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March 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
19:07
Daniel McAdams - "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly"

Ron Paul Institute Director Daniel McAdams offers his assessment of the Trump Administration thus far, including where it has excelled and where it is falling short...

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Time Text
Why Are We Propping Up Their Papers? 00:06:40
Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to Lake Jackson.
I want to echo my colleague Chris's appreciation for everyone who's here, everyone who made it happen financially, and everyone who physically made it happen by showing up.
It means a lot to us.
Very touching.
We talked about it before.
So the story of my talk began probably in early February, and I wrote a little update to our subscribers about it.
I was rather more sanguine than I am now, I'll be honest with you.
I was going to talk solely about the mind-blowing aspect of understanding the exposure of the real undercore of our foreign policy.
But then things sort of went a little bit south over the past few weeks.
You know, he hit the ground running, I mean President Trump, and then did some boneheaded things, in my opinion.
So I went from my title of being looking through the matrix to now the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And so I'm going to have more of a reflection than a proper speech, so to speak.
I just want to make some observations on these three categories.
So in the good category, and I will say there are more good than bads, and there's only one ugly, but it's pretty ugly.
So the good, the first one I would say, and this is my own bias, obviously there's plenty of others that we could talk about, but the expose of USAID and that, and through that, the entirety of our foreign policy and foreign aid system, or scam, you would say.
Because what it showed us when we actually saw what happened is an unbelievable spider web reaching throughout the entire world, manipulating not only policies and politics and who gets elected and Burkina Faso or what have you, but manipulates our very perception of reality.
And that's where it starts.
Spending, budget, that's very important, but it starts with our perception of reality.
And what we found out is that USAID wasn't mucking around everywhere else.
It was mucking around in our own minds.
And that's critical.
And I'll just give one example.
So we learned when we had this exposure of what was going on that 90% of the independent newspapers in Ukraine were actually funded by the United States government.
Now, on the one hand, you could look at it from a fiscal perspective.
Gee, that seems like a waste of a lot of money.
Why are we propping up their papers?
But there are other things that are actually more insidious about this.
And one of them is actually very physical and a real threat.
Because if you think about it, in the intelligence world, yes, of course, there's SIGINT and there's humint and there's all these sort of different ways of covertly collecting information.
But the number one way our intelligence agencies collect information is through open source intelligence.
They read newspapers.
And we have the legions of spooks out there reading newspapers and reading blogs and watching the Liberty Report and God knows what else they do.
So what happens when you have 90% of the independent newspapers in Ukraine covertly funded by the U.S. government?
And very actively, by the way, because there have been some reports from some of the editors saying, well, we won't touch that story.
We won't do this.
We won't do that.
Well, everyone looking to these for open source intelligence is getting a false perception of what's happening in Ukraine.
It's a loop.
It's a closed loop.
And I have been wondering, because I followed it very, very closely way back when I was working for Dr. Paul on the Hill in 2006 in the Orange Revolution, 2004 or whenever.
Been following it very closely, but particularly since 2014 and particularly since 2022.
And I'm sitting here and I'm reading a lot of things, but I'm sitting here thinking, how are they getting it so wrong?
Russia's losing.
Russia is about to go under.
Ukraine is winning all of this, not the whole narrative that we heard since the invasion in 2022.
How are they getting it so wrong?
Well, it's clear now that all of these subsidized publications by the U.S. government were feeding back into the intelligence agencies who are reading them and then reporting to their bosses and it goes up the chain.
Mr. President, Ukraine is winning.
Look, it's in the papers.
It's in the Ukrainian papers.
And no one says, well, who funds those papers?
And we did.
And so that, I think, is enormous because Ukraine is one tiny example.
Literally every country on the earth.
And Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, he pointed it out.
All of these opposition papers in Hungary, as soon as USAID money dried up, they just went away.
They disappeared, literally disappeared.
So I think this is a massive, massive win for our minds to understand and for the average American to understand that USAID and all of the U.S. foreign aid is not about people going around helping some people who had an earthquake or a flood.
Let's rebuild this.
No, that's not what they're doing.
They're doing something else.
As David might say, they are providing the infrastructure for a neocon foreign policy, this idea that we have to be the ubiquitous force in the world.
And that's what they're doing.
And they're playing with our minds to do it.
So that is a very, very important.
Now, David mentioned Doge.
I think that is very important as well, but I won't go into it as much, other than how it affects the perception of reality.
Because all of a sudden, you're seeing an enormous, the critical mass of Americans saying, oh my God, we really don't need this much government.
They could send everyone home and we wouldn't notice.
In fact, they've been at home for years and nobody has noticed.
They have second and third and fourth jobs.
And so that is very important.
It's prevailing culture that is always the leading edge of change.
And now all of a sudden, that prevailing mindset, all of a sudden, oh my God, we don't need a Department of Education.
It was unheard of.
As David said, they've been trying to get rid of it since the 80s.
So that's very important.
And on top of that, it's popular.
Doge is popular.
We talked about it on the Liberty Report.
Poll after poll.
People like this idea.
This really is our moment, all of us in this room.
People like the idea of getting rid of government in a very physical way.
And that is a very good thing.
Now, I would say related to the first one is the deconstruction of Voice of America, RFERL, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, which I think just happened last week.
This was a source for U.S. propaganda lies.
In the 21st century, we do not need a state-funded media.
Defunding NED: The Debate Continues 00:12:23
First of all, they don't do it very well.
Compared to RT, which is also state-funded media, but is actually very good quality.
VOA has always been terrible.
RFE has always been terrible.
They have a very ignominious history.
There's not enough time to really go into it.
They played a big role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, where they encouraged people to rise up.
We're with you guys.
Come on, you do it.
And they rose up and they looked around.
There was no one.
This is what they do.
The other, of course, is defunding NED.
And the last on my good list, and it could go on longer, but is simply President Trump picking up the phone and talking to President Putin.
Just that physical act has reduced the threat of a nuclear, a world-ending nuclear war, I think, in a very, very substantial way.
And that is important.
The entirety of the brain-dead Biden administration and Blinken, who was the architect of what's happening, or what happened in Ukraine, along with Victoria Newland, they were Obama's flunkies under Biden.
Ukraine was his project.
And so for four years, Biden or whoever played him on TV wouldn't pick up the phone call, wouldn't pick up the phone and talk to Putin.
He derided him.
He's a thug, he's a murderer, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
So the fact that Trump is simply talking to Putin, that lowers the temperature, and that's what we want.
And I think the same is happening with China.
And he's even suggested that he would talk to Iran, you know, in between threats of annihilation.
So those are good things.
And I think we should praise those about the president and encourage him to continue doing it.
Now, there's a couple on the bad list.
And I'll be brief.
And one, I think, is his handling of the whole Russia-Ukraine war.
And many of us, when he took office, tried to encourage him, not that he's listening to me, but many others have said, listen, here's your exit strategy.
This is Biden's stupid war.
It's not mine.
I don't want it.
I don't want to get into it.
I want to leave it.
Boom, we're gone.
Simple.
Cut off the money, cut off the weapons, cut off the targeting, cut off the intel.
The war is over.
Ukraine was never going to win this war.
It's not rocket science.
You just look at Russia and Ukraine.
You look at the military capabilities.
You look at industrial capabilities.
It was never a question.
It was on the encouragement of the neocons and the absurd Europeans who are still fighting World War II, but from an opposite way, in a weird way, who are pushing it.
So I wish that I don't want to hear about rare earths.
I don't want to hear we're going to take over your power plants.
I don't want to hear Japarozha.
I don't want to hear any of this.
I just want to hear him saying, we're done.
Now, he cut off the intel for a couple of days, and I thought that was great.
And then he reinstated it.
And so I think that's a bad.
Now, Yemen is bad.
Yemen is terrible policy.
It's based on lies.
My good friend Kelly Vlajos had a piece in Responsible Statecraft a couple days ago that I would encourage you to read.
The Houthis had not been hitting any ships at all for months.
And Hegseth, our defense secretary, there are some good things about him, but he flat out lied when he said that they recently had shooting at our ships.
They hadn't been.
And as Thomas Massey, I think a hero to most of us here, maybe all of us, he pointed out when Trump decided to start bombing Yemen that this Red Sea corridor is really not important to us.
In fact, he said, I was talking to Grok, and Grok said, we're not even the top five countries that benefit from these shipping lanes.
We just don't use them.
They're more for the Europeans than for us.
So the idea that we are going to go in and bomb the H-E-blank blank out of them, and they're not really attacking us at all.
And what we're doing is we're decimating the infrastructure.
This past week of bombing has decimated infrastructure and has killed dozens of women and children.
Kind of reminds me of what the Israelis have been doing.
So this is a stupid move.
You're not going to defeat the Houthis this way.
They just fade away into the mountains in Yemen, and then they come back out with their rockets and fire them again.
This is not the way to do things.
So, oh, and over a billion dollars apparently have been spent on this.
And U.S. equipment is depleted.
This is another important point, which is that the Yemenis are firing some pretty primitive drones at our carrier groups that are there.
And there's not really a threat, but you have to attack each one of them.
A good friend of mine, Bill Scriver, wrote a piece yesterday about this.
And typically what you do is you have to fire two counter missiles to intercept a drone or anything incoming.
That's just standard practice.
Guess what?
We don't have any left.
We gave them all to Ukraine.
So we have severely depleted stocks.
We don't have the industrial infrastructure to rapidly start remanufacturing these.
We are being bled dry in a war that has nothing to do with our interest, that we have brought upon ourselves, defending the behavior of a different country in the region that we have no business to be interfering with.
Now, the third bad one, there's only three bad.
There are five goods and three bads.
It is the green lighting of the Israelis to begin the slaughter again in Gaza.
And we have to recognize this past week has been unbelievably bloody.
The first two days, a thousand people were killed, most of them women and children.
The Israelis bombed their houses and they said, oh, we've got to move into tents.
Then the Israelis bombed their tents.
And I won't go into the details, but probably, if you have the stomach for it and you look up the pictures of some of these babies who've done nothing.
They're not Hamas.
What they've done to these babies is unspeakable.
We're in the midst of a Holocaust, of a horrible genocide.
And the fact that President Trump just sat back and said, okay, green light was terrible.
And when did this start?
This started after Israel broke the agreement with Hamas.
It wasn't Hamas that broke it.
This is a multi-phased agreement.
Phase one had been completed.
Hamas wanted to go into phase two, as agreed, which would have ended in the departure of Israeli troops and the rebuilding.
Israel said, no, we need a little bit more time.
We need more time in phase one, but you need to release the hostages anyway.
Hamas said no, and there you go.
So, related to that is President Trump's depopulation plan for Gaza, which to me, I found it disturbing, not because ethnic cleansing is bad, and it is, but I found most disturbing is that he appeared to be in a bubble because he threw this out there.
We're going to build a big, beautiful place there.
Everyone's going to want to live there.
And someone said, well, can the people who actually live there come back?
No, they don't want to.
They won't want to.
And what he was met with was consternation and horror by the rest of the world.
You can't do these kinds of things.
And I think he was genuinely surprised at the reaction.
I think he was genuinely shocked.
And that tells me that the people around him are somehow not in touch with reality.
I don't know what they're in touch with, but not reality.
So that concerns me a little bit.
And when am I done?
Three minutes.
Oh, my God.
We got to do the ugly, though.
Okay.
Now, those of us not on the left were shocked, have been shocked, at the wokeness.
Remember, words are violence.
That's what they said.
Your words are violence.
So if you bring in a right-wing commentator on campus, that's violence.
He doesn't have to do anything.
Well, the woke right is doing the same thing right now.
And President Trump started it with this post he had on Trump social where he talked about, we're going to deport all these criminal students who are breaking the law and supporting Hamas.
Well, when a lot of people interested in the First Amendment, people like Judge Napolitano and Jonathan Turley and the other constitutional scholars, John Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute, when we pushed back on this, they said, well, you guys, you're not noticing that word illegal.
If they do something illegal, they'll be deported.
And there was a bit to that.
But guess what?
As usual, it didn't work out that way.
Because Mahoud Khalil is a grad student at Columbia.
And I'm sure a lot of you have heard about this person.
I don't really know his political views.
I guess he's probably pro-Palestine.
I don't really care, quite frankly.
But he's certainly been demonized.
He participated in protests at Columbia University.
Trump yanked their money, $400 million, because of this, that and other things, because of having the protests.
He was protesting against the Israeli slaughter of Gaza.
He doesn't like the U.S. support for Israel's slaughter in Gaza.
And here's the thing.
Not only did he not break the law, he wasn't even accused of breaking law.
They didn't come there with a warrant and said, here, you know, we suspect you of blowing up a building or whatever.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Plain clothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security banged on his door in the middle of the night.
His wife is an American citizen.
He's a permanent resident of the U.S., a legal permanent resident.
Banged on his door, banged down his door, ripped him away from his wife.
They would not identify themselves to him.
He had no idea who was taking him out of his house.
Wife is eight months pregnant with their first child.
And this is happening in New York and Columbia.
Boom, they take him, they take him down to Louisiana, which is what they always do.
And he has no idea what's going on.
And here's the thing that's very troubling, and this is why I think it's ugly.
If he had been out there at Columbia starting to burn a flag, they would say, well, that's protected speech.
We all accept that.
We may not like it, but that's protected speech.
If he was holding a sign that said, down with Canada, Germany sucks, that would have been okay.
That's fine.
But the fact is, he didn't like the policy of one particular foreign country.
And that is the problem.
And that is why he was arrested and faces deportation.
Now, people will say, well, the First Amendment has its limitations.
It doesn't apply to non-citizens.
Of course it does.
And anyone who doubts that, read Tom Woods, read Judge Napolitano.
The framers of our Constitution, we don't have time to go into it, they recognize free speech not as a grant by government, as a recognition of the state of man given to us by our Creator, whoever you believe that might be.
It's a limitation on government understanding nature.
And sadly, Khalil is not alone.
And I could name three or four, but there's other one is Dr. Badar Khan Suri.
Sorry if I mispronounced his name.
He's a postdoc at Georgetown.
He is being threatened with deportation.
He's here legally as a postdoc.
He is married to an American-born wife.
He's being deported, apparently, because of his wife's political views.
She, I think, is of Palestinian background, and I think she said she supports the political goals of Hamas, but certainly not the other parts.
He's being deported for this.
Here's the point, guys.
You can support Hamas in America if you want.
Now, you can't do violence.
You can support any damn thing you want.
You can speak out for it if you want.
There are limitations, obviously.
But certainly, if your wife says something, you shouldn't be deported.
This is a slippery slope.
This is ugly.
And they first said they were just going to come for criminals.
Then they came for people who weren't accused of any crimes.
You can imagine anyone else who starts speaking out against this, what kind of justification they'll have.
It's very, very dangerous what's happening.
And I think we have to speak out in favor of the First Amendment because if the First Amendment is gone, everything else falls.
There is nothing left in this country if our First Amendment is gone.
So we have to, above all, protect that.
So I hope I've given a balanced view of things that we're happy about and things that we are extremely concerned about.
One thing that we will do is keep our eyes wide open and speak out as long as we can.
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