah, but that's the whole effort is to maintain the empire. | |
| So we have to get that out of the notion. | |
| The founders did not give us an empire. | |
| They gave us a republic. | |
| So I'm delighted that you're going to be with us and continue to be with us in that struggle. | |
| Go ahead and close out, TJ, and tell them how they can reach you. | |
| Certainly. | |
| Well, first of all, thank you all so much for having me once again. | |
| And Dr. Paul, truly, the only reason I'm in this race, the only reason that any of the people that I named are in this, is because of the contributions that you made to this call. | |
| So it really means a lot to be on here. | |
| There is a remnant of young people who see the lies that we have been fed. | |
| And you can keep up with my race. | |
| I mean, I'm on Twitter. | |
| It's at real TJ Roberts. | |
| My website is votetjr.com. | |
| And for any contributions, it's votetjr.com slash donate. | |
| And if anyone has any questions about my race, they can reach me at tj at votetjr.com or even shoot me a text message at 859-446-0185. | |
| Very good. | |
| TJ, once again, I want to thank you for being with us today and congratulations on your efforts. | |
| And we will be watching because we expect great things from you as you continue to do exactly what you've been doing. | |
| But right now, I want to also thank our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report. | |