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May 7, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:08
Can We Break The Cycle? With Guest Joshua Smith

As part of our ongoing series of presidential candidate interviews, we are joined today by the Libertarian Party's Joshua Smith to discuss his vision for the United States and the road toward a libertarian future.

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Time Text
Special Guest Appearance 00:02:25
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Good to have you here.
And today, we're going to have a special guest.
Yes, indeed.
I don't know if some accident have a libertarian on our program.
Wow.
But we want to hear from a lot of people with the views, and we certainly want to expand our knowledge about what's going on in the libertarian movement.
And our guest is Joshua Smith.
And he is a candidate, you know, for the nomination for president in the Libertarian Party.
And he has a date coming up that he has to be ready because he has a little bit of contest.
And that is on the 26th of this month, there will be a convention in DC for the choosing of the candidate.
So Joshua will be there, I assume.
And Joshua, I would like to welcome you to the program and you can give us some updates and we will find out just where you stand on the issues.
Sure.
Thank you so much.
First of all, it's an honor to be here.
Dr. Paul thinks I can't express my gratitude enough for all that you've done for the movement and for people like me.
And to see us grow up and start to try and take some reins here and create a bigger movement means a lot to me.
So yeah, we just got done traveling.
We traveled to a bunch of state conventions.
As you guys know, the Libertarian Party does their nominations just a little bit different than the other parties.
We have state conventions all over the country.
They choose national delegates to send to their national convention here in May over Memorial Day weekend.
And about a thousand people pick our nominee.
And they're from all over the different states.
The way that they pick them is depending on how many registered libertarians there are in each state, that dictates how many delegates the state gets to the national convention.
And so yeah, we got a big date, big, big, big date.
Hopefully we get the nomination.
We could turn it into a 50-state media tour and try and push libertarian values to the mainstream.
I mean, that's really what the goal is here with the Libertarian Party.
You know, I think we got to play to win.
We have to play to win.
We have to go out there and make a scene.
But I don't think anybody in the Libertarian Party is under the illusion that we're going to have a president, a Libertarian president in 2024.
But the goal is to move the needle and get people to start adopting our policies and getting more people on board with the libertarian message and movement.
And that's what I plan to do.
Iraq War Recollections 00:02:50
So again, thank you so much for having me on.
I appreciate it.
I'm just excited to be here.
Great.
Joshua, in your resume, you mentioned that you were in the military and you're a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Tell me exactly which years you were in.
And the other thing is, is I have a little bit of experience of the type of question I'm going to ask because in 1962, there was a crisis in with missile crisis in Cuba, and there was also a Vietnam War going on.
And I was in the middle of my residency and I was drafted, which thank goodness they don't do that anymore, but it's still on the books, which bothers me.
But what years were you in?
And did your service help to mold your opinions?
Or were you pretty well knowledgeable and had some opinions about the military?
What effect did the military experience have on you?
No, so I absolutely had no knowledge of the world outside of my small city that I grew up in.
Well, my large suburb in California that I grew up in.
And I joined right after 9-11.
So 9-11 happens.
I'm an impressionable 17-year-old kid, senior in high school, and I wasn't really doing much with my life at the time.
I kind of was from a rough place, kind of lived a rough life.
And I saw it as a means for a couple of things.
One, to protect my countrymen from these evil terrorists that had attacked my countrymen.
One to improve my life and improve the life of my families and hopefully my community.
And that's the way I looked at the military.
That's the way they made me believe it was going to be joining this fight.
And so, yeah, not long after 9-11, I was in boot camp.
And then, so I think into 2001, yeah, into 2001.
No, mid-2002.
Sorry, it was summer of 2002.
And I went to boot camp.
I went to my school.
I was attached to the USS Constellation, which as you know or may not know was the largest part of the shock and ah campaign in Iraq.
And I, you know, at this young age, almost 19 years old, 18, 19 years old, I'm going, what the heck are we doing in Iraq?
Why are we in Iraq?
I thought this was, you know, Pakistani nationals via Afghanistan.
We're going after bin Laden.
We're doing all these things.
And here we are fighting a war that we were fighting when I was six years old, sitting on my couch watching the first maybe ever live televised war in Iraq.
And we're still bombing Iraq today.
And so, you know, we got really jaded on deployment.
I mean, that's where I kind of came to terms with the fact that maybe our mission was corrupt and maybe we were doing the wrong things overseas.
And, you know, I got out in 05 and I was an anti-war activist.
I mean, I wanted to find a way and an avenue to use what I had seen and what I had been a part of to move the needle on this anti-war message.
And then I found you in 2007, of course.
And you were the only one speaking to me.
Jan 6th Protests and Change 00:13:14
You know, I was fed up with the Republican Party at that point.
You know, it's party of Bush and McCain.
And here's this great statesman that's talking about ending these wars and bringing our troops home and stop meddling in foreign interventionism.
And so that's where I planted my flag.
And, you know, I've been that same anti-war activist all the way to today.
And things haven't gotten better.
It's gotten worse.
You know, we're looking at imposing war with Russia and China and Israel and Palestine and the Middle East and Iran.
And it's just, you know, when is enough enough for us?
And so, you know, that's at the forefront of everything that I do policy-wise.
I always think about this anti-war sentiment and how important it's got to be to Americans that don't understand how bad this is harming our lives.
Well, very good.
And Daniel, Daniel, we'll have a question for you.
Hopefully.
Well, welcome to the show, Joshua.
Really happy to have you on the show.
Now, you're running for president as a libertarian in the Libertarian Party.
As everyone knows, I'm sure all our viewers know, there have been a lot of changes in the Libertarian Party over the last four years.
The Mises caucus had a pretty dramatic takeover of the party.
There's been a lot of movement, a lot of speculation.
From your perspective, now you said you watched a good Republican come up, but you have not decided to run within the Republican Party.
Where do you think the LP is headed and where do you think it should be headed as a party?
Right.
And I, so, you know, my grips with the Republicans aren't with people like Thomas Massey.
I want everyone to know that very clearly.
I think Thomas Massey, of course, Dr. Ram Paul and all these, there are some great people that came up through the Republican Party.
My problem is, is that as a member of the Republican Party for many years and somebody who supported Ron and watched the way that they treated Dr. Paul on the national stage, I just didn't see that as a viable outlet for my work specifically.
And so I joined the Libertarian Party one time in 2010 and didn't get any of the activism outlets that I wanted.
And then I joined again in 2016 because I couldn't do the Trump Hillary thing.
I just couldn't I couldn't support him.
There was no way I could do it.
You know, I didn't, I didn't believe what was coming out of Trump's mouth.
Of course, we all know that Hillary is an absolute terrible POS.
And so, you know, I joined the Libertarian Party and got involved there with the Gary Johnson campaign, just kind of as a bystander.
I wasn't really doing anything.
I worked as a state party representative.
But I think that the Libertarian Party today is here to message.
I think that that's the most important thing that we can think about and do.
Of course, we want to win elections.
We want to decentralize.
We want to get all the down ballot candidates elected.
We want state reps.
Want people that can get elected to their county boards?
Because that's where really, really, libertarians can make a huge difference right now is getting elected to these things and nullifying stupid laws that fine people for not cutting their grass or something.
And so, but I think that we're a messenger and I think the libertarian presidential candidate has to be the best messenger out of the group.
That's absolutely got to be the goal for us.
There are some quantifiable goals for the party and for the presidency.
If we can poll at any of these big packs, a Quinnie PAC PAC or poll at 15%, maybe we have an opportunity to get in the debates and we get to go up there and give a different perspective.
Maybe we get that 5% to 15% somewhere in the national election and we get to be a national major political party and we get all the same benefits that the Republicans and Democrats do.
I think that that's the move.
I think that we have to take those steps to get there.
And I think we need a messenger that can do that stuff.
And I think the party now, the messaging coming out of the party is absolutely 100% better than it was when they were calling Ron Paul a Russian spy.
Okay.
I just want to make, I want to make that very clear that I joined the board for the national committee of the Libertarian Party in 2016.
No, sorry, 2018.
I ran against Nicholas Sarwark for chair.
I ended up as an at-large.
I ran again in 2020.
Famously, Dr. Ron Paul endorsed me for chairman of the Libertarian Party that one of the greatest days of my life next to the birth of my children.
And I ended up as an at-large again and then vice chair.
And so I've watched it, this move from this kind of woke socialist almost talking points where they were, you know, a little bit of this on economics and a little bit of this on the culture.
And really, we just want to be invited to the champagne parties in DC at the press club.
And we're not trying to really rock the boat.
And I think we're at a place now where we have a party that's ready to rock the boat.
And I think that that's good for us.
I think that's good for America.
I think that not just giving people another option, but giving people the option to join someone that's ready to shake things up, that doesn't want to just be one of the two uniparty members that wants to go out there and give people a different perspective and kind of wake up the remnant.
You know, there's 50-something percent of the population that didn't vote for a presidential candidate.
And we've got to reach those people because those are our people.
And so, you know, I think that the party now is in much better hands.
I do.
I believe that.
I think that, you know, the messaging has gotten entirely better.
And it's, you know, you're going to have to clean a little bit of house before you start building this new movement.
And so I think that that's been done.
And it looks bad, you know, as far as numbers go.
But man, I just from running this campaign and traveling the country, I can tell you there's so many people out there that are waking up, especially after COVID.
I mean, this was the greatest tyranny we've experienced in my 41 years.
And we have people that are just fed up.
They've lost their businesses.
They were given $1,000 a month for a couple of months and told, get over it.
And I don't think people are over it.
And I think we have a really good opportunity to start shaking up the establishment.
Joshua, I want to ask an economic question, and it has to do with trade, free trade versus protectionism.
The major parties have vacillated.
They've gone back and forth and both sides flip on it.
And yet, trade becomes very important because it's affected by the manipulation of the currencies.
And since the reserve currency of the world, the dollar is on the defensive.
And we have a lot of problems there.
But trade is vital.
Then we have the foreign policy that messes things up too.
So do you have a position?
Do you get to talk about it?
Do you get any questions on free trade?
And I'm interested in your position on the sanctions and also whether or not you'd ever endorse tariffs.
Yeah, so I 100% subscribe to the theory of Dr. Ron Paul on this.
And I know that sounds cheesy, but it's the truth.
Free trade for all, entangling alliances with none.
I think our foreign policy has been disastrous for the United States.
I think tariffs are just a tax that the consumer pays at the end of the day.
And I think that the government knows that.
I mean, it's not like this is some secret.
It's not like there haven't been economists for years and years and years saying that tariffs don't stop what you're trying to get them to stop.
It's just an extra tax on the American public.
And the same thing, this goes all the way to the Fed as well, right?
The Federal Reserve is just a giant counterfeiting machine that steals your wealth through a tax called inflation, right?
I mean, that's really the layman's terms of explaining and breaking this down is like all these monetary policies that have been set by government officials help their cronies.
And at the end of the day, it's always this crony movement, this crony capitalism movement, right?
Like we talk about capitalism and we get in this argument all the time and about how capitalism is this and that and this and that.
But true capitalism, true unfettered capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism is 100% one of the most freedom and stealing markets you could ever have.
And so we don't have that.
We don't have capitalism in the United States.
We have crony capitalism and tariffs are just another part of that.
I would never, ever, ever, you know, I would never endorse tariffs on another country.
I don't think that limiting what consumers in the United States can buy is a good thing.
I think that that's got to go the dustbin of society or dustbin of history.
Okay.
Daniel, yeah.
Question.
In fact, I'm going to take a question from one of our regular viewers.
His name is Gypsy Magic.
He's on every day and we appreciate him watching.
He was wondering what your views are of the January 6th prisoners.
What would you do if you're president?
What do you think about them and what would you do if you were president?
Oh boy, let's moment of silence for everybody.
Okay.
January 6th, worse than 9-11.
The worst day in American history.
We almost lost our entire democracy.
No, it's, you know, look, I believe that all January 6th protesters, and I'm not going to call them rioters or insurrectionists, what like the government and the mainstream media would like me to call them, they're protesters.
They were political protesters.
Look, this happened in the COVID times.
I mean, this was, you know, people were pissed off.
You know, we had governors taking seeds off the shelves and not allowing people to grow their own gardens because of COVID.
We had surfers getting arrested that were surfing by themselves and in water, you know, out in the middle of the ocean.
We had skate parks getting filled up with sand.
It was a terrible time for Americans.
Americans were not being treated well by their government.
And these people were mad and they felt like the election was stolen.
And I believe to some extent that's probably the truth.
Anybody that thinks this was the most secure election of our lifetimes is probably lying to themselves.
We know that elections have not been fair in the United States for many, cycles.
So, no, I think that all the January 6th protesters need to be removed.
I've committed to working with the district courts to try and get convictions overturned even as president.
I think that this has all just been a sham, especially once the videos came out.
I think it's pretty clear that this was kind of a guided rope tour.
They were led in by the DC or Capitol Police.
And nobody was harmed except for protesters.
I mean, at the end of the day, the only people that actually got killed were protesters.
And so it's a big sham.
It's a big play to try and get more government control over the populace.
Of course, they let them just the year before riot and burn down private businesses all over the country in the summer of love.
And those people aren't arrested.
Those people aren't going to federal jail.
And they don't have felonies and grave misdemeanors on their record forever.
So I think they need to be released right along with people like Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht and Edward Snowden.
So that's kind of where I'm at.
I think that the January 6th protesters need to be released.
We need to work to have their convictions overturned.
And I think we should never let the government dictate those kind of things again.
Very good.
Josh, I want to ask you about your travels because I know what it's like to what you're going through to go to each state and talk to each of the state organizations.
But I want to know if there was one or two or three episodes of a reception.
You know, some states are small states and there won't be much.
But was there any time when you were pleasantly surprised?
say, boy, I had a nice crowd there and we got some media attention.
We got a press conference.
And I know there's a lot of the other kind because I went through the other kind for a long time.
But did you have any pleasant surprises and say, boy, am I pleased to see this?
I'm on a campus and we have a nice crowd out like this.
What does your memory tell you about any good meetings that you've had?
Sure, sure.
Well, so I've been actually, if you guys can believe this, I've been traveling for this party.
I've gone to 49 states now.
I've not made it to Maine yet, unfortunately.
It's the only state I haven't made to.
But I've been to 49 states since 2017 when I first started running for chairman, national chairman.
So I've essentially been on a national campaign since 2017 the entire time.
I've had a couple of months off here and a couple of months off there.
And so I've gotten to see a lot of cool stuff.
I got to do ballot access petitioning in Ohio right there downtown in Cincinnati and got to hear how these big crowds would come up to this little festival we were at and talk about how they were fed up.
And yes, absolutely, we'd love to sign that.
We can't believe that they make it so hard to get you guys on the ballot.
So I've got this for this specific campaign, unfortunately, and the way it works.
And I said it in the beginning is we travel around to state conventions.
That's the big thing.
I've got to do a lot of really great media.
Obviously, I'm on Ron Paul now.
I'll be going back to Timcast for the fourth time on Friday.
We're in talks with Patrick Bet David and trying to get on Sean Ryan and doing some really big media.
And that's kind of been our biggest audiences, which has been really nice because I think today in the digital age and 2024, this alternative media is way, way, way bigger than the mainstream media is.
They're dying.
They're dying off.
They're losing.
But some of the state conventions that I've been to have been very surprising.
I've seen such a bigger crowd than I had seen at these same states before.
I was just in Minnesota where we won the straw poll there for their state delegates and it was much bigger.
We actually set up a live podcast there.
They had Defend the Guard and all these great organizations there.
So the unfortunate part about this in-house nomination process is that when we travel around to the states, we're doing state conventions.
And these are already set up for Libertarian Party members, mostly doing business, party business, and then, of course, debates.
We've done a lot of debates.
And I will say that the debate in Georgia was one of the greatest debates I've ever been a part of.
It was absolutely amazing.
It was hosted and moderated by the great Clint Russell from Liberty Lockdown and Brad Binkley from the Propaganda Report.
And so we've gotten to do a lot of great things.
But I will say that the reception's been great everywhere I've gone, from the grocery store to events.
People are ready.
I mean, we're really at a point now where people are ready.
And I know there's this heavy polarization between Trump and Joe Biden, but there's a whole remnant of people out there that want freedom, that are done with this system, that are ready to find somebody that can carry the torch.
Drugs and Cultural Shift 00:10:36
Daniel?
Yeah, Joshua.
I mean, you give a good segue into what I wanted to ask about because people are fed up with both Biden and Trump.
And I think that's nowhere more evident than in foreign policy.
We saw this absurd $95 billion giveaway that was passed with the help of both parties, with the blessing of Donald Trump, who we thought had been opposed to giving this money to Ukraine, at least.
And so when it comes to the important issues, there's not a lot of space between the parties whatsoever, the two main parties.
But let's just pretend right now that someone picks you up and drops you right into the Oval Office.
As we're speaking right now, Rafa in Gaza is getting bombarded.
So right now, President Smith, what do you do?
Well, first of all, we got to pull all Foreign Aid.
And I've said very clearly that I would veto all Foreign Aid spending bills from the office.
I mean, that's the least we can do.
You know, we've got to get rid of this authorized use of military force as well that gives the president this open-ended ticket to just direct the United States military around the world and go to war, almost like an open-ended spending bill.
But, you know, We've just really drilled ourselves in as this military, this world police, and how we have to go around and affect all of these foreign civil wars that we're not part of.
And Israel's no different.
I mean, I've said that I am the only America first candidate running today.
And when you think about the two old parties, I am the only America first candidate.
Some people might call me an isolationist, and that's okay.
I don't believe I'm an isolationist.
I think I'm an anti-interventionist.
I think that if a president is going to run to govern the United States, then they need to make the United States their first priority and not sending billions of dollars around the world to countries to fight wars when we have 12% of the population in the United States that they can hardly feed themselves.
And that's the truth.
And the middle class is disappearing at an expansive rate.
I mean, it's just really going quickly these days.
And we're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel and helping with these wars that a lot of people in the United States don't support, including people like me who are just Christians who understand that that land isn't as any more special than any other land in the Bible.
So I think we're at a point now where we need a president.
We don't just want a president.
We need a president that's going to say, no more, no more forceful spending, no more foreign welfare parasitism.
We've got to cut them off.
And if they want to, I've said it, I said this on Stew Peters the other day.
It's, you know, we either do free and fair trade deals that benefit American citizens or we don't work with you anymore.
I mean, that's really where we've got to go to next.
We're just destroying the economy.
We're destroying the world.
And we're making it much harder on American citizens.
And presidents got to be America first.
We got to worry about American citizens first.
And we're just not doing that.
We haven't done that in a long time.
Not in my lifetime, probably.
So, Joshua, over the years, campaigning, depending on what year it was, people would come up to me and they say, well, it's sort of like you on most of this stuff, but there was always a but.
Leonard Reed used to say, you know, everybody is for freedom, except that they all have a but.
Right.
You know, they all have one exception.
Now, early on, when I first went to Congress, most of them had they didn't have the vaguest idea what a libertarian was.
They never heard of Austrian economics.
And they thought anybody who didn't want to fight a war was an isolationist and didn't want to talk to people.
But, you know, then in later years, I would get a lot of challenge.
Ron, I like what you're doing.
And this would come mostly if I'm running in the Republican race.
And they say, but I don't like, I don't know.
And they weren't, you know, nasty people and they probably would still support me.
They would say, but I don't know about this war on drugs.
You know, they hadn't come around to doing that.
But now during the presidential races, you know, more recently, as I got more mainstream Republicans out and not the libertarians who understood, the Main Street would come up and say, Ron, I like what you're doing.
We ought to like all this spending and all this deficit.
And we trust you for doing this, but I can't accept your foreign policy.
Do you have any of that type of talk?
Has anybody come up?
They're very friendly and they say, I like you, but.
And then they give you their butt.
Sure.
And definitely that pertains to the drug war.
And I think that that's a culture war issue at this point.
I think that there is this really hard right shift when it comes to the culture war.
And I think that drugs are getting wrapped up in that.
And I think you've made some wonderful points over your tenure about the drug war and how it's great, maybe one of the greatest failures of the United States of all time.
And, you know, I really try to reiterate some of those points that, you know, just because we legalize drugs doesn't mean you're going to go out and do drugs.
Just because we decriminalize drugs doesn't mean your kids are going to go out and start doing heroin.
I think that we've locked away a lot of people for victimless crimes that shouldn't be in jail, that probably just needed help or more community charity or those kinds of things.
And so, yeah, I get that.
I get that with the drug war.
I have not surprisingly found that as much with my foreign policy outside of the neocons.
Of course, there's always going to be John McCain neocons, right?
John McCain, George Bush neocons, until they die off.
I mean, really, that's what's going to take.
But the new generations, my generation, the millennials and down, there's a really big push to end these wars.
I mean, and you know, you're seeing these protests on campus today that are protesting Israel and their atrocities in Gaza.
And, you know, they're not on my side of things most of the time, right?
These people are not on my side of things when it comes to the economy.
They're not on my side when it comes to public education and the Federal Reserve, maybe sometimes and some of these other things.
But they are 100% on our side, right, when it comes to some of these foreign interventions.
And so I'm seeing a big appetite, even from the right and the left to kind of be done with this foreign interventionism.
And so I'm hoping that that sentiment continues to grow.
I hope that if we get the nomination this month, that we have the opportunity to help that sentiment grow and kind of try and put some of those issues on your back and wear them like a bullseye and bring more people to movement.
But I'm seeing a growing sentiment from the public for sure.
We're going to be finishing up and I want to see if Daniel has another question for you.
Yeah, just I have one final one.
I was just going to mention, you know, Joshua, you mentioned off camera that in the day you had been involved proselytizing the Occupy movement toward Ron Paul.
And I think, just as a side comment, I think that was the last time that you saw great success in getting the kinds of mindset that maybe some of these young people have on campus that are not with us on all these things to get them coming around on the Fed and these issues.
And I think maybe if you're conspiratorial, and I sometimes am, that the powers that be saw this cooperation as extremely dangerous, and we haven't seen it since then.
But I wanted to ask you a quick question about the military.
You're in the military.
You serve the country in a very difficult time.
Someone I look up to a lot is a genuine American hero, in my opinion.
That's Colonel Douglas McGregor.
And I was watching an interview with him earlier today, and he was talking about the U.S. military is absolutely not ready for a conflict with Russia, no matter how much the neocons and the talking heads talk about bring it on.
He said the state of our military is not prepared for it.
He said there's a real lack of discipline in the military.
He said that comes from the top down, dividing the force on racial grounds, pushing unqualified people up the ranks because they have other attributes that are politically attractive to the leadership.
He talks about us having a demoralized military.
Do you keep up with military issues?
And how do you see the colonel's comments as I've characterized them about them?
Yeah, I think it's absolutely true.
That's 100%.
And I'll tell you this.
So it all started with tennis shoes, Dan.
It all started with tennis shoes.
I joined, like I said, right after 9-11.
We were one of the first recruit divisions in boot camp to be wearing tennis shoes and boot camp and sweatpants.
And there were no more boots and utes for these runs and stuff.
And back then, we were going, hey, this is pretty soft, you know, but this, that was nothing in comparison to today's military.
We've gone so soft that there's just no, there's no way that people will be ready for a war with Russia.
I mean, these people are out drinking whiskey and fighting bears in the woods, you know, and in negative 30-degree weather.
There's no way Americans are ready for that.
But it goes so much further than that, too.
You know, we're talking about China here, too.
You know, we hear China's our greatest enemy and all this stuff all the time.
And, you know, if we don't protect Taiwan, we're going to lose our chip manufacturing and this and that.
And the truth is, is that we could create those semiconductors right here in Austin tomorrow.
We already create like 27% of the world's supply of semiconductors in the United States.
We can mine cobalt and all that stuff, silica here in the United States.
So it's really just a tripwire with China.
And the U.S. government wants these things.
I mean, that's at the end of the day, the military-industrial complex, the deep state, the administrative state, whatever you want to call these people.
They want this stuff because it bolsters their wealth.
It continues to drain wealth from the middle and working class and put money in their pockets.
At the end of the day, that's really what it's all about.
And Russia is one of those big targets.
And so is Iran.
Nobody's talking, you know, we're not talking about Iran enough that, you know, the U.S. government's been after Iran since the 50s, right?
I mean, forever, they've wanted a war with Iran.
And this Palestine-Israeli conflict is just a tripwire for that.
At the end of the day, that's what all the bloodthirsty neocon warhawks here in the United States are licking their chops at.
They're like, oh, we're going to get Iran, you know, and that's what they'd like.
So, yeah, I don't think the American military is ready for a war with Russia or Iran at this point.
And, you know, and if we start pushing our fingers in the chests of all these countries, Iran and Russia and China, I mean, we're going to have a full-scale world war, possibly thermonuclear.
And, you know, I can't remember who it was.
Maybe it was Douglas who did the runs the ops, these kind of war games, where he said, you know, we pull a carrier off the coast of Taiwan.
We lose an aircraft carrier.
We have thousands and thousands of dead sailors.
And, you know, and we, we're just not ready, absolutely not ready.
And we shouldn't be, I mean, we, we need, we should be ready for a war on our soil.
We should be here to defend American citizens, not go around the world and play world police.
Pushing Buttons Worldwide 00:01:56
And, you know, I always go back to the what if speech by Dr. Ron Paul.
And it's probably the one speech that I've showed thousands and thousands and thousands of people that have actually changed their minds on things.
It's, you know, what if, what if we, what if people were doing to us what we're doing to other countries?
What if they were setting up bases all around our borders and Canada and Mexico and pushing their way into Texas and telling us when we could do what?
And I think that Americans would be pretty pissed off about that.
And the American military is not ready for those kind of wars with big military superpowers.
Absolutely not.
And they shouldn't be right now.
We need to fix what we got going on in the United States first.
Joshua, this has been great, but I want to give you an opportunity because we are going to close down here to give information how people can get in contact with you and your campaign.
Sure.
First of all, thank you to Daniel and Dr. Ron Paul for having me on the show, man.
I can't express my gratitude.
And, you know, like I said before the show, we're going to make sure our children, our grandchildren, are living the Ron Paul legacy for many, many generations to come, hopefully.
Look, if you want to find out more about my policies, if you want to see videos, if you want to volunteer to help, if you want to donate to the campaign, we have a goal of $10,000 for the national campaign between now and May 23rd.
You can go to joshua smith2024.com.
It's right there on the bottom of the screen.
You follow me at Twitter at Joshua at Large.
And of course, twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays after the convention, we'll get back to doing shows.
I'll break the cycle with Joshua Smith on YouTube, Ron Paul, Twitter, all those great sites.
Look, at the end of the day, I'm just a blue-collar working class guy raising seven children in the country here in Iowa.
I'm just like everybody else out there.
I know that makes me maybe a bad candidate, but the truth is we need somebody who's lived this life to go out and go up against these financial juggernauts and tell them how we feel.
And I think I'm the guy to do that.
So again, thank you guys so much for having me on.
I appreciate you and I appreciate anybody who wants to come help the campaign.
Wonderful, Joshua.
And we appreciate very much you coming on.
And I want to tell our audience we appreciate them very much.
And we thank you for tuning in.
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