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March 7, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:00
Who Is 'Taking' The Panama Canal? Trump Flip-Flops (Again) On Russia...and More!

In today's Liberty Report Chris Rossini and Daniel McAdams chew on the latest news that you may have missed. Russia, tariffs, Panama, Syria revolt. Tune in!

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Al-Qaeda's Rise in Syria 00:08:15
Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
I'm Chris Rossini.
Dr. Paul is out today.
He's taking the day off, and I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Daniel McAdams.
Daniel?
Good morning, Chris.
How are you this morning?
Great to be with you.
We're going to do our roundup of the news.
We picked some news items that we're going to cover that we thought are important.
Before doing that, our Friday viewers understand that we have a partnership with Birch Gold Group.
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Daniel, you could start with our first story.
Okay, sure.
Thanks, Chris.
I just wanted to cover something that's both of them are actually kind of breaking news in a way.
The first one deals with Syria.
Now, our viewers will recall a few months ago, the fall of the Assad government in Syria and the escape of Assad and his family to Russia left a group in charge, HTS, which is essentially al-Qaeda in Syria.
So, although we had been promised since 2011 that getting rid of the dictator Assad would usher in a democracy and freedom and liberty in Syria, the opposite has happened, as could be predicted when you have Al-Qaeda running your government.
They've gone around killing minorities, they've gone around killing Christians, killing Druze, killing Alawites throughout the country.
And now, there has been a bit of a rebellion back against the Al-Qaeda.
By the way, the fellow who ran it, Julani, who's running things now, has declared himself president.
So, so much for democracy and is himself a leader of al-Qaeda, former leader of al-Qaeda in Syria before he got a very expensive suit and a $50,000 watch.
And now he's acceptable in the salons of Europe and the United States.
So, anyway, if we can go to that first clip, this is what's been happening the last couple of days.
It intensified overnight.
The parts of Syria that are majority Alawite, that would be Latakia and Tartus area, they had a slight rebellion now against the Islamist al-Qaeda government that's run things.
And so, some clashes have taken place in those areas.
And there's been in response to that, there's been increasing crackdown.
A part of these clashes now are in response to the crackdown and the slaughter of Alawites.
So, we see that 16 Syrian troops, I would say Al-Qaeda troops, have been killed, but far more Syrian civilians have been killed by HTS, i.e., al-Qaeda.
Now, if you go to that second clip, I warn you that you'll see partially some disturbing images.
But what's happened now is a retaliation by HTS, which controls the vast majority of military equipment in Syria, is that they've gone from village to village in Alawite villages and slaughtered people.
And this is mass murder of residents in the village in Latakia province by HTS forces.
It looks like they shot all the men in the village.
Alawite crowds are demanding protection by Russia, which, by the way, is not coming.
And exactly the region where the fighting broke out yesterday.
So serious, serious issue, entirely predictable.
Nobody, I mean, this should be kind of a no-brainer.
Nobody wants to live under al-Qaeda.
But of course, there are some braindead people, Chris, and some of them happen to be in our government.
One of those being Joe Wilson, the representative from South Carolina, who really is as dumb as a bag of rocks.
And if you go to that next clip, now Max Blumenthal, who's not brain dead, who's in fact quite intelligent, he posted, unfortunately, another unsettling photo of a bunch of civilians that were put together and killed.
And so Joe Wilson said the butcher Assad is attempting to restore power in Syria.
Assad is hiding in Moscow and has Russian support.
Iran has called on the people to revolt.
Russia and Iran are working together to destabilize Syria.
We need Russia and Iran out of Syria completely.
There's Joe Wilson's dumb take.
Max Blumenthal, of course, responded with an accurate point, which is that Israel lobby tool, Joe Wilson, spent years helping Syria's al-Qaeda-led opposition gain power in Damascus.
Now he offers de facto U.S. endorsement of its ongoing sectarian pogrom against Alawites.
That is what's happening to Alawites in Syria today at Joe Wilson's urging.
And so it's revolting.
And I'll skip that next one of Joshua Landis.
Josh is a professor in Oklahoma who for about 10 or so years has been urging the overthrow of Assad.
And now he's gotten what he's been shooting for.
And a lot of people have gotten shot.
But I do want to, Chris, before I turn it over for your comment and reflection, I do want to put up that next one, if you can, this next point, which is the, here's a resume of Jolani, the fellow who's running Syria.
Interesting guy.
He's got an interesting resume.
He is now the president.
He's made himself president.
But previously, Chris, on his resume, we don't get resumes like this at RPI.
He was head of al-Qaeda.
He was then head of, he was before that was head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
He was on the Mujaheddin Shura Council.
He was also in the Islamic State of Iraq before that, Al-Nusra Front, before that, job at Fatah al-Sham, also al-Qaeda.
And the HTS, of course, and the Syrian Salvation Government, boats, both al-Qaeda groups.
So these are the people.
When you listen to the regime change neocons in Washington, D.C., who tell you it's going to be a wonderful democracy if we can just get this bad guy out of power.
These are the people who end up going into power.
And it's happened in Libya and elsewhere.
So anyway, something to keep our eyes on.
There might be a civil war brewing.
However, one side has all the guns and the other side has very, very little guns.
So troubling, but you know, Chris, this is the fruits of the neocon regime change regime.
It is, Daniel, and it's really, I'm ashamed of my government for being involved in this.
And they've been involved, you know, at least since 9-11 and before talking about Syria.
They were going to start with Saddam.
And everywhere that they march, they just leave wreckage, whether it's Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq.
I mean, we could just go country by country.
And now Syria, we still have troops in Syria that were left there.
So it's really, it's a shame because it has nothing to do with us.
This is not for us.
We benefit zero from this.
We get hatred towards us.
Look what those Americans are doing out here.
So it's a shame, but it's almost predictable because the empire does not give up.
Even though we're pulling out of Syria, we left troops there.
We still have troops there.
And what I think is relevant is with Ukraine, too.
The way the empire works is it doesn't give up.
It pauses.
Like when it's losing, it'll pause for a little while.
And it leaves a foothold.
So that's what I worry about with Ukraine.
Trump's Economic Gambles 00:15:28
I know we're getting onto a different topic, but this mineral deals and we're going to have companies.
You know, after Trump is out of office, now you have this foothold that you can open up, reopen conflict with Russia.
That's how the empire works.
You don't want it to have a foothold anywhere, and then you'll have peace, but that's not how they work.
So they had a foothold in Syria.
It took them a little while, but they finally got al-Qaeda to go in.
That's how pathetic this story is and what has happened to that, you know, once beautiful country.
Absolutely.
Daniel, you were muted.
You were muted there.
Oh, sorry about that.
No, that's an absolute great comment.
And I want to bring up what you said when we go into my next segment.
But I think you're up to bat right now.
Yeah.
So the next thing we're going to talk about is tariffs.
Not a fan of tariffs, of course, because they're almost like a bandage.
They don't address the real problem.
President Trump is a big fan of them.
He views them as a tool, which, you know, they can be a tool, but they are a very dangerous tool, a very risky tool that can lead to very bad consequences, such as the Civil War in 1860.
That began over tariffs, the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
People can look that up.
So tariffs have a very bad history of turning into disaster.
That doesn't mean that they will, but they can, if not handled properly.
The problem in America is that we have the biggest, most bloated government in history.
We are saddled by it.
And because of it, we cannot be competitive with the rest of the world.
Doge does what it can, but it is so massive that we're talking about empire.
If that's not addressed, then forget it.
We're dead meat, ultimately.
We're just kicking the can, and there may not be much road left to kick it down.
But one thing I wanted to talk about with tariffs is tariffs are not inflation, because then you'll have the other side.
They talk about, oh, Trump is going to create inflation with tariffs.
No, tariffs do not.
You may or may not have a rise in prices.
People are creative.
They can adjust in the economy and you may not have a rise in prices, but most probably there will be.
But it's not inflation if prices rise.
In the same way that if a hurricane hits and prices skyrocket when you go to the store for water, for ice, for this, that's not inflation.
You can't walk in and say, oh, man, inflation is so bad.
No, it's the hurricane that caused the prices to rise.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
It comes from the printing press, from the Federal Reserve, when they print money.
And you see the rise in prices throughout the economy, not in a hurricane-hit area, not in certain industries because of tariffs, throughout the entire economy, because the value of the money has been debased.
It's worth less.
It's not a localized thing.
That's inflation.
Price rises happen all the time.
I mean, if you go to an auction and you're auctioning a baseball card and it's bid up to a higher price than ever before, you can't be like, oh, man, this inflation is terrible.
That's not inflation.
Inflation is always a monetary thing.
And so you have people on the left saying Trump is going to create all this inflation with tariffs.
It's not right.
It's not correct.
And hopefully you'll have this in your mental tool belt to counter those arguments.
That's a great point, Chris, and it really can't be said enough.
The idea that inflation is not your friend.
I mean, if you know, I'm sorry, the tariffs are your friend.
I mean, it's a 25% tariff on China.
What's that going to do to the poor people who go to Walmart?
You know, it's going to kill them.
But I mean, you also bring up another underlying issue that is really important.
We've tried to address it, Chris.
And I don't believe it's been satisfactorily addressed, which is that there is a group of blind supporters.
There is another group of blind opponents of Trump.
Neither of these two seem capable of digesting facts in reality.
So when we say that tariffs are not a great idea right now, it is taken as somehow we hate Trump and we want him to fail.
When in fact, our obligation is to bring these things up and try to inform people.
You know, the tariffs mask the real problem, which is the size of government.
Until the government can be strangled down to the proper size, and that can't be done by executive order alone, Chris.
As you well know, Congress has to get in on the act to cut the size of government.
And we know from Senator Paul a couple of days ago, who tweeted out: basically, listen up, guys.
And next week, we're going to be voting on a continuing resolution that will continue to fund USAID, foreign aid, and everything else that we've gotten all excited about at the same levels as under Biden.
So until that is corrected, until government is really shrunk, then it's basically a moot point as to whether some tariffs can be an alternative way of funding government because government is just too big.
So I want to move on, and I just want to kind of riff on something that you pointed out, which is the foothold.
And that's such a great visual image that you put out.
They have to leave that foothold to go back in there.
And that's exactly what's happening with Ukraine.
And I have been consciously optimistic about Trump's approach.
From the beginning, he said, I'm going to talk to Russia, which he's done, which is always good.
I mean, they talked to Hamas even this past week, which is always good to talk, even though it wasn't very successful.
However, on the other hand, you have the foothold thing.
And I don't know what's behind it.
If President Trump's advisors on Russia just don't get it, and I suppose that they do not get it, people like Kellogg and Waltz already very biased.
They've said some crazy things.
Kellogg has said, some things like Russia's on its last legs.
But at the same time, it's ready to invade Europe.
So I don't know, it's kind of a schizophrenic thing.
But so Trump himself, while on the one hand, is doing a positive thing by saying, I'm not going to play by the rulebook that Biden and Blinken and Sullivan and the others put down.
I'm going to do a new rule book.
The problem is the foothold issue.
And it's such a great image that you put out there.
He wants to be in between brokering.
He wants to be at the table making peace between the two.
And he's doing that by not disengaging us, which is what we need to do.
Because the whole war came about because of our engagement, the overthrow of the government in 2014.
Before that, the overthrow of the Ukrainian government during the Orange Revolution in the early 2000s.
This whole problem was caused by our engagement.
So therefore, we cannot get out of it by further engagement.
You can't drink to get sober.
It doesn't work that way.
And so Trump wanted to do this mineral deal, which nobody, frankly, nobody understands.
It doesn't make any sense.
He's not going to get the minerals.
I don't know why he's pushing it other than, as you say, to keep us engaged, keep us with the toehold in there.
It doesn't make any sense.
So what happened is basically, Maybe it's this morning, maybe it was yesterday.
He was talking about getting together, getting rid of sanctions on Russia, etc., etc.
And then this morning he got up and said the opposite.
And if we can go to that next clip, this is interestingly enough, Vero Hedge, which is usually has a lot of integrity, they changed their headline on me.
So after I sent it to you, so I can't use the headline.
They put in some goofy Bloomberg stuff, which I do not believe is accurate.
But nevertheless, what happened this morning is, well, last night, as we know, Russia is at war with Ukraine, is at a special military operation, and they did a very, very robust bombing campaign against Ukraine.
That's kind of what you do in a war.
And so that's what they did last night.
They've been doing it for three years, but something about it set Trump off.
So if we have that, yeah, leave that up.
So basically on he went to his truth social and he was furious.
He said, based on the fact that Russia is absolutely pounding Ukraine in the battlefield right now, I'm strongly considering large-scale banking, sanctions, sanctions, and tariffs on Russia until a ceasefire, ceasefire, and final settlement on peace is reached.
Now, Hedge rightly points out there are already far-reaching sanctions on Russia's banking sector.
But then Trump said to Russia and Ukraine, get to the table right now before it's too late.
Again, getting involved in this.
Now he's going to sanction Russia.
It's confusing.
And Max Sennen had a, if you go to that next clip, had a good comment on Trump's kind of weird, to be honest, weird post.
And Max said, after spending a month working on economic rapprochement with Russia and flirting with lifting sanctions, Trump now says he's close to imposing more sanctions on Russia instead.
Russians with attitude account on X even makes it a better point.
If you go to the next one, it says, Trump be like, quote, please stop winning, Russia, which is essentially what he's saying.
And Alex Christoforo, who is one half of the indispensable Duran team, again, summed it up perfectly.
If you go to that next one, now he commented on what Trump said this morning about sanctions on Russia by saying, given the fact that U.S. officials are now openly admitting that they are in a proxy war with Russia and Ukraine, and that refers to Rubio, which he said yesterday, the very first time an American official said that.
So given the fact that America admits that it's a proxy war, Alex goes on to say, it would be best for the Trump White House to simply admit that its proxy has lost and wind this thing down.
Sanctions only strengthen Russia and weaken the collective West.
And we've seen that subjectively true over the last three years.
Alex continues, Trump's art of the deal back and forth with Ukraine is only setting up his administration for a military defeat.
A defeat that could have been attributed to Biden and company, but now runs the risk of being attributed to Trump.
And this truth post on the heels of a closing Kursk cauldron is a weak and panic look.
I would say well said, Alex.
Trump, you can walk away from this.
It's Biden's war.
It's not yours.
Wash your hands like Pontius Pilot and run as fast as you can away from it.
Not that he's listening to me, Chris, but that's what I'd say if he asked me.
I agree.
And when I read more sanctions, I'm thinking to myself, how ridiculous.
I mean, I remember when all the sanctions were put on.
Remember all the U.S. companies were pulling out of Russia.
There were Ukraine flags everywhere.
Remember going to the airport, seeing signs, how we stand with Ukraine.
And I believe that Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world by far.
I think I'm right about that.
I remember seeing a graph and nobody's even close and it all failed.
All the sanctions failed.
Russia's fine.
They have plenty of big friends.
We failed on the battlefield.
All the 300 billion failed.
All the weapons that NATO pumped in failed.
So this is when I hear Trump saying more sanctions, I'm hearing more COVID boosters.
They don't work.
Keep taking more of them.
It's embarrassing.
Just get out of this already.
Don't string it along.
You don't have to look tough.
You know, sometimes the tough guy is the one who knows that he's beat.
And he doesn't have to be the one that's beat.
You could blame all this on Biden.
Just get out of it and, you know, and stop with the threats.
I think that's enough.
Amen.
Daniel, yeah, you know, you mentioned earlier how Trump has these blinded supporters.
And then on the other side, there's blinded hatred.
They can't say one good thing about him, no matter what he says.
The blind supporters cannot say one bad thing about him, no matter what he does.
And what we said before he even took office is Trump is a mixed bag.
Take it one principle at a time, one policy at a time, and you'll be fine.
One thing that I wanted to bring up is this Panama Canal, because what this showed me is even though the mainstream media is disintegrating and becoming irrelevant, X is wonderful, excellent.
Elon Musk saved us, saved free speech.
But one thing that cannot be eliminated is herd mentality.
And that exists on X2.
Even though you don't have the mainstream media, you have herd mentality because this is a human thing.
People like to be nestled into a crowd.
They like to be comfortable.
They don't want to be different.
They don't want the crowd to ostracize them and kick them out.
So they will go along with whatever is popular.
And one thing that was popular when Trump was first elected is we're going to take Panama.
U.S. is going to take Greenland, Canada.
All of a sudden, we're turning into this global imperialist.
And the Panama Canal looks like it happened.
America is back.
The U.S. is going to take the Panama Canal.
Well, what do we just find out this week?
Guess who took the Panama Canal?
BlackRock.
Is BlackRock the U.S.?
Was that how it was sold?
You know, I saw all these memes with the U.S. flag all over the place and Greenland and Canada and Panama.
I didn't see any BlackRock logos.
So what ended up happening is these right-wing influencers ran cover for what ended up to be BlackRock.
So this, and this is, this is all herd mentality.
And I don't see him saying anything now about it.
Just sweep it under the rug like the COVID vaccines.
But this is, you know, this is what happens.
U.S. is going to.
U.S. is going to.
Well, who is this U.S. that is going to?
Is it BlackRock?
Is it Pfizer?
Is it Moderna?
That's who ends up being the U.S.
But what ends up happening is you get all this jingoistic patriotic fervor.
And then, you know, later on, weeks later, you find out that it wasn't the bill of goods that you were sold.
So BlackRock took the Panama Canal and right-wing influencers cheered on this globalist company taking the canal.
That's a great point, Chris.
And the thing that right-wing influencers did was help the administration when they delivered a nothing burger on the Epstein files.
Remember, they delivered these dossiers directly to these right-wing influencers who were props in a play and rightly got egg on their face.
So we have to be skeptical of these types too, because they're in it for the griff.
And that is a fact.
Americans will not benefit from BlackRock running the Panama Canal.
That is the opposite.
March 22nd, Lake Jackson 00:01:13
Well, I'm going to close out, Chris, if you don't mind.
And I'll close out by telling our viewers that March 22nd, Lake Jackson.
You're going to want to hang out with Chris Rostini.
He's going to be there at the conference.
He's going to be participating in the conference.
He's going to be hanging around.
So am I. Come down and have a great time.
It'll be, it's a beautiful venue, Chris.
We've been down there a few times at the, believe it or not, Lake Jackson has a couple of nice places and the Dow Academic Center at our local college is quite a nice place, a very modern place.
So it's going to be a lot of fun.
So I'll put a link in for tickets after the show is over.
I forgot to do it beforehand.
But grab those tickets up.
We're closing in, Chris, on selling out.
You know, we've got a few left.
But anyway, it'll be fun.
Over to you, Chris.
Very good.
Yes, I'm looking forward, as I do every year, of meeting the people that watch us.
It's always a great time.
Also, great speakers.
You will get something out of it.
Hopefully a lot of stuff out of it.
And we look forward to seeing you.
With that being said, on behalf of Dr. Paul Daniel and myself, thank you very much for tuning in today to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
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