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Jan. 23, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:35
Trump Vows To End Department Of Education. Will He? CAN He?

President Trump has doubled down on his desire to end the federal Department of Education and return the task of education to the states. Republicans have long talked a good game but to date there has been very little action. Will Americans finally get a "win" on this issue? Also today, Trump names new top Middle East policy pick for the Pentagon...and he's very promising!

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Republicans And Education Reform 00:14:50
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Warming up.
Yes.
Warming up.
Finally.
No snow today.
No, no, no.
Well, very good, but it's snowing trouble someplace in the world and try to iron that stuff out.
But I want to start off with education.
You know, Department of Education and the control of education by the federal government, which I think anybody with a lic of sense or even a smidgen of an understanding of the Constitution would never try to justify this monopolistic control of all the educational system in the country and finance it to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and wonder why we're not doing so well on education.
But, you know, it's something Trump had said he was going to do.
He said, under the Constitution, education should go back to the states.
I agree, and I think this is a good move, and it'll be lots of fighting and fuming over this.
But, you know, this isn't the first time I thought about education because there were two episodes that happened on the development of this system.
You know, way back when I was in college in the 50s, I know Eisenhower was president.
I was still thinking about being a school teacher, and I was in an education course, and the Department of Education at Gettysburg College said that he had to take a couple of days off because there was an important meeting, you know, in Washington, and Hiko had to go and attend this.
And it had to do with the government, the announcement Eisenhower was making about education.
And he says there's a, and he explained to us, he says, and there's been a lot of people concerned that the government would overstep their bounds and there'd be too much deferring to the federal government.
He says, but I went to that meeting and they assured us it would never happen because back then there was no Department of Education.
But then the second time I have a memory of this was when I was in Congress and Jimmy Carter was president.
And guess what?
I voted against the Department of Education.
But the process has been going.
The degree of education of a well-organized and a good educational system has continued.
And I would say that right now, it met its peak.
And the educational system and all this wokeism probably helped bring it to its sneeze.
And I think Trump might be able to pull this off, but there's going to be plenty of crying.
But it should be a place where they could save some money.
The amount of money they say there, it should just be handled differently.
And all of a sudden, the cost is going to go down.
They worked over all these decades that the more money you spend, the better the education to get.
And the opposite was case.
They should have taken a few courses on mathematics, adding and subtracting and finding out how the educational system contributed to our bankruptcy.
But anyway, I don't know how you feel about this, Daniel, but I suspect that you probably, you weren't there when I was voting on this.
You probably would have said, Ron, I don't think you should vote for this.
Well, you know, one way they could get rid of it, you know, there's a lot of political weight, you know, political risk in saying shut down the Department of Education.
The media is going to be against them.
But if they just send everyone that's involved in DEI home, there probably wouldn't be anyone left in the Department of Education.
There'd be like three people, the janitor.
But, you know, the proof is in the pudding.
As you know, Carter did a lot of good things, especially after he was president.
But federalizing education through the Department of Education was not one of the good things that he did.
And the proof is in the pudding.
You know, has it made our kids smarter?
No.
Are they better prepared?
No.
And now this is anecdotal, but I'm sure a lot of our viewers, I myself have seen it too.
These cute little things that it's like basically, what did you need to know to graduate from high school in 1900?
You know, you look at it, you had to speak Latin and Greek and all of these things and all this incredible math.
And even a college graduate these days couldn't pass it.
That was normal for kids back then.
Nowadays, most kids can't even read when they get out of high school.
So it's not working.
It's something to be abolished.
And he's doubled down on it.
Let's go to this first clip.
This is no, we saw this on heads this morning.
Originally from campus reform, Trump doubles down on plan to return American education back to the states.
Go to the next one.
I think that's where he talks about it.
There is a quote, in a pre-inaugural speech made at a rally in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Trump outlined various policies he hopes his second administration will achieve in the near future.
On the topic of education, Trump highlighted education secretary nominee Linda McMahon, whom he called fantastic.
Here's a quote.
And a very special woman, Linda McMahon, is going to be our future Secretary of Education, which we're going to be giving back to the states, Trump remarked.
Let the state run education.
Trump also said how he told McMahon, quote, if you do a great job, you will put yourself out of a job because you're going to be sending it back to the states.
You know, I think the principle of back to the states should be clarified because we really don't want the state itself to run education.
But if you go back to the position where the states makes the determination, they at least can allow these options and not punish people who want to have private education.
And, you know, I still marvel at reading about the founders and their education.
They didn't have a state to run their education.
Boy, they were well educated.
And it was usually individualized.
And there were universities back then.
They still went to universities and advanced their education.
But it wasn't a cradle to the grave stuff.
And over the years, it kept getting younger and younger.
Now it's sort of a babysitting job.
And they have the kindergarten and all these things.
Every once in a while, you find out some kids can't even pass kindergarten, so that's a problem.
So it's just a system of bureaucratic control of education versus families doing it.
But the parents should be responsible for it, the ultimate decision-making.
But once again, then you get back into economics.
Why are the parents not available for this?
Because of our economic system, that we think that we can spend all the money we want.
Just think, we spend all this money on education to improve it.
And what it does, it makes it so the parents can't stay home and take care of their kids.
It's so one thing piles up on another.
People just do not want to fully understand and see the benefits of what it would be like to live in a society that emphasizes personal liberty.
That's what they should be taught, just to taught to understand exactly what the difference is.
Well, you know, exhibit A for why you need to decentralize education in America is something that you have mentioned on the show numerous times.
And that is what happened in places like Loudoun County, Virginia, when during COVID they were doing all these horrible things, when they were forcing boys or allowing boys to go in the girls' restrooms, et cetera, et cetera.
The parents got fed up.
They went to the school board meeting, the local school board meetings, and they raised holy, you know, what, and they got them fired.
That's what, now if they're in Washington, you can't do that.
It probably puts you in the gulag.
Just think how open borders has contributed to the problem.
The immigrants come in illegally.
They don't speak English.
And, you know, properly managed immigration legally is one thing.
But when you have the, you know, mass immigration, that doesn't help, it doesn't help the educational system.
And that has been part of the problem too, cost-wise.
But, you know, some schools would say, oh, we're getting 20 new students.
Our benefits from the federal government are going to go up because, oh, we'll have to have special teachers because we have to teach them English first.
You know, it goes on and on.
But maybe this is a reversal point.
Finally, when things get bad enough, the people wake up.
Yeah, Trump helped to wake them up.
But I think you have to have other things.
People finally have to discuss.
There's been people, you know, even when we were working on the Department of Education, there was a lot of people saying it.
A lot of people since then have said about it.
But now there's more and more people.
They're looking at the results and saying, oh, the results are.
And now they're starting to blame the proper authorities, the people who run DEI, all these other things.
They're putting it together.
And that is one of the reasons why they're pouring on the support for Trump, who wants to make things better.
Yeah.
Well, let's look at a couple more things from this article.
And now I'll go to the next one.
Now, this is in the 2024 Republican platform.
In that, I'll go back one, please.
In that platform, the party pledged to fight to, quote, ensure safe learning environments free from political meddling and restore parental rights.
Included in the plan were efforts to advance, quote, universal school choice, combat critical race theory and gender indoctrination, as well as return education to the states.
This is from the Republican platform.
We're going to close the Department of Education in D.C. and send it back to the states where it belongs and let the states run our educational system as it should be run.
The platform states, it's our goal to bring education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before.
I would argue that it has attained it back what it was state and local.
But there is a history of this, Dr. Paul, and this is why I think both of us probably are taking a healthy dose of skepticism.
Go to the next one because this has been part of the Republican platform for a long time.
Abolishing the Department of Education has been a core tenet of Republican presidential campaigns dating back to Ronald Reagan in 1980, who said that education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and state governments.
So the Republicans have been talking a good game for a long time.
And I would just say, Dr. Paul, this means Congress also needs to step up to the plate and back the president on this, and they can help facilitate it.
You've got both houses.
What else is it good for if you can't get things like this done?
Yes.
You know, I remember back in the 80s, Reagan was president at the time.
And I was taking my votes as I had promised I would, and I have to continue to do so.
But there was a time early on when I was taking these votes, and they were really challenging the Republican Party.
And they would be arguing, you're not a good Republican, this sort of thing.
And they even had a proposal to censor me, which did not pass because I wasn't following the line.
But when they would do that, I say, why don't we do this?
Why don't we compare my votes with the votes of all the other Republicans on how many of us followed the Republican platform?
Or you could use that same argument and set it up for the Constitution, but that people wouldn't have known what you were talking about.
But they talk about it, and so there'll be some of that that'll go on now.
Let's hope we minimize this, you know, because a lot has been said, and a lot of people voted thinking one thing, and iron it out.
I mean, I think even the people who are in charge of moving in this direction, they understand what it is, but they have to keep the hope up for the people who understand it.
And we're hopeful, and we want to help, but we also realize that it's not going to be an easy task reversing this trend.
And I see things in the total economic system, whether it's the foreign policy or educational policy.
And like I said, if you have a system where mothers have to always have a full-time job and they're not staying at home, they're hardly able to become a good guidance for their kids' education, which could have happened.
But maybe it'll shift.
Yeah.
Well, as you say, giving it to the states is not a panacea for the problems.
But one of the good things about it is it allows healthy competition among states, you know.
And, you know, we were a homeschooling family.
We still have one who's being homeschooled.
And in Virginia, it was pretty good.
You did have to file your curriculum, but it was sort of, you know, just for appearance's sake.
In Texas, it's great.
You don't have to do anything.
You don't even have to notice them.
So when there are states that are bad and they're very oppressive when it comes to homeschooling, people are going to move.
They're going to move to states that are better if they want to homeschool.
And again, the proof will be in the pudding because we know the statistics for homeschooled kids, they do extraordinarily well.
And I would just, the final word on this, here's an easy thing to do if you're worried about education.
Put that next one up.
It's called RonPaulcurriculum.com.
And here's an answer for people that are looking for something.
So getting the federal government out of education, looking into homeschooling, especially the Ron Paul curriculum.
I still have my youngest daughter is still using the Ron Paul curriculum and using it to great advantage.
I highly recommend it.
That's just one way you can have educated kids, right?
That's it.
And they'll all be educated.
It's who is going to be the educators?
I'll take Tom Woods, Gary North educating my kids.
That's it.
Of course, the whole problem there is how we have endorsed the idea of breaking up the families.
The economics does that.
Like I say, the mothers have to go to work.
More money spent.
The cost of education goes up and the quality goes down.
Peace Process in the Middle East 00:11:35
And I think people are catching on now.
And I think it's just great about this DEI.
You think, you know, if anybody complained for years, the several years it's been invoked, you know, people were sensitive.
Oh, that means I'm a bigot and all these things and I'm discriminating.
Where exactly the opposite was the case.
Now we know who the real discriminators were and the people who were really telling the untruths.
And that's why I think it's delightful that people are waking up about the educational system.
Well, let's move on to the second thing we want to touch on.
We touch on it with some hesitation because you can cause problems by praising it at some point.
However, it came to our attention yesterday, and partly thanks to David Camp at anti-war.com.
Now, we've been critical.
I have certainly been critical, I will confess, to I've been critical of some of Trump's picks for his policy advisors.
I don't have a lot of regard for Kellogg.
I don't have a lot of regard for Waltz and many of the others.
I think they have biases that will preclude them from giving the president the full range of choices that he needs.
Nevertheless, I think Trump deserves praise when he picks people that have a more realistic view of the world.
And if you put that next clip up, This is one of those people, from what we can tell, Michael D'Amino has been named.
He's a fellow at Defense Priorities.
Now, that's a think tank that is for realism and for less interventionism.
He's been picked to be the Middle East policy chief in the Pentagon.
And if you look at, there's a pretty good record of what he has said about foreign policy and about what we should be doing in the Middle East.
If he's able to continue providing advice through the chain of command in the Pentagon to the president on how we can fix Middle East policy, I, for one, will rest easier at night because I think from what I've seen from what he's done, I have a lot of confidence in him.
And we're not at the point where they're going to accept the non-interventionist policy.
But that is the goal of moving in that direction.
So I think we could be optimistic on some of the things that Trump has done and continues to do.
And I like the word realist too, even though that's not non-interventionist completely.
But they're certainly identified as some place a long way from empire building.
That's been the general problem is that we have too many empire builders.
There's still a lot of that, and people love it.
And I think that's one thing that the president now stimulates it.
People feel good about their country.
But I like to feel good about our country too.
But I want to feel good because we have freedom.
And in the original history of our country, the many other countries said this was the place to come.
Look at what they have there now.
But that isn't the case now.
Some of the statistics, whether it's education or economic policies or non-intervention, but the whole world is run by the dollar, and that's why everybody's in debt.
So there are problems coming.
And I think the administration knows and they have, but Trump is going to be always going to be the cheerleader.
And in this case, we needed one.
But we have to be realistic about how far we can get with shifting the gears in this direction because Domino is going to get a lot of grief over this.
Maybe they won't say they'll get ho after him, but not Trump.
Well, let's listen to a little bit of Domino.
Now, he's on a podcast with Colonel Danny Davis, great guy, really good guy, who's also with defense priorities, or at least was when this was done.
And they're having a little discussion.
We want to listen to about a minute and 15 seconds of this.
Dr. Paul, you're going to be really pleased when you hear what he has to say about what we should be doing in the Middle East.
Let's go ahead and listen in.
Yeah, absolutely.
And again, that's the bigger thing here.
You know, we could talk about sort of the military analysis all day, and I think it's really important to do that.
But the bigger point here has to be, you know, we have now seen 20 years worth of evidence in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, that we cannot force liberal democracy at the end of a gun.
Okay, Iran is a nation of 90 million people.
Enough of the people in that country have to overcome what many sociologists and political scientists have called the collective action problem, right?
The cost-benefit analysis of organic political change, that calculation has to get to a point where change can happen.
And that's how it has to work if it's going to last and if it's going to be meaningful.
This idea that the United States should be using its military to go around the world and depose every single tinpot dictator that we find and bog ourselves down there to the tune of trillions of dollars to thousands of American lives with no real goal or purpose where we are squandering our national resources and our bandwidth that need to be directed on far more pressing issues is just not really in America's interest.
And that's, again, the biggest point that I would make here is that, you know, this idea that you can send a couple of interest and it doesn't work.
You know, that's right.
But what I see happening is the failure, whether it's education or foreign policy, is becoming apparent and waking up some people.
We see that, especially in Ukraine, now, it's not so much enthusiasm for Ukraine now.
But all of that stuff came together because of ideas about our moral responsibility.
It's been cast upon us.
And we have to take care of the world and spread our message, but it's through authoritarian approaches.
And that, I think, is the problem.
But it was the idea that people planted with Marxism or modified Marxism where authoritarianism was granted and you didn't have to seek much support from natural law or any of these other positive things.
But it's the ideas that's going to be reversing it too.
And this is why this Mike Domino is so great because he's talking about ideology, you know, about what should our positions be.
And he, you know, even though I don't call myself a realist, it's really a pretty good term because it's implying, are you going to realize how bad interventionism is and world empire is, inflationism is?
And that to me is a good thing.
Then they should start sincerely having a debate on what are you going to replace it with.
Yeah.
And, you know, in my opinion, at least as a non-interventionist, the biggest fault with realism is that it still insists on the universality of liberal democracy, which is not necessarily the case.
So later in this interview, Domino said, well, I'm against the Iranian regime too.
I wish it would change, but we can't change it the way we've been doing it.
So I agree with half of what he said.
I don't care about the Iranian regime.
It's none of our business what kind of country they have.
If they want to have a theocracy, more power to them.
We'll stay away from them.
They stay away from us and everything will be hunky-dory.
So they still have this kind of this belief in this universality of this philosophy.
It's the Fukuyama type of end of time thing.
Nevertheless, I mean, we feel so desperate when things come a little bit in our direction, we're ready to say hallelujah.
But, you know, in a way, we're saying something about what they're going to do.
By us moving out, they have to make their own decisions, but we don't aggressively go in there and say, you do it this way.
But just the fact that we have been involved in so many things.
So right now, the threats that Trump will use to get out of Ukraine will be, you know, if we move out, what's going to happen?
So indirectly, that's exactly what we're appearing at.
But one is a sort of a passive way by removing the dangerous things that we have done, the financing of either side.
And that would move us in the right direction.
But they don't have enough confidence that either local people or individuals are capable of making economic and moral decisions.
Let's do one other thing from Dave's write-up of this because it's interesting that he's drawing some concerns.
But what he says is very, very solid.
If you can put that next clip up.
Jewish Insider reported that Domino's appointment has alarmed pro-Israel Republicans due to his views on the region.
The report cited comments De Mino made during a webinar last year where he said the Middle East, quote, does not really matter for U.S. interests.
Now, I don't know why they're flipping out over this because that's just a basic fact.
Here's what he says.
Vital or existential U.S. threats, interests in the Middle East are best characterized as minimal to non-existent.
And I think if you look at America's experience as the primary security broker for the region, it has not rendered any lasting political, economic, or security benefits in the service of U.S. interests or the American people, he said.
And that's a very great statement, I think, which is to say we just have no business meddling around in there.
And history shows that when we do it, we mess things up.
Very well done.
And I think if these so-called Israel pro-Israel interests would really look objectively, they would agree that our intervention has not made it safer for Israel.
On the contrary.
It looks to me like what they need is a good lesson in logic.
You know, it's not logical what they're doing.
It makes more sense of what Domino is telling us about, because it would be a major step in the right direction, and that is for peace to break out and let the individual there take care of it.
And what does it do?
It means we come home.
We save billions of dollars and millions of lives.
That seems pretty logical to me.
And although the group and Domino is not libertarian, non-interventionist, it's a good step in that direction because that is exactly what we need this backing away.
And the more we back away, see, I think what they refuse, this group of people that want to see it, this is for way.
I think Russia would be a good example of us.
Instead of putting our troops and our bombs up right at the next door and defying our promises that we made, if Putin is suggesting that we talk to each other, and I think maybe Trump will do a little bit more of that, but there's certain areas of the world where it won't be as easy.
The Middle East is not as easy.
I think dealing with Ukraine and Russia is going to be a lot easier than dealing with the Middle East.
Yeah, probably true.
Well, I'm just going to close out by just mentioning one thing.
Don't Cheat Out Legal Immigrants 00:04:03
You know, I've just been reading a little bit about this.
Now, it would be easy to write off Trump's executive order ending DEI in government as being sort of window dressing.
But I can assure people that this is real.
It really is happening.
And Mark Zaid, he's kind of a lefty insider attorney.
And I don't have a clip for it, but he wrote about this.
He said, it goes beyond what's happening at the Department of Homeland Security in NASA today, where apparently there were memos that were sent to the employees telling them DEI is over.
And he says, CAIA employees were told that all resource and affinity groups are canceled.
No Black History Month or MLK celebration or any other ethnic recognition months.
DEI folks are to be fired rather than allowed to rotate to former offices.
CIA is also already apparently banning lanyards.
Those are the little things you already get into the building that have to do with affinity groups.
So they really are doing this.
I've actually talked to a friend of mine that works in government, and they've been told, no more of this celebration, Hispanic month that's on the pay while you're being paid.
So certainly people can celebrate their ethnic backgrounds wherever they want.
But it had grown to such a huge thing that people should be on the clock, I don't know, protecting the borders or building rockets, whatever they do over there.
And they were being paid to not do that, to sit around and celebrate these many, many multiple different types of months and celebrations.
That's all gone.
It really is gone.
And I think that's a terrific thing.
And I want to just finish up as well with mentioning something that for me, it's being more cautious than I think they are.
And that is that the borders have been messed up.
It took years.
It took especially four years of open borders to create a monster.
My argument has always been you remove all the incentives for coming in and all the benefits.
And all we do was open the doors, just walk in, we'll feed you, we'll clothe you, we'll educate you, and we'll take all the money from the people who are still working.
So that's not working.
To reverse, that makes sense.
So there is a great effort to do something with our borders.
I've often said, there's something about walls that don't make practical sense to me, and I don't think they're as necessary as people think they are.
But right now, Trump is doing his best to live up to his promises as he sees it.
And there's already national, you know, state and national troops.
There's 1,500 there now.
And Trump wants to plan 10,000 troops on the border.
So it's going from what has been traditional for our traditional for our borders.
They've always been by civilians, not the military.
We didn't have a military force around our borders.
There's been exceptions to that.
But I think that this is a big shift away from having a system where we can handle it with non-military forces.
But this can get out of hand.
I think they might have to do some of that, and the details are out there.
But I would like to see denial of all the special privileges.
Don't cheat out the people who are trying to come here legally, and don't cheat out the American citizen who has to pay for all this and sacrifice their standard of living.
And that you can do.
And I think that will diminish if there are no subsidies, no freebies.
That in itself, no easy citizenship.
It wasn't even just the easy road to citizenship.
Special Privileges Gone 00:01:04
It was an easy road to special privileges and be taken care of.
So I think people should be treated at the border like we treat people at our door.
I mean, because we don't just let anybody walk in our house and say, well, you have an empty room back there.
We want to stay there.
We don't tolerate that.
And we shouldn't do that in a country either.
And especially when the people who are the innocent and still working are forced to pay for it.
But that's going to be around.
And my only message is be careful with using these military troops.
I'm sure somebody's going to find justification to have troops on the border.
But I'd like to find justification that they're no longer needed.
We've gone a couple hundred years without it before we ought to know how to reinstate that principle.
And I too want to thank everybody for today, for coming in to visit us on the Liberty Report.
And we appreciate that and the support and to help us spread the message of Liberty.
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