So Much For 'Democracy' - Blinken OKs Ukraine Cancelling Elections
In between playing guitar in a nightclub and eating pizza in a Nazi-themed restaurant in Kiev, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the time to justify Ukraine's cancellation of elections and the inevitable loss of democratic legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. This "war for democracy" thus is revealed as just a proxy war on Russia. Also today: The Gaza aid pier is about to go live, but may well lead to disaster. Finally, new documents show Biden's complicity in the horrors in Gaza.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into 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?
Doing well.
All right.
We're going to talk about some very important things like elections.
Democracy is spreading around the world, but they have a few setbacks.
Of course, our definition of democracy doesn't brag on it, and founders didn't think much about democracy.
But anyway, we go to war to spread democracy.
And Nancy Pelosi is the biggest champion of democracy.
That should raise questions right there.
But what we want to talk about, democracy coming or going to Ukraine.
And so much for the effort, because it looks like it's elusive.
They had this goal of, you know, in a short period of time, the NATO people were going to whip Russia.
Russia would run with their tail between their legs and disappear, and they would have a chance to finally bring democracy to Ukraine.
Well, it hasn't worked out quite that way.
The headline on Zero Hedge today sort of gave a pretty good hint of what's happening.
So in quotes, they say, so much for democracy.
Blinken goes there.
It looks like he went there for this purpose to Ukraine to justify Ukraine's canceling election.
Is this a setback or are they moving in our directions?
We don't think too much of the pure democracy pitch.
So I think most of our viewers know exactly what's going on here.
But it is a little weird, even for these people who are up to no good why they were doing this.
It looks like they're a little bit confused or something.
But Selenski said, oh, I'm for him anytime they want.
We should have elections.
We believe in that.
We believe in democracy.
Oh, but we don't have any money.
We have to win this war.
If you give us some money, we'll have an election.
So it seems like it's an aside from what's going on.
The NATO-Russian war going on.
And at the same time, they're saying, well, if we only had an election, everything would be okay.
And I was thinking about having the election and democracy in Vietnam.
And the big escalation there was we participated in a coup in killing the person that had been elected.
So much for that.
But this just is a demonstration of the silliness of some of the things that we do.
Some elections are justifiable and they should be, but it has to be defined what they're doing.
Pure democracy, of course, is what we oppose because that means the dictatorship of the majority.
Our founders didn't like the idea, didn't say a word about it, but had no intention of promoting democracy.
They understood the danger of the majority dictating to the minority.
And yet today, the people who claim they're the greatest supporter of the minorities and human rights are in favor of pure democracy.
And yet that cannot be the way that you're going to give people's rights.
We happen to believe that people will have their rights and their chance to express themselves and have an influence is through freedom.
And under those conditions, you don't have this nonsense going on.
Yeah, well, the whole, I mean, we have a short memory, I think, unfortunately, in the U.S., but the entire justification for the U.S. involvement in this proxy war has been, well, we have to fight for Ukraine's democracy.
Ukraine is fighting for democracy, and we have to support them in the name of democracy.
Well, what we saw, and we talked about it a little bit yesterday, but not necessarily this aspect of it.
The U.S. government and U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine was facing a crisis because on May 21st, which is coming up very soon, this is the 16th, the government of Ukraine will lose its democratic legitimacy.
It will no longer be a legitimately elected democratic government.
That poses a problem for the U.S. because that means in legal terms, the U.S. doesn't have a legal interlocutor to deal with in Ukraine.
So stepping into this quandary was Anthony Blinken.
And we talked a little bit yesterday about he went to a pub, he played some music, he didn't realize that he was singing a song against interventionist foreign policy.
He thought he was for it.
We didn't talk about it yesterday, but he went to a pizza place that had Nazi memorabilia on the wall.
We didn't talk about that.
It wasn't very nice.
But I think the main reason he went was to talk with the Ukrainian government and try to figure out how are we going to deal with this problem of you guys not being elected because this whole thing is about democracy.
And so, and that's why, if you put this first clip up, this is essentially how the Biden administration decided to square the circle.
Blinken justified Zelensky's decision to cancel elections.
He made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Tuesday, and he gave a speech.
I've got a couple of clips from the speech, Dr. Paul, that are really interesting.
But he made a speech where he justified Zelensky's decision to postpone the elections.
I would say cancel.
But presidential elections were due to be held in March, but they weren't.
And Zelensky will remain in office after his term ends on May 20th.
Ukrainian parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held last year, but they were also canceled.
So neither the parliament nor the president will be legitimately elected come next week.
You know, there's a bit of irony here that our government will send people over to Ukraine because they're looking how to learn how to run elections.
And when you think of the chaos that we have, we live with it.
Half of the people, or more than half of the people, don't believe our elections are legitimate and that they're always rigged.
So what are we going to do when we go over there?
Let's say they didn't have to cancel it for the various reasons.
But are we the people that could set a good example on how to run an election?
Or are we going to go and teach them how to rig an election?
And are we going to show them, well, to run a good election, you have to have a Department of Justice on your side, and you have to have a little bit of assistance from your FBI.
So yes, when a time comes when you're ready for elections, we'll be ready for you.
But we do expect to have money.
Oh, sure.
We'll have to collve it up again.
Not only do we buy the weapons and fight the wars, then we're going to pay for this election, which is so silly.
That's why it's not surprising that this thing is just thrown out there.
They have no more intention in trying to get some type of legitimacy in voting.
And, of course, my personal belief about democracy, it only comes out of the marketplace when people get to vote with their dollars.
Yeah, that's the real democracy.
Well, the issue of why cancel the elections, well, the justification that Zelensky had was, well, it's wartime.
We can't have an election.
It's wartime.
But the real reason, I think, is different.
And I think this piece from antiwar.com really does kind of let the cat out of the bag if you put this next clip up.
Because the reason Zelensky and the U.S. do not want an election is that Zelensky would lose.
And this is from the same article.
Earlier this year, a poll in Ukraine found Zelensky would lose to Zeluzhny.
You know, Zeluzhny was running the military up until recently.
He got too popular, so they had to get rid of him.
That Zelensky would lose to Zeluzhny in a presidential election.
The poll found that 41% favored Zeluzhny in a first round, while only 23% would vote for Zelensky.
Zelensky is deeply, deeply unpopular in Ukraine.
That poses a problem for U.S. foreign policy because we don't dare allow the Ukrainians to change their own war policy toward Russia.
You know, this is our war.
We're running this thing.
Yeah, but wouldn't that justify the need for them to understand how you really run an election?
Yeah, you know, to get the bad guys in.
And it didn't work out that way.
It's not going to work out that way.
And it's just an illusion, more of an attempt to control the people.
And this, to me, is just an example of how silly this stuff gets and how it justifies the early position that we have held here.
Well, the very early position a long time ago.
Just stay out of other people's business, but especially since 2014.
It was up to no good.
It's turned out that way.
It's no surprise that this happened.
And it's bankrupt in this country.
It's bankrupt in this country.
And it's inviting moral decay.
So it to me is not much good news in this other than exposure.
And that's positive.
Yeah.
Well, I clicked a couple of things out of Lincoln's speech because it was so delusional.
It was so at odds with reality that I just wanted to show a couple.
And I think you'll get a kick out of this, Dr. Paul.
Now, here he is.
He's giving a speech where he's justifying canceling elections.
And here he says, today, here I'm in Kiev to speak about Ukraine's strategic success and to set out how, with our support, the Ukrainian people can and will achieve their vision for the future, a free, prosperous, secure democracy.
And he said, we're meeting at a critical moment.
Putin is ramping up another offensive.
He's sending wave after wave of Russian soldiers, Iranian drones, North Korean artillery and tanks and missiles, and fighter jets built with machines and parts supplied by China.
So the reality that he's saying here is that this ragtag Russian army is sending waves and waves of soldiers in to be slaughtered.
They're using junkie weapons that they get from North Korea.
They can't even build their own weapons.
Well, none of that's true.
I mean, if it was true that they were sending in these waves and waves, then why is it that Russia is not the one that's short of manpower?
I mean, over and over again, even in the speech, he says, we have to, sorry, but you had to have that mobilization.
You have to get more troops.
If they weren't suffering disproportionately loss of manpower, why are they so panicked about getting more troops?
It's belied by what he actually says.
Well, they certainly wouldn't have any money left over for an election.
So we'll have the real election, and that is send more money for a military victory, which they're not going to get.
And that is how they determine their leaders and dictators.
And, you know, the people in charge right now in Ukraine do not have exactly a perfect record of setting up honest governments.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I just wanted to do one more from his speech.
I have a ton of them.
Maybe I'll write about it later.
But this is another one that's so hilarious.
If you put the next one up, so he says the $60 billion aid package was approved by our Congress with overwhelming support across both political parties and both houses of Congress.
Well, and he also says the American people's support for Ukraine has been consistent over the course of the war.
It's never wavered.
A significant majority of Americans believe we should continue to provide assistance.
There's so much delusional gobbledygook in that.
And I just did a couple.
He says, first of all, they passed aid to Ukraine with overwhelming support across both parties.
Well, go to the next clip.
Here's the actual vote.
And the actual vote on that aid was Republicans 101 yes and 112 no's.
Republicans rejected this aid.
He's lying.
They rejected it in the majority.
And as to his other point, that Americans have never wavered in support of keeping this war going.
Gaza Crisis Diplomacy00:11:55
Put the next one on from Responsible Statecraft.
And I just grabbed this out of the just out of Googling it.
Nearly 70% of Americans want talks to end the war in Ukraine.
They don't support the continuation of this war.
The vast majority of Americans do not want us to be involved.
They want the war over.
So so many lies in that speech.
If you read it and know anything about what's going on, it's just astonishing.
It's a sad story.
And the American people have trouble getting the information that they do need.
But anyway, I can't see much good coming out of this episode other than the fact that a few people have been exposed and catching their lies.
And that's not too difficult because it seems to be universal.
There's a few in our own government that tells lies.
Believe it.
At least they try to get away with it.
Well, the next scam that we have is our second story.
Now, this is written by our friend Kelly Vlajos, who we've known for a long time.
She's over at Responsible Statecraft.
If we can skip ahead a few, I got a little bit too ambitious with some of those blinking quotes.
My goodness.
$320 million U.S. military pier, if you can find that one and put it up.
I'm not sure if we, I think we have that.
Yeah, there we go.
Thank you.
$320 million U.S. military pier to open for business.
But storms ahead, writes Kelly Vlajos.
She says the fact that the U.S. military pier project off the coast of Gaza was temporarily stalled last week due to high swells and winds is symbolic of the challenges it now faces.
But it is reportedly opening for business within the next 24 hours.
$320 million to build a pier to deliver aid to Gaza.
Something smells fishy about this, Dr. Paul.
Yeah, I wonder if the representatives of Hamas and those that represent Israel are all in favor of this activity.
It's surely a mess.
But this is a military pier.
It's supposed to be floating.
It's going to require a lot of military personnel.
They don't know what the total number is going to be.
And it strikes me as being a little bit ancient, you know, to have this floating pier out there.
And it's going to, until it dawned on me, what they're trying to do is probably just have one more block of anybody trying to escape from Gaza, you know, to get out.
You know, they're closing down the exits into the north and the south.
And they can't get out.
So here they're going to have it.
It's not, you know, the main justification is we have to get the food in there.
And they don't even admit, they cover up the story that maybe Israel is preventing that from happening instead of saying, oh, they're all for this.
Says, feed the people while we kill the rest of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the crazy thing.
We've talked about it on the show, too.
There are already roads to deliver aid.
That is the most efficient, the cheapest way to deliver aid is to simply tell Israel: okay, if you want the money, you're going to have to open the roads and let us get aid because people are starving.
These are not Hamas.
These are families.
These are kids.
These are women.
These are elderly people.
Let us get the aid in.
No, they don't do that.
Instead, they do this.
And it's sort of typical how the U.S. government does things.
You could solve a problem for a couple of dollars.
No, we'd rather spend a few million.
And in fact, here's from Kelly's article, if you put the next one up.
She says, so what do we know?
A trident pier, the length of five football fields, is being anchored to the Gaza coast.
Humanitarian aid will be dropped off there via ships from the floating pier, also built by the U.S. military, two miles off the coast.
According to the Pentagon, two Navy warships will be protecting the floating pier and the seabound transfer of the aid.
Now, here's the part that you were just talking about.
Some 1,000 U.S. service members are engaged in the project, and get this, Dr. Paul, which is costing an estimated $320 million for the first three months.
And I didn't realize that.
I thought it was, you know, one and done.
No, this is just for the first three months.
The U.S. personnel are not supposed to be going on the ground in Gaza at any time.
Yet they'll be right off the shore, right?
They're just preparing them for a cost overrun.
Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
That's just the beginning.
But, you know, the other thing, they say it was truly having some significance and is helping the military or whatever.
You know, one bomb would take care of that.
And there's a lot of people around the world that have bombs capable of doing that.
So it's just another method of spending more money, but it's increasing our danger.
Do you think that thousand people that are going over there, military, like Navy people, special forces, or FBI or CIA or whatever, there'll be a lot of activity there.
And nothing more than further bankruptcying us and further undermining our national security and deceiving the people.
Well, the thing is, we are viewed, and I think legally so, rightly so, as combatants in this.
We've given Israel the guns and the bombs.
So Hamas, of course, being on the other side, is going to look at U.S. troops there as a hostile force, as we would, as anyone would.
So it seems, again, like folly, and we've talked about this on the show before, like folly to put a thousand troops out there vulnerable to a Hamas that has shown that it can be ruthless as well, and it's at war essentially with the U.S. as a proxy.
Why would you stick them there?
And, you know, a lot of people think, and I think there's something to it, that the goal here, really, especially on the part of Netanyahu, who's deeply unpopular at home, protests every day in front of his office, he's deeply unpopular, that the goal is to somehow suck the American military in to start doing some of the fighting for Israel against Hamas in Gaza.
Well, you know, they systematically have been blocking efforts to really escape this monstrosity over there.
This could be part of that too.
Maybe not.
It isn't to help people and feed them.
It might be there.
Some people are trying to say, because even before the war broke out, the limitation on what the Palestinians could do in fishing rights and moving out to sea, there were strict restrictions on it.
It was like being in prison, but those are words you're not supposed to use.
Yeah.
Well, whatever the case, it's setting up U.S. troops to get killed as a tripwire.
And it's immoral for, I think, for our government to use U.S. military personnel as tripwire to further involve us in this conflict.
You know, it's really a very cynical and a very bad idea.
So anyway, we'll keep an eye on this pier.
My guess is it's going to fizzle.
It's not going to work like they said it would.
And, you know, the money spent, the contractors are paid.
You know, 10% for the big guy is already paid.
So anyway, so the last one we want to do is a, and we saw this thanks to antiwar.com, but an investigative report by the Independent, which is a UK publication, that I think is pretty devastating to the administration.
If we can put this up, this is a serious investigation.
And the headline is, Joe Biden has done more than arm Israel.
Leaked documents reveal his own officials see him as complicit in Gaza's devastating famine.
So the administration's own officials consider him complicit in this.
If you go to the next one really quick, because Biden and his administration have been accused of being complicit in enabling a famine in Gaza by failing to sufficiently act on repeated warnings from their own experts.
Interviews with current and former USAID and State Department officials working in Gaza and internal USAID documents reveal that the administration rejected or ignored pleas to use its leverage to persuade its ally Israel, the recipient of billions in U.S. military support, to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to stop the famine taking hold.
Short version of that, Dr. Paul, they just didn't care.
You know, it's hard for me to believe this stuff because you can't believe that human beings can be so nasty, but then they have their justifications.
I think back about, you know, the road to World War II because some have claimed that there was a deliberate necessity for us to be involved in that war and they maneuvered us into war.
This is another thing that they have this, but how could they do this and just deliberately allow this to happen?
But then the evidence of the people who are closest to it who had a sincere effort of trying to feed these people are saying exactly the opposite, that our government hasn't helped and it's caused harm.
So that to me, but I've, you know, after reading that, she convinced me that, you know, whatever their motivations are, I guess they have to live with those motivations.
But there's evidence that there was no honest effort to prevent this problem, but also to make it worse.
And I think some of the rhetoric here would go along with it.
It's an enemy.
We have to destroy.
Every single one of them have to be destroyed.
And they will pursue policies that are unbelievable, but they in their own mind, I guess they have to do that as a mechanism to live with themselves because, yeah, it is bad and all bad.
But it's going to be overall good next year.
We're going to save the world if we just allow some of these things to happen.
So this is really a sad story.
Yeah, it is.
And the whole idea, I mean, if it were any other country, the U.S. would say, look, if you want some aid, you're going to have to do a couple things.
Don't punish the civilians.
They're not part of this war.
We've always recognized that there are military.
Now, of course, it's sort of a guerrilla warfare because it's not a traditional military that the Israeli army is facing.
Nevertheless, you don't starve the entire population because your war is a little bit difficult.
You know, and some of this policy, of course, was making it worse and all.
But The article also pointed out that there was some diplomatic cover for war for Israel that we participated in to make sure that they didn't, because their position, of course, is to help and not purposely starve people to death and all.
But we participated in the charade.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I wanted to just do a couple more clips from this article.
It's a good article, worth reading.
You can find it on anti-war.com.
But the thing that's important, thanks.
Yeah, just leave that up.
That's great.
Thanks.
The thing is that the level of dissent within the administration is, according to this investigation, is unprecedented.
Now, this is from the article, and this is a quote.
This is not just turning a blind eye to man-made starvation of an entire population.
It is direct complicity.
Former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over U.S. support for the war, told the Independent.
So, and then just go to the last one.
I'm going to skip a few because I've just had too many clips on this.
But keep going to the last one.
Unprecedented Dissent Within00:05:04
There we go.
So inside USAID, career civil servants with extensive experience were horrified by the lack of urgency from their politically appointed leaders.
Internal USAID documents seen by the Independent showed that staff were passing their concerns about a lack of action up the chain to USAID Administrator Samantha Power and other senior leaders in the form of letters and internal dissent memos, but to no avail.
And this is a USAID staffer saying, what was surprising to me and deeply disappointing was the fact that we're hearing nothing about the imminent famine in Gaza.
And that says a lot about Samantha Power, Dr. Paul, who sort of pioneered this idea of responsibility to protect.
We can't allow a government to harm their own people.
We have to go in.
She's famous for opposing the genocide in Rwanda and all of these sorts of things.
Well, it turns out her opposition to this kind of genocide is very selective at best.
Well, I'm always impressed when somebody has a career involved, income involved, and then they get so fed up with it, and they resign.
Instead of saying, well, I'll fight it from within and play those games.
I think those who resign and there's a penalty for themselves are the ones that have to deserve a little bit of credit.
Yeah, absolutely.
They put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and we're going to break a little news.
I got a note from our good friend Thomas Massey yesterday, and he said, guess what?
Tomorrow, probably maybe Friday, I'm going to introduce the original Ron Paul.
We put up that bonus clip too.
The original Ron Paul version of the end the Fed legislation.
Now, here he put up yesterday a poll on Twitter X. Should I introduce a bill to abolish the Federal Reserve?
End the Fed.
86.6% said end the Fed.
In fact, only 2.8% said keep the Fed.
There was 10% saying just show us the results.
Nevertheless, he has committed to reintroducing the original Ron Paul version of End the Fed.
He says he's rolling in with 12 plus original co-sponsors, and it only seems like it's going to grow from there.
So I think that's fantastic news to end the show with.
I hope Thomas Jefferson's listening.
He never wanted to start it, you know.
So this argument is going on for a lot of years.
And economically speaking, and a personal liberty, it should be something that 100% of the American people should support because it serves no special, no benefits for the average person.
It does great benefit to the very wealthy, you know, the bankers and the rich, and who gets the money first.
And that is why there's this tremendous difference between income.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
And the one reason we don't need the Fed and we need to get the audit done so the people will even give us more support is the fact that there's it subsidizes and provides the funding on a temporary basis.
It looks like, oh, we're providing welfare for the people who really need it, and we have to have a strong national defense.
And it goes on and on until the country goes bankrupt.
So, symbolically, this is something that I noticed a good many years ago that it was so inclusive.
The issue of money, because if you have a beef with the foreign policy, you better understand money.
If you have a beef with personal liberties, you have to understand the money.
Just think of the excuse, the very first thing that came out in this system to monitor the people was the Bank Secrecy Act, which of course was exactly the opposite.
So, it's used as an excuse for an attack on our liberties.
It's to use it for an attack on our economic system and also the printing of money, the Federal Reserve, you never have to worry about the bills being paid.
What you have to worry about is that money that is losing its value.
Thomas Massey deserves a lot of credit for doing this.
It's very helpful.
And I think the status of this whole movement is different.
I think it has changed in the last decade or two.
And I think there's a lot of groups out there now that know about it.
And I know when we had the first votes on auditing the Fed, we had every Republican supporter and a lot of Democrats support it.
So, you know, having it open and people knowing what's going on and audit, the same thing ought to be done with the Pentagon and a few others.
But that to me, so, Thomas, thank you very much for doing this and continue this, and we'll continue to give as much support for this effort as possible.