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March 27, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:31
Arrested And Deported For Exercising First Amendment Rights?

President Trump announced earlier in his second term that foreign students who engaged in illegal activity would be deported. Most people agreed with the policy. But then his Department of Homeland Security began showing up with masks on and in plainclothes to arrest and deport legal foreign students who broke no law but held views the Administration doesn't like. This is a slippery slope that will backfire on those who support it.

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First Amendment Under Threat 00:03:20
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 morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
We're going to be talking about the First Amendment.
Yes.
We've heard of that.
Sometimes there's a lot of people who forget about it.
But, you know, there was a neat little summary of the First Amendment brought to attention by a friend of ours, Napolitano Justice, Judge Napolitano.
And he reminded us of some dates, which I found fascinating.
You know, it didn't take the Civil War or the First World War or current events to have to, you know, be concerned about the abuse by big government, centralized government's abuse of the First Amendment.
And we always mention frequently, you know, quite frequently, the way big government works because, you know, truth becomes treason in an empire.
Lies, the empires are run by treasonous people.
But I think the point that Judge Napolitano pointed out is the sequence.
It wasn't recent.
It was right in the second president, John Adams.
He's the one that gave us the anti-sedition acts.
And of course, most of that was repealed by Jefferson immediately, you know, after he, well, after he became president.
But so it was immediate.
So it must be a characteristic of human nature.
There's big people, you know, the people at the beginning, they had the anti-federalists and the federalists.
And there was a contest over power, money, and control.
And what do they have to do if they want to control power and money?
They have to control speech.
And they have to either threaten or punish people with speech.
And Napoleon points it out very early on.
And it's been going ever since.
And, you know, I don't know whether he mentioned it in his article, but it deserves mentioning about the first World War I, how the abuse was done.
So this is something we're facing today.
We're seeing it on a regular basis because it has to do with power and war and political systems and what's going on in the Middle East, Ukraine, in Gaza, and now, you know, throughout the world, we have suppression of speech, but it's starting to hit home.
It's sitting home.
We have an empire to defend.
And we do that with threats and innuendos and suppression of free speech, scare people out of it.
And there's been more and more cases.
And, you know, there were some promises made in the last election about having a much more open and honest government.
But right now, unfortunately, from my viewpoint, we're seeing where there's breaks in this.
And we better not be overconfident that we have people in place that will really worry about our freedom to speak out.
And we were very unhappy with the previous administration.
And I sure hope it doesn't happen with this one.
But there are hints that makes a few of us a little bit concerned, maybe a lot of concern.
Concerns About Free Speech 00:15:06
One of the things the greatest misunderstandings of our system in the U.S. is, and I still get it when I post on X about this, that the First Amendment and the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, they're not granted by government.
You know, the framers of the Constitution, the people who started this country, put them down on paper because they recognized that they pre-existed government, they're granted by our creator or our humanity or whatever you want to call it.
They're simply recognizing in a state of nature, man has the ability to speak what he wishes, he or she wishes.
And people say, well, that doesn't apply to non-citizens.
Of course it does.
It's not granted by government.
That's the whole purpose of it.
But anyway, it is a very, very chilling slope that we're going down now.
And that's why we wanted to focus on this.
And now let's put up this first clip.
Now, this is the latest in a series of events where people in plain clothes with their faces covered will go and they will arrest someone without identifying themselves and take them away without a without a warrant, without telling their family, what have you.
Put on that first clip.
Now, the latest is Ramesa Oz Turk.
She is a PhD student at Tufts University.
Federal agents arrest Tufts student as part of crackdown on pro-Palestine speech.
She's a Turkish student in the U.S. on an F1 student visa.
She was arrested outside of her apartment.
She's in federal custody.
She's been taken from Massachusetts and sent down to Louisiana, which is the same thing that happened with Khalil Mahmood, another student who was arrested.
Her lawyer said she's not been able to contact her.
Go to the next one.
Now, what happened?
Well, this is what's really chilling, Dr. Paul.
There are these NGOs that are probably affiliated with foreign governments that are keeping lists of people who say things they don't like.
And they're giving that list to the government.
Oz Turk had been targeted by the Canary Mission, a pro-Israel group that doxes students and professors, professors who are critical of Israel.
The Canary Missions page on Oz Turk lists only one example of her, quote, anti-Israel activism, and that is co-authoring an op-ed that called for Tufts University to divest from Israel and acknowledging the Palestinian genocide.
No reason was given for her arrest.
Her visa has been revoked, and she's about to be deported from the United States for writing an op-ed.
Now, I do have a video of her arrest.
Tell me if this doesn't remind you of something out of the Gestapo or out of the Soviet times, where this woman is walking down the street, people with masks on break out of their cars and arrest her.
And she rightly, as a young woman, is terrified that a man accosts her, grabs her.
And let's cue up that video and watch this, a full screen list.
And let's watch.
This is a surveillance of what happened.
I believe that happens in the U.S., Dr. Paul.
It seems bizarre.
You know, the real irony here is she was reciting our policies since 1948 because we pretend that we're for a Tuesday solution.
And I think a two-state solution, if you're talking about written law and man law versus natural law, it seems like it would be natural to have people voluntarily, you know, come together and work together, but at times separate oneself and you have two special.
There's still a lot that exists in the world.
But this is a whole thing.
They're challenging something that's been official.
I wonder if there's ever been a president or anybody that spoke out against that.
Somebody must have said something, but traditionally, that is official.
Right now, they like to avoid it.
They don't even want to bring that subject up.
The thing that is really troubling is she didn't beat up a Jewish student.
She didn't burn down a Jewish building.
She simply wrote an editorial in her school newspaper.
And for that, she gets this.
Now, if she had blown up a building, what have you, you know, the police would have come and they would have been dressed like police and identified themselves.
We are the police.
You blew up a building or we suspect you did and you're under arrest.
Instead, you can see them putting on their masks.
And again, you're a young foreign woman going to school in the U.S. and you see this kind of thing.
She probably recognized it from the darker days of Turkey when they had military rule, etc.
So very, very disturbing.
Again, for writing an op-ed.
Wouldn't it be interesting?
How many people were participating in the arrest, six or eight or you know what would be interesting is to get the home addresses, not for an evil reasons, but the home addresses of these people, what state are they from?
Are they local police officials that's supposed to be involved?
And if there has been a crime committed?
No, they're from probably all over the place, which really makes it worse than ever if they can bring people in like that.
But anyway, the damage has been done no matter what their home addresses were.
But my suspicion is they had to gather people up like that.
And you wonder why it's so easy to find six or eight people willing to do that.
Where are their brains and where are their sense of morality about doing that?
I wonder if they have any idea how serious a crime they committed.
I mean, they're the ones who are committing the crime.
Yeah, absolutely.
And well, you warned about this back after 9-11 when they wanted to create, they're from the Department of Homeland Security.
And you warned that we're creating an organization that's going to start behaving.
I don't know if you use the exact words.
They're going to start behaving like the Gestapo.
They're going to view themselves as being above everything else.
And now we're seeing that in real time.
Everyone likes to say, Ron Paul was right.
You were right in this circumstance.
But I don't think a lot of people are going to want to acknowledge this part.
That's right.
Being used for it.
But now, thankfully, now this is Christy Noam's Department of Homeland Security, and she has some very unusual views.
But as usual, we can turn to people who actually stand up for civil liberties regardless of who's in power.
And one of those people is Glenn Greenwald, a good friend of ours, good friend of the show.
Now, he has a couple of really interesting posts on X about this.
He has a thread about the arrest of this young woman.
And now the Prem Thacker posts that new DHS claims without citing proof that Rumaisa Oz Turk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.
Among the activity she engaged in was the writing, co-writing of an op-ed urging Tufts to heed student resolutions, right?
That's what they're claiming now.
That is activity in support of Hamas, writing an editorial.
So Glenn Greenwald comments and says, Trump campaign, we promise mass deportations of those here illegally, starting with violent criminals.
Trump administration, actually, our priority are those in the country legally.
Postdocs, Fulbright scholars, PhDs who commit the supreme crime of writing op-eds against Israel.
He's got a good point.
Well, I'll tell you what, that's for sure.
So we do have some good people out there, but they are not necessarily the one that the major part of the media reports to and gets a real debate.
Fortunately, there's a little bit of debate going on, but I still think that people who are the authoritarians, even from John Adams all the way through, there's always some.
And they tend to be in charge because they have political power and their incentive is to have political power.
No resistance because they don't want to hear any.
I think the people who react this way are insecure.
They're trying to prove themselves that their side is winning and they don't want anybody to talk about what they're doing.
They don't want to hear the truth about what's happening, but the truth needs to come out.
And thank goodness for people like Greenwald and others who will speak out.
They're out there.
Most of them are our friends.
Yeah, exactly.
Thankfully.
Well, here is a couple of more posts from Glenn on the topic.
This is a thread that he put out that really is worth taking a look at.
If you go to that next one.
Now, this is what's really chilling, Dr. Paul.
The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security are taking orders from extremist pro-Israel groups such as Canary Mission and Betar USA.
They keep lists of students who criticize Israel, and the U.S. government uses those lists to deport people.
Glenn continues.
You can freely criticize the U.S., but not Israel.
And that's exactly what happened to her.
And he makes a very important observation because, you know, there's a lot of talk about the woke right.
And the right will say that's untrue.
We're not woke.
But the fact is, they're just as woke.
If you put this next one on, Greenwald points out the American right spent a decade viciously mocking the left for trying to cleanse American universities of views that made minority groups unsafe or that constituted hate speech.
Now that's their goal, not for Americans, but for a foreign country.
They're doing exactly what they accuse the left of, is saying, is canceling people for having the right, for the wrong quote unquote views, not for doing illegal things.
Boy, that's for sure.
And it just seems like the task is, if not greater, it's significant.
It hasn't gotten easier for us because in many ways, some of our allies are into the group of people who are running things now.
And it's hard to criticize the administration for so many other things, because I believe there's a lot of people who are optimistic that we're going to cut back on the size and scope of government.
But are we going to cut back on the size and scope of the government that's going to regulate our speech?
That's the question we're trying to answer today.
Yeah, and people have to speak up.
I mean, we hope President Trump does well.
We're not against him.
But this is a bad thing.
You shouldn't do bad things.
And if no one speaks up, this is a slippery slope.
It's an absolute slippery slope.
And I do have Trump's original word.
But when he first talked about this, he said, we are going to deport illegal students in here involved in illegal activity, to which a lot of people said, okay, well, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
If a student comes over here and starts blowing up buildings, yeah, they should be gone.
But then the first people they arrest are people who are engaged in absolutely protected First Amendment activities.
It's a real problem.
But I wanted to, now go ahead and skip ahead to that op-ed try again.
I'm going to skip the last one because we basically covered it.
But I wanted to read the op-ed, Dr. Paul, that got this woman arrested in the street.
And I didn't, it was quite a long op-ed, but I wanted to read the entire thing to make sure that we weren't making a mistake.
Maybe she said something really, really bad or evil in it.
And in fact, it was a very long op-ed, as students are wont to do, urging the university to respect the vote of the student organizations that are criticizing Israel's behavior in Gaza.
Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation, indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians, and plausible genocide.
Now, that is what she wrote that got her arrested in the middle of the day by people wearing masks.
Now, I went to another source of newspaper, the Forward, the Jewish Forward, which is one of the oldest, I think, the oldest Jewish newspaper in the United States.
If you go to that next one, it's not just people who are pro-Palestine who are concerned.
Jewish groups are very concerned because they're involved in the protest too.
Now, this is an op-ed by Josh Nathan Kaziz, and he said one of the largest Jewish charities in the U.S. has been secretly funding a shadowy online blacklist targeting college students who criticize Israel.
For three years, a website called Canary Mission has spread fear among undergraduate activists, posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student supporters of Palestinian rights.
The dossiers are meant to harm students' job prospects and have been used in interrogation by Israeli security officials.
At the same time, the website has gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial trail, connecting it to its donors and staff.
Registered through a secrecy service, the site is untraceable.
So, this group comes out here.
You can't find where it's funded or how it's funded.
And they're basically set out to destroy the lives of anyone who speaks up in any way critically of Israel, which in fact happens to include hundreds, probably thousands of Jewish students.
Yeah, and eventually will punish the very people they pretend they're protecting.
You know, the labels, I think, are very important, both negatively and positively.
But, you know, after 9/11, the term terrorist has been used.
All you have to say, he's a terrorist, he's a terrorist.
And it always bugged me the fact that you could have two people doing exactly the same thing.
But if you get charged with terrorism, because it's terrorism, almost a subject, a subjective viewpoint, you're interpreting what their real goal is.
But if you can label on that, the punishment is different.
How can you have relative punishments because somebody is labeled a terrorist?
Punishing Perceptions 00:02:35
And right now, they have these labels that they put on people.
So now, if you come in and write something, which we might find more truthful than what we get from the major media, they're getting punished.
And the people too often are supporting the people that think they should be punished.
They should be thrown out there.
Look, we've seen pictures of them on TV.
You know, they're evil people, but not looking at the details of it.
And believe me, I was pretty strongly against all this.
I called it the whole mess, an invasion that was going on.
And it was, we subsidized that monstrous thing.
And now we're seeing something coming out of it, which is not necessarily, you know, an answer to what we had to put up with for those four years.
Yeah, exactly.
We're all for it.
People are here illegally.
Well, we got to deal with it.
You know, we're not against that.
Now, I don't often do this, but I want to mention on the chat, we have someone called Beard Dimfel who says, if you're not a citizen, do you even have any rights?
The right to own firearms, the right to free speech.
We can answer this over and over again, of course, because these rights are not granted by the government.
They are a recognition of the state of nature over and over again.
We have to say this until I'm green in the face.
Not only my shirt.
But go on to the next one.
Now, this is from the Jewish Forward.
They make a good point that not only is this blacklist terrible, it doesn't work.
So they go on to say Canary Mission has been controversial since it appeared in mid-2015, drawing comparisons to a McCarthyite blacklist.
Well, some of those listed on the site are prominent activists.
Others are students who attended a single event or even student government representatives suspected of voting for resolutions that are critical of Israel.
In recent months, it has been the subject of, and I highlight this, growing backlash from pro-Israel Jewish students and local Hillel professionals who say it's damaging to their own work.
Now go to the next one.
This is Tilly Shames, who runs the campus Hillel at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
And she said, the tactics of the organization are troubling, both from the moral standpoint, but have also been proven to be ineffective and counterproductive.
She goes on to state that the Canary Missions publication of dossiers on students on her campus has led to greater support for the targeted students and their beliefs and had spread mistrust of the pro-Israel students who were suspected of spying for Canary Mission.
Why We Give Away Money 00:07:10
So it had the opposite effect that they wanted.
Sort of like all those accusations against Trump being the most evil monster in the world.
And the boy, the boy they pretended how bad he was, well, we'll impeach him two, three times, whatever is necessary.
And it was building his reputation.
It was a positive.
So there's a point of no return.
They lose credibility.
But in the meantime, a lot of people can suffer from these false charges or whatever they're trying to do or what the real motivation is.
You know, the one thing about Judge Napolitano that I really liked, and I emphasize it more than I used to, and that is his point about natural law, you know, and humanity, which is something that is universal.
And it's not, you know, they call that the other one positive law.
And I always say, why do they call that positive?
You know, it's the government law.
It's so negative.
But the positive law is what's written down and reinterpreted and it challenges the natural law.
And there's a lot to learn because the founders, the founders understood the term natural law.
And matter of fact, it motivated the First Amendment when they were writing that, that they wanted to make sure it included all people for all reasons of expression.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the judge gave a keynote to our students, Ron Paul Scholar seminar last year.
Those were a lucky group of students.
I was lucky just to sit in on it because that's what he talked about.
It was an hour of power when he talked about the framers' intent, natural law.
It was just terrific, terrific stuff.
Great.
Well, I'm going to close out, I guess.
We're getting close to the witching hour here.
And I'll do something a little bit different to close, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind.
I want to just give a shout out, put on that very last clip.
I want to give a shout out to our friends over at antiwar.com.
You know, we rely on them a lot.
We rely on Dave DeCamp and the others a lot when we do this show.
And it's their turn to raise a little bit of money.
You've got to keep groups like this alive if you want to get the truth out.
You can only imagine how many organizations and groups would love to see anti-war.com shut down.
We consider them a sister organization.
We support each other.
We help each other with different things.
And so they're doing their spring fundraising.
I would encourage anyone who benefits from them to go ahead and look in there and give to antiwar.com.
They have a message up now today from John Mearsheimer.
It's a great group, friends of ours for decades, 20, 30 years from the very beginning.
So, you know, a lot of stuff has been going on throughout history about regulating speech because people are threatened by that and they're insecure about it.
And they don't have a love of liberty and they have a much greater interest and they justify it morally.
The people need help.
They need people like us are smart.
We need them.
They need us to take care of them.
How would they eat?
And how would they get medical care?
How would they get a good education?
And they're convinced that they're doing well.
Others are just pure warmongers and power seekers.
And, you know, I've often said that our foreign policy is atrocious.
It's based on the assumption of empire.
And to gather up more supporters and empire, we go to the Uyghur nations.
And because we are artificially, have been artificially very, very wealthy beyond our means.
And now it's being discovered maybe we aren't quite as wealthy as we thought we were.
So we would go in and we still are capable of doing it because compared to others, we are still a rich and blessed country.
So we go into the people that we want them to do our dirty work for and do and carry out some evil things that we don't personally want to be blamed for.
We've shifted from losing a lot of lives in Korea, like in Korea and Vietnam, and now we just support certain invasions and different things because we have money.
We buy the bombs and the information they need and send in some other troops.
And now I think the control has changed a little bit because, you know, I say we give them money.
And if they do what we say, we give them more money as long as they respond.
If they don't, then we bomb them.
But right now, it's we give people money and the demands are you will say what we do and you will play the propaganda scheme and you will not say anything that we consider all, you know, not sufficiently supporting our position, even if it does violate, you know, some fundamental premises of civil liberties.
So I think now, you know, just like when the individuals commit crimes, well, we'll take away your money.
Oh, Columbia University, they have this conflict there, say, all right, we're going to take away your money.
And Columbia decides, well, we better be careful.
So we threaten them.
It's almost like you send them money and you're going to bribe them to control them.
You don't bomb them.
You just tell them how they're going to live and what they're going to say and what they're going to do and fight if you have to.
So I think that is a terrible move.
It's more difficult to understand and resist because a lot of people don't see through this that they are really being bribed through our money.
But then that will all end because I just don't think we have the money to do that forever.
And the people do respond.
And then they go around and the people will capitulate, but it will also mean that we want control and we control it through our money.
So as our monetary system gets weaker and the dollar gets weaker, it's going to be more difficult to buy that type of control, whether it's the threat of bombs or the threat that we're going to deny you your foreign aid.
Well, why don't we start with not giving the foreign aid out in the first place in order for us to use that as a weapon against them?
So we give them the money.
You do what we say.
Oh, your punishment is going to be is we're going to take away something we gave to you illegally in the first place.
You could take away the money anyway and deal with the other problem.
But no, it's complex and yet it might look different to different people, but it's the same thing.
It's control, it's authoritarianism versus personal liberty.
So that's one thing that we'd like to do at the Liberty Report is promote peace and prosperity.
And I'll tell you what, it's not difficult to understand that if you want more peace and prosperity, it won't be hard to understand why personal liberty is the real issue at hand.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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