Blinken Fiddles In Kiev As Ukrainian Troops Burned In Kharkov
Secretary of State Antony Blinken dragged C-Span cameras along to a pub in Kiev where he jumped onstage to play Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" with the house band, seemingly oblivious to the rapid advance of Russian forces in the north. Meanwhile, Blinken green-lights Ukraine to strike deep within Russia despite Russian warnings of retaliation at the source - whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. What could go wrong? Also today: Blinken's "holding up" weapons for Israel exposed as cynical political farce. Finally: Hero Massie drops pro raw milk bill.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
So let's solve another problem.
Yeah.
Or pretend.
Anyway, there's help comes from Zero Hedge to tell us what's going on in the world.
They've been very helpful, anti-war and the others.
Very useful.
And just reading what Thomas Massey has to say frequently will help guide us to that better answer than we're hearing in the media.
But today I want to start off with an article by Zero Hedge.
The title is Russia is about to overrun Ukraine's defenses.
Why aren't they talking about peace?
Why are there no peace negotiations?
Then when you go into it, it's a good question.
But, you know, that's the whole thing about the fight here in this country.
One group is for peace negotiations.
The other says, don't ever do that.
If you do that, you're a command and all this nonsense.
So there's this effort now to, you know, for some at least, to try to at least talk about it.
But it isn't getting very far.
It seems that there are a lot of unwritten rules.
In declaration of war, when two countries really make the decision and the people get behind it, you don't have so many exceptions.
Right now, even what's going on in Israel and Gaza, they have a lot of rules.
A lot of times they avoid using them, but they pretend that we're humanitarians.
So at the same time as we're sending bombs and killing one group, we're sending weapons to the other side as well.
And humanitarian aid to the Hamas people and the Palestinians.
So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
And I think the motivation is and how we go to war has a lot to do with it.
And I think we have to take a lot of responsibility because we are the kingpins.
We have the money.
We have the dollars.
People still believe in that.
And therefore, most of the wars, especially since World War II, probably wouldn't have occurred, you know, whether it was Korea or Vietnam or the rest, if it hadn't been for American foreign policy and American dollars and American military-industrial complex, and also the ability for the media to support these efforts.
Yeah, the article is written by actually by Brendan Smith at Alt Market, and it's a great article.
If you can put up this first clip, we found it on Zero Hedge, but it's a very good point.
And over these past few days, people have been following it.
Hopefully not as closely as I do because that means you wouldn't have any time to do anything else.
But nevertheless, the Russians have launched a serious offensive from the north, and they have moved toward Kharkov very, very rapidly.
Many reports of Ukrainian soldiers turning and running.
And so he has this article, Brandon Smith does.
Why are there no negotiations?
Russia's about to overrun Ukrainian defenses, which they've done.
But he makes a couple of, if we can sing it down just a little bit, he makes a couple of really good points.
But he's talking about the propaganda that governments use to keep the public invested in any war.
And I thought these two paragraphs were so good and so nifty because they capture it all.
The first, he said, is the commitment lie.
And that can be sort of summarized by saying, well, once you're in, you can't get out.
You can't just let the other person win.
Who wants to be the last person to die in a lost cause, essentially?
If you can just keep it up, please.
So there's that one, the commitment lie.
And then the second one, and of course they've used that for Ukraine.
We will do whatever it takes for Ukraine to win.
We will do whatever it takes for them to win.
And the second is the domino effect lie, which is that if you allow a particular enemy to win in one conflict, they will automatically be emboldened to invade other countries until they own the entire planet, he writes.
It's the same claim used to trick the American public into supporting the war in Vietnam.
And it rarely turns out to be true.
In fact, Brandon writes, nations that engage in regional wars tend to be so weakened by the fighting that they don't have the means to move on to another country, even if they wanted to.
And it's a very, very good point that he makes.
And I'll just, if we can go to the next one, because he talks about the fight over the $61 billion to Ukraine.
And he said, in the U.S., we heard both of these narratives heading into this fight.
The neocons and Democrats worked together to force the bill through.
There were some conservatives fighting to stop it, but they were as being helpful to the Russians.
But in reality, Brendan writes, no one in the mainstream media wants to talk about is that Ukraine has already lost the war.
He's saying the truth.
He's saying the emperor has no clothes, Dr. Paul.
He says no amount of additional funding or arms shipments are going to help them.
It has nothing to do with conservatives questioning the validity of war spending, he points out.
Because anyone who has a basic understanding of military strategy, he says, knows that the key to winning is always manpower first, logistics second, not superior technology or armaments, not superior cash, and certainly not popular support from foreign interests.
So he just lays it out, Dr. Paul.
Look, this is a fact.
They're going to lose.
They don't have what you need most, which is a superior army, superior manpower.
But nobody wants to admit it.
You know, there's a couple things that are psychological about this because it's been written and known rather well that throughout the centuries, people do dumb things when it comes to war.
The first thing is, is the people who are starting the war deceive themselves.
They lie to themselves, even though it makes no sense, but they foresee themselves as being much more powerful in the situation, and they think, well, we'll march in here.
You heard all that nonsense about when the Ukraine war started.
But then you throw in on this the people who see an opportunity to make some money of it, and it gets a little bit more complex.
But most of the time, the people who keep doing this and hiring and drafting the kids and spending all this money in a way we don't even look at it, we don't even, we're totally in denial about how much money we spend and how dangerous that is and how under these circumstances, both domestically internationally, actually we lose the war.
It's like we've been invaded by totalitarians because people are less free in this country every single day.
And the other thing that countries generally do is they deceive themselves into not realizing, oh, the enemy tends to, you know, the enemies tend to be much more determined than they ever think.
Oh, you know, the Russians said that the Ukrainians will roll over the Ukrainians.
In this case, the Ukrainians were going to, Russia was going to roll over for the Ukrainians.
And they deceive themselves into that.
And it's usually just a few people, one of the few people that we follow closely in the military, will describe, well, that is the case.
And you just even describe some of this attitude.
You have to be realistic, but they do.
They want to be in denial, and then they fed this pebble up from the media.
And all of a sudden, you can't have a peace treaty like that because you'll be unpatriotic.
It'll be dangerous to us.
And yet, the exact opposite is true.
And that, of course, is on the top of our list basically is to try to get the truth out there so people would reassess this rather than rolling over and saying, well, I don't want to be on Americans, and we've got to go get those Russians.
The Chinese we have to deal with, so you better be prepared.
And they're not that tough.
America's never loses, never lost a war until recently.
Well, what Brandon Smith says is essentially what you're saying.
The bottom line is Ukraine is about to be overrun.
So why is no one pushing for some kind of a treaty, some kind of negotiations?
And he surmises that the elites are realizing that after these two years, and they've said Ukraine will win, they can win, they are winning.
And he's saying, basically, when it dawns on the American people who have been so propagandized that, hang on, they lost, how can that happen?
That he's saying that the elites are counting on the Americans and the Europeans being so furious this wasn't supposed to happen that they will actually start supporting more escalation, i.e. a direct U.S. and European conflict with Russia.
And that's overall the endgame.
So that's what he speculates.
Well, who knows?
The truth really gets mixed up and it's denied by many.
And then there's the special interest.
So it is very complex.
But it's interesting how complex they can make it because they're lying to themselves.
They're lying to the world.
There's other motivations other than peace.
And things just deteriorate.
Where the solution, you know, in the narrow sense of thinking, what would have been better for America in the last couple hundred years, maybe have taken seriously the principle of non-interventionism.
That, yes, wars will be fought.
I don't think we can prevent that.
But maybe we should fight very few wars.
Maybe they should be done with to some degree the consent of the people rather than the way they do it now.
They just maneuver themselves into a gradualism.
And, you know, we're just going to send in advisors.
Then we're going to send in, you know, the CIA agents.
And it just builds and builds until we get into such a mess that neither side says, well, let's sit down and negotiate because we don't want to look weak.
Blinken's Bluff in Kiev00:08:53
And, you know, we always talk about the hawks in this country that puts pressure on the politicians.
Well, I think that happens in all the countries.
There are factions in Russia that are more hawkish than others.
And some would be willing to.
Even most people wouldn't consider this, but that happens in Israel as well.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Well, the thing that's happened this past few days is that the Russians really have just moved in.
And in fact, it's confirmed by none other than the BBC.
If we can put this next clip on, the Russians simply walked in, Ukrainian troops in Kharkov tell BBC.
They literally just walked in and the Ukrainians turned and ran.
And you asked, well, why is that the case?
Well, here's a fascinating report.
And this is a machine translation from a report that came out in the Ukrainian media yesterday.
If you can put this next one on.
This woman is the head of an anti-corruption center in Ukraine.
And she said, where are the fortifications?
Kharkov OVA paid millions to fictitious firms.
So apparently a billion dollars was spent to create these barriers on the front lines.
And they all went to fake companies and everyone skimmed off the top.
And I saw a picture actually, I should have, I wish I had it, but these dragon's teeth that are supposed to prevent tanks from coming.
They were all dumped in a pile.
They weren't along the front lines.
They were dumped in a pile.
So the Russians just went around them and went in.
So essentially what she's saying is this entire thing is full of corruption.
A billion of our dollars wasted on it.
But here's the thing, the U.S. reaction isn't, how terrible is this?
This is Blinken in Kiev yesterday.
If you put this on, he's mad about it, but you know why he's mad about it.
Blinken urged Ukraine to fight corruption as it was fighting militarily.
But he accused President Vladimir Putin of weaponizing corruption in Ukraine.
He says Putin knows how powerful corruption can be in sowing dissent and division and distrust, undermining faith in government and its institutions.
So he's mad that Putin is referring to the corruption that exists in Ukraine and quote, weaponizing.
It's probably one of the biggest copes I've ever seen.
Yeah, you mentioned that there's some faking going on, fake wars.
But you know, it's too bad that these fake wars that they create and they manufacture and they have all kinds of high-falutin reasons for doing this.
It's too bad that there can't be these fake wars without casualties.
But there's always casualties.
There's people, if nothing else, they get their money stolen.
But then who dies in these wars?
It goes on and on.
Even though the war is manufactured in people's mind, they don't really have a justification.
But the only thing they can say to us when we say, you didn't have justification, then they turn it in.
Oh, you don't care about freedom.
You don't care about the Constitution.
We're saving the world and on and on.
So you're a bunch of fascists and communists and everything else.
So they won't deal in reality.
And one of it is really just the denial of depending on truth.
And they can't handle that.
And I keep thinking of this trial that has been going on.
And, of course, I've tried to emphasize that telling the truth is a good quality.
But I thought, boy, that trial tells you this country, maybe it's in worse shape about lying than I believe.
But then again, you do hear, in spite of our foreign policy mistakes and that has gone on, there's always a few and growing numbers at different times that will stand up and demanded to know the truth of things.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the other issue with Blinken in Kiev, we have an opinion political about it, is that Ukraine apparently has been saying, hey, let us shoot long-range weapons deep inside of Russia.
Don't stop us from doing that.
And that's been apparently a sticking point.
I'm not sure if it's a Tempest in the Teapot, but nevertheless, if you put the next clip up, this is from the Kiev Post.
Blinken went to Kiev, he announces another $2 billion in aid, and he says Ukraine can decide for itself to strike inside Russia.
Now, one of the reasons I believe that the Russians have gone on with this offensive in Kharkov is because from the Kharkov region, Ukraine has been shelling Belgorod, which is inside of Russia.
The other day they took down an apartment building in Belgorod.
So the Russians came in and said, well, we're going to take out your, you know, the area where you're shooting from.
But so if Blinken locates deep strikes within Russia, this, I think, has a danger, Dr. Paul, for a serious escalation.
Because Putin said at his inauguration, he said that if he was talking more about France and the UK at the time, but he said, if these missiles that you're giving Ukraine hit within, deep within Russia, we reserve the right to go after their locations of launch and their locations of origin.
So essentially he's warning.
And then right when he said that, he ordered a tactical nuclear weapons drill for his military.
So he's basically making it very clear, don't do this.
Don't start striking deep within Russia.
And of course, people like Blinken, they always think that everyone else is bluffing.
Everyone is bluffing.
Well, they thought that back in 22, and Russia wasn't bluffing.
So, you know, again, it's like, why can't they stop?
Why can't they just back up and say, no, they always have to go forward.
Right now, it looks like it's easier to identify the bluffing coming from the American side than it is on the other.
And they need to believe what is very evident.
And the Russians aren't playing games.
Yeah, they're not.
Well, the other thing that Blinken did, and he goes to Kiev, the troops in the north are being overrun by the Russians.
A lot of Russians moving over.
Taking a lot of villages, moving closer to Liman, moving closer to Chasov Yar and other places.
But he has some time to go to a pub.
And let's put this one video, I just want to read the video before.
I think this is so important and so symbolically important.
Olga Bazova writes, I haven't seen a more cynical thing than Blinken having a good old jolly time in a Kiev bar while the armed forces of Ukraine are getting crushed nearly along the whole front line.
This is just morbid.
So as the Ukrainian troops are caught in a bloodbath in the north, here is our Secretary of State going into a bar.
And let's listen for a couple seconds, Dr. Paul.
We don't want to hear too much of it, but that's probably enough of that.
I think he's auditioning.
Because he might need a new job.
Maybe, maybe, maybe you're right.
But if you notice that, he brought on C-SPAN cameras along with him to go record this.
And I just want to do a couple of clips about this because I just think it's symbolically so important.
Now, here's what the State Department said.
Secretary of Blinken joined with a local band with a message.
Ukraine is standing up for the free world.
But go to the next one because the thing is they don't understand the song.
Blinken is such a boomer, he doesn't get it.
And Shurubiki Man writes, Blinken is too dull-witted to realize that Neil Young's Keep On Rocking in the Free World was intended to be an ironic, sarcastic take on the superficiality of American freedom rhetoric, while the real problems of homelessness, poverty, and environmental degradation get ignored.
So he misses the whole point of the song, which is making fun of the jingoism.
He actually embraces the jingoism.
And Mike Benz, I'm sorry to emphasize this so much, but Mike Benz, you know, he was in the Trump State Department.
Super smart guy.
Very interesting insights, particularly when it comes to color revolutions.
He makes a great point.
Because as Blinken is saying, let's keep rocking in the free world, Mike Benz points out, no elections in the free world, no opposition media in the free world, no dissidents in the free world.
Evidently, the only thing that's free in this free world is U.S. taxpayer money.
Base vs. Base Politics00:03:31
So he's pointing out that they don't have any opposition parties.
They don't have elections.
They don't have any dissidents.
They have no opposition newspapers.
So the only thing free is the free money that we're giving them.
It's total absence of reality.
You know, and we do it too on the various things because our foreign policy doesn't make a lot of sense.
But what about the spending policy?
They don't live in a real world.
They will not accept the facts that are staring them in the face, and what they're doing is crazy.
And most of the time, these things are evident, and they all end badly.
Yeah.
Well, I guess the second topic we wanted to cover, and this is probably in the category of cynicism as well, is that remember, Biden made a big deal, or he allowed the media to make a big deal of how he was withholding some weapons for Israel because they're slaughtering all these people in Rafah, you know, and it was going to be a big deal.
He was playing politics to his base.
Look at the Wall Street Journal put out yesterday.
This whole idea that he's withholding weapons, come on.
Biden moved forward on a $1 billion in new arms for Israel.
It was just a couple of days so that he could get those headlines because he knows he's getting beaten in a lot of these battleground states because of his policies.
The progressive base of his party is furious that he's allowing this slaughter to go on.
There's genocide to go on.
So he announces, actually, that's the one we're there on the bottom.
So he says, okay, no, that's just politics.
We're going to send the weapons.
Send them anyway.
Yeah.
Yes.
So the next item I had on here was we're going to get to Thomas Massey eventually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can get along to it.
Just the last thing on this is that he's going to send new bombs, $700 million in tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles, $60 million in mortar rounds, sending to Israel.
So it's kind of a cynical thing because he pretended that he was holding back weapons.
And so the Republicans were able to jump on and say, we're impeaching you for holding back weapons.
So the Republicans can play to their pro-Israel base and Biden can play to his pro-Palestine base.
And in the meantime, more people are getting slaughtered.
More Israeli soldiers are getting killed.
Lots, lots of Israeli soldiers are getting killed.
They're covering it up.
Lots of Palestinians are getting killed.
And meanwhile, Biden, the Democrats, and the Republicans are just playing FTSE and playing politics.
It's pretty cynical, I think.
Yep, and they can throw the money around and pretend they can do both things.
We'll put some rules and make us look good.
But then we'll send you more money anyway and more weapons.
But all I can think about is the fact that hopefully someday this all has to end because it's so vicious and wrong.
And I, of course, get frustrated because the American people go along with this so much, you know, with all the nonsense that goes on.
You know, it's their money, it's their lives, and they're all involved.
But unfortunately, the American people are slow to wake up.
But that has to be that there's a success element of the mainstream media.
They still have access to a lot of people.
Raw Milk Debate00:02:53
And the propaganda's out there.
But it's challenging right now because there's certain the elements for support in the Middle East now is pretty well split up, split with the Democrats as well as with the Republicans.
But unfortunately, we saw when some of these votes are close and when it's a big issue, I have always maintained that all of a sudden there's a burst of bipartisanship.
Even though people get fed the stories and oblivions, oh, no, we're different.
We're different.
We're against all this, except if we need to do it.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's finish up with a little bit of good news.
And the good news is that Thomas Massey keeps up the fight for freedom, keeps up the fight that you made famous in the House.
And put on this next clip.
He introduces a bill.
Representative Massey introduces a bill to allow interstate traffic of raw milk.
H.R. 8374, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, prohibits federal interference with the interstate traffic of unpasteurized milk and milk products that are packaged for direct human consumption.
The bill just says, hands off, let the states trade in these products.
You know, the Constitution, the way I understood it, the Interstate Commerce Clause, was to make sure that you could go back and forth among the states, and there was free trade among the states.
But the opposite happens when they come in and say, well, there's going to be a law, you can't ship your milk from one state to another, it becomes rather silly.
But it came up in one of the presidential campaigns, probably the first one, because it's been a while and nobody talked about raw milk.
And of course, I had the interest in it because, you know, it was something that represented freedom of choice.
And I alluded to it once in a speech, and I was sort of making fun of it.
I said, you know, some people have this idea that we ought to have the right to, you know, sell milk across the state line.
And the crowd went wild.
And I was impressed that there were more people than a few of us that could see the connection between freedom and the right to drink raw milk if you wanted.
Yeah, if you wanted, exactly.
Well, Massey said executive branch agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration do not and should not have the power to shut down trade between peaceful farmers and willing consumers.
It's Congress's job to legislate.
The Interstate Milk Freedom Act would make it easier for families to buy the milk of their choice by reversing the criminalization of specific dairy farmers.
And I will say that we bought contraband milk when we lived in Virginia.
It was produced in Pennsylvania.
We bought it in Virginia.
It illegally went over state lines.
Right to Buy Products00:03:26
And guess what?
We all survived and thrived.
What would we have done without the government?
But it's crazy that you have to smuggle a product, a food product that people want to buy.
You got to smuggle it.
You got to hide it like it's cocaine or something.
Then if somebody gets a cow, they have to inspect how they are buying or selling or whatever.
Crazy.
So Thomas says you shouldn't have to have a law that protects people to buy milk across the sale.
But I pointed out at the beginning, we do have a law.
It's in the Constitution.
You have a right to buy products across state lines.
And yet the interpretation of the Constitution is arbitrary.
And it's, you know, too often ruled by pure democracy.
If we get 51% to say, oh, we shouldn't be doing that, they just throw the Constitution aside.
One of our big problems that we have to deal with.
Absolutely.
Well, I'll just close out by thanking our viewers for watching the show today.
Reminder, August 31st, Washington, D.C. Be there, be square.
Hopefully, we'll have those tickets on sale tomorrow.
Get started.
And I will reveal the theme of our conference this year, tomorrow.
But thanks, and we look forward to seeing you.
Dr. Paul, up to you.
Very good.
I too want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today because we take very seriously our efforts to try to promote the cause of peace and prosperity.
It always baffles me to wonder why it doesn't have nearly universal support, that issue, because I think it's the answer to some of our questions.
And if you look into all the problems that we have, whether they're economics or foreign monetary policy, you'll find out that the guidelines were put into our Constitution, and yet the majority of people have chosen to go the will of the demagogues.
And unfortunately, the demagogues win because of a false promise that there'll be people who need help and we will help them.
Well, all the effort to help and be humanitarian usually ends up doing the opposite.
And that is a tragedy.
So I think the responsibility are on us who believe in these viewpoints to learn how to present these views and get people excited about it.
I was pleased during some of the campaigns that I found out that young people were very receptive to the principles of liberty.
And the only two things you have to overcome is because people sometimes will disagree with something.
You have to be tolerant of other people as long as there's nobody committing aggression, killing people.
So you have to be tolerant of habits that aren't crimes, and you have to be willing to give up all your efforts to use force.
And there's all kinds of aggression and force.
And believe me, there's all types of aggression being done in Washington, D.C., because basically big government is just a great monster that uses the principle of aggression to fool the people into supporting their views.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.