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March 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
24:49
Rep. John J, Duncan, Jr (Ret) - "It's All About the Money"

Retired US Rep John Duncan on how to really make America great again.

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Time Text
Representative Jimmy Duncan 00:07:21
That was wonderful.
Thank you, Tom.
Next, a gentleman who has spoken at one of our conferences not too long ago, perhaps four or five years ago.
It is wonderful to have him back again.
Jeff Dice was talking about the old right.
This man embodies the old right.
And he was a former representative from Tennessee, Republican, from 1988 until 2019, one of only six to vote correctly against the Iraq war.
Ladies and gentlemen, Representative Jimmy Duncan.
Well, thank you, Chris, for that kind introduction.
I do like to be introduced.
Several years ago, I presented a flag to the Rogers Creek Elementary School in my district out in front of the school to all the 250 kids out front.
And then one of the second-grade teachers asked me to stop by her class.
And when I walked in, she said, now, boys and girls, do you remember who this is?
And I'd just spoken to the kids out in front, and one little fellow raised his hand in kind of a nervous way.
He said, are you the man on the nickel?
And so I tried to explain I was not the man on the nickel.
It is a real honor for me to be here with all of you patriotic Americans at this conference and what a great conference it's been already.
In fact, I think I'm sort of the weak link here.
I can tell you that I've been around this politics for a long time.
I rode a train for 77 hours to go out to San Francisco in 1964 when I was in high school to be an honorary assistant sergeant at arms.
I've said since then you can't get any lower than being an honorary assistant, but it got me into the convention.
That was the first election that I probably really got really excited about.
I came back to Knoxville and sent my first paycheck as a bag boy at the ANP.
I was making $1.10 an hour.
I sent $19.00 some cents to the Barry Goldwater campaign.
I have followed politics closely since then.
I can't tell you how much respect I have for David Stockman.
I remember when he was in Congress and when he worked with President Reagan, and he is really someone that I have tremendous respect for.
I told Tom Woods last night, if somebody tells him that they're his biggest fan, they're lying because I believe I am his biggest fan.
I listen to his show just about every night, mostly late at night.
I can tell you that if you're having trouble getting to sleep, turn on the Tom Woods show.
No, really.
I'm very serious.
He has a following of millions around the country.
And if you want to know how I feel about most things, you can listen to Tom Woods or you can listen to Judge Napolitano because the Judging Freedom podcast, I think, is also great.
But I think one of the biggest compliments I ever got was after Ron Paul had announced that he was leaving Congress.
I think it was the New York Times had a big article and they said, who would probably be the most likely members to replace Ron Paul in the Congress?
And they settled in that article on me.
And I can tell you, I regard that as a great compliment, although nobody could ever replace Ron Paul.
I served for 30 years in the House of Representatives.
There's more turnover in the House than people realize.
And I served with almost 1,500 other members.
And most members of the House don't really get that much publicity, and so you'd have to be an absolute political junkie to be able to name more than about 50 of those members.
But I thought Ron Paul, I would rate him as the best member that I ever served with.
And a man named Bill Kaufman, who I'm sure some of you are familiar with, the conservative columnists and author, he wrote a book that I think all of y'all would love called Ain't My America.
And he devoted about 10 pages in that book to some of my career and some of the things that I had done.
But he told me, he wrote another article one time for the American Conservative urging me to run for president, which I never would have ever have done.
But he told me about a saying that came from a 1930 novel called The Lions Then.
And in that book, it's a book about a fictional congressman named Zimmer.
And it has these words in there, and I have hung these, I had these words hanging on the wall in my Knoxville office.
And it says, no matter how the espousal of a lost cause might hurt his prestige in the House, Zimmer had never hesitated to identify himself with it if it seemed to him to be right.
He knew only two ways, the right one and the wrong.
And if he made a mistake, it was never one of honor.
He voted as he believed he should.
And although sometimes his voice was raised alone on one side of a question, it was never stifled.
And if I've ever seen words that more described, better described Ron Paul's service in the House of Representatives, I think those words do it because he was a courageous, probably the most courageous person that I ever served with.
I think now, in fact, the last six years that I served in the Congress, I got to serve with the great Thomas Massey.
And he is now another person that I really admire and respect.
But I can tell you, this man seated right down here is one of my absolute heroes, one of my mentors.
When I was in the House, if there was a vote that was 400 to 2 or 430 to 3, it was me and Ron Paul.
And Dr. Paul, it was an honor to serve with you.
I will tell you that Ryan Gerduski, a man who I never met and who never interviewed me, wrote the last article that was written about my service in the House in December of 2018.
And he summed up my philosophy and my beliefs better than I could have myself.
And he wrote this: he said, Duncan belongs to a brand of conservatism that dates back to the Eisenhower era, one that regularly opposed both the military-industrial complex and big business.
He looked out for the interests of Main Street instead of Wall Street.
He voted and voted to protect America's liberty and security at home instead of traveling the world in search of monsters to destroy.
Other Republicans used to believe in the same things Duncan advocates.
Money And Main Street 00:03:55
American greatness isn't achieved by sending a generation to fight and die to make the world safe for democracy.
It ought to be about advocating for the interests of the working class instead of Wall Street, K Street, or weapons developers.
And I think that probably sums up most of your philosophy, too.
I said, my speech said it's all about the money.
And I can tell you, the money, there's an old saying, follow the money.
And boy, if you do, you can follow it and it tells you a little bit or tells you the whole story practically about most things.
When I think about Ukraine, Ukraine, there was a lavish party held in 2022 by the four big defense contractors to celebrate.
This was at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington to celebrate all the money.
that was going to be made off of the Ukraine war as long as the defense contractors and all the members of Congress to which they contribute could keep the war going.
And I read that in 2022 the total GDP of Ukraine was $160.5 billion.
Gosh, with the $350 billion that President Trump has mentioned that we've spent on Ukraine and the hundreds of billions more that the World Bank and the European countries have put into that war, we could have bought the whole country and had the biggest party that had ever been held in the history of that country.
But it all goes back to the money and who benefits.
You look at it now, these defense contractors, and you hear all the time about the revolving door at the Pentagon.
And then you look around some of the wealthiest counties, many of the wealthiest counties that surround Washington are among the wealthiest in this country.
And that's who benefits.
You look at the health care system.
I was invited to speak to the American Medical Association during my first term in Congress at a conference at the Broadmoor Hotel.
And I remember the head of the American Medical Association at that time, he said, you know, doctors shouldn't have opposed Medicare.
He said, we'll get our part.
And boy, they surely have.
In fact, now, you know, health care, just before Medicare and Medicaid, health care was slightly less than 5% of our GDP.
Now it's approaching 20%.
And when Americans, before the mid-60s, most Americans could afford medical care.
Now, only people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and others can afford it.
You look at all the billionaires, nine new billionaires in big pharma were created out of the COVA fraud.
You look at federal student loans.
When I shock students at the University of Tennessee, when I tell them that when I started there, it was $90 a quarter, $270 for the whole year.
I heard Steny Hoyer, the Democrat leader, say that when he started at the University of Maryland, it was $87 a semester.
Now what you have, the Readers Digest a few years ago had an article called Student Loan Slaves, and I saw one study a few years ago that said college tuition and fees were 450% higher now, four and a half times higher than they ever would have been if we didn't have the federal student loan program.
Stand Up To Israel 00:13:07
And then there's just so many things like that, and it all goes back to the money.
When the administration, when George W. Bush and his administration found out that I was thinking about voting against the war in Iraq, and I can tell you, I went to Congress as a very traditional Republican.
In fact, I voted for the first Gulf War in 1991.
But then I saw Saddam Hussein's elite troops surrendering to CNN camera crews and empty tanks.
And I decided then that the threat had been greatly exaggerated.
And so I looked into it a little closer the next time around.
And I read an article in the Forts magazine that said a prolonged war in Iraq would make our troops sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists.
There was an article in the U.S. News World Report that said, why the rush to war?
And I saw then I was speaking to a group at the Greenbrier shortly, a little bit before that, and I saw that we were conducting what the newspaper in an article I said called the Forgotten War.
And it said we were spending $4 million a day to enforce a no-flight zone in Iraq against a company that had no real Air Force.
And I thought that was ridiculous.
And about that same time, I saw where one of our bombs had gone astray.
It was on the front page of the Washington Post.
One of our bombs had gone astray and killed seven little boys who were playing soccer in a field in Iraq.
And it described the horrible anguish of the father of one of these boys who said his son's head was blown off by the dropping of our bomb.
And so I decided then that they were exaggerating the threats.
And I was called down and put in a little secret room at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and George Tennant and John McLaughlin, who were the director and deputy director of the CIA.
And I asked them at that time, I said, there had been a front page story the day before where Lawrence Lindsey, this Harvard professor, had said a war with Iraq would cost us $200 billion or more.
And I asked them about that, and they said, oh, no, that was a great exaggeration.
Condoleezza Rice said a war with Iraq would cost us about $60 billion and we get some of that back from our allies.
Well, that had to be about the worst estimate in the history of the world.
And then I said, well, if you're going to vote for this war, you're going to go against every traditional conservative position that I've ever known because you're going to be providing massive foreign aid, huge deficit spending.
You're going to war to enforce UN resolutions when conservatives have always been the traditional biggest critics of the UN.
Do you have any evidence of any imminent threat?
And they didn't.
And in fact, George Tennant confirmed that in his first speech the day after he resigned as head of the CIA.
And he said in a speech at Georgetown University that they didn't have any evidence of any threat.
Well, it shocked my district.
And for, in fact, a year after I had voted against the war, I had a minister of a Baptist church in Knoxville that I was supposed to speak to.
He called and said his biggest contributor would pull out if I spoke there.
And, you know, he was very apologetic, and I just said, no, I understand.
And so I didn't go speak at his church.
And for about three or four years, that was clearly the most unpopular vote I ever cast.
But slowly, much, much to my surprise, it became, I guess, the most popular vote that I ever cast.
But I ended up my time in Congress being very anti-war Republican.
Today, I write a weekly column for a newspaper in Knoxville called the Knoxville Focus.
You can see all my columns online.
If you look up Knox Focus Duncan Archives, I've written six columns over the last couple of years against this war in Gaza.
I think it's been one of the most cruel things I've ever heard of to kill all those thousands of little children over there in Gaza and what they've done to those people.
And I know Jeffrey Sachs, who I listened to on Judge Napolitano, he said one time, he said, Netanyahu is one of the most violent and dangerous people in the world.
He is leading Israel into the greatest insecurity of its modern history, complete diplomatic isolation.
And he said, Netanyahu was the leading cheerleader for our war in Iraq.
Dave Smith, another Jewish podcast host, he said, I think Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has been horrific and inexcusable.
And he said, it's insane for us to flirt with another war in the Middle East.
And now we've got people like, we've got these neocons like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton who are chomping at the bit for us to get into a war with Iraq.
The defense contractors and the neocons are pushing for that.
And it would be one of the biggest mistakes we could ever make.
George Will was a conservative who was acceptable to the Washington Post.
So you can tell that I wouldn't have agreed with him on a lot of things.
But he said two things that I really liked.
He said neocons were the most magnificently misnamed people and were really the most radical people in this city, meaning Washington, D.C.
And he also said that the place in this country where we have the least freedom of speech now is on college and university campuses.
And certainly those things are both true.
I mentioned a quote there about Dr. Paul.
There are a couple of other quotes, though, that I wish that would be on the wall of every member of Congress or in every office in the White House.
And that's these two quotes.
One from President Trump.
He said at his inaugural address, he said, we will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
And I hope he stands by those words in the years ahead.
And President Kennedy said in a speech on November 16, 1961, he said, we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6% of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity,
and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.
And how great those words are.
And the only change that I would make now is we're slightly less than 4% of the world's population.
So the words are really more appropriate even today.
Finally, let me talk just a minute and talk about what's going on now with Doge and with Elon Musk and so forth.
There's a great book about Eisenhower's foreign policy called Ike's Bluff, written by Evan Thomas.
And he wrote in that book, he said, when Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said further budget cuts would harm national security, Ike acerbidly replied, if you go to any military installation where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there will be such a rush to cut costs that you'll have to get out of the way.
And I can tell you that as President Trump walked off the floor of the House the other night after his State of the Union, I handed him, I wrote a column where I quoted that.
And about three weeks ago, I wrote a column entitled, Trump's Right, Cut Everything, Even the Bloated Defense Budget.
I handed to President Trump a copy of my column where I have that quote.
That book also says that Eisenhower told his chief of staff, Andrew Goodpastor, General Andrew Goodpastor, he said, heaven help this country if this nation ever has a president who doesn't know as much about the military as I do.
If I had been involved in politics in 1952, I would have supported Senator Taft for the nomination.
But I have developed a great respect for President Eisenhower because I think that if you look back to the speech that he gave on April 16, 1953 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, it's called the Cross of Iron Speech.
It's probably the greatest or the strongest anti-war speech ever given by one of the presidents of this country.
And of course, everybody is familiar with his words in his farewell address.
And it's very significant to me, though, that two of the greatest military leaders in this country's history, George Washington and Dwyan Eisenhower, both warned us.
George Washington warned us against an overgrown military establishment.
He said that's auspicious to liberty.
And he said that he said a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils and betrays the former into participation into the quarrels and wars of the latter.
That farewell address has been read in the United States Senate every year since 1862.
But I don't think there's been many of them that have been listening to it, but I wish that more would.
And Eisenhower, Mitchell Bard, wrote in the Times of Israel newspaper in 2014, he said, Eisenhower went on television, and he did this a week before the 1956 election, went on television to criticize Israel's failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned that he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply.
Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal and apply sanctions to Israel.
Boy, wouldn't it be something to have a president who would stand up to Israel now because I can tell you we saw when Netanyahu spoke to the Congress and got 58 standing ovations, there was only one member of Congress, Thomas Massey, who had the guts to stand up to them.
And if you think about it, if any other country in this world was doing what Israel's been doing in Gaza over these last couple of years, every member of Congress would have been leading the charge to criticize and condemn that, with that one exception.
It's been a great honor for me to be here with you and especially to be here with my friend Ron Paul.
And when I think of Ron, I not only think of those words that I read to you a few minutes ago about the fictional congressman, I will say this, I've loved those words from the song The Impossible Dream.
And it says, at one point it says, and the world will be better for this, that one man, scorned and covered with scars, still strove with his last sense of courage to reach the unreachable star.
And that fits our friend Ron Paul.
Here he is, almost 90 years old and still growing strong.
Almost 90 and Still Growing Strong 00:00:24
And I can tell you, I hope you're doing it, Ron, for many years more.
I remember about 20 years ago I saw in the Knoxville News Sentinel that Strom Thurmond was running for re-election at the age of 94.
And they found a 105-year-old woman who had been his babysitter at one point when she was 16 and Strom was five.
And the 105-year-old woman endorsed Thurman for re-election and said he's a fine young man.
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