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Oct. 8, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
23:32
So...How'd Kamala Do?

In the widest-reaching interview of her presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala sat down with 60 Minutes' Bill Whitaker for some questions about her positions. It didn't go well. We'll have some of the highlights and lowlights. Also today: Frightening new legislation aims to muzzle US non-profits who challenge US government narratives.

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Time Text
A Long-Standing Problem 00:08:37
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is off today, as you can tell, because you're seeing me and not him.
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I've got a couple things I want to talk about today.
Keep it short.
First off, how many of you watched the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes last night?
I did not watch it, I have to confess.
I went immediately to TwitterX looking for snarky videos and outtakes from it because I thought that would be a bit more fun.
And to be honest, I almost feel a little sorry for Kamala Harris.
If she wasn't so evil, I would feel even more sorry for her because she does have that deer in the headlights look.
She seemed incapable of answering questions.
And of course, the right wing glommed onto all of these misfires on her part.
But I thought it might be fun to glom onto a couple of them ourselves just to have a look at the kinds of things she's saying.
So I've got a couple clips.
I've got a bonus clip from Tim Waltz.
Can't leave him out of the fun.
And then I have a surprise bonus clip in the end to remind us of when we had political leaders who could actually speak and say something interesting, even if they didn't believe it.
It was interesting.
So we're going to clip over to the first one.
The first question was about our democracy in a way.
And in fact, I thought the interviewer did a reasonably good job with some of these questions.
So here's a question about the process that saw Kamala Harris kind of Chauncey Gardner-like sitting in a position where she's running for the president.
Let's roll this first one.
Was democracy best served by President Biden stepping down and basically handing you a nomination?
You didn't have to go through a primary process.
You didn't have to fight off other contenders.
That's not really the way our system was intended to work.
President Biden made a decision that I think history is going to show is rare among leaders, which was to put country before self.
And I am proud to have earned the support of the vast majority of delegates and to have been elected the Democratic nominee.
I am proud to have received the endorsement of leaders around this country from every background and walk of life to fight in this election over the next month for our democracy.
But I think this truncated process is why people think or say they don't really know who you are.
Look, I've been in this race for 70 days.
Okay, a couple of things to unpack there.
The first thing is they asked about, well, how'd you get in this seat?
Joe Biden won the primary.
What happened?
What's up with that?
And she said, well, Joe Biden made the decision, which will be proven to be historic, that he put the country before himself.
Now, we've heard that before.
It's the kind of bumper sticker that she and the people behind her like to see.
But if you kind of unpack it a little bit, it seems a little funny.
So what does that mean?
Does that mean that he put the country before himself?
So that means that he realized that he was unfit for office and decided to pull out, even though he has a tendency to seek the glory of another term.
Well, when did he know that?
And how long did the people around him know that, that the country was actually suffering?
And by pulling out, he was putting the country first.
So it really shows like they're liars.
And again, the question is about she's going to fight for our democracy, although she did not get a single vote in the primary process.
By definition, fighting against our democracy rather than for our democracy in that case.
And in the end, when the questioner, Whitaker, cornered her a little bit, she said, look, I've only been in this race for 70 days.
Yeah, but she's been the vice president for three and a half years.
So it was an interesting opening one.
Let's do the second one, which is about a question about flip-flops, a pretty reasonable question.
And listen to her response.
Sen, the columnists say.
Okay.
They say that the reason so many voters don't know you is that you have changed your position on so many things.
You were against fracking, now you're for it.
You supported looser immigration policies.
Now you're tightening them up.
You were for Medicare for all.
Now you're not.
So many that people don't truly know what you believe or what you stand for.
And I know you've heard that.
In the last four years, I have been Vice President of the United States.
And I have been traveling our country.
And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground.
I believe in building consensus.
We are a diverse people, geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds.
And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can figure out compromise and understand it's not a bad thing, as long as you don't compromise your values, to find common sense solutions.
So Chauncey Gardner in being there does come to mind again, although Chauncey Gardner had a good heart and he meant well.
And you can see a kind of a malevolence in Kamala Harris's approach.
And I can see that she's looking at Whitaker as the next guy going to the gulag for daring to ask a question.
But it was a legitimate question.
You keep changing your positions.
Well, what are your positions?
Well, I keep traveling around the country building consensus.
I'm seeking what is possible in terms of the common good.
It's one of those, that's a mini-word salad, maybe a spring mix word salad that doesn't mean very much at all and shows a kind of a lack of understanding of what it takes.
Now, the next one I want to do is on the border because it's a difficult issue and a difficult question.
So let's listen to what she has to say when she's questioned about her positions on the border.
Now, Elon Musk is the one who tweeted this out, so let's keep that in mind.
I've been covering the border for years, and so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration.
Correct, correct.
But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration.
As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.
Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?
It's a long-standing problem.
And solutions are at hand.
And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.
What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?
I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem.
Okay.
But the numbers did quadruple.
the numbers today because of what we have done.
We have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half.
We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half.
But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem.
Okay, it's a long-standing problem, she points out.
Yes, it's a problem that dates back to the beginning of your administration.
And then we're going to get a little more salad.
The solution is at hand.
Okay, that's encouraging.
And she said, from day one, we've been offering solutions to this problem.
Well, the rest of us really don't know what they are.
And in the end, she devolves back to blaming Congress.
So I would say this is probably kind of a disaster of an interview on her part.
Now, she went on another interview a couple of days ago, which apparently is popular with young women.
Terrorist Supporting Speech 00:13:21
I'm certainly not in their demographic in any way, shape, or form.
I don't even identify as a young woman.
But apparently it was a talk show where they talk about sexual things.
And apparently it was more comfortable for her on this program.
Trump, I think, wisely decided not to go on the program.
But this is sort of her first policy interview with a professional journalist who, again, I think did a good job.
So he didn't do too well.
But we also had Tim Waltz on, the vice presidential candidate, the running mate of Kamala Joy Harris.
And he had an interesting answer to the question of some of his, let's put it this way, foibles.
So let's put this next one on and take a look at Tim Waltz.
In your debate with JD Vance, you said I'm a knucklehead at times.
And I think you were referring to the time that you said that you were in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square unrest when you were not.
Is that kind of misrepresentation, isn't that more than just being a knucklehead?
I think folks know who I am, and I think they know the difference between someone expressing emotion, telling a story, getting a date wrong rather than a pathological liar like Donald Trump.
But I think it comes down to the question of whether you can be trusted to tell the truth.
Yeah, well, I can.
I think I can.
I will own up to being a knucklehead at times, but the folks closest to me know that I keep my word.
A knucklehead at times.
Of course, he asked him about that one particular instance, but we know many of them, including questions about his military service that he tried to play in an inaccurate way.
So the question is, can you trust me?
I think you can.
That's not very encouraging.
So there's kind of that in a nutshell.
But I did want to look back and try to remember.
Now, this is not, this is not, this is someone who was not without many faults of his own.
But in this kind of word-salad world that we seem to be living in now, we can be thinking that, hey, am I going insane?
Does nothing make sense?
Does no one say normal sentences anymore?
Well, I'm going to have a bonus clip to bring us all back to reality to a time when we had someone who actually said some things and they sounded pretty good.
So let's run that last one.
Let's just turn in the way back machine and roll this one out.
He has then accused the people of living too well and that we must share in scarcity.
We must sacrifice and get used to doing with less.
We don't have inflation because the people are living too well.
We have inflation because the government is living too well.
We'd like to ask the president, why is it inflationary to let the people keep more of their money and spend it the way they'd like?
And it isn't inflationary to let him take that money and spend it the way he wants.
That was a good one.
And again, President Reagan talked a good game.
He did some good things, but he also raised taxes.
And he also spent, like a drunken sailor, on a Cold War, especially that was not what it was cracked up to be at the time, especially.
But anyway, he could talk and he could develop positions and he was able to do things that were unpopular.
As you remember, at the time, all of his neocon advisors, this is where the neocons first came into government, all of his neocon advisors says, don't go to Reykjavik.
Don't meet with Gorbachev.
Don't do this compromise.
In fact, they flipped out because Reagan was ready to sign some serious, wide, sweeping agreements with the Soviet Union at the time to limit nuclear weapons, to wind down the Cold War.
And unfortunately, it fell apart at the end.
But he was willing to talk to an adversary who, unlike the current Russian adversary, we are told, was actually a pretty serious adversary who viewed us as one and was ready for war with us.
So, again, a president who can compromise and who can talk, which is not too bad.
So, I hope we had a little bit of fun with that.
But I do want to, I want to cover one other story that's interesting that I came across yesterday that's a little bit more serious and a little bit more chilling.
And it's basically partly, I just want to make all of you aware of it so you can keep an eye on it.
And this is a new piece of legislation that I find extremely threatening.
Now, put on this is from Truth Out.
Now, Truth Out is a lefty site, right?
But they share our concerns on civil liberties.
Now, this is the article.
Movement media are fighting for Palestinian liberation and against censorship.
So you look at this and say, these are not my people necessarily.
Now, some of you will say these are my people, but a lot of you won't.
But in this article is something quite interesting.
In fact, I went down a rabbit hole a little bit.
I went back to my old job of reading legislation, which I can assure you is not much fun, especially the way it's written by people who do not work for someone called Ron Paul.
I try to dig into this legislation, but let me just tell you a little bit about what Truth Out says about this piece of legislation.
Go ahead and go to the next one.
A bill currently making its way through Congress could kill independent media outlets like ours.
Now, that sounds like a pitch for donations at first, but I kept reading yesterday.
So H.R. 9495 is a bipartisan piece of legislation.
That's a bad sign, ostensibly about allowing U.S. nationals wrongfully detained abroad to postpone their tax deadlines.
It sounds relatively innocuous, but this bill also includes the text of another bill.
By the way, that's a very common thing.
One that made it through the House earlier this spring, and I've highlighted this.
It gives the Treasury Secretary the discretion to deem a nonprofit a, quote, terrorist supporting organization, which would strip them of their tax-exempt status.
Now, this is important because a lot of the First Amendment killing moves by governments since 2020 have gone, and before then, by the way, they've not been able to run it through Congress, etc.
So, what they do is they run it to the Treasury Secretary and OFAC, the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they're the ones who are able to attack it not on First Amendment grounds, but on financial grounds.
That's how they got away with their latest attacks on RT and Sputnik and a few others is through OFAC.
So, it's going to give the Treasury Secretary, whoever that may be, the discretion to deem a nonprofit a terrorist supporting organization.
Go to the next one now.
This kind of sweeping jurisdiction should terrify anyone who cares at all about civil liberties.
It should especially concern readers of nonprofit media, and I would add nonprofit organizations.
The bill can have compounding effects.
Outlets might self-censor.
We saw a lot of that during COVID.
Organizations might spend limited funds and time defending themselves from any old hateful threat that comes their way.
Donations may dry up as funders worry about whether they can face some kind of penalty of their own.
The terror label is already powerful, this Truth Out article continues.
It can freeze assets and spark investigations.
And this bill creates a whole new category.
Critical few words, that of a terrorist supporting organization that can poison by association alone.
Now go on a little bit further.
I just want to get this down because here's the real point.
One could make any number of critiques of this bill.
It puts a terrifying amount of power in the hands of a political appointee, i.e. the Treasury Secretary, who could easily weaponize it against any enemy of their choosing.
It's unconstitutional, likely, and this is the point they make that's important.
It's also redundant.
Providing material support to organizations on the U.S. list of foreign terror organizations is already illegal under a whole host of legislation that already exists.
And that is important.
It is already illegal.
If the government goes through the process of designating an entity or a country a terrorist supporting entity or country, it is already illegal to provide any material support.
What this is doing is something very different and much more insidious.
It's creating a whole new category solely in the hands of the Treasury Secretary and of course the deep state behind that person to categorize anything they don't want or don't like as a terrorist supporting entity.
Now some of our friends on the right might look at this and say, well, all these Palestinian protesters are a bunch of terrorists anyway.
They deserve it.
They've got it going to them.
Well guess what?
What goes around comes around because especially if someone like Kamala wins who's not a fan and not a friend of free speech and not a friend of organizations that she doesn't like because she'll have Hillary whispering in her ear, you can better believe that.
It's going to come back to haunt you because I just did a very, very narrow dive, not a deep dive, into what kinds of organizations, if Kamala wins or someone like her, who they might be targeting.
And this is from a Newsweek article very recently.
I think it was actually a couple days ago, written by William Arkin.
FBI targets Trump followers as the 2024 election nears.
Now go to the next one.
This is from that article.
The federal government believes the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it's quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent, and I highlight this, what it calls domestic terrorism.
So, those of you smugly thinking, yes, let's take out these Palestine protesters.
Let's take out these lefties, these annoying lefties, these Hamas lovers.
Well, guess what?
They're coming for you.
They're coming for all the conservative alternative media as well.
You better believe it.
You better believe it.
And when you give the power of being able to silence an organization or a news outlet in the hands of one political appointee, you've got trouble.
And you say, well, come on, that's not what the law says.
Well, let's look a little bit at legislation.
Let's go to H.R. 9495.
This is what it looks like in the cover.
It basically says what it is.
So you go down to section 4.
If you go to the next one, here's where it gets juicy.
Section 4, termination of tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.
Now it sounds again ominous.
Who was terrorist supporting organization?
What does that mean?
What are the definitions?
Well, there are none.
And if you go to the next one, except for this, terrorist supporting organizations.
Now, this is where it's obvious in the legislation.
For the purpose of this paragraph, the term terrorist supporting organization means any organization designated by the Secretary as having provided during a three-year period ending on the date of such agenation material support or resources within the meaning of section, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All determined by the Treasury Secretary.
You'd say, well, hang on.
You know, if you're providing support for terrorism, then maybe you should have some problems.
But the strange thing is, if you're actually supporting terrorism, according to this, well, you only get your tax exempt status taken away.
No, that's not the case.
Let's go to the U.S. Code.
I dug deeper yesterday.
Here's the U.S. Code.
This is the Cornell Law Library.
18 U.S. Code 2339B providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.
Go to the next one.
This is U.S. Code.
It says, if we go to that next clip, please, whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization or attempts or conspires to do so shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years or both.
And if the death of any person results, shall be in prison for any term of years or for life.
So we have a means by which to determine that you are really a terrorist supporting organization.
That means you provide material support to terrorist groups.
Now we can quibble about that, about who really qualifies for that, but that's on the books.
What they're doing here, guys, folks, is they are putting the bar way, way lower.
Hey, we can't prove that you are supporting terrorism, but you have challenged the narrative on, name the issue, Ukraine.
Ukraine's not winning.
Well, Russia is acting like terrorists.
If you put out an article saying that, you're terrorist supporting.
Well, Israel's slaughtering Palestinians.
They're slaughtering people in Lebanon.
Well, you seem to be siding with the terrorists, sir.
We Won't Shut It Down 00:01:19
We're going to shut down your organization.
We won't shut it down, actually, because we can't do that.
But we'll take away your tax exempt status and we will put a scarlet letter on you to terrify anyone into not giving you another penny.
This is chilling, folks.
This is really chilling stuff.
Keep your eyes out.
The war on speech is up and running.
And it's not right-wing.
It's not left-wing.
Don't get in that mental cage.
It's them versus us, people who believe in liberty and freedom.
So I want to do one final thing, which is to remind everyone that we survive on your tax-deductible donations.
If you go to that last clip, please.
And I've included a link in the description to where you can go and support the Ron Paul Institute, which is the home of the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
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We can't do it without you.
So please, if you can see it in your hearts, to give us a donation.
Make it a monthly donation.
That would be awesome.
If you can do that, we will appreciate it.
And I appreciate you watching the Liberty Report with just me and not Dr. Paul, who's much more entertaining and intelligent than I am.
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