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April 21, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:41
Neocon Knives Out For SecDef Hegseth

Just days after media reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discouraged President Trump from attacking Iran, multiple media stories have dropped claiming incompetence and worse on his part. Meanwhile three top aides known for a more realist approach to foreign policy have been sacked on dubious grounds. Is Hegseth about to learn what happens when you cross the neocons?

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Setting Interest Rates: Price Control Debate 00:09:32
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Good.
We got some rain?
Had a nice weekend, and now we're getting rained on and water the plants.
Yeah, perfect.
Exactly what we do.
But today, I want to check and find out who's watering the plants of dirty politics.
There's still people around.
There hasn't really been the type of revolution that we would wish we'd have someday.
Absolutely.
So we'll talk a little bit about it.
I've been fascinated with a little event going on in the last couple weeks, maybe even longer than that, but really it was hot and heavy this week.
The great debate, I think, is between Trump and Powell.
And, you know, you have Powell, who's a diplomat.
He's dignified.
He's a scholar, and he speaks softly.
And yet, he doesn't like anybody intruding on what he's doing.
So he has his mind about what interest rates should be.
But I guess, guess what?
Trump has his own opinion.
Trump, here he is.
He's in business.
He may well know and understand the significance of the interest rates and the Federal Reserve.
Not that it has driven them into our corner, but I'll tell you what, those two people I've mentioned are definitely at odds over what to do.
And we shouldn't be surprised about this because it's a debate because it's based on a false assumption.
The debate's going to go on forever.
So when you have interventionism and decide the market isn't to be used to decide what the most important price is in the economy, and that is the price of loaning out money, the interest rates, they don't want to hear from it because if the market's saying, oh boy, you're in trouble.
There's too much inflation.
We better lower the interest rates and the business people will produce more and the prices will come down.
And they go into all that nonsense.
But the false assumption that they work on, I think, is ridiculous, is that they can do something about it with a debate by manipulating policy and what the interest rate should be.
They key in on the interest rates, which is right.
But they're now saying, I wonder what the market rate for interest is.
Maybe the market rate for interest is on credit cards.
You know, it's a little bit higher.
So anyway, they get involved and then they argue of who's the smartest.
And it can get pretty lively.
And it has been.
But, you know, what they're doing, though, both of them, the reason I don't think it's a healthy, a worthwhile debate, the debate should be people like that that think they can and they know what the interest rates should be and what the market says and what the market rate thinks interest rates be.
But setting the rate of interest is price control.
And in the old days, most people knew price controls were bad.
Today, heck, it used to be that tariffs were bad, but now tariffs are acceptable and prices.
And for a long time, though, now, people have lived with it because it seemed like manipulating interest rate at a time and playing a softer role on it, you know, did bring us out of recessions and keep by making the bubble bigger.
And they've been getting away with that.
But they're endorsing the principle.
The more it worked and has worked, the more they're endorsing in principle wage and price controls, which the government is always involved indirectly.
And this just encourages them to get involved.
So since this debate is going on, it means that they believe in wage and price control.
And we will see it because this debate is not going to be settled.
Because they don't even ask, the two of them getting together.
Hey, do we really know what the interest rate should be?
No, nobody knows what they should be.
No, they don't do that.
And we don't hear that debate.
But what the option they use is attack on the market, the free market, sound money, who knows what all, support for war.
It's a big deal on where you allot the money.
And I saw somebody tell on the right the other day, they said they wanted to make the point that the big thing, the big thing, of course, is printing the money and distributing it.
But they said, watch who gets it first.
And that's the big guys.
That's the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry.
That is where the real power is.
So they both endorse that.
I think what they're really arguing is how much we should give this group.
Maybe this company is our friend.
Maybe this drug company is better than that company.
But they play the role of being diplomatic.
The left, we're helping the poor people.
Yeah, we're helping the poor people get poorer.
That's what they're doing.
So I looked at that debate and I was fascinated with it and thought how far removed they were from a real discussion about monetary policy.
And this, even if they get a good temporary reprieve, which they're not getting right now, you know, gold's going up $100 a day.
And they better get concerned pretty soon.
But they might just once again, what Roosevelt do, he didn't want that to happen.
He knew what was coming.
He said, we'll just take the gold away from the people.
But they're not arguing the case, you know, freedom versus slavery, freedom versus authoritarianism.
In this case, this debate emphasized to me that it's back of the old stuff.
And it's heresy to say that Trump is no different than Powell.
But actually, most Americans aren't paying a lot of attention to this.
They're paying attention to some of the other things that are more superficial.
And maybe USAID, that's a good thing, but they're not paying attention to this.
So I like to mention this and talk about it and look at it and try to warn people because guess what?
I'll let you know Seeker.
I don't have the biggest notion what interest rates should be, but my prediction is in a market, they should be higher.
That's all.
That's the curse of being libertarians.
We see that both sides are wrong and then they both gang up on us.
Well, here's what Trump said to Powell.
He's furious.
He's mad.
He wants those rates down.
He said preemptive cuts.
He said just today, actually, just this morning, 9:40 in the morning, just before we started the show, preemptive cuts and interest rates are being called for by many, with energy costs way down, food prices, including Biden's egg disaster, substantially lower, and most other things trending down.
There is virtually no inflation, he says.
With these costs trending so nicely downward, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation.
But there can be a slowing of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates now.
Europe has already lowered seven times.
Powell has always been too late, except when it came to the election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected.
How did that work out?
That's pretty nasty.
You know, I see this as, you know, influence and where are they going to get it and how are they going to influence it?
But the consumer really is in charge, more so than people want to believe, because they can dictate the success of products.
And governments come in and say, well, you're hurting us.
You're not buying our stuff.
So they want to manage their friends, you know, and send the money to them.
But anyway, the consumer really is king ultimately, but they get pushed around.
They also get to be the ones to be punished.
And, you know, some people are seeking the truth about interest rates, the hard money people, the principled economic laissez-faire people want to hard money.
But there's a certain group that, although recognizing that all perfect truth is not knowable, but some people can seek it and look at it and talk about it and make the difference between all authoritarianism.
It should be easy for us to see the two different things.
But in this case, you know, there's a bit of nihilism in here because they don't want to hear the truth.
I think on both sides.
They don't want to listen to the consumer.
And what is the consumer saying?
Is it a rosy scenario out there?
And they say, oh, prices went up 0.2% this week.
That just goes right over their head because they just came out of the, you know what they do?
They measure.
I remember the first time I was a bit shocked.
And I had not been doing a lot of shopping.
Need to Mind Our Own Business 00:15:42
When I was in Washington, I had to do my wedding.
And I thought, oh man, I spent this much money and I'm getting a bag this week.
They measure it by the size of the bag before what they're buying.
They know they're not buying steak.
What does the government do?
Instead of inserting steak in the CPI, they insert hamburgers mixed with something else.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, let's move on to the main topic that we were going to discuss today.
And that is rather speculatory.
I want to thank Georges, by the way, for kicking in some funds to help us with the show.
He's done it a few times that I haven't thanked him or her, but thank you.
But the Pentagon, Pentagon is in chaos.
Put up that first clip.
We're seeing it everywhere.
Heg says slams disgruntled former employees after new allegations of OPSEC failures, Pentagon mismanagement.
Now, he is mad because three of the top appointees in the Pentagon, very senior guys, now they were fired.
They said they were leaking stuff and they fired them.
And these guys went ahead and they wrote a statement saying, well, we didn't leak anything.
We didn't do anything.
We don't even know why we're fired.
And so Hegseth is slamming them.
And this is after Hegseth has been slammed for the signal chat.
And for a couple, he actually had two, he was on two different chats where he was discussing highly classified information.
One was his wife and brother was on the line.
Two, they were talking about Yemen.
So he's in trouble.
He's lashing out.
And go to that next link because this gives you an idea of what's going on here.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has taken heavy fire once again.
And what looks like a coordinated attack, Sunday brought a new sensational allegation of Hegseth violating operational security ahead of the March 15 strikes on Yemen and an op-ed from a former Hegseth associate calling for his removal over total chaos.
Depending on, I have a clip from that op-ed, Dr. Paul.
While it's hard to discern motives, now I have highlighted this, Dr. Paul.
While it's hard to discern motives in DC's House of Cards intrigue, the renewed assault comes after Hegseth reportedly helped dissuade President Trump from launching Israel's long-pursued U.S. war on Iran.
So that's what I think is happening.
The chaos there to me is similar to the chaos in the economy.
Once they get in and regulate and think that they know what's best, that they don't listen to common sense, the Constitution, and whatnot, then you end up with a mess.
So in foreign policy, the same principles there.
We have an economic system of interventionism, which is very vague.
You could do anything anytime, whichever group is the loudest, and whichever group has the most influence.
Well, foreign policy is the same way.
If the foreign policy, there are some that lean to a better position and would like to drift a little bit closer to what we're talking about.
But there's not enough graduates from the Mises Institute and other places to really have a great influence, even though I believe they do have an influence, but we need a lot more.
But when you have a foreign policy of non-intervention, then you have all this stuff, and then you have division within.
If this administration was a year old, you'd think maybe some differences would develop.
But look how quickly the differences are.
And whether they're sometimes they could be personal.
But if you have a precise foreign policy of non-intervention, it's clear-cut, we don't intervene.
We don't start wars, and Trump knows those are good words, and he used them.
But yeah, and I like that.
But I remember Bush even used those words.
You know, we need a humble foreign policy.
We need to mind our own business.
Then they get in there because they want to satisfy a few people out there and say, well, say these things and we can do whatever we want.
And they expect to get away with it.
And most of the time they do.
But so when I see these battles going on, I think, not again, not again.
And then there's two sides now.
Both sides will get very emotional because if you say, well, we think Trump says some good things, but he says some dumb things too.
Oh, then the supporters rebel against the criticism.
But the same way, you know, the Democratic Party is in shambles too for the same reason.
They can't agree on it.
And we're running out of money.
We're running out of common sense.
Some of the countries we support are running out of soldiers.
And they're talking about in various countries, well, we need to draft more women.
You know, that kind of stuff that goes on.
So they, I like, maybe, maybe I just comprehend complications like managing an economy and managing the world.
I'll say, well, what would be the best for our country?
And you know what?
I think the founders thought about those things.
And they came up with some pretty good advice that we should stay out of entangling alliances.
Isn't that a great statement?
And we're entangled in so many things that it just opens up the door to the special interest.
And as long as there's money to be printed and the people trust it and the people are using our dollar, the bubble keeps getting bigger.
But guess what?
The bubble's leaking.
And the sign is there that it may burst soon.
And some major changes will have to be done.
Yeah.
You know, we learned a lot from, you remember our old friend Karen Kwatowski, the longtime writer for Lou Rockwell.
We learned a lot from her after the Iraq war because we're getting some thunder here.
What did you say?
No, this is authentic.
This is live TV.
But when she was in the Pentagon in the run-up to the Gulf War, to the Iraq war, remember, she was just basically doing this, listening.
And all the neocons were going in and out of the Pentagon.
They were stovepiping the intelligence up, saying what they wanted.
And she has proven invaluable because she gave us a look as what it really is like in the Pentagon.
And I think that's what we're seeing now.
Hegseth, to the surprise of many, myself included, Hegseth last week, and I reported on this on Thursday when you were out.
He was on the side of caution with regard to war with Iran.
We expected him to be with Rubio and Waltz and the others cheering it on.
He said, hang on, guys, let's wait a little bit on this.
We don't need to do this right away.
And right after that, a target is painted on his back and they're getting him.
I really, and I don't have any insight right now, but I suspect that's what's happening in the Pentagon.
The neocons are in there and they are furious.
They thought this was their best chance to hit Iran that they've had in decades.
And they thought it was going to happen.
They were this close.
But Hegseth, of all people, who's kind of one of them, you know, he's a real hawk at least.
He said no.
And I think that's why we're seeing all of this talk of chaos in the Pentagon.
See, and there's an illusion when some neocons work their way up the ladder and they become credible.
They've been in the business for a long time.
They get away with this.
But the neocons, you know, even if you get rid of the top tier, which it doesn't seem to have happened, they're still around.
But if you do get rid of the top tier, the infiltration, the infestation is all throughout, you know, all the levels.
So somewhere along the way, people can do things.
It's sort of like you might have up 18,000 people in the FBI and the CIA, but all you need is the plant of two, three, four hundred people, and they can take over a country.
They can run a secret operation and participate in a coup, which we do routinely.
But you can't say too much because then you might be unpatriotic.
You have to do whatever is possible to defend and increase our power over the rest of the world.
Yeah.
Well, adding to the confusion now is that John Ulliott was the top spokesman of the Pentagon in the first Trump administration and a big supporter of Hegseth.
He, in fact, wrote an editorial supporting Hegseth when his confirmation was in doubt.
Now he's coming out and saying because of this chaos, because Hegseth is really not running the Pentagon in a good way, he should step down.
Now go to that next clip because this is a piece that he wrote in Politico today.
He said, it's been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon, from leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings.
The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president who deserves better from his senior leadership.
Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account.
Given that, it's hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in this role for much longer.
Now, go to the next one.
Now, here's where Uliov is upset.
Uliat, sorry to mispronounce his name.
The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon's top ranks.
On Friday, Hegset fired three of his most senior loyal staffers, senior advisor Dan Caldwell, Deputy Chief of Staff, Darren Selnick, and Colin Carroll, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegset tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming that they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.
And here is Hegseth, former friend.
He says, Yet none of this is true.
While the department said it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector.
In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing.
Now, these three guys, particularly Caldwell, Dr. Paul, they were known to be more interested in restraining our foreign policy.
So, all of a sudden, somehow, I mean, I'm just piecing it together, somehow they were able to turn Hegseth against these three guys, lie that they were leaking, get them fired, and now they're probably doing this.
They're happy they got these guys out.
All this is so important, but to take that and put it to a one-sentence, you know, for the public to grasp what exactly is going on, that is the job that we have.
But I also think that both the president and the staff contribute to this nonsense because, you know, take Yemen, for example.
You know, think of that.
That wasn't stopping a war, that was accelerating a war.
And it could have been staff telling them they were probably split on the staff, but he looked like he was not bashful about what his position was like.
Same way on Gaza.
I mean, what they immediately do is since he's been in office, they've dramatically increased the amount of bombs that we send over there to go after the Palestinians.
So the people get they don't always see that because if they pick a champion, that champion can do no wrong.
Yeah, that's the problem.
They go along with us.
That's why everyone gets mad at us because sometimes we criticize Trump, sometimes we praise him.
You know, both sides hate us because we try to be a we got to get both sides liking us.
I wish they liked us.
Well, our good friend Kelly Vlajos, who we've known for a long time, she has great piece in responsible statecraft today, and she brings it together as she is so talented in doing.
Go ahead, a couple to Caldwell, two others.
Go a little bit forward.
I'm going to skip all this stuff.
One more.
Okay, here's Kelly's piece.
Just came out, came out yesterday.
Caldwell, and she updated actually just as we were starting the show.
Caldwell and two others sacked at DOD, fight back in a fiery joint statement.
That would say good for them because they were slimed and slammed and smeared.
Go to the next one.
Dan Caldwell, an Iraq war, all three of these were military people, by the way.
They fought in wars.
They knew what war is.
Dan Caldwell, an Iraq war veteran who left his role at Defense Priorities, Defense Priorities is known for being more restrained on foreign policy, to serve as senior advisor to Defense Secretary Hegseth released a joint statement with Hegseth Deputy Chief of Staff Darren Selmick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff and the deputy secretary of defense.
Go to the next one.
I'm just going to read a sentence out of this statement that they released.
The three of them who were fired and told that they were leaking, they said, we're incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service in the Defense Department ended.
Unnamed Pentagon officials, I would add neocons, have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.
All three of us served our country honorably in uniform.
For two of us, this included deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And based on our collective service, we understand the importance of information security and worked every day to protect it.
Now, I believe them because they were there.
At this time, we've still not been told what exactly we're investigated for, if there still is an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of quote leaks to begin with.
While this experience has been unconscionable, we remain supportive of the Trump Vance administration's mission to make the Pentagon great again and achieve peace through strength.
We hope the future to support those efforts in different capacities.
So they had no idea why they were fired, these three guys.
See, hopefully, under the system that I dream about, it would be easy to tell because if the policy is being violated, I think we have these conflicts, and we end up with both sides vary their policies and positions endlessly and for various reasons.
There's different groups support for different reasons.
But the policy has to be clear-cut.
You know, it's sort of like money.
What is money?
Well, maybe the Constitution gives us a guideline.
Maybe it should be precious metals, not whatever the Federal Reserve says it is, and they do it in secret.
You know, that's where the problems come, and then they end up with fighting over it.
And I think foreign policy is the same way.
And then it's the whole idea once Federal Reserve has to be secret.
You can't audit it.
What about the CIA?
A lot of people have written books on the CIA and they expose them a lot, but I'll bet there's books that have never been written.
Different Groups, Clear-Cut Policy 00:06:16
Oh, yeah, lots of them.
And that to me is open government and honest people there doing this rather than being on both sides of these issues.
And I wrote an article once about politicians should be sued for malpractice.
If they promise to do something, I'm going to always vote against any spending that's over the budget.
If they don't, well, I say you should be able to follow suit again.
I'm assuming.
But I guess that's the election.
You have to do it at the election to follow a suit against them.
And to some degrees, it works.
I mean, to some degree, that was accomplished in a narrow way with Trump, exposing the corruption and the waste and the fraud that has gone on.
If you go back to that a little bit more enthusiastically, we would be happy.
But I want to just do a little bit more because I think I smelled where the rat is.
I could be wrong, could be wrong.
Total speculation.
I'm not in the Pentagon.
It's a very complicated place.
But move ahead to that.
Reports are already emerging, if you can.
This is from Kelly's article.
Reports are already emerging that Joe Casper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's chief of staff, might have been the antagonist that led to the investigation and termination of Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll.
According to Politico, some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Casper and the fired advisors.
Quote, Joe didn't like those guys, said one defense official.
They all have different styles.
They just didn't get along.
It was a personality clash.
And here's an interesting twist.
As of Friday, Casper himself was being shipped out of his role and to another at the agency.
So, Dr. Paul, I was curious about this Joe Casper guy.
Why did he hate these three guys?
Why did they not get along?
Now, I don't know.
Maybe it's because they used up all the coffee in the lyrics.
Who knows what?
But I did find something interesting.
Joe Casper was chief of staff to Congressman Duncan Hunter, who was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Major, Major Neocon hated your guts, I'm pretty sure.
So if Casper was his chief of staff, he was definitely in sync with Casper.
He would have hated these guys because they were military and they didn't want to go to war unnecessarily.
So who knows?
It's just too bad the system doesn't weed them out before they get there.
Yeah.
But I think it's a reflection of what they've been taught, not only by other government officials, but what's taught in the university.
The expert university emphasizes foreign policy.
This is the stuff they teach.
You've got to be shrewd and smart and you haven't to take this into consideration.
They come up with all kinds of excuses.
But that's it.
This stuff should be exposed.
And I can always argue the case about this war business.
Why is it that wars are done, started in secret, and they become disasters?
They last a long and long and money and death.
And finally, after, I used to say after three or four years, they get tired of it.
Now sometimes they're smart enough that they try to save the lives of the Americans and kill somebody else.
So you can't go on for 20 years that we're involved in doing that and provide them with the bombs and the equipment to fight these wars.
So it's the same thing with this.
They keep going on as long as they get an encouragement.
Yeah, there's a lot of money involved, as you say.
You know, people may think that this is, I'll just close by saying, people may think that this is insider baseball.
We're wasting a half an hour of their time talking about it.
But who the people are the policy?
The personnel is the policy.
And the people who are in the Pentagon are consequential.
They're important.
So these three guys, if they were to advise more restraint, let's not go to war with Iran.
Let's not do this.
Let's stop supporting Ukraine.
That's important.
And that's why Kelly, and I won't read it, but Kelly went on to talk about how Danny Davis, who we know, who's a lieutenant colonel in the Army, military combat experience, he has a podcast now, great guy.
He was supposed to be Tulsi's deputy, and he was refused.
He was not appointed because he was for more restraint in the Middle East.
So they pick off these people and the neocon will come and take their place.
So this is consequential stuff.
People, you have to pay attention to who are in the support roles in these organizations.
Yes, Hegseth is the top guy.
He's the top dog.
But there are people under him who are advising him.
When they get his ear, you know, things can happen.
So I think the lesson is pay attention to these things and, you know, look closely at what's going on.
I want to thank you for joining us and also thumbs up, hit it, please, and like.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
You know, in many ways, I think a lot of people know exactly what I'm talking about.
Why stick with the principles and iron them out and eliminate those that don't agree with the basic principles they're running on?
But I think they'll say, well, that's not the way the world is.
The world lives in a more practical area.
And we have to be a little bit politically diplomatic.
We have to get along with more factions.
So they go and they have to include some people from one faction include the other ones from the other one, thinking that's going to soften the blow and they're going to get appointed to something more easily.
And I think that leads to the problems.
But just now you sorted it out some way.
Good guys be, well.
They may not be good guys.
And the bad guys are there.
Maybe in secret they were really trying to help out.
So that's a shame.
It depends on the leadership and that's what I hope we can contribute and that is information.
And of course what we promote is the principles of peace and prosperity, which we believe can be achieved with a lot more personal liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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