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Dec. 17, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:58
$267 Million Wasted In Fight Against 'Misinformation'

According to a new report, the US government keeps pouring money into fighting "misinformation" - but is it just another word for censorship? Also today: Israel moves deeper into Syria. What's the endgame?

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Time Text
Bigger Picture Misinformation 00:14:15
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 today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing fine.
Good.
And we have an important assignment today.
We are going to solve the problem and the debate going on.
How do you stop all this misinformation?
How can the liars keep lying and how can the good guys keep being canceled?
But it's a messy situation that's been going on.
I would say in modern time, the debate really has gone on for a long, long time.
But I would say the whole talk about misinformation probably blossomed out with COVID.
Who's telling the truth?
Are those six doctors that knew the truth and got canceled?
Did they know about it?
And how about the government?
Government is involved in medicine.
Government's involved with the pharmaceuticals.
But there was a lot of misinformation.
And a lot of other people have come to the conclusion that we actually talked about during COVID.
And that was that the government directed medicine was dangerous and people died because of that.
And I personally believe that the case.
But anyway, generally speaking, misinformation has stuck with us and we still hear about it.
And it just means, you know, how is the First Amendment to be handled?
I think they're really talking about the First Amendment.
Misinformation is saying something politically that you don't like and how do you handle it?
And I think it's a misunderstanding, a misguidedness, and the people who always want to say misinformation, misinformation, cancel them, fire them, do whatever, do punish them.
And others, you know, if they say, well, no, you can say anything you want, and they don't know how to sort it out.
Who should be the arbiter?
And there was an article today that we saw that we were mentioning and that is waste of the day.
It's $267 million spent on fighting misinformation.
I assume the article means the government's spending money on deciding what is misinformation.
So it's a misnomer to call this a real problem of the First Amendment, but it turned out to be that way because the First Amendment is rather clear.
And in my early years, I tried, how do I simplify it?
I said when people would say something, well, can you say this or that?
And I said, well, the First Amendment was not designed so that we could talk about the weather.
The First Amendment was designed that you could attack your government and speak your peace without worrying about being imprisoned or punished for it.
And yet, even though that seems simplistic, it really, it really, I think, simplifies things.
And now it's messier than ever because the government is bigger than ever.
And if they can silence their political opponents, they will and they continue to do it.
And they probably will continue to do it.
But Daniel, as we talk, I want to make the one point that if there was a little bit more emphasis on an understanding about property rights, we would have less concern about what they're doing to the First Amendment.
Daniel?
Yeah, Dr. Paul, this is a new study that came out from the Transparency Group Open the Books.
And we saw through Zero Hedge, it was picked up by Real Clear Investigations.
And as you point out, we can actually put up that first clip and have a look at that.
As you point out, it was a quarter of a billion dollars.
That's, I guess that's small change now that was spent by the government since 2021 to fight against misinformation.
And obviously, as you point out, Dr. Paul, it's tied to it's tied to the COVID situation.
In many ways, I think we've talked about it so much during those two or three years, Dr. Paul.
But I mean, COVID really ripped the lid off of the authoritarian core.
of our government.
You know, we saw really the hard, nasty core of it.
And this is an example.
But the thing is, once the genie's out of the bottle, they used COVID as an excuse to force the government to force corporations and individuals with power to silence the people that weren't saying what the government wanted them to say.
Now, they did it in the name of emergency.
But nevertheless, again, once the genie is out of the bottle, they can use it for everything.
So now, if you go to that second clip, this is from the article in Real Clear Investigations.
The federal government recently spent $267 million on grants supposed to suppress misinformation.
And then they make a good point.
Of course, federal bureaucrats themselves get to decide what is and isn't misinformation.
And we have the admission from Zuckerberg, who's now trying to kiss up to Trump.
But, oh, it was wrong for us to censor people.
Oh, gosh, I wish we hadn't done it.
Of course, they'll do it again if they need to.
So on the one hand, we're talking about a huge waste of money, Dr. Paul.
But on the other hand, it goes to something deeper than that.
You know, Daniel, the one thing is that this debate really came up dealing with Trump, you know, because there's a lot of misinformation and attacks and challenges and legal malaria.
So it went on and on.
And so the Department of Justice was the Department of Injustice when it decided we need to make sure the language and we want to control language.
We want to control speech.
And they took it upon themselves that they would be very much involved.
So they threw dealing with the truth out the window.
And they said, we can charge Trump with all these crimes and the Congress joins in.
Well, what we need to do is impeach him a couple of times.
We'll teach them, though, who's dealing with the truth.
And the enemies of Trump were saying that we know the truth.
So this really got to be a big battle, especially with the Justice Department, because that becomes serious.
I think the founders weren't innocent of using pretty harsh language and antagonism with their political opponent.
But that was something that went along.
But eventually, though, the First Amendment did survive the founders' debates that went on.
And for the most part, most Americans believed it's been accomplished that we are protected.
But I don't think people feel good about it, that it's going to be solidly there.
I don't feel that way.
Even though now I think really actually the movement with Musk is a positive.
It's not that I can defend everything that he ever did or said, but when it comes to making it available for people to speak their peace, where in the past they would be canceled and it would be a coalition with the social media and government, I think they went too far.
And I think they finally stirred up the people.
And what are the reasons that the whole thing fell apart when it came to all the lying and activity that they were doing around COVID?
Yeah, the thing about COVID authoritarianism, ironically, is the misinformation they claimed to be fighting with this quarter of a billion dollars was actually their own misinformation.
Now, this is from the Open the Books report.
And they said, what is misinformation?
They said, according to the HHS website, misinformation is information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading, according to the best evidence at the time.
And then they go on to explain, during the pandemic, health misinformation has led people to decline vaccines, reject public health measures, and use unproven treatments.
All three of those turned out to be not misinformation, but correct information that the government tried to suppress.
And as you point out, Dr. Paul, there's a big question as to how many people died because they listened to the government, not because they ignored the government.
And there are so many other examples of what the government labels misinformation that are in fact true.
You know, the Hunter Biden laptop is a famous one, and there are so many others.
So when the government gets to decide and fight misinformation, what it really is trying to do is get corporations to silence people.
And that's the real threat.
I mean, they call it a big waste of money.
Yeah, a quarter of a billion dollars is a lot of money.
There's no question about it.
But the bigger crime by far is trying to find a workaround against the First Amendment and trying to put Americans who disagree with their government into a kind of digital gulag.
And you pointed out when Musk bought Twitter, now it's X, how he opened the books and let us see exactly what was happening.
That was really a peek behind the curtain to the authoritarians pulling the strings.
So hopefully this will serve as a cautionary tale.
When that next big emergency comes, and it will come, it may not be a disease, it may be a war or what have you.
They're going to roll out this machine, Dr. Paul, all over again, and they're going to try to silence people who disagree with the prevailing government narrative.
You know, this is not a new problem.
When I look at it historically, I sense that this happened in the earliest recording of human history.
There was right and wrong and telling the truth.
And this is a struggle to find the truth.
But, you know, that we can expect.
And we have people that happen to develop over the many centuries, the concept of natural law and telling the truth and what kind of activities we should be involved in.
And then there's another group that deny it.
They see truth as the enemy.
And anybody tells the truth, they get to the point where it's treasonous.
Truth is treason in an empire lying.
So the bigger the empire, the bigger the government, when they start running medicine and COVID, they have to tell more and more lies to keep it together.
So this is in the big picture.
I see this.
It's truth versus nihilism.
And the people who say that you can't know the truth, so why waste your time?
They would argue, Daniel, that you and I just waste our time trying to figure out to the best of our ability to find out who's telling the truth and what's the consequence of what foreign policy is like, especially our foreign policy.
And it's difficult.
I think I don't think we'll run out of work because we'll have to continue to do that.
But I see glimpses all the time.
I mean, a lot of people we meet over the years.
I keep thinking of the people I met in politics, but maybe we're sorting out a certain group of people that might already be on that track of looking for truth and accepting the fact that there's something more than just the government dictating to us what truth is.
And you have to obey because once the government controls everything, medical care, education, food stamps, the whole works, you better obey or you suffer.
And that's how that's why tyranny is held in check.
If you don't obey, they don't come with a gun and arrest you.
What they do is they just deny you an economic benefit.
They take away their food stamps or they take away their homes and they have total control.
So they do it that way.
But I tell you what, the argument is, I find it happened to be fascinating because I think there's a lot of people who are looking for the truth, are very sympathetic.
And, you know, maybe imperfectly, I think that's what the last campaign was about.
Who are they believing?
Are they going to people believing?
Were they believing the people that, you know, the Nancy Pelosi's and Biden and all these other people and making out these stories?
And you know what?
In a way, it should be encouraging.
Yes, I know the shortcomings of the Trump organization and the administration, but there still was a division.
I really do believe that the people sorted it out to the point where the systematic lying and the systematic misuse of the Department of Justice became clear.
I think it had something to do with the way the election turned out.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that's my opinion.
Yeah, that definitely sounds reasonable.
One of the examples that was given in the Real Clear Wire write-up of this, two recent examples of things that the media labeled misinformation that were absolutely true.
And one of them was: if you remember, just a couple of months ago in October, the story came out that the FEMA was withholding financial aid to the hurricane victims in Florida that had Trump signs in their yard.
And of course, the news media, the mainstream media said, that's misinformation.
This is paranoia.
This is a conspiracy theory.
Well, it actually turned out to be true.
You know, the media did their best to cover up, certainly to cover up for the Biden administration.
And the other one they pointed out recently was the misinformation that Biden would drop out of the presidential race, which was called a conspiracy theory by Politico in February.
But a few months later, he stepped down.
Misinformation Punishments 00:04:57
And there are many, many more of them.
And in fact, we know, Dr. Paul, that the biggest purveyors of misinformation after the government itself is the mainstream media.
And we just saw, I don't know if you had seen it, Dr. Paul, but CNN faked an entire story from Syria.
They faked, they sent their reporter in in an absolutely fake situation to release a prisoner that turned out to actually be a torturer for the government.
So they put out misinformation all the time.
But what's more serious than the money spending, Dr. Paul, is what happens if you find yourself identified as putting out misinformation because we're seeing a lot of things happen that are, as you point out, Dr. Paul, in terms of denying an economic benefit, people are they experience debanking.
Banks won't do business with them anymore because you're a misinformation spreader.
Deplatforming, we saw all this.
You're banned from all the different platforms.
Essentially, you're put into a digital gulag.
And we know we've seen that happen now, especially with the Twitter files coming out.
But again, there's nothing to stop it from happening in the future when the next emergency comes along.
And I think that's the reason why we have to be so diligent in what we do to prevent them from the ability to do this.
When there is a debate on speech, is it permissible or not, who's going to be the arbiter?
You know, I think there are probably some close calls.
You know, how far can a person go?
You know, there are laws against slander.
There's a limit and there's a way to resolve this.
But I think if it's a lot of people are in the middle, you know, you say that, I say that.
I think when you're trying to sort it out, I think the solution has to be where you always err on the side, if there has to be an error, is on the side of permitting it, you know, even if it's ugly.
But if it's not, I'm not there slanderously promoting a killing of a person.
You know, that's a little bit different.
But the punishment, the punishment should be that people should not be able to say anything and everything all the time.
But my argument is property could solve this problem.
Because what about the many, many centuries, we've had a lot of different religions.
And is it because of the First Amendment?
I think it's more because of a property rights, because if you have a church or a synagogue or a mosque, nobody can walk in there or a television session or our studio.
They can't come in and say, oh, you guys said this and we want equal time.
And, you know, they try to push that on people, equal time, equal time.
Well, that I don't think is a solution.
Your property, if you own the studio, if you own your churches and all, you should be able to practice what you believe in.
And that should settle the dispute.
It's your property and you should be able to regulate it.
That's quite a bit different when the government owns everything.
When they control medical care like COVID, you can't even debate medications to that point.
And then what about in education?
Who makes the decisions on that?
Because it's pretty darn important about what kind of economic policies you're studying.
And it's something that if it was directed toward private property ownership, what about, you know, I think the immigration problem could be solved that way.
Most people in this country would say, well, you live in a house and you have four bedrooms and the government knocks on the door and say, okay, your quota is we're putting three illegal immigrants in your house.
There's not many who say, oh, come on in, we'll take care of them.
We'll move out and we'll make sure they get fed well and they need some clothes and we'll buy the clothes.
Nobody would accept that.
But when a country does it, they say, oh, that's okay.
But the country should be private property too.
If anything, our government should be protecting the concept of allowing people to live their own lives without somebody coming in there and abusing them.
But no, everything is done collectively because there's always collective rights.
I think collective rights are very dangerous because they have factions here, racial faction, sexual factions, the whole work.
And that leads to trouble because they think they can gang up and dictate what is right and wrong and what people can say.
But what they do is the right to say this is, you know, they have to realize the rights don't come because you belong to a group.
You should never be punished because you belong to a group and you said something.
Israel's Exploitation of Chaos 00:06:53
You should be allowed to do what you like as long as you don't hurt people.
But that's not the way it is.
Everything collective rights.
Just think of this polygenderism.
They say, well, somebody that says they're such and such, and it defies all sense of logic and moral standards and everything.
And they demand that they take away the rights of other people.
It becomes nutty at times.
But I think, really, Daniel, I think that you can find some optimism in the campaign because a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about right now was mentioned and talked about in the campaign.
And I do believe that there is a shift to people waking up.
And there was much too much toleration of this nonsense that the far left has promoted.
Well, let's move on, Dr. Paul, to a little update on Syria, if you're ready.
If we can go ahead and put that clip up from the cradle, we're going to have to go move ahead.
I think one or two more.
Okay, here we are.
So this is from the cradle.
It's a publication that focuses on the Middle East.
Israel expands occupation of South Syria as HTS, now that's the former Al-Qaeda, vows, quote, no conflict with Tel Aviv.
So what's happening, Dr. Paul, and it's unclear exactly where this will end, but we do know that the Israeli military has occupied, I think, the territory three times the size of Gaza inside Syria.
I think they have taken at this point over 800 bombing runs.
Yesterday was one of the more serious ones.
You could see it almost looked like a nuclear weapon went off.
And in fact, it registered over three on the Richter scale.
It was like an earthquake.
That's the power of the bombs they've been dropping.
So we don't know what's going to happen in Syria.
It looks like chaos as we've been watching it.
But one of the things we have noticed is that Israel is definitely taking advantage of the chaos to move and occupy strategic parts of Israel.
And it appears that Turkey has the same designs on a different part of Syria.
So it looks like they're carving it up, Dr. Paul.
Daniel, I think we've mentioned this before since we've talked about this several times.
But, you know, the people involved now are called HTS and they used to be part of Al-Qaeda.
But we're on their side now.
So does that mean the United States is now one of its closest allies now in the most current war going on is Al-Qaeda?
Oh, it couldn't be true.
It couldn't be true.
We do need an awakening.
We need somebody, you know, at least we'll suggest what we think is the truth.
Maybe there will be other people who will join.
But I quite frankly think there's a lot of people who are sick and tired of this kind of nonsense.
But that to me is utterly amazing.
That should make everybody question.
See, it went on for years when, you know, years ago, decades ago, Biden said, Assad has to go.
Assad has to go.
And nobody really questioned it.
What's he up to?
Eventually, by golly, United States, along with Al-Qaeda, Assad had to go.
And it also involved, the other reason why you can say that we're the ally is because the main property appreciation goes to Israel.
And quite frankly, the whole theory of greater Israel looks like that's not passive.
It looks like people still think about that.
That should worry a couple people.
Yeah, we're seeing exactly a replay of every one of these neocon regime changes in the past.
You know, we saw it with Victoria Newland in Ukraine.
That was going to be their great success.
were going to overthrow the Russian government and create this wonderful democracy in the eastern part of Europe.
Well, as we talk about all the time, Dr. Paul, how's that worked out?
Not very well.
And under Obama, with both Kerry and Clinton in the Secretary of State seat, they did the same thing with Libya and elsewhere in the region, the whole Arab Spring.
It's all turned out badly.
Libya is still a disaster.
And so now they're patting themselves on the back, Dr. Paul, as if somehow Syria is liberated.
And in fact, you can see it's getting bombed, it's getting occupied.
The people are terrified.
They're telling them you can't celebrate Christmas and all of these things.
It's hard to imagine.
It's easy to blow things up.
The U.S. is very good at it, but putting things back together, they have not really done a good job.
Now, the other curious thing is this, the former Al-Qaeda, now HTS, how the leader Jolani said, we will not take aim at Israel.
We will not attack Israel because we've been told for so long that the arch enemy of al-Qaeda is Israel.
No, it doesn't seem that way, especially when he says we're not going to attack him.
We're not going to bother Israel, even as Israel is bombing the country we just took over.
Now, there could be a number of reasons for that.
It could be that Israel is simply militarily superior, in which case, provoking them is not a smart idea.
Nevertheless, it does lead a lot of people to wonder and scratch their heads: why does it seem like Israel and this al-Qaeda group get along so well?
You know, answers are slow in coming, but there are certainly a lot more questions being raised, Dr. Paul.
I think this confidence they are expressing about coming together and seeing a group now that looks like they've taken over, that may be bad news on the long term because I don't think that's going to settle peace in the Middle East.
It might for a year or two, and some people will be happy.
But I think it's dangerous.
And that's been all one of my arguments over the many, many years where I didn't believe in sending any financial and military aid around the world, including the Middle East.
And my argument was that long term, I think Israel is going to face some problems.
And the whole thing is, is right now, you know, there's some effort to show who's really boss, you know, because we see that more bombing going on now, Israeli airstrikes on Western Syria.
And what about this big blast?
It sounded like it was a mini-neutral weapon or something, but I guess it was a plant where they had munitions.
But it was big.
It got a lot of attention.
Showing Appreciation 00:03:44
So that is a problem.
And that's going to have to be ironed out.
And just think of just so bad.
So unnecessary.
And we aren't the total cause, but we are a contributor.
And we contribute money and weapons and technology and death and destruction.
And morally, I believe our government has been responsible.
I sure hope the hinting of the new administration is such that we don't need to be in wars like this.
And we don't, why are we in Syria?
So all these places.
And it's so easy for the average American to set it aside because so much else in life engages them.
And not realizing that this is a big deal.
This is a big deal for our safety, our national security, our spending, our inflation, the whole work.
The foreign policy needs some addressing.
And that's what we hope to do here, you know, by emphasizing that we will search for the truth and report it the best we're able.
Absolutely.
To close, Dr Paul, uh by uh asking uh to put on that very last uh clip, if you can, and remind everyone that um, we are desperately trying to raise end-of-year funds for the RON PAUL Institute.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I too want to show our appreciation for so many supporters who do their very best to help us.
But one thing individuals can do is just spread the message because everybody can do that.
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You know, I'm so impressed with how the internet works.
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