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April 15, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:16
Neocons Defeated? Think Again!

While the second Trump Administration was billed as a clean break from the neocons who have dominated Republican (and Democrat) politics for decades (including Trump 1.0), unfortunately we are steadily seeing neocons and especially neocon policies creeping back into place like a bad virus...

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Wars and Neocons Think Still 00:05:32
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 today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
Is all well in the country today?
Everything is fine.
And the budget is balanced?
Oh, absolutely.
No war, no, no war.
We want to do not one subject today.
We want to just talk about a philosophy, you know.
And my question that I'm trying to answer in my own mind, but I think I have the answer.
I want to see where we come down on this.
The question is, are the, now with the new administration, are the neocons really on the defensive?
And could it be that they're not on the defensive and they're where they were before or they made advances?
But, you know, I keep looking for the good stuff, but I still see a lot of neocons popping up.
You know, they may be invisible.
They might not have the top position, but some of them do.
So I think there's neocons around there.
So I think the answer to this is, you know, going to depend on some opinion.
All the neocons on the defense, I think they're pretty aggressive.
I think they remain on the offense because I happen to think that the neocons have an inside line to the deep state.
And they get some, you know, when it comes to foreign policy, monetary policy, economic policy, and maybe even terrorists for all we know.
So that I think means that they might have an edge on us who are trying to promote, you know, a free society.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think Trump was elected, not to dump on him, but he was elected because he wasn't going to bring the neocons in.
And I think he was irritating them at first quite a bit.
So the question we're having is, are they back?
Have they ever gone?
Where are they?
You know, I think back to it's actually almost 12 years ago to the date that we founded the Ron Paul Institute.
Remember, we were up at the Republican Club on Capitol Hill.
And I remember the press release so well because I drafted it and I was hoping I was right.
It turns out I'm not right because one of the lines that I started it with is the era of neoconservatism is over.
And I think I was too optimistic because I think we're still dealing with the neocons.
They're still around.
Yeah, and there's three several areas that we can talk about because I think this is an open-ended discussion and a problem.
But the one that pops in most people's mind when they talk about neocons, they think about militarism.
Yes.
You know, and supporting of all the wars.
And they've been around and had in charge for a long time.
And they've played a significant role in driving us into bankruptcy and perpetual wars and all the disadvantages and the destruction of an interventionist foreign policy.
And if you look at that, then they have to, the neocons are, you know, responsible for a lot of dollar spending and all that's going on.
And I just think that there's still a lot of problems around here.
And even on personal liberties, you know, I think that civil liberties, I think there was hope, at least I was hopeful, maybe that with this cleanup, there would be, with the new administration, a little more respect for personal liberty, because ultimately you can't have much of a voluntary society if you don't have protection of civil liberties and the right to speak out.
But, you know, just look now, who's responsible for the nonsense going on in our universities?
And it isn't one person because I see this as a system.
The fact that the universities sold out, take the money, and they'll do their obedience.
What have they done?
They taught the nonsense for 50s, 60s years.
It's been going on.
And that's the propaganda that they've been used to set the stage for where we are now.
So those are the issues.
There's a lot of people out there, still good people, want to see the correction in these areas.
But to come down on one side of the other and say, forget it.
Forget it.
There's uh uh, the neocons aren't on vacation, they're busier than ever, they've been motivated and they're have dug in their heels and they are seeing to it that there's not going to be a shift in attitude, because there's quite a bit of evidence and we'll go over these things.
That seems like uh, it's Neoconnish, you know so, but uh uh what, what comes?
It will be determined, I think, by the limitations on budget and spending.
Uh, because that's how empires end.
And so uh, I I think that a lot of people see it as a problem, as a serious problem.
We have to do this, we need more government law, but I see this in a much bigger picture about how, how long do empires last, and are we seeing uh, the major opening salvo of the disappearance of our so-called empire?
Yeah well, you know, we did something different this morning when we were thinking about the show and we, we came, you know, with some articles and you had the idea, why don't we just do some brainstorming about is it true or is it not true that the Neocons are back and that they're doing Neoconnish stuff, as you said?
Al-Qaeda in Somalia 00:08:15
So it was a little different.
So we were just sitting there.
We came up with, I think, seven or eight items on the on the bad side of the ledger.
So let's look at a couple of them.
Uh, this first one is, of course, from Anti-war.com.
This came out today, uh, Israel to receive major new weapons shipment from the U.s.
The details of the shipment are unclear, but why not said it would include 3 000 munitions for Israel's air force?
Uh, supporting Israel has definitely always been a very strong Neocon position and this administration is definitely not taking a break from the last one, which was also very supportive.
Yeah, I don't.
I I don't think it'd be possible for somebody to say, well, we see a sincere move and action in the Middle East to settle that war.
Yeah, looks like the war is guaranteed to continue until we're broke.
Yeah, and we are getting close to that point where people will refuse our dollars and that's the ultimate bankruptcy.
Yeah so, but there, there's another one that's coming in the news I think this one that i've watched the least and but it's getting more and more in the news and and uh, there's various reasons, probably economic and natural.
Uh uh, you know natural resources and all in Somalia.
Yeah, I mean why?
Why should the average American who's having trouble with his budget be worrying about?
Yeah, we want a strong national defense.
We need to be tough.
And what we need to do is we need to send more bombs to Somalia.
So, and how can members of Congress stand up and vote for that?
More money to bomb people in Somalia.
And also, along with that, when you argue the same case for Yemen.
And that's been going on.
We've been involved for a long time, but we're more involved.
And we talked about this the other day, that they're talking about having a trillion dollars increase just due to Yemen.
And that next year, this is astounding.
They sort of hardly believe their eyes.
Yeah, but yes, next year.
And they almost talk about pride, a strong national defense.
Next year, we're going to have $2 trillion.
That's not a good sign.
Well, here's the Somalian one.
Put it up here.
Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka pushing for U.S. to escalate war in Somalia.
It's almost like, Dr. Paul, that they're worried that Trump may solve the war in Ukraine.
So they're looking for other places.
Now, Gorka is definitely a neocon.
He's a super uber hawk neocon.
And I actually knew him in Hungary, but he wants us to start bombing heavily in Somalia.
And you know why, Dr. Paul?
Because, oh my gosh, Al-Qaeda is there.
Al-Qaeda is there.
They're bringing up this old bogeyman of Al-Qaeda is there.
But the thing that's so funny and that just shows you how the neocons are, that's the same al-Qaeda that the neocons put into power in Syria.
Al-Qaeda is running Syria, literally running Syria.
The guy who's in charge that calls himself the president had a $10 million price on his head by the U.S. government as an al-Qaeda terrorist.
So on the one hand, they love Al-Qaeda.
They want to put him in power in Syria.
But when it comes time to bomb someplace like Somalia, oh my gosh, Al-Qaeda is coming.
We need to bomb them.
You know, it'd be like saying, there's criminals in the land.
There's criminals in the land.
Why don't we have a real idea and identify it so we can protect all the innocent people?
And lo and behold, what's the administration doing?
Who knows who's promoting what?
But it sounds like there's a lot of sympathy now for moving this real idea.
And we talked so much about that yesterday, how foolish and dangerous that is.
And it's war control and identification and knowing what people do.
See, in a free society, the government hardly shouldn't bother anybody who's not hurting people.
You can live your life as you please.
You can do dumb things or smart things, no matter what you say.
You can even criticize the government or get kicked out of school.
So this is, unfortunately, there's a lot of that activity going on.
So it's a dangerous, dangerous society.
And that to me means that the neocons aren't crying over that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the other issue now is Iran.
We talked about Israel.
We talked about Somalia ginning up war with Somalia again.
More bombs.
Well, it's also Iran.
Now, they had a meeting over the weekend.
The foreign minister of Iran met with Witkoff, the president special envoy.
And we certainly applaud that.
We're always in favor of talks.
That's a great start.
Talk, talk, not war, war.
We'll put the next one on.
They have a good meeting.
They're going to have another meeting pretty soon.
But now Trump is acting aggressive again.
He suggests that Iran is slow walking the talks and he repeats the threat of military action.
So this is really not the best way to have a dialogue and a discussion by keeping the threatening, threatening and threatening, threatening.
A very neocon thing.
My suspicion is, Dr. Paul, that he is so surrounded by neocons that they're bombarding with this 24-7.
They were furious that Witcoff went over there to talk.
The neocons were furious.
So I think he feels like to appease them, he's got to go up there and say some nasty things.
And during the campaigns, they make their statements of what they do, but most people realize most of that is irrelevant.
But in this case, they went and they made these promises.
What happened in the last administration, last Republican administration?
What they did, they undid a token effort that we thought was maybe a proving thing.
And there was proof then or talk then.
They're not really building a nuclear weapon.
And then our own government.
But they're still saying they're treating them like they're about to bomb somebody.
It reminds me of Iraq.
They terrorized the world.
This is a maniac.
And the guy was barely getting able to get out of his hole in the ground.
Didn't get out.
Yeah, didn't get out.
Well, the next one is, as you alluded to earlier, Dr. Paul, the military budget.
There's nothing the neocons love more than massive military budgets.
And part of the reason is that all of that money goes into the think tanks that they're always sitting in.
Where they're not in government, they're in think tanks thinking about how to get back into government.
So here's the next one.
Trump promises to raise military budget to a trillion dollars, even as Doge hacks other agencies to the bones.
Well, that second part we'll talk about later.
But they were bragging about a trillion-dollar military budget, even as Trump said a couple of weeks ago that he'd like to cut the Pentagon budget in half.
We thought that was a great idea.
That's a good start.
Nope.
Now they're reverting.
And my guess is, I'm not giving Trump a pass, but my guess is the neocons are push, push, pushing more spending.
Yes, and they're well hidden.
It's not like you see them on evening news, and we can find them.
We can find their supporters.
But who's really has the puppet strings to tell them what to do?
And these policies change.
So I think what we're seeing so far, it's disappointing because there's no momentum.
I mean, we thought Doge is at least the momentum was cut, cut, cut.
And when we saw the exposure of USAID, that has been great.
But now there's a sort of a mixed feeling there too.
Really, what's happening there?
So do the neocons have a have a pressure point where they can put on people in there?
And it looks like it's possible.
Absolutely.
And I'm going to do this next one just as a quick one before we get to the Doge one.
And this is Pete Hegseth.
Talk about neocons.
He's definitely a neocon.
He and Rubio and Wallace, they're all neocons.
Neocons In Ascendance 00:11:13
They're all in the ascendance.
He says he won't rule out war with Iran.
Well, I don't know that it's up to him.
I didn't realize that.
I didn't realize that was our system.
But he's not ruling out war with Iran.
Now, over to the one you were talking about is the Doge, which we had huge, and we still do huge admiration for what they're trying to do.
Put that next one up.
But Elon Musk did come out and say that basically the savings is not going to be $2 trillion.
It's only got to be $100 billion.
And I don't think necessarily, I don't think that Musk should be blamed for that.
I think what happened is he hit a brick wall of resistance in the government.
The neocons want nothing more than a big federal government.
That's what they like.
And so I think he went in there and they fought him every step of the way.
Every step of the way, they fought Musk.
They fought Doge.
Even Congress wouldn't get behind him.
Yeah, they applauded when the lights were on, but they wouldn't pass a budget to reflect those cuts.
But their presidents and the government is incestuous because they're there and you think you have this good news on our side exposing them the idiocy of it all.
And yet nothing real happens.
It pops up.
You know, if they get rid of 10% of them, it doesn't hurt them a bit.
You know, when you think of all the education has gone around, all the brainwashing that goes on, and all the bribing that goes on, how they own the universities if you don't do it.
And if they don't, there's regulations on people writing, writing, you know, on their college campus newspaper and getting thrown out of school and all of this.
So it's so many people buried in the system.
So that's why, even economically, economically speaking, I'm an optimist in that they do the right thing and they could, things could work out real well.
But the whole thing is, how do you cancel out all the education that has gone on for more than 100 years, going through all the socialistic proposals and then the interventionist proposals, and they all go on and on.
And then all the conniving that secret central banking does.
So it is so powerful that it, to me, means this is a big job.
And I unfortunately predict that we can and will be, we could do it the right way and not have so much pain.
But most of the time, the people don't go a long way with it.
And the government's the power that they have, they don't go with it, but they get eliminated because I believe the people wake up finally and it's just totally ignored and they quit paying for it because they can't pay for it.
They make the nation poet.
You know, they didn't convert all the dedicated communists in Russia to get rid of the Soviet system.
It destroyed itself.
And I just wonder if we're on that verge and what does it mean?
And what can we preserve and what can we put in this place?
So let's say we have a victory on the Federal Reserve.
You know, are you ready to do something?
Because I've recently been asked on interviews, what three things would you do?
And what would you do with the Fed?
And, you know, if you say, I'll get rid of it.
Well, if you had a wand and you did that, yeah, long term, it might work.
Wouldn't it?
In the meantime, you're going to be the igniter of the revolution.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, there's nothing the neocons love more than the warfare welfare state.
I mean, if you had one sentence to describe them, that's it.
They love those two things.
They came from the left.
They came, their intellectual roots are in Trotskyism.
So they love a big government.
They love a big welfare state.
They want everyone to be addicted to big daddy government, but they also love war.
And so here's our next example of how the neocons have honed their way in.
House approves Senate blueprint for big, beautiful Trump budget bill after conservative rebellion.
Now, conservative rebellion is kind of a joke because you and I know, Dr. Paul, after having been in the House so long, that that's a symbolic rebellion.
It's a little bit of grumbling, aside from Thomas Massey, who did hold out and didn't vote for it.
So you had all of these Doge cuts.
They look fantastic on paper.
Keep doing it.
But when the budget comes through, it's a big, beautiful budget.
Emphasize the word big.
Yes.
And they have ways of hiding the real debt.
You know, they say that we're up to our debt limits and we have to close down the government, which is a bunch of baloney because that's just trying to scare the people.
The first thing they're going to cut are old age benefits and people laying in the bed sick.
Yeah, yeah.
Or the kids going to school and helping sick children.
And they scare the people into frighten the people.
Oh, we can't do that.
But they never stop and think you could work your way out, but the odds are overcoming the propaganda and the people in charge.
Because quite frankly, I've come around to thinking that some of the people who promote this, they're not just making mistakes.
I always think, oh, they're just misled.
But some of them are evil.
Yeah, some of them are evil.
Evil, and they'll do anything to stay in enjoying the pie, you know, and getting their so-called share.
Yes.
So we'll continue giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, maybe more than he deserves.
I don't think he's a neocon, but I think what happens is he laid down with dogs and he woke up with fleas, you know, the old saying.
He surrounded himself with them and now they're back and they're back in full force.
Well, here's a bonus round that I found just before we sat down.
And it's a post on X from our good friend Scott Ritter, who spoke at our conferences before, put that last one up.
Now, he puts out, at a time when the U.S. is working with Russia to restore a full range of diplomatic ties, Marco Rubio is collaborating with Keith Kellogg and the Treasury Department to sabotage Trump's flagship foreign policy initiative.
Rubio isn't a team player.
He will betray Trump just like Mike Pompeo did.
I think he's right.
That's what happens when you put a neocon like Marco Rubio in that position.
He's going behind Trump's back.
He's doing all sorts of things to destroy Trump's efforts to repair relations with Russia.
They're true believers.
They're dedicated.
And it is equal to a religious dedication because they see themselves as, you know, they don't see themselves as a neat little criminal, even though I think they know that.
They see themselves as they have to be able to convince themselves to believe their own lies.
And that's when we agree, when people start believing their own lies and they're in charge, that's when things deteriorate.
And we're at that point now.
They really believe that.
You hear people talking as soon as they get in office, all of a sudden, well, we have to modify this.
And it just doesn't work.
So I think we see a lot of warning signs out there.
And I stick to the fact that I think it's philosophic and you can explain it because the educational system has been with us for a long time.
But that's where I also see the most hope.
Because I think, and I use as an example, there are quite a few like this, individuals, but organizations, because we've always praised our good friend Lou Rockwell because he made stuff available and he stuck to the principles.
And this is, and he's converted a lot of people.
I always like that because he was encouraging people to become professors and teachers to combat what we've put up with, you know, for 150 years.
Yeah, and they've done a great job at it.
So I'm just going to close by saying, so after you've seen all that, we've all the evidence out there, we're making the case that neocons are back, they're in power.
And you might say, what are we going to do now?
We'll throw our hands up in despair.
And I think you probably agree with me, Dr. Wald.
Now is not the time for that.
Now is the time we have to double down on our principles, stick more strictly to the principles.
Now, a lot of people, I'm not going to fault them, but they were hoping that the man, Donald Trump, would implement some of our views on economics and on foreign policy.
And they supported the man.
That's fine, but you can't forget the principles.
And we have to stick by the principles.
And where criticism is warranted, we have to make constructive criticism if we can, as much as we can.
And I think that's our time now to really stick by these principles.
Know and and to get people to join us.
The technique people use uh very important because you could be 100 right on what you're saying.
But if you do a lot of shouting and grabbing your uh adversary by the shirt or by the coat and saying this is the way it is, why are you so stupid?
Guess what?
That doesn't work.
That's not good diplomacy, but uh, Something that I tried to avoid a long time ago because I'd get into argument and I don't like arguments, but I like debate.
So my approach has always been to try to remember to ask the opponent question.
You know, why is this good?
If you believe in this program and taking this money, where do they get this money?
Could this money be equivalent to theft?
If you took the money, you'd be charged with theft.
Ask them questions like that.
And some of them might not accept that, but they can seek in if they hear a lot of people asking, you know, honest questions about what they're really endorsing rather than just looking at the fluff and say, oh, I want to take care of people and I want peace.
I like Ron Paul and Daniel because they're for peace and prosperity.
So we'll do that.
Well, they ought to know exactly what we believe in and know what the monetary policy is, what the economic policy is, what the foreign policy is like.
And I think that is crucial.
And one way that I think you can gain supporters.
And I thought at times when I had the opportunity, young people are especially open to reasonable questions.
And I think it's natural for people who start to think about it.
They can't stand inconsistency.
They can't stand that people are hypocritical.
And that wakes people up too.
And I think that operated during the COVID crisis.
People saw the hypocrisy of it all.
And there's a lot of that in politics.
But people have to be prepared and know where the information comes from because we have been taught and brainwashed into believing that there are the holy warriors that are going to save us from ourselves and bring about peace and prosperity.
The truth is, we think it comes from the advancement of personal liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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