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Jan. 7, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:33
Can Biden Prevent Trump From Drilling For Oil?

Citing fears of "climate change" outgoing president Joe Biden has pre-empted incoming President Trump's stated goal of increasing oil and gas production to help solve our economic problems. Should a lame duck president be able to tie a newly-elected president's hands? Also today, Facebook claims to abandon its "fact checker" scam. Should we believe them?

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Time Text
Presidents And Power 00:12:35
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel Mick Adams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
Are you all set to go?
I think so.
Solve another problem?
I hope so.
At least discuss a problem.
You know, when you get government to solve a problem, Mises had a good saying, you know, about a regulation.
You're right, run regulation to solve a problem, you get two new problems.
That's a pretty safe rule.
That is.
But we're going to try to go things in the opposite direction.
And every day we once in a while we hear something, sincere efforts.
There's a lot of sincerity in people hoping we do better in cutting back.
But, you know, I still have this reluctance to believe that the special interests are going to be happy about cutting a nickel.
So we'll see, but we'll have to keep plugging along.
I want to start off with an article and a position of Jonathan Turley.
He's been a friend.
He's been a friend way back when we were in Congress.
He sort of helped us get started on the Liberty Committee.
He must have liked our shrimp much.
Okay.
The big question he addressed yesterday, and I saw him a little bit on Fox talking about this, and that is that, you know, the ugliness of what the Democrats are doing as they're leaving is just out of pure hate and spite.
They have no concerns at all, you know, for common decency.
And certainly their goals are always moving in the direction of statism and government and spending and all this.
So that's a mess.
But this comes up under this whole thing that Trump's been bragging about, you know, the first day, we're going to open up, drill, baby, drill.
And now, you know, Biden might be sleepy, but he had somebody tell him, well, let's get him.
Let's get it.
Let's get Trump.
We'll put a regulation.
We'll put restrictions on there.
Oh, well, Trump said what a lot of people know.
I thought, well, why don't you just erase them?
And here, Jonathan Turley, who's pretty meticulous about looking at the law, he says it might not be that easy because it's been done before, and it's not easily done.
Once a president do it, why would that be?
And from my estimation, Daniel, what happens is the presidents do this.
Well, why should they have so much power?
And all of a sudden you look at it and say, oh, Congress gives them this much power.
Sometimes we complain only about the executive branch.
But, you know, what about war?
They don't demand that you declare war before you start financing billions and killing millions of people.
So that goes all the way back.
It goes to special interests that can't control.
The people, the voters don't look at things carefully.
And the people who really want to go in the opposite direction, that is, be radical environmentalists and actually ruining the environment on many occasions.
So they are in a position where they can stymie all of this.
But Jonathan was very meticulous on this.
And it really raises a lot of question.
And I think he came to, I don't think I gave him the idea.
And I don't remember us talking, but he wrote, and I thought, well, that's what I was saying.
Get the Congress involved.
They gave away the authority.
Why don't they take some of this authority back?
And not less.
Can you imagine the amount of financial interference a president has to make one ruling like that?
You know, there's a few acres there, like 670 million acres, and he does it with a stroke of a pen.
So it doesn't wake a lot of people up.
This hope it wakes up a few other people who claim they're going to cut back on big government.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's put that first clip up because if our viewers want to read this article, it's definitely worth reading.
JonathanTurley.org.
Sue, baby, Sue.
Trump planned to unban the Biden drilling order could prove difficult.
And I mean, I have to be honest, Dr. Paul, I guess I just haven't been paying attention to these kinds of things.
But if we can actually just keep that up for a second, I didn't realize that Biden could do this, that he could say, hey, as I'm literally holding my bag and leaving office, I'm going to do all of these things.
And this is only one of them.
We can talk about some others, but with Ukraine, with the Middle East, I mean, this transition period has been unprecedented in my view, at least in my memory, of presidents who are going out in terms of this.
But what he's done, as you point out, Dr. Paul, he decided to just ban oil and gas drilling on over 670 million acres.
And he says it's because of climate change that he's doing this.
But what it really is, and it's very transparently obvious, which is to hobble incoming President Trump.
Now, we know that Hillary did that when Trump won the first time.
She hobbled his presidency, and you even wrote about it this week with this whole Russiagate nonsense.
And they're doing the same thing now.
I mean, it's so undignified, but I guess that's an old-fashioned term.
But, you know, it's trying to not only destroy Trump's presidency, but to also try to destroy our economic recovery.
Drilling in those areas, becoming energy independent, producing energy, that is the best way to fight inflation.
And so he's actually, it just shows he doesn't care about the American people whatsoever.
Well, I think you're driven by hate and being right and true and believing in natural law.
That doesn't even enter the equation.
So they do that.
But, you know, I wasn't quite as surprised as you were because, you know, I had two more years more experience in Washington.
I'm pretty cynical about it.
But so I'm not so shocked about it.
But what I am always annoyed by is when you look into it, there's an explanation on how we get into this mess.
You know, we worked hard to try to prevent war, but then later on, other people will look into how do we stop war.
And after 20 years or so and killing a couple million people, they say it's about time we stopped this war.
So that's what happens here.
We give this power to Congress and the people.
The people are the closest to the Congress.
So the people go and urge the Congress to do these things.
And so the executive branch and the judicial branch, you know, you say, well, let the judges take care of it, let the Supreme Court take.
Well, that's not so good.
Soros taught us a lesson about that.
And he also realized that you don't start at the top and go to Supreme Court.
You go in all the little courts.
And boy, he's built a real empire there.
But I think people are catching on, and maybe the opposition will wake up and be a little more cautious about appointments of the lower level judges.
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons we wanted to talk, at least from my perspective, why I wanted to talk about today, is because when I first read that Biden did this, I said, you know, what a jerk.
You know, I can't wait till Trump gets in because he's just going to say, forget that, we're not going to do that.
Turns out it's not that easy.
And this is from Turley's article, if you put on this next clip.
I did not know this at all.
But Turley writes, the question is whether the order can handcuff Trump in pursuing one of the main parts of his campaign platform to unlease America's fossil fuel resources.
This is all familiar ground, and this is the part I didn't know.
Biden acted under Section 12A of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which states that the president, quote, may from time to time withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands on the outer continental shelf.
So you covered it very well in your opening, Dr. Paul.
So a 1953 law that is ambiguous, saying the president can do it if he wants or not, now it's coming back to haunt them.
And Turley concludes, and I don't have a clip, but he concludes, as you say, the problem was started by Congress back in 53 with this ambiguous law.
It needs to be fixed by Congress.
Make it a clear law.
Make it clear and understandable.
You know, 1953 is, for personal reasons, is a big year on my educational system, you know, proceeding through my education.
But 1953 is a big year because we frequently identify that as a bad year for coups.
We participated in one of the biggest coups that we're still suffering from.
And I think most people know exactly who was president in 1953.
And he's an honorable person and was just recently put into office.
And he signed this law.
So it's been there a long time.
So there was the movement on the far left was already very busy influencing government about environmental things and intervention overseas and kicking out the Shah of Iran and installing the Shah of Iran that had to be removed later on.
So that is something I think that people have to realize they have to be vigilant.
I think it's easy.
And I'd like to at times say, oh, well, this is so bad.
I can't do anything about this today.
But you have to remain vigilant and always pick away at their weak spots because it is ideological.
It's what the people talk about.
And I still think that when they get away with the things that they get away, there is an attitude, a prevailing attitude.
And the prevailing attitude shifted on COVID and things changed.
And so that's why that is so important.
And so I was shocked.
My shock was way back then they did that.
We don't even think of 1953 as being one, well, but the movement was on.
World War II was over and our empire was building.
And we still haven't brought peace to Iran.
Well, the two final thoughts that I had on it were the first one, this also shows the danger.
And there was a Wall Street Journal article last week.
We didn't talk about it, but basically revealed that basically for all four years of his presidency, Biden was not okay upstairs.
He was not, he was in la-la land, and his presidency was being run by someone else.
And I think this is the danger when you have that kind of situation because you have people.
And in fact, we didn't talk about this either, but it came out a couple days ago that Jake Sullivan was talking to Biden about preemptively attacking Iran in the waning days of his presidency, start a war with Iran.
And so you can see when you have people like Sullivan, very ambitious, doesn't care that his boss has got a couple screws loose upstairs, and it's, hey, hey, boss, here's a good idea.
I got a great idea, you know, and the bosses, you know.
So, this is a danger, and we need to address it.
But the second one, there is a bright point, I think, in this, and that is Senator Mike Lee, who's a friend of ours.
He's got some good libertarian instincts.
He's going to be the chair of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, and he says he's going to push back on this.
He's going to take Congress and push back on this rule and the underlying law.
So, I think that's a good news.
That's right.
And maybe he will look at that one sentence that Jonathan pointed out in the 53 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act because he quotes that, which states that the president, this is back in 1953, the president, quote, may from time to time withdraw from a disposition any of the unleash lands of the outer continental.
Community Notes Triumph 00:09:17
So explicit a power.
Just think for how many years nobody said boo and nobody used it until we get somebody, you know, a president that's a little bit more astute and capable and quite yielding to his handlers.
Yeah.
They are some eager beavers, that's for sure.
If only they put all that mental energy into doing something productive, they'd be better off.
Well, the second one we wanted to talk about is a lot of people are talking about this now.
It's out there.
And it's a sort of we've been monitoring with some interest, and we've been pleased about it.
This kind of the wokeness, the response against the woke.
The pendulum is swinging against it.
And if you can put this next one up, actually, this is from Cyril Hedge.
And it's about Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he met with Trump and he also apologized a couple months ago, I guess, for the fact that they were taking orders from the White House to censor people.
But they've made a switch.
Fact checkers are too politically biased.
Zuckerberg abandons Facebook censorship for X-like community notes, which is quite interesting because a lot of people were banned.
I was banned from Facebook for many months for something that was their fault, not my fault.
So now he's saying, you know what?
It didn't really work that well to outsource all this stuff.
We're going to follow Elon Musk and his free speech model.
Now, Musk's model is not perfect, and a lot of people have complained about some aspects to it.
However, it's undeniable that there's more ability to express yourself without worrying or self-censoring.
So it's interesting that Zuckerberg has decided to follow that model.
You know, and I don't think it's all of a sudden a springing up of righteousness and them doing the right thing.
I think that this is a reflection that the attitudes have changed, you know, and the people are resisting it.
Once again, the people, I think it was a business decision on their part, too, because, you know, there have been businesses.
You know, I think it was in that article where they listed all the companies that have already done this.
So they're moving away from it.
So that's not a dictator writing another law.
That's the people a large vote are saying.
And I think the vote was reflected in the last election.
They're sick and tired of all this stuff.
And when did he do this?
After the election.
He signed to back off.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I'll put on the next clip because this is what he said.
He said, quote, more specifically, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.
He went on to point the finger at the real problem: quote, after 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
We tried in good faith to address these concerns without being the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased.
That's a fascinating admission on a number of fronts, Dr. Paul.
The first is, well, why are you bending with the wind of what the mainstream media is saying in the first place?
Why don't you have some courage?
Why don't you have some conviction and say, well, we're not going to be bullied by the New York Times into doing the bidding of the censors for them.
No.
But now that it's not fashionable to do it, now they're changing their tune and saying, well, we hired a bunch of really bad people to be our censors, and they were so biased.
We're just realizing it now after eight years later.
So it makes you wonder.
It's almost like the when did you stop beating your wife question.
You know, it's like, well, why were you doing it in the first place?
You know, the principle of prior restraint is involved here.
Because in the old days, if you had a newspaper, most people realized that the newspapers, the editorials, and the things didn't get an explicit approval by the government.
But since the mechanism has changed a whole lot, you know, and it's, you know, we have the social media and all this activity, they now, that's the thing, why, the big question is, why can't they go back to something similar to what we had and look at it as private property?
And the people who own the station or own the studio or whatever, that they do it.
But the real problem has come up about because they overstepped the bounds.
Yes, they would cite that and they would say, you remember how they would come back to the libertarians, you libertarians, it's private property.
They could print anything they want.
Except I think the exposure of what was really going on, that there was a so-called secret manipulative coalition of government and doing this and going after their enemies.
And that's what had, I think that's what finally brought this down when they found out that the government was involved.
This is the government's on the defensive in many ways right now.
And so I think that represents a healthy change or at least a healthy discussion about this.
And I mean, in theory, the libertarians were right when they said that Facebook is private property.
I mean, obviously he's subject to the shareholders and what have you, but essentially it's private property.
And if Facebook wanted to be censorious, if they wanted to censure everybody, if they wanted to control what you say, certainly they should be able to do it.
But there's also the issue of fraud because you can't advertise one thing into another.
So they should be transparent.
If they're going to censor, you can't talk about COVID, you can't talk about disease, you can't talk about politics, then they should be transparent about it.
But they weren't.
People would get banned for things that were unclear and there was no way to resolve the issue.
But as you point out, and this is thanks to Matt Taibbi and all the people who were involved in the Twitter files, they exposed the role of government.
It wasn't Facebook saying, we need to ban this because it's in our business model to not have people talking about it.
It was the government on the phone non-stop ringing them up.
Don't let them talk about this.
Don't let them talk about that.
You got to do this.
You've got to do that.
That was the real problem.
Well, I think there has been a lot of improvement.
And now they're starting to use more often, especially with this little episode about the community notes used by X.
And tell you the truth, I don't know exactly how that works and how many openings there's going to be for influence by the government.
But the government never gives up.
The people, the people who don't believe in truth, they have no problems because they can lie, cheat, and steal and think that they're doing the Lord's work.
They're the Lord's work.
That's true.
And community work notes, I think, works well because there's not the implied use of force behind it.
I mean, I've used it.
Some of them have been bad on X, and some of them have been very good, and some of them have been very, very funny because they'll catch people that are absolute hypocrites.
They'll catch them in their hypocrisy and they're humorous, and they have that effect.
But they don't carry, at least, from what I can see, the implicit threat of force that you're going to get this taken down.
It's more like this is actually not what happened.
This is what did happen.
Well, does the owner of the institution like X, do they appoint people to do this?
Who becomes the community notes?
I think they're volunteers.
I think among the readers, the users of the platform, they volunteer to become to write community notes.
Well, I just hope Soros doesn't find out what's going on here.
But the thing that I like on X with community notes is you can rate the note.
Like if you read the community note and it's totally, it's off and it's biased.
And I've done it a few times.
You click on it and say, no, this wasn't helpful.
And you can tell why it was.
You know, we're pleased with what's happening with X, and I didn't pay much attention to it, but I've expressed to you, this is interesting stuff.
My message is getting out.
Our message is getting out better than usual.
I said, where did that come from?
Maybe we were being held back a little bit.
All of a sudden, it's put out there, and it is, to me, exciting.
I just hope they keep it clean, you know, and honorable and let the people, you know, in many things, I mean, the very vulgar pornographic things, yeah, they're out there, but there's not a government coming in and doing this.
But it's usually monitored.
I mean, that's sort of what parents are supposed to be involved in, you know, monitoring what the kids are being exposed to.
So I think this is very good, but it's good that there will always be somebody, you know, keeping an eye on it.
But from our personal experience, because I didn't pay much attention to it, even though we used it, we used the internet, and we have our program on there, and even though they did cancel you and this sort of thing, it worked to a degree.
Religious Values and Liberty 00:05:33
But this is so different, and I don't know whether, I don't know exactly the reason that we've, in a way, had sort of like an explosion of interest in an idea that I've been talking about this for a long time, but it seems like there's more people interested, and I don't know how that happens, but well, generally speaking, over the many decades, I've always been surprised that when the people hear the message, the reception is usually pretty good.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, this is good news.
We didn't talk about it, and we're getting low on time, but there was a great article, maybe you have it, that McDonald's is abandoning its DEI practices.
And this is all due to Robbie Starbuck, who's a great activist.
I think he's gotten a lot of these companies to abandon these.
Frankly, they're just racist and bigoted practices of only promoting some and not others.
And so McDonald's backing off on it is a very good, very good thing.
It's a very good progress.
And Sarbuck, I think, deserves all the credit because he's been kind of a one-man band getting these companies to realize it's not in your best interest to be so hateful towards your customers.
Well, we ought to give a little plus to the people that have already done it because you might say McDonald's a little slow.
But return to the rationale follows similar developments as a host of huge U.S. companies.
Walmart, Ford, John Deere, Lowe's, Harley Davison, Jack Daniels, Microsoft United, and Boeing.
We've been very careful about that.
Yeah.
But no, I think that's the way a free society works.
They haven't canceled freedom.
They'd like to, and they work on it.
And we're always under duress because freedom and freedom of real truth and expression, it is the enemy of these people who would like to be total authoritarians and say, well, you guys waste so much time.
You keep looking for the natural laws and looking for truth.
It's a fool's era.
That's their opinion.
But it happens that that fool's errand has been lasting for, well, maybe six, seven thousand years.
People have been working at it.
And so I'm delighted when there's a discovery of what's happening.
And it has been ups and downs.
There's some pretty neat stuff, you know, even 1,000, 2,000 years ago talking about this issue.
But then there's been quite a few years.
I guess the authoritarians make up for it because they have bursts of success.
And you would take, you know, the 20th century.
That was a very bad century for the really bad people killing a lot of people and undermining so many people who are looking to live in a free society.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I would say, you know, kind of ending on a happy note, this is good news, but I think there should be two caveats.
The first of which is, I mean, I think generally you shouldn't rest on our laurels or Robbie's laurels of having achieved these things because, first of all, they can change the name and preserve the practices.
They could rename it.
This is not our DEI program, but it's the exact same.
So I think we should be, you know, vigilant about that.
And the other is the idea that the right wing loves to censor as much as the left wing.
And so there's a big danger of that as well.
Whew, we got rid of those leftish censorers.
The right has its own areas where they won't allow you to talk and don't want you to talk.
And so we have to be diligent.
I think that's where libertarians can maybe help a little bit society because we're neither right wing nor left wing, but we're looking at things from a liberty perspective so we can call out both sides when they're doing their hobby horse of censorship.
You know, there's always a statement of doing something wonderful and good for the people, and that's why you have to have the government doing this for you.
And the one thing that is still accepted by a lot of people, and that is when people come up and say, we're going to do this because we have to make the people safe.
That's why you have protection against drugs.
That's why you have to go and invade other countries.
They might come and attack us someday.
It's always safety.
And people do go along with that to a large degree.
But it's a tough thing saying, you know, the government's not there to make us safe.
The government is there to do the best job they can to protect our liberties, to make ourselves safe and voluntarily get together and provide safety.
So whether it's a religious value, oh, we have to make a shift.
This religious value is bad.
And then they're not eating the right food.
They don't exercise enough.
It gets on and on, but it's always safety.
And I did have conversations when, in a quiet, very polite conversation with some of the lefties in Congress, and I would ask them, why do you do this?
You know, basically this, taking away people's freedom.
Yeah, their answer was right blunt.
I said, they're too dumb.
Conferences Forward 00:01:52
Yeah, yeah.
There's that thought there, for sure.
Maybe we can point out that there's a bit of ignorance that have brought the collapse of the most recent democratic approach to attack on our liberties.
Exactly.
Well, I'll just close by thanking our viewers, A, for watching the show.
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We appreciate your tax-deductible contributions to the Ron Paul Institute, which helps keep the Ron Paul Liberty Report alive.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And we will continue our process mainly having daily programs and reports, but we also look for the opportunities of bringing people together.
And that's various conferences that we have throughout the year, and we will be doing more of those.
And they aren't times when you get thousands and thousands of people together.
It's where there's smaller crowds, they're very serious.
But the main thing they are is the people that come to these conferences are usually there because they enjoy it.
They enjoy getting along with other people that are like-minded.
And this to me is a wonderful opportunity.
So sometime this year, we don't have our schedule, but we will be having conferences, and we should all look forward to that because most of the attendees go away feeling very good about their visit.
I want to thank everybody today for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Please come back soon.
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