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Nov. 13, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:00
Trump's Shocker SecDef Pick!

President-elect Trump has selected a US military veteran and Fox News commentator to be his next Defense Secretary. Official Washington is panicking due to his "lack of experience." Is this a good move or a bad move? Also: Huckabee to Israel? And make way for DOGE.

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Time Text
First Thoughts on New Cabinet 00:14:34
Hello, everybody, and thank you for turning into the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Are you feeling better now that we're going to have a new cabinet come up here pretty soon?
We'll all be libertarians.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, they have to be a little bit better, don't you think?
We'll see.
Except maybe people will let their guard down and say, oh, you know, we won.
They'll take care of it.
Trouble take care of it.
And all of a sudden find out that there are some statists sneaking in, probably the back door.
But anyway, they're going through the process, and it looks like Trump's taking hold of this whole transition like a businessman would.
But, you know, I was taught early on that you can't say, if we only had people run the government like a business, it would be okay.
But it doesn't work because there's no profits, there's no stockholders.
And it's just a facade to go on and think, well, we just want, if you run a business where you have to answer the stockholders and to supply and demand in the marketplace, it's different than how you have to run the government.
And I can remember when I was in high school early on, they said, well, we're going to have a businessman run the post office and everything will be okay.
That didn't work out real well.
So right now, I mean, I think it's good that you don't have communists running things.
Maybe you have people who pretend a little bit, but it certainly is in the answer.
That's why I think the use of language is so important, because if you're talking about what the government's going to do, you don't want to acknowledge too much automatically.
Well, that's the government's job.
We just need to make it more efficient and all this other stuff.
But we came up with early bunch of appointments.
Can't keep up with them all.
I think the cabinet's too big.
I think, what was there, about four or five at the beginning.
Very few.
But anyway, big cabinets, a lot of review, there'll be a lot of arguing.
And then there'll be the appointment process and seeing if the Senate's going to agree with Trump.
But yesterday, I guess it was yesterday, we heard a controversial appointment for picking who's going to run the Pentagon.
And that, I think, surprised a lot of people.
And they picked somebody that was famous mostly from most people's understanding as a TV personnel.
His name is not easy to say.
It's Hag Smith.
And he's a military man.
He's been in the service, but I don't know whether that qualifies unless you've learned some lessons that are more non-conference.
Maybe one with non-intervention.
If they learn that and say, boy, all this stuff.
But anyway, he's been in the military.
I've watched him on television, never suspected that he would be appointed.
And even now, there's a few people who have dug up some past history because you even admitted to me, you know this guy.
You did give, you found a few tidbits that makes one wonder, you know, about how this is going to work out.
But I sense that, yeah, philosophy is playing a part in us, getting rid of the people that were there and appointing people.
But I think the thing that's ruling the day is loyalty, which should be that way.
You should be loyal to the leader, you know, if you're in a company and if you're playing football, you had to follow the leadership.
So that's, I think, I think Trump is very interested because he claims he learned a lesson because he ended up with some people in the administration and the Justice Department that wasn't exactly on his side of justice.
So we still have this appointment and a lot of talk about it, and I guess we'll be talking about it for the next several days.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because Trump, I've heard him several times make fun of military officers who go on TV.
You know, it turns out he's picked someone, he's picked a military officer who went on TV to be his defense secretary.
Let's put up that first clip because this is kind of not necessarily these words, I don't think, Dr. Paul, but you probably were thinking along these lines.
This is a politico article that came out this morning.
Who the blank is this guy?
Defense World reacts to Trump's surprise Pentagon pick.
Now, if you see him on the right, he kind of looks like someone out of central casting.
That jawbone and the, you know, the whole look that he has really looks like, you know, if you told AI to come up with someone like that, he looks like it.
Now, I thought that, you know, we'll focus a little bit maybe on some of the positives first.
And, you know, I'm a black pill guy, so it's hard for me to find it.
But I think, ironically, the politico article, the way they framed the bad things about him, we thought that actually kind of sounds pretty good.
So let's go through a couple of those.
Now, here's the article.
If you look at that next one, President-elect Donald Trump's Tuesday night surprise pick of a conservative commentator and television host as his Pentagon chief shocked Washington, which had expected the nominee to be a seasoned lawmaker or someone with defense policy experience.
And it's kind of funny because you said it when we were talking in your study earlier, but you always said, I don't want anyone with experience.
So when I read this, I immediately thought of you that they think it's bad, but it's actually probably not necessarily bad.
Go to the next one.
One assessment was more blunt.
Who the blank is this guy? said a defense industry lobbyist, defense industry lobbyist, who was granted anonymity to offer candid views.
The lobbyists said they hoped for, quote, someone who actually has an extensive background in defense.
That would be a good start.
And that was supposed to be a negative, but you may have taken it the same way I did, that that's pretty good because he's not in with all the lobbyists.
Yeah, and you know, there are exceptions on both sides of this because I think a person that is going into Congress and they're a libertarian, they wouldn't say, I'm not going to take anybody.
Maybe they might look at somebody who works for Thomas Massey because it's been sorted out.
So it's whether how they, how they qualify, because if you're independent-minded and you haven't been there, you can be a libertarian or you could be a communist.
So that is a good statement, and it was a political, catchy, catchy phrase to say, well, I don't want these people, because it was so true that if you knew, because when I won a special election, 1976, there were a couple people who had recently left the Congress.
So we got dozens, hundreds of applications of everybody on these staffs.
And I told the staff, I said, just if they've been working on the hill doing the usual stuff, if they weren't somebody that was promoting the cause of liberty.
And that was, there was a big stack there that we just really couldn't talk to.
So that's what people believe in is makes a big difference.
And we won't write off everybody, but we'll be more cautious on what kind of a grade we give them.
Now the other thing that Politico hit him with, Hegseth, Peter Hegseth with, was also the same thing I thought.
I was coming in this morning reading it, and I wasn't driving, by the way.
And I thought, this doesn't sound too bad.
Put this next one up.
This is supposed to be the bad stuff about him, and it actually is pretty good.
Put that next clip up.
Heg Seth in a Fox appearance this year called for a fundamental shift in U.S. military priorities, warning that the current focus on diversity and inclusivity is weakening America's defenses.
Here he is quoted saying, these ideologies, political correctness, have made their way into the ranks.
And generals and leaders didn't stand up and say, no, we should only be focused on readiness and meritocracy and lethality.
That's a good quote.
That's an encouraging quote, I think, from him.
It's supposed to mean he's a bad guy.
Actually, sounds like he's a good guy for that.
Now, one final quote from the Politico piece, if you put it up.
Now, they're quoting Max Bergman, a former Obama administration official, who said, I think it's a surprising pick.
Someone who's a TV personality when the entire rhetoric from Trump and everyone else in the world is falling apart, and you pick someone who is not necessarily the most experienced.
So you can kind of see Dr. Paul official Washington here, you know, having a panic attack that he's not one of the old boys.
And that is supposed to be bad.
Could be bad.
It could be tricky because, you know, walking to the Pentagon without knowing how it works could be tricky.
But I think all the things they said were bad, probably on the good side of the ledger.
I want to read this sentence, and you may be bringing this up also, but the article from Politico describes this transition philosophically.
It says, Trump's return is expected to bring a collective rollback of Biden administration policies, likely reinstating a ban on transgender troops, ending abortion travel policies.
That's like subsidizing, reigniting battles over Bayes' name for Confederate history.
Do they have a right to change history?
You know, that's what slashing diversity progresses, okay?
And the use of troops.
Oh, this is the one.
But the conclusion, the use of troops on U.S. soil against civil unrest and his political enemies.
He evidently is soft on that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I was looking for that.
I was going to put that quote up, actually, because I thought that was mostly good stuff, except for the last one.
And, you know, that, but you know what?
I think there's a public resistance.
You know, I believe in the posse comitatus.
And that came out of the Civil War.
We're not supposed to use troops to enforce it.
But we've already done that.
So, well, so that, I mean, if you looked at the numbers, there's a lot more in there that, you know, the woke people would never endorse.
But somebody says, why do you guys, why do you, Democrats, why do you Republicans do it?
You give this wokeism more credit, more attention than the Democrats who would do it.
But it seems like their distribution of the views of the woke industry is pretty, pretty efficient.
Yeah.
Well, lest our viewers think that we are completely in the tank for Mr. Hogseth, let's look at the other side of the ledger.
Now, my first exhibit A would be the fact that he was trying to prevent you from becoming the president, i.e., he was working on the McCain campaign back when you ran.
Let's put that first video clip up because here he is.
I know the actual video clip, that first video clip, if you can.
Take this one down and get the video clip up.
Yeah, so put on your headphone if you don't mind, Dr. Paul.
Here he is at a McCain campaign event being introduced by none other than Lindsey Graham.
Let's hear what he has to say.
Pete, how do you say your last name?
Heckthet.
Have you ever heard Vets for Freedom?
It was an organization created of veterans of Iraq that came to Congress to beg the Congress not to surrender.
They came to Congress and they said, whether you're a Republican or you're a Democrat or a vegetarian, please don't let what we have done in Iraq be for nothing.
Hang in there.
Please don't let what we've done in Iraq be for nothing.
Hang in there.
My first question would be, how many deaths are you willing to put up with military personnel and private lives to have your way?
So that's too on the negative because he was campaigning against you and he was campaigning in the late 2000s to keep our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the way.
So it's a sad thing.
And the fact is he'd been deployed there as well.
So that's, you know, often they come back and they don't want to go.
And just think, Daniel, that was a period of time when we were very active in the Congress.
Don't do it.
Bring him home, yeah.
And so here's a couple of other baddies, I have to say.
Put up the next, not audio clip, but the regular clip, if you can.
Now, this is from Michael Tracy.
He's indefatigable as a researcher.
He's dug up a couple things.
Now, this is not something to watch, but Pete Heggs says, Trump's new pick for defense secretary says, if you open your Bible, you will find that God granted Abraham the land of Israel.
And this should apparently inform our understanding of the modern Israel-Palestine conflict.
He is extremely devoted to the state of Israel.
If you go to the next one, here's another thing on the bad ledger.
When he ran for office, Bill Crystal endorsed him.
The person who hates Trump more than he hates anyone on earth endorsed Hegseth.
So that's in the bad ledger.
And the other one is he wants to go to war with Russia.
Put the next one on Michael Tracy.
Again, Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality, Trump just named defense secretary, repeats the classic John McCain line.
That's right.
He was campaigning for McCain, calling Russia a gas station with a flag.
And he says that Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union.
He praises Trump for increasing sanctions on Russia and for arming Ukraine.
So that is where he's had.
He's a major, major hawk.
He wants to bomb Iran.
I wonder if I have that clip.
What's that second clip?
See if we can put it up and see if that's what we're looking at.
Yeah, put that second video clip up and let's listen to him talk about Iran.
Before you play it, though, I'm going to read, if you can get it queued up, and I'll just read what Michael Tracy wrote about it in the second video clip.
Ambassador's Plan for Bombing Iran 00:06:15
Yeah, hold on.
Don't start playing it yet.
But after the Soleimani assassination, Pete Hegseth called on Trump to bomb Iran's energy production facilities, ports, and nuclear facilities.
He said Trump should even bomb mosques, hospitals, and schools if deemed necessary.
Let's listen.
I think I'm on 38 seconds of this.
If you want to put your earpiece in and hear him talking about we need to bomb Iran.
Sometimes you have moments, Steve.
And I happen to believe that we can't kick the can down the road any longer in trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
They used the killing of Soleimani as an excuse to say we're scrapping the Iran deal.
We all know they were scrapping it anyway.
So what better time than now to say, we're starting the clock.
You've got a week.
You've got X amount of time before we start taking out your energy production facilities.
We take out key infrastructure.
We take out your missile sites.
We take out nuclear defense.
We take out popular capabilities.
Or, you know, take out a Quds headquarters while you're at it if you want.
I understand that's not a popular idea.
I understand.
Okay, we can take that.
So Trump ran on no more wars.
I'm going to end the wars, not start wars.
These people hire him.
These are the people he hired.
You started off by saying that you don't want to come down too hard and talk about all the shortcomings.
But what are you going to say when you decide that you're going to look for some shortcomings that are disappointing?
There are some bad ones.
These were the softest one you could find.
They're so sad.
And, you know, understanding is what I want.
How does this transpire?
You hear this, and there are people that we like, and they make efforts, and they have a lot of things, and they say a lot of things, and the people join in.
They get disgusted with the radical who want to really, really hurry up this destruction.
But then you come up with a statement like that.
It's offensive to people who might still follow a constitutional, non-aggressive, non-interventionist foreign policy.
I mean, where does that, what do they think of us?
They don't think well of us, I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, there's a little bit more bad news, Dr. Paul, and that is Trump's decision for the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel, especially if you care about peace, which the president said he did.
Put that next clip up.
This is the announcement from Trump Vance yesterday afternoon, I think it was.
He says, I'm pleased to announce the highly respected former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, has been nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
Mike has been a great public service, governor, and leader in faith for many years.
He loves Israel and the people of Israel.
And likewise, the people of Israel love him.
Now, here's a part that's interesting.
Mike will work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East.
And you think that might be a good thing, but how's he going to do it?
Well, put the next clip on because this is our friend Dave DeCamp, who tweeted something out yesterday, a video.
And we don't need to watch the video because Dave characterizes it for us.
This is Mike Huckabee, Trump's pick to be ambassador to Israel, saying in 2008, quote, there is no such thing as a Palestinian, and explaining his idea to send them to one of the Arab states.
So it sounds to me like his idea of making peace is just to say, get rid of them all.
They don't even exist.
You know, somebody with that much power, it's almost like being godlike.
You know, that they can decide, he's not a people.
What if they come along and say, you libertarians, you're not people.
You're not people, yeah.
Of course, there's a few of them that says that.
Well, there were some people in the past that said that, and it didn't work out well.
But the thing is, the context of him saying it is that he said, now there are Arabs and there are Persians, there are all sorts of people like this, but there are no Palestinians.
But the thing is, by that measure, you could say there's no such thing as Americans.
You know, we have German Americans came over here, we have African Americans came over some involuntarily, but you can't say that they're Americans.
It's just a crazy, crazy idea to deny that certain people exist.
But if you do deny that they exist, it's certainly much easier to turn your eyes away when they're being slaughtered.
That's why I'm always complaining and criticizing this whole thing of collective guilt, collective rights.
And elections is notorious for all the minority groups and age groups, everything else.
And they break it down to the minutiae.
And I think it's good to break it down to the individual.
Why don't they just see people as an individual?
And often, even early on, before a lot of minorities moved into the suburbs and all that, but I had neighbors that were minority, but they never got counted.
So the more mixing up of the races, the less likely is it.
But they still play on, they play on the, and I think that's what people got finally tired of.
They got thrown in a basket.
They weren't doing so well.
And They decided, well, you haven't helped us, and we belong to this group, and you told us you'd help ABC group, and you didn't do it.
Well, why don't we just think that the best way to think about liberty is an individual issue.
We have our right to our life liberty and pursuing whatever we want to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'll just finish on Huckabee, Dr. Paul, by let's skip the next one and go straight to the judge, our good friend Judge Napolitano.
Now, he was obviously a little bit concerned about Huckabee going over to Israel as well, and he made a couple of good points.
He said, here is your new U.S. ambassador to Israel.
One, there's no such thing as a Palestinian.
Two, two-state solution is irrational and unworkable.
Three, there's plenty of land in the world for Palestine.
Four, there's no such thing as the West Bank.
Five, there's no such thing as a settlement.
Six, there's no such thing as an occupation.
Now, the thing is, people should be perfectly fine to believe that if they wish.
But if you're sending someone over there whose sole job is to create peace and he goes there with those prejudices in mind, it's doomed to fail, you know, unless your only concept of peace is to simply ethnic cleanse everyone out of there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Put them in a group and get rid of the group.
Ramaswamy On Trillion Dollar Cuts 00:03:40
Yeah.
Terrible.
Well, anyway, that's bad.
But there's some other news that's interesting.
If you put up that next one, the Trump Vance administration announced, incoming Trump Vance administration, made a big announcement, Dr. Paul, that might be interesting to you.
President-elect Trump said, I am pleased to announce the great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way to my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful spending, and restructure agencies essential to Save America movement.
So he's named the two heads of it.
Yep.
Musk and Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy.
So I'll tell you, they're good people and they're smart and they are true believers and they're efficient.
And it's a mixed thing.
Somebody said, well, they're not even going to be part of the cover.
They won't be efficient.
But you know what?
The people who were in the jury box in the election, I consider that a big, I consider that the jury.
And they finally ruled.
So I don't think you have to have the official capacity.
But I don't know.
It's too early to see even what they do with this.
The Congress will have the last say on what the format is.
But I think if they're effective, if they're related to what the government's doing and they're respected and recognized, that's okay too.
They don't have to have an official government address for it.
But that to me is, I think the effort is wonderful.
I have the one shortcoming I have on this is it's been a pet pet.
I have a lot of pet peeve.
This pet peeve was, you know, when we'd have a vote for getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
And I said, you know, but that's the nature of government.
Yeah, yeah, that's what they're good at.
And they're always, and a lot of times that's what they want to do.
They want to be more efficient at hiding their stuff and taking care of their special interests.
But that waste, fraud, and abuse.
And I think, yes, you want to do that, but the argument about the Fed would work into this.
Just changing the people at the Fed to do the same job isn't going to work.
You have to eventually get, as long as you have a monetary authority that has all this power, you can forget about it.
They're going to be efficient only to service the people who guarantees that they get this power to do this.
So that's something they have to deal with.
But I know, we know, and we have visited with both Musk and Ramaswamy.
And they're very, very dedicated.
And I think they truly believe that they can cut a couple trillion dollars off the budget.
But I don't think my problem with that is that that will awaken a lot of people.
You can't cut $2 trillion without annoying a couple people.
It's going to happen because if they don't do it deliberately with a policy, it'll be reduced.
The debt's going to be reduced just by the depreciation of the dollar and the debt and the mail investment gets liquidated.
Persuading Members for Change 00:03:16
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's easy to be negative saying they won't have any real governmental power.
It's basically an NGO that's advocating for something.
So it's easy to be that way.
But you're right.
I mean, I think the power they have, and certainly both of them understand it very well.
Ramaswamy is a great speaker.
Musk is a great magnetic personality.
The power that they will have is not governmental power, but they'll have the power of PR, the power of people that like to listen to what they say and persuading people to then persuade their members of Congress because ultimately that's where the change comes.
It'll have to be Congress going along with it, persuading their members to vote in favor of these cuts.
That's the key.
Yeah, and I think we visualize that all the time because attitudes are very important.
You know, prevailing attitudes, I think, is what drives things.
And I saw that in the COVID arguments.
Finally, the attitude toward government telling us what shots we had to take.
And now the statistics are just sort of really sad, especially the young, the kids that ended up with those shots and how much they're still suffering from.
So much damage.
Exactly.
Well, I think we've exhausted our bad news today.
It's a little good news sprinkled in.
But I'm going to close by making an announcement that we're excited about.
We're going to be joined tomorrow by our great friend, Colonel Doug McGregor, who's going to come in and talk about some of these things we've been talking about from his perspective.
So we're excited about that.
Set your alarms noon Eastern Time live on Rumble.
You won't want to miss it.
It's going to be a great time for us, I think.
And if you put on that very last clip, another thing I was watching this morning, Dr. Paul, is Bitcoin, and it's going through the roof.
And it's interesting to see what's going to happen.
But my point would be to our viewers that your Bitcoin now will make the biggest difference ever for the Ron Paul Liberty Port.
You'll give the smallest amount of Bitcoin to give a huge difference because it's up in the 90s.
Who knows what will happen?
But please consider using a little bit of that.
Break off some of those coins, please, and send them to the Liberal Report to keep us going.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I want to emphasize how much we appreciate our viewers for tuning in.
And in spite of our observations that things aren't as smooth as we'd like them to be, and as others argue they are.
But I think it's very definitely better off than where we were six months ago.
But we also can't work with denial.
We can't deny some of the problems that we face.
The big problem is none of us like to be negative and say, watch out, the inflation is coming.
There is going to be bad times ahead.
And, you know, when I talked like that to the college students during the campaign, it was, you know, it was honest and straightforward.
And they seemed to understand it, and they were very interested in it.
But they were also pleased to know that you didn't have to stop there because there are answers to our problems.
It can be found in a simple way.
And that is, you know, the answers that can be found in a voluntary system where the goal is to promote peace and prosperity and personal liberty.
That has certainly been our goal here at the Liberty Report.
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