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Feb. 4, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:06
The Musk Revolution

he New York Times has taken aim at President Trump's famous hatchet man, Elon Musk, for sending his teams through the institutions of the Executive Branch rooting out decades of mismanagement, financial abuse, and outright fraud. From USAID to the Department of Education to the Office of Personnel Management, we are seeing a revolution in Washington. Will they be able to pull it off?

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Time Text
Privacy Concerns Rising 00:13:14
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 this morning.
Good to see you, Dr. Paul.
We're back together again after about a week, I guess it was.
Where were you?
I have to admit, I had some other activities that I was obligated to attend to.
It happens, yeah.
So anyway, just think, we didn't report as we usually do every single day and try to catch up on all the events.
The events keep marching on, marching on.
But we do see at times glimpses of people putting monkey wrenches into the success and the totalitarian of the deep state that we've been living with.
Now there's hints, and we have our beefs with the president.
We don't endorse everything.
But we also have to admit, life is different.
Life is different right now with the new administration.
And we are looking forward to better times eventually.
But right now, the Democrats are still trying to figure out what was wrong with the campaign.
What did they do wrong?
What happened?
Maybe they had the wrong issues or something.
We're the wrong candidate.
But they're coming.
The excuses are really very, very funny.
But right now, Elon Musk, he had a name for himself, though, you know, four or five years ago.
The first time I heard it, I said, is this guy real?
Is he doing this?
And of course, since that time, he probably increased his influence 10 or 100 times, 100 fold because he's world renowned now.
But he just happens to be a friend of Trump.
And Trump has a job on his hands, but they're sticking together and they're doing a fair job in trying to follow some of the campaign promises.
It's just my only problem is some of his campaign promises wouldn't be exactly pure libertarianism.
But the one thing for sure, Trump and Musk are interested in not going out of their way to ridicule libertarianism.
Matter of fact, if they see an opening, they just assume we'd be on their side.
And I think that's a sign of what's happening in the community around the country, maybe around the world, that we're witnessing something much bigger than anybody realized.
And they're witnessing the failure of the progressive era.
It's been going on for a long time, but it's been going downhill, too.
And this is, I hope it's a climactic end to the assault on liberty that we've had in what?
Medical care, education, morality and government, and the Department of Justice, privacy.
All those things have deteriorated.
So now we find out this bold guy by the name of Musk, he's in there.
He's disrupting things.
And you know what?
The far left does not like him, you know, because he just goes after it.
And there's some technical questions that people bring up.
But, you know, the funny thing is they're finding and saying, oh, you know, they're looking into this stuff that the government's doing and what we've been getting away with all this time.
And they're putting monkey wrenches in what we're doing.
And they want to know what we're doing.
They want to know where the money is.
So they're being accused of being, you know, invasion of privacy.
Well, the real invasion of privacy has been the authoritarianism of the left and those moderates that went along with it and the warmongers and everybody else, stealing the money from the people and secretly running government.
And where the real violation, if there was no violation of the people's privacy and their liberty, you wouldn't have this monster to deal with.
So it is a little ironic.
I think people should pay attention to it.
But I think this halibaloo about, oh, technically they shouldn't be doing this.
They shouldn't be clamping down on that.
You know, one thought that crossed my mind, Daniel, was they ought to ask Jefferson for advice.
He was not gentle in his discussion of what you had to do when they got out of control.
And so I see, and I'm sure you do, see some positives.
And I think that's very good.
And we'll continue to support those things, which is shrinking the size and scope of government.
Because I think because they have sought us out and other libertarian community, that means that we're growing in strength and influence, but in a different way than typical Republicans and Democrats see it.
I think that that libertarianism and liberty is still alive and well.
Well, you know, Elon Musk is a tremendous hate figure for the left, you know, and they, it's a lightning rod.
And I almost think, given his interesting and peculiar personality, I almost think he actually enjoys it.
The fact that just his presence, just his name causes them.
It used to be Trump.
I almost think that Musk has surpassed Trump, supplanted Trump as the target of hate on the left.
And why do they hate him?
Because he doesn't play by the rules that they themselves have made, right?
They made all the rules, and he says, no, I don't think I'll follow those rules.
And I think that makes them crazy.
And he has the ability, partly thanks to his wealth, partly thanks to his stature in the business community, and partly just the strength of his personality.
He has the ability to thumb his nose at them.
And that drives him crazy.
But the real question, and this, sort of our whole show today is based on this New York Times article.
And Michael Schellenberger brought it to my attention at least with the post on X about Musk's, I would say, short march through the institutions, right?
The opposite of what happened in China, in communist China in the 60s.
This is a short march, and it's a very quick march.
And the question, Dr. Paul, I think, is, is, how do you make huge changes in government?
How do you dismantle this edifice that has had plastered on year after year, layer after layer of bureaucracy?
What is the right way to do it?
And I think what's happening now is a lot of people in D.C. are flipping out.
They're flipping their lids because he's doing it by going in there and just cleaning the stables, cleaning out the stables.
Well, I want to introduce the article, and I highly, for reasons that will be obvious, I highly recommend it.
Put on that first clip, Inside Musk's Aggressive Incursion into the Federal Government.
Now, this is the funny part.
Now, this would be a theme throughout the article, Dr. Paul.
The billionaire is creating, over and over you see this kind of envy of the fact that he's wealthy, and also these suggestions that he has conflicts of interest throughout the article.
I think there are six or seven quote-unquote journalists who wrote this piece.
But it's fascinating.
I go to the next clip here, and this is just to introduce the article.
In Elon Musk's first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols.
They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs and even an entire agency that had come into Mr. Musk's crosshairs.
Now they're talking about USAID, Dr. Paul, and we have some clips on that later.
And you wrote about it yesterday.
We'll talk about it.
Keep that up, please, if you can.
They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.
I don't think there's a single person in America, Dr. Paul, who actually has to work for a living that wouldn't read that and say, yeah, I'm sure that's true.
You're lazy and you didn't believe.
Exactly.
And empowered by Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy, all one that already has far-reaching consequences.
They don't understand that most Americans, if they even bother reading the Times, Dr. Paul, when they read that he's waging a war against the federal bureaucracy, they're going to raise their hands and cheer.
They're not going to be cluck-clucking about it.
You know, they've been interested in this war because that's how they stay in power.
And if they let the reformers get ahead, then they lose this power that they've worked hard on.
But, you know, just a few years ago now, it was they were witnessing this and they didn't like Trump.
And so they saw that he was doing a little bit better than they thought he'd be doing.
He was a president, but he was a bum president, and we have to do him in.
So all they had to do is, you know, throw some real hard punches at him.
You know, why don't we impeach him?
Why don't we charge him and put him in prison?
Why don't we bankrupt them?
You know, went on and on, which was interpreted by the people, and they got sick and tired of it because they considered it all lies.
They didn't convince the people.
So the lies caused them to lose credibility.
This is part of that revolutionary spirit, position.
And now they're doing it.
But they're getting further along with it right now.
It's a different one.
And that's what's driving them nuts.
They thought they were really had Trump defeated.
You know, when the media went after him, he was a convicted criminal.
So that was signed, sealed, and delivered.
But now all of a sudden, they're behind the eight ball now.
They do not know what to do.
Because I think that what has occurred, even with imperfections and exactly what all it comes about, but they've been hit by, you know, the people, the American people suspecting all these things to be true.
Now, this Musk guy, he must know something about computers or something because he finds out what's going on.
And the argument is, oh, he's violating people's civil liberties.
How much civil liberties were violating, creating this monster stuff?
And they said, no, only Congress can investigate this stuff.
And here is this guy, he might not even be in the administration.
We don't know.
But he is rocking the boat.
Well, you know, all the time that I worked with you, you and your staff in Congress, you and your staff in Congress were very often fighting against the overreach of executive authority.
And we were fighting everyone else in the legislative branch, even.
The thing is that D.C. loves executive authority when it means waging wars without Congress participation, when it means adding more layers and more levels to government.
They love executive authority more than anything else.
The only time they don't like executive authority, and that's why Chuck Schumer and the others are absolutely flipping out, the only time they hate executive authority when it comes to doing the opposite, which is reducing government, cutting things that are not necessary, using the power that he has over the executive agencies to reduce what they do.
All of a sudden, we've got too strong of an executive here.
But, you know, the one real challenge is going to be with this administration.
And I think what you say is absolutely true.
But the one thing that they haven't talked a whole lot about it, and that's the executive orders to look after the Federal Reserve.
Because all this stuff we're going to be talking about and ending to, all these programs that have just, you know, grows like a cancer.
And so that to me is saying that people are waking up.
But I still think, I guess people get tired of me harping back.
You know, if you can't pay for this, if you can't cheat with counterfeit money and all these things, we wouldn't have the wars, you know, this whole idea.
But they have, you know, we've had sympathetic comments from, you know, on the Federal Reserve as well.
But I'm talking about really exposing it.
But that's where the split comes in the Republican Party because you have some with strong libertarian leanings, but we have some that still think it's sacred to endlessly finance the various factions around the world.
Our intervention, even today, we read about more money.
In the midst of all this talk about cutting, the Congress is getting ready to send more money and the administration too.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think what's terrifying Official DC is the fact that things are happening so quickly, you know, and that really frightens them.
And it because it hasn't given them a chance to organize themselves, to circle the wagons and fight back.
And you can see if this next clip, you can see this is from the same New York Times piece.
This will tell you what's happening.
Next Big Payment Shift 00:12:59
They don't know what to do because kind of Musk's kind of right.
They are kind of lazy.
Go to the next one.
Go to the next one after this.
Okay.
The speed and scale have shocked civil servants who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to figure out, discern what is unfolding.
So they are having a panic attack inside government.
They're keeping the information from Musk.
They're trying to hide behind it.
But if you go to the next one, and this is important, this time, however, because they want to make it look like he's just a businessman coming in there to mess things up.
This time, however, Musk carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Musk's ready-fire aim impulses, but has praised him publicly.
He's a big cost cutter, Trump told reporters, sometimes he won't agree with it and will not go where he wants to go.
But I think he's doing a great job.
So he has the authority from the president as a special assistant to do these things.
Now, one area that's really interesting, Dr. Paul, if you go to the next one, actually skip to one because we'll come back to this.
And we talked about this before the show.
This is fascinating.
Mr. Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government's real estate portfolio managed by the General Services Administration.
He's moving to terminate leases.
Internally, GSA leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50% of the agency's budget, according to people from the, can you imagine how many thousands of properties GSA is holding on to across the world, you know?
Yes, and one example I told you a little bit about occurred in Lake Jackson, Texas.
We had a post office there.
It was, I think it was a building privately owned.
The government wanted to lease it for their post office.
And then they moved the post office.
They built a new one.
And the building became run down.
It looked bad.
And the owner said, hey, look, you guys, you guys with government, you guys aren't taking care of our building.
That's ultimately our property.
And they worked hard on our, they couldn't buy it back.
They wouldn't take care of the building.
And this was one time I got involved.
This was, I was getting, you know, not giving the special interest some of their money.
just trying to get their building back and live it up to the contract.
And they finally did.
And it's a beautiful building.
It's being used.
But the owners had to stand there.
It was a major building in downtown Lake Jackson.
It looked nice, but everybody knew it was empty.
Times that by a million, probably.
But they always paid the bill.
There it is.
They kept bills.
They didn't do it because some people say, hey, this is great.
They're supposed to fix it up and all this kind of stuff.
But it was the private ownership that finally won over, you know, the federal government.
But I guess the federal government still leases land and stuff for post offices and many other things.
Millions of things, I'm sure, everywhere.
Office space.
They let everyone work from home for all these years and they didn't let go to the offices.
You know, they still have the officers.
Well, here's the thing.
Now, we talked about the speed.
This is the real issue.
Now go to the next one.
This is exactly it.
Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government, said one official who works inside an agency.
Musk says he's making long overdue reforms.
So far, his team has claimed to help save the federal government more than a billion dollars a day through efforts like the cancellation of federal building leases and contracts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, although they've provided few subsistence.
That's what's making them upset, Dr. Paul, is they're moving too fast.
They haven't had a chance to organize their defense against this.
And that, I think, is what's making them crazy.
Now, this is what caught my attention because Schellenberger brought this up, Dr. Paul, and this is another aspect of it.
And I'm sure you read about it over the weekend, and Musk tweeted about it.
They went in to look at automatic payments made by the Treasury.
And they just make these payments automatically.
And Musk says some of these are even going to terrorist groups.
It's just an auto payment, auto payment.
Go to the next.
I think I have to skip ahead a little bit because we need to talk about this part.
Go ahead.
We already talked about this.
So this is from the New York Times article.
It said Musk has told administration officials he thinks they could balance the budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter.
It's unclear what he's basing that statement on.
Of course, they're sarcastic.
The federal deficit for 24 was $1.8 trillion.
The government accountability office estimated in a report that the government made $236 billion in improper payments.
So they're basically admitting $236 billion were going where they shouldn't go.
And they're saying, well, that's not very much.
And actually, Schellenberg, he retweeted this and he pointed this out.
It's important if we go to the next one, Dr. Paul, he says, 43 paragraphs into the New York Times piece, they finally admit, they finally reveal that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud.
They call it improper payments in 23 alone.
And then he, sorry, Dr. Paul, but one more.
Then he commented on his own post on X. Schellenberger did, if you go to the next one.
He says, actually, it's not even that.
They're not even right.
He says, naturally, the Times got the number wrong.
The correct number is $233 billion to $521 billion annually.
So just in these payments, Dr. Paul, you're talking up to a half a trillion dollars going fraudulently where they don't belong.
That's starting to add up to some real money.
That was established for efficiency's sake, you know, because it was automatic and somebody didn't have to sit down and write them a check.
But, you know, this auto-pay, they get on a list and it goes on and on and then they rip off the taxpayers.
But it made me think about the automatic renewal of voting lists.
Just think of that.
People have been on voting lists and they might be dead for 30 years.
And they just stay there.
And for some reason, the people in charge, of course, that both federal and state stuff, but it's usually partisan stuff.
But it's the same principle.
Put it on an autopilot and automatic repay.
They think that's efficient.
We can cut back on personnel.
But the more automatic it is, the less personnel works.
Some of them just get flat out lazy over that.
Well, some of the big news over the weekend was shutting down USAID, and you wrote about it in your column this week.
In fact, if you can put this next one on, this is kind of neat, actually, because you recorded it yesterday, as you do every week.
If you put that next one on, go ahead, one, I think.
No, go back one.
Go back one.
So these got into some weird order here.
Go back one.
Yeah, there we go.
So here's your recording of the weekly report.
Audit USAID, then shut it down, to which Elon Musk reposted, interesting.
And then about 10 million people saw it.
But it's really fascinating.
Now, here's a clip.
I have an audio clip to put up, Dr. Paul.
And this is one of the reasons why I think the American people are going to agree with shutting down.
You want to put your earpiece in, Dr. Paul, before we let this play.
And this is the new press secretary, very impressive young woman, press secretary.
She comes out and she says, well, here's why we're trying to shut this thing down.
Now listen to what she has to say.
Through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on.
$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces, $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.
I don't know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap, and I know the American people don't either.
You know what it is.
That's so bad.
And it is.
It's a horrible thing that happened.
But it also is how did we let it happen like this?
Someday they're going to wake up and how did we go to this many wars since World War II and never declare the war?
This is bad.
Why did the people, you know, if democracy is so great, why did the people keep allowing these people to go there and do these same kind of things?
And they get away with it.
But you know, my argument is there's a pretense of great prosperity that will last forever.
But if it had to be paid for by, you know, taxing people in real terms, it wouldn't happen.
We'd stay out of the wars and everything else.
That's why I think counterfeit money and a government that's so powerful can get away with it.
So it is horrible that they do it.
It gets so silly, but I really endorse what they're doing because I know that if I start talking about a trillion dollar deficit, I think it's more than that.
A trillion dollar deficit, even I can't quite comprehend that.
And here they get these crazy, stupid things.
How did we let this happen?
The other thing is, I was wondering the other day that I was going to start in an organization of people that would join it if they have never received a check from government.
And look at the whole population because all of a sudden, you can't tinker around with Social Security and all, even though Reagan and some others tried to slow it up a little.
Well, the thing is, we sound like we're giddy because I think it's nice to see for a change things being dismantled rather than built on to, which is the normal way in Washington goes.
But the thing is, it's not just numbers.
Now, they're reducing numbers if they get rid of these properties and what have you.
It's not just about numbers, and this is where it comes back to the libertarian approach.
It's about the philosophy of governing.
So, yes, if Musk can save these $2 trillion or however many they want to save, that's fantastic.
That's great.
But you still have to deal with the other part of it, which is the philosophy of what government should do at home and abroad.
You know, that's the real issue.
Yeah, in a way, the risk there is, let's say they do actually cut some spending on this.
But there's a bipartisanship between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives that do agree in the area of foreign aid and wars.
And there's always something that they agree on.
Otherwise, how did all this stuff get passed?
How many times, I imagine you do remember when I'd be voting against some of this national security money to stop wars and all that?
And I'd get six people say, oh, yeah, I think maybe we ought to cut back.
There's more than that now.
Oh, yeah, there's more than that now.
Now, the pushback on this thing that we heard, now that catches your attention, a transgender opera in Columbia, I mean, I'm sure they're thrilled about that, right?
That catches attention.
But the pushback on that is, okay, you're talking about peanuts, though.
$40,000 here, million bucks here.
And that's legitimate.
That's a legitimate pushback.
It gets headlines because it's so salacious.
However, you also have a different metric to measure these things by.
Dollars versus harm.
Perhaps in dollars sense, this is not a huge amount, but the harm it does to a reputation overseas, to societies overseas, to some conservative religious countries and societies.
If big Uncle Sam comes in and says, hey, you need to put on a transgender play.
Here's some money.
We're going to find some patsies to put it on.
It hurts our reputation.
It hurts the local culture.
And it's overall damaged beyond the money spent.
You know, when the Department of Education came into being in the 1970s, you know, it was to be efficient and improve education.
And it's not a good.
But it did exactly the opposite.
The consequence, and that seems to be the biggest problem.
It's so easy to believe in these programs when most people think they were getting a benefit.
I want them to think that way, but I want them to think that way because what the politician has just done is allow them to keep more of their own money and give them an incentive to take care of themselves and challenge the principle that the government was created to make us safe from everything.
And that is that it's hard to challenge a politician.
Representative Jimmy Duncan's Speech 00:02:46
All I'm doing is making you safe.
I'm making you safe and secure and happy and rich.
We'll make certain group people richer and some get richer than others.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and I want to ask if you can put on that very last clip because finally it took a little bit of time.
But finally, we are up and running with the Ron Paul.
You're seeing this for the first time, Dr. Paul, if you don't hate it.
The Ron Paul Institute Spring Conference here in Lake Jackson, America in the age of Trump 2.0.
There is an awful lot to talk about, Dr. Paul.
We're going to have a great event planned down here, as I joked about it in my update to our subscribers, down here on the coast of the Gulf of America.
So anyway, we're going to have a great time, great conference down here.
Excuse me, there's a link to get more information and get your tickets.
Excuse me, it's going to be a great event, a hot breakfast, a lot of great speakers.
In fact, our first speaker is a great friend of ours, and I'm super excited that he's coming.
And that's Representative Jimmy Duncan.
John Duncan's going to come and be one of the speakers.
We featured several of his articles at the Ron Paul Institute recently.
He's writing a lot now, and he's thrilled to come up.
We're thrilled to have him.
We've got many more speakers.
You're going to be speaking.
You've got to speak.
But we've got a lot of other folks coming to speak to.
So it's going to be a great event.
Get those tickets.
And sales are going really well.
In fact, I only sent out the update last night and we sold about, I think, 10% of our tickets.
So things are going really well.
Jimmy Duncan was a good friend.
Yeah.
And he was one of six.
There were six Republicans that voted against this senseless war going into Iraq.
And that's when I really started working with him when that subject came up.
And Jimmy Duncan, there were two things.
He was against the war, and there were only six of the Republicans because the pressure was pretty heavy.
And it was something that I was fascinated because he did a lot of one-minute speeches.
And we talked, we sort of decided that the label libertarian applied to me.
But he liked thinking that he was part of the old right.
You know, when they were libertarians, so we gave him conservative credentials.
But the other thing that I admired of, because you know, some people take canned stuff from, you know, everything they do, they're reading something.
Jimmy Duncan wrote his speeches because I saw him with this yellow tablet.
I said, where'd you get that yellow tablet?
I thought I was the only one that wrote a yellow tablet.
So he would write on there and give great speeches.
And boy, I'm so delighted that he's coming.
Jimmy's Yellow Tablet 00:01:00
Yeah, it's going to be a lot of great time.
And I hope all our viewers tune in one way or the other, either coming to the convention or the meeting that we're having or the follow-ups and the results of the party.
And we do have a party and have fun.
But this is so important that we do have our meetings like this because that is one of my requests.
If you're going to do it, this is serious business, but we can't get too serious because life is not eternal.
And you ought to have fun.
And that's one thing that the groups that we get together, I'm always am.
Are you guys having fun today?
And most of the time, they're all cheering, and we do.
So please consider coming to some of our seminars because I think they're very valuable.
But in the meantime, I want to thank all the viewers today for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
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