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March 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:33
Tom Woods - "The Ron Paulian Roots of MAGA (and What It Still Has to Learn)"

Libertarian communicator Tom Woods traces our current political moment back to the first two Ron Paul Republican Presidential runs...

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Time Text
Introducing Tom Woods 00:02:00
It was me and my dad.
We were sitting in the audience.
And one of the speakers was Tom Woods.
And I remember it like it was yesterday.
That was 20 years ago.
And if you would have come up to me as I was sitting at the table and said, you know, in 20 years, you're going to be on a stage introducing Tom Woods, I would have thought you were crazy.
What are you talking about?
I wasn't involved in a liberty movement.
So you never know what can happen with your life.
And here I am about to introduce the great Tom Woods.
He's a brilliant communicator.
I think he's a libertarian overachiever.
I could stand here for an hour describing all that he has done for our movement.
He's a brilliant communicator, host of the very popular Tom Woods show, creator of the Liberty Classroom, courses on the Ron Paul curriculum he's created.
Best-selling author.
And he has enough fans and supporters that he takes them on cruises.
So what a pleasure.
20 years later, I'm standing, introducing the great Tom Woods.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
I don't know how closely you've looked at your schedule, but evidently I'm speaking from 11:30 to 11:30.
So I'm just here to say hi, basically.
Stop by to say hi.
All right.
I've got to make this not quite a full minute count.
In 2007, when I heard that Ron Paul was going to run for president in the Republican primary, I actually thought to myself, that ought to shake things up.
And I didn't really appreciate at that time what the long-term significance of it would indeed be, because I believe it started the ball rolling on all the best parts of our present political moment.
Paving the Way for Change 00:03:47
The worst parts are still there because they haven't fully absorbed the ideas of Ron Paul.
But it was Ron Paul who first pushed that Overton window open wider and wider.
And he resonated with people because he was a regular person.
He was a normal person.
He didn't speak to you in slogans.
He didn't treat you like you were seven.
He didn't wait to hear what a focus group told him people wanted to be told.
He told them hard truths and let the chips fall where they may.
It reminds me of what Jon Stewart said to him in their first interview together.
Jon Stewart said to Ron Paul, Dr. Paul, you appear to have consistent, principled integrity.
Americans don't usually go for that.
In 2008, Dr. Paul had a book called The Revolution, and it was translated into a number of other languages.
One of them was Italian.
Now, a lot of Italians were probably unfamiliar with the term the Ron Paul Revolution.
So the Italian translation of that book had as its title, of course, in Italian, not the revolution, but the third America.
And I always felt like that was a very insightful title because Dr. Paul does represent the third America.
There is a third America.
An America that believes that there's a choice other than sanctions and bombing.
Starving people to death or killing them.
Those are two Americas, but there's a third America represented by the people in this room.
Or activist judges who lean left and activist judges who lean right.
Maybe there's a third America where we strip activist judges of jurisdiction in areas where they have no business.
That's the third America.
Or how about a Department of Education run by progressives or a Department of Education run by neoconservatives?
There's a third America.
How about no Department of Education?
And by the way, when you try to abolish the Department of Education, you know what's going to happen.
You're going to be told you hate education.
Because after all, the Department of Education has education in the name.
And that's all these people need to know.
Well, the reason we want to abolish it is it's unconstitutional.
Education is properly a local concern.
And by the way, in case anybody cares, not a single educational metric appears to have improved since 1979.
And in fact, when you say the year 1979, the absurdity of the whole thing becomes manifest.
Are we to say that we had no educated people before, like 1979 was the pinnacle of human achievement, the 1970s, really?
Dr. Paul gave the right permission to be anti-war and thereby paved the way for a Donald Trump to come along and say, you know, this Iraq war was based on lies, lies told by the family of this creep Jeb Bush.
The way had been paved for brains to accept this.
Nobody could look at Dr. Paul's record and say he's some kind of a commie.
He had a better record than any of his critics.
And he insisted that empire is the wrong approach for a free society.
Scott Horton's Debate 00:08:38
Now, Jeff Dice talked about the old right, and you can find a bunch of those people who made exactly these arguments.
One of them was Felix Morley, who for a time was editor of Human Events.
Felix Morley sounded like Pat Buchanan, which is how basically everybody sounded in those days.
And they had many arguments, and some of them were arguments going all the way back to the framers of the Constitution about the dangers of empire, the dangers of war to a free society.
And really, how long could this seriously have gone on trying to convince conservatives that having an overseas empire was in their interests, that this was somehow a conservative thing?
How long were you really going to snooker these people into believing, you know, it would be revolutionary and impossible to have food stamps at home, but we can export feminism to Afghanistan.
At some point, somebody was going to wake up and say, this is like weird, utopian weirdness.
I mean, what is conservative about any of this?
It doesn't conserve anything.
And I could go on, we'd give a whole talk on that, but I don't want to do that.
Instead, I want to recall a moment that I bet a lot of you have forgotten.
But it's a moment I remember distinctly.
Late January 2008, only four candidates remained.
It was a debate between Mitt Romney, John McCain.
This is already sounding fascinating, isn't it?
Mitt Romney against John McCain.
Battle of the Titans right there.
Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.
Now, in this debate, Romney and McCain have this extended argument about who said he was going to move however many troops into Iraq on what timetable and when they were going to remove them.
And it went back and forth, and it was absolutely inane because none of this amounts to anything other than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.
Utterly frivolous and trivial because the two of them were so close on the issue, you couldn't even slide a credit card between them.
So one America was Romney, the other indistinguishable second America was McCain.
Who could even tell the difference?
But the third America was Ron Paul.
And I want to quote for you what he said.
Now I've condensed it a bit.
Here's what he said.
I find this rather silly because they're arguing technicalities of a policy they both agree with.
Somebody finally says it.
He says, these are technicalities.
We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policeman of the world.
Instead, he went on, we have these silly arguments going on about who said what when.
So finally, somebody speaks up and says, these so-called debates we have in this country aren't even debates.
They're a joke.
Well, then after the debate was over, what do you suppose all the commentators talked about?
Now, if we lived in a normal society where our media personalities weren't robots or creatures from other planets or lizard people, they would have said, well, it was very important for Ron Paul to point out that the debate was without substance.
No!
What did they all say?
They said, well, you know what was most interesting about that debate was that confrontation between Romney and McCain.
A confrontation about nothing.
But we had that third America on that stage if people cared to listen.
And what started to happen is that thanks to this ground being laid, is that we now live in a world which it's true tried to suppress the message of a Ron Paul, but that toothpaste got out of the tube and isn't going back in.
We now live in a world, thanks to Dr. Paul paving the way, not only in which a Donald Trump can make irreverent remarks about previous American foreign policy, but also where our good friend Scott Horton, who honestly Scott Horton would give his right arm, his left arm, both of his legs and his brain to Ron Paul if he asked him for them.
We have Scott Horton debating one of the worst warmongering neoconservatives imaginable, Bill Crystal, in a public debate several years ago.
Nobody knows why Crystal agreed to this.
Did he not know who Scott Horton was?
Because those of you who have seen this debate know that Bill Crystal got his head handed to him in that debate.
It was a massacre.
It was devastating.
These people of the first and second Americas live in a bubble where all they do is debate America number one and America number two.
And the third America is not even on the table.
But Scott was there to represent that third America, and he absolutely destroyed Bill Crystal.
And as Crystal was leaving the building, Scott tried to speak to him, and Crystal turned around and said, I don't owe you one more minute of my time.
He had been absolutely humiliated, not prepared, because he's used to debating foreign policy with people who agree with him on 93% of it.
But suddenly, there was the guy.
There was the Ron Paul figure on the stage.
Well, now Scott has had the opportunity to go one-on-one with General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and go toe-to-toe with him.
And Clark knows he's dealing with a serious person.
More recently, just a few days ago, Christopher Steele, you know, the liar behind the steele dossier?
It's all lies.
He was on Piers Morgan against guess who? Scott Horton.
And Scott ripped him a new one.
It was unbelievable.
And Scott said, I can't believe this liar dares to show his face.
And he just went down the whole list of things this guy had lied about.
That's the world we live in because these steps were taken back in 2007.
Now, Dr. Paul was not a household name the way Donald Trump was.
So the approach that the media took to him was different from the approach they took with Trump.
The approach with Dr. Paul was just to ignore him, to suppress news about him.
I mean, those of us who were around for this, we remember this.
Like, we can all recall examples of this.
Everybody knew who Donald Trump was, though.
So you couldn't pretend he wasn't running for president or not mention him or whatever.
So they had to try a different strategy against him.
The strategy against Donald Trump was to treat him absurdly, accuse him of treason, call him a Nazi, whatever.
That's what they did.
Now, had Dr. Paul won the Republican nomination, you better believe they would have shifted into that Trump mode against him.
Because at that point, the whole country knows about him.
Then they would have shifted into the crazy lies and he's going to bring the Nazis back or whatever.
It would all have come out.
But they thought they could just get away with ignoring him.
That was a mistake.
That didn't work.
That made people more curious.
Why are you ignoring him?
Because it was creepy.
If I may cite Jon Stewart one more time, Jon Stewart actually said on the Daily Show, when did Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel?
Good question.
At Fordham University, a professor named Paul Levinson, who, by the way, was not in sympathy with Dr. Paul's ideas, but who had this old-fashioned commitment to basic fairness, started talking about this phenomenon of the way Dr. Paul was treated.
And he said, I gave a 45-minute lecture to my class at Fordham University in September 2007 about the mass media's misreporting of Ron Paul in the presidential campaign, about how ABC and Fox, especially, cropped pictures, left Ron Paul out of poll reports, and committed other lies of omission in their coverage.
Now, I want to show you on the screen here my own personal favorite example of invisible Ron Paul.
Ron Paul's Media Battle 00:15:15
So here it is here.
Okay, so this is a photo of a TV screen.
So in this quarter, Dr. Paul had actually come in second in fundraising.
Now look really closely at the screen, and I leave as an exercise to the viewer which candidate is missing from this report.
Not even if it's, they want you to know that Tim Paulenti is doing okay.
That's very important.
Tim Paulenti, remember John Huntsman?
Neither do I. Herman Kaine, I remember a little.
Herman Kaine was the guy who, one week before Fannie and Freddie went into receivership, said there's nothing wrong with the U.S. economy, and anyone who says there is is a liberal who hates George W. Bush.
That was how clueless Herman Kane was.
Oh, and he had worked at one of the regional Fed banks.
So that, what does that tell you?
And Newt Gingrich is Newt Gingrich.
So no Ron Paul.
Anyway, like just not even, not even there.
Not even there.
Like they would say, they would talk about the first and then the third, thinking no one would ask who was the second.
All right.
I do have, I have one other slide, and this is to save me.
I used to do a lot more public speaking than I do today.
And I would walk through airports lugging suitcases full of books around so that I could sell them at events.
And I have just decided that I don't want to do that anymore.
I like to just walk through the airport, gliding a light little carry-on with me and not lugging.
I mean, my gosh, my days of lugging suitcases through airports are absolutely over.
So I have these.
You can actually just get them electronically now.
Okay?
You can get them electronically.
So you will find every controversial topic.
I've got a book on it.
So I have a book called Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Gender.
I have a book called Our Enemy, the Fed.
So when your friends say, well, wait a minute, didn't we have downturns before we had a Fed?
We can't blame that on the Fed.
I got all the arguments to answer that.
I have the deregulation caused the financial crisis of 2008.
I have a book on that because that's not true.
If only we had been able to crack more skulls, we could have prevented the housing crash, is what they think.
So if you go there, you can get yourself some free books, and I don't have to carry anything.
Now, we had to therefore try all different strategies to get the word out because the choice is when you have an anti-establishment candidate, either he's ignored or called a Nazi.
So we were in the ignored phase, so we had to think of ways creatively to get the word out.
And I have such fond memories of this.
Some of you may remember this.
We had a night called Paint the Town Ron.
And at night, you were to go out and hang up Ron Paul signs everywhere and Google Ron Paul and who is Ron Paul.
And then the next day, everybody would wake up and feel like an occupying force had taken over their town.
And it would arouse curiosity.
I did that.
And I tried to be, you know, my thought was: this is public property, and I'm simply using my proportional share of it by hanging a Ron Paul sign.
And if you want to take it down, you can take it down.
At Halloween in 2007, there was a website called RonPaulawen.com.
And the idea here was you can burn a CD with information and speeches of Ron Paul and stick it in with the kids' candy when they come to your door.
You're not going to be the most popular neighbor, but you might get a few more Ron Paul voters.
If you wanted to go as Ron Paul for Halloween, we had RonPaulMask.com.
I mean, the thing, it was crazy, absolutely crazy.
But you could see something was brewing.
The foundation was cracking.
The foundation that would try to impose Jeb Bush in 2016, Dr. Paul was already cracking away at it back in 2008.
So in 2007, to me, the first piece of evidence that something was really, really happening was there was a tax forum that was put on in Iowa that was co-sponsored by something called Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance.
And they were going to talk about taxes with the Republican presidential candidates.
Except by some oddball coincidence, they hadn't invited Dr. Paul.
So these are people living in Gotham trying to figure out what to do about the Riddler, but they're not going to invite Batman to help them figure that out.
So at the time, so I called them.
I just needed to know why would you not invite him?
What reason do you have?
And I knew why, because they're all establishment hacks and they don't want an anti-establishment guy.
But I called him up, and it was a guy named Ed Phaler.
And I looked into old Ed Phaler, and it turns out he had been a supporter of George Pataki.
Now, that's an old name you might not remember.
George Pataki was governor of New York for a while, and he was the emptiest of empty suits in a GOP filled with empty suits.
And Phaler was a supporter of George Pataki.
So there isn't going to be any Ron Paul revolution with this guy.
So I wrote about it and publicized it.
I wrote about it on Lewerockwell.com about exactly what was happening.
I thought, let me at least embarrass them a little bit for doing this.
Well, we got a little bit more than that.
What we got instead was the Ron Paul supporters decided, well, we're not just going to take this lying down.
We're going to go to the same building where they're having their event with the seven candidates.
And Dr. Paul's going to give a speech on taxes across the hall.
Just one candidate.
And he had more people for just him than the other seven had for their roundtable where they were going to talk about how they might try to cut things by 2%.
And what was great about it was we have film of it.
The Ron Paul people marched into the building all together, single file, all of a sudden, all these people with Ron Paul revolution signs, one after the other, after the other.
And you can see the faces of the organizers.
What in heaven's name is going on here?
Well, you blanked around and you found out is what happened.
So then in 2008, Dr. Paul had not won the Republican nomination.
John McCain had won the nomination.
And were we just going to have that be the end of it?
I mean, we had to go out with some kind of dramatic finish.
So there was the rally for the Republic in 2008.
The Republican convention was held in St. Paul, so the Twin Cities.
The other one is Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is where the Rally for the Republic was held that same week that they nominated John McCain.
Now, how were we going to fill that target center that holds like 10,000 people when the Republican convention had already taken up all the hotel space in the area for months, all the rental cars for months?
Logistically, this can't be done.
There's no way we can bring all those people in there.
But yes, there is, because the frustration with the establishment and the feeling like now we have a truth teller on our side was such that we put our heads together and we figured, hey, look, I got a couch somebody can sleep on.
I got this or that.
And we made it work and filled that thing for Dr. Paul for one of the great speeches, in my opinion, of his career.
But meanwhile, during this time, it hadn't quite, it was starting to crack through to some of the smarter people in the U.S.
But smarter people do not include Conservatism Inc.
I will never forget turning on a GOP presidential debate in 2011 and hearing Sean Hannity say, well, tonight, all eyes are on Tim Paulenti.
Not really.
No, not really.
Non-entity.
Absolute non-entity.
This is a guy not a single person in that room or a single person in this room or a single person anywhere in the country has given a second thought to ever since.
And not everyone was ready at that time for a Dr. Paul.
It was very embarrassing to see grassroots GOP activists obediently repeating the media line that Ron Paul was a kook and you should support more respectable candidates.
It never dawned on them, maybe we ought to respect rather than ridicule a man who tells us uncomfortable truths that he knows will get him in trouble instead of flattering us with things we want to hear.
And why didn't these activists even once ask themselves, why are we repeating talking points about Ron Paul that come from the New York Times, which thinks we're Nazis just for being Republicans?
And not to mention, what does the media consider to be a respectable candidate?
If you lay waste to foreign countries on the basis of dumb propaganda, that's A-OK, totally respectable.
If you say something might be wrong with that, or if you suggest that there could be something wrong with a monetary system that destroys and it evaporates 95% of the value of your currency, well, you must be crazy or a kook because the New York Times hasn't given us permission to hold that opinion, so how can you hold it?
The Guardians of Approved Opinion haven't approved this particular opinion for you.
You're not authorized to hold it.
Ron Paul was a kook.
Why?
Because he told people that this foreign policy is counterproductive and evil.
It was the equivalent of setting trillions of dollars on fire and that no, the reason the United States is disliked around the world isn't that Americans are just so awesome and all these foreigners are envious of our awesomeness.
He would not speak to us like we were in elementary school.
And in the short run, he paid a price for that.
But in the long run, he'd be recognized as a prophet.
And it took these Republicans way too long to figure things out.
They would happily pull the lever for Mitt Romney, whose whole career was a series of knives in their backs.
Now, when Donald Trump came along and said these people are shysters and they're all talk and no action, the groundwork for that revolt had already been laid by Dr. Paul.
In fact, so many voices on the new right today say Ron Paul was right.
Well, better late than never.
And now so many influencers with huge audiences use the word warmongers to refer to neocons.
This is a new thing.
Or talking about and perhaps actually executing the abolition of the Department of Education.
How many years had Republicans flap their gums about that one?
And finally, it's actually happening.
Well, Dr. Paul had been paving the way for that.
Also on health, Dr. Paul had been very good on this because he could smell a rat.
The way that big pharma behaved in terms of its relationship with government is not the way that an industry that's innocently pursuing the common good behaves.
So he could see something was fishy about that.
And the health freedom movement rallied to a Ron Paul.
And I believe that that also helped to keep empowering that movement, keeping it strong and vibrant.
And that's culminated in some of the appointments that we've seen to the current administration.
And then in terms of health, let's not forget, who were the two best public officials on COVID?
In my opinion, Thomas Massey and Rand Paul.
Where do they come from?
The Ron Paul Revolution.
That is what I mean about the lasting legacy of what Dr. Paul did.
We've got Elon Musk retweeting Ron Paul, saying Ron was right, the Fed should be audited.
That's great, because I remember I testified before Dr. Paul's subcommittee about auditing the Fed.
It was a very lonely thing at that time.
And I remember being at the airport in D.C., heading back to catch my flight to head home.
The phone rings.
It's Dr. Paul calling me to apologize for the atrocious behavior of his colleagues toward me in the hearing.
But we're finally talking about maybe abolishing things.
You know, you ask, one of the moments in one of the debates was with Tommy Thompson, who was governor of Wisconsin.
And they said, Governor, can you name us three programs you would abolish?
Just three, right?
Dr. Paul could name you three in, you know, 500 billionths of a second, right?
You know, right?
So the answer he gave was he blabbed, and they said, well, we didn't hear three programs.
Can you try one more time?
This was his answer.
Well, the first one, first one, he only gives one.
The first one I would eliminate is a program in the Department of Health and Human Services in CDC that deals with the stockpile.
The stockpile does a great job, but there are some inefficiencies there that we're able to make some efficiencies and make some changes in that would eliminate that program.
I don't know what that means.
I have no idea what that means.
So even the Fox News debate hosts who were not friendly to Dr. Paul, one of them turned to Dr. Paul and said, Congressman Paul, can you do better than that, sir?
And of course he could.
He could list, we have to get rid of this, we have to get rid of this, we have to get rid of this, and people chuckled.
But you asked them today, they want to get rid of this, they want to get rid of it, they're ready.
They weren't ready then, they're ready now.
But what Trump needs to hear the most from our message is that America first means America first.
It doesn't mean America first with an asterisk or America 12th or it doesn't, it means America first.
And when Pat Buchanan was writing some of his final columns before he retired, those columns were really memos to Trump.
Because what, you know, as we heard earlier, sometimes Donald Trump's opinions are formed on the basis of the last person he talked to.
So these memos really matter.
Yeah, they were newspaper columns, but they were memos to Trump.
I believe Tucker Carlson does the same thing with some of his social media posts.
He knows those will get to Trump.
And he knows that on some of these big issues of war and peace, it does matter who the last person he talked to is.
So this is very important.
It's crazy that we live in this environment.
If it were Don Jr., I wouldn't feel like I have to worry about that so much.
If it were some of the influencers themselves, I wouldn't feel like I had to worry about it.
But this is the part of the message that in particular he needs to hear.
And there's a part of the message that the rest of the Make America Great Again movement needs to hear, and that is some of the most important things we need to work on are outside politics.
Now, it's been a great pleasure and fortune of my life to work alongside Dr. Paul on some projects, but in particular, the homeschool curriculum.
This has nothing to do with politics, but it has everything to do with the future, because it means that young people will have a fighting chance of hearing our message on some level.
And not just that, they'll also learn things that I hate to break it to you are not taught at the local schoolhouse, like how to manage their money, how to run a home business, how to be an effective public speaker.
The kinds of things that if we had a whole bunch of young people who knew them, we'd be in much better shape than we are now.
So RonPaulHomeschool.com is the site for that.
Dr. Paul's Vindication 00:01:52
Now, I, for one, am very happy that Dr. Paul has lived to see the beginning of his own vindication.
Although he's such a stoic, it wouldn't have mattered, wouldn't have affected the way he lived his life, whether he was going to win or lose or what.
He was going to do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may.
But we now live in a world in which Roger Stone is pushing for the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Ron Paul.
And as I said at dinner last night, Dr. Paul, I promise if we're able to make that happen, I promise the medal will be privately funded and no taxpayer money will be spent on that medal.
I want to conclude first by thanking the Ron Paul Institute for its important work, for all you wonderful supporters of the Ron Paul Institute, whose assistance is indispensable to the mission of this institute, and to say that I have been so proud over the years to, in one way or another, even remotely be associated with this man.
I would, during those presidential campaigns, watch YouTube regularly, scour it for what was his latest interview, what's the latest speech he gave, what's the latest head he exploded by answering a question they expected him to evade because the focus groups don't think you should answer.
I used to watch that as a very, very dedicated viewer, and I felt like with this man as our spokesman, I can always be proud because he's a good man, he's a courageous man, he's never going to back down.
It's been incredible to have any association with him at all.
Because, Dr. Paul, you are the embodiment of what Emerson meant when he said: if a single man plants himself firmly on his own ideal and there abide, the whole wide world will come round to him.
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