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Aug. 26, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:12
Burn A Flag...Go To Jail?

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday that he claims will send those who burn US flags to jail for a year without early release. But the devil is always in the details. Also today, a new poll shows how far Israel has fallen in US public opinion.

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Time Text
Trump's Executive Order Mystery 00:15:03
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 this week.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Good.
Doing well.
Got a couple items we're going to deal with today.
You know, I'm going to have a little statement about an economic matter that caught my attention.
But the main part of the program, we will be explaining away all the confusion about: are you allowed to burn a flag?
Or should you be or should you be executed for it?
And the other thing is there's a poll done recently that would be a bit encouraging and say maybe to a degree we could call it good news.
But before we start on that, I want to mention something because it's been in the news and we've mentioned a program, and that has to do with Intel.
We have fire and we just heard just the other day that the United States invested $8.9 billion to buy 10% of Intel.
The word buy is not exactly correct, but we've invested money and we have ownership of 10% of Intel, which was very disturbing to me and still disturbing to what it really means about why are we doing this.
And I see it as a danger sign because the plan is that they're going to do a lot more of this.
And Trump and others in his administration have always been very supportive of what they call a sovereign wealth fund.
And that's where the government is, the government is very much involved in a lot of corporations.
And here, the National Economic Council director, Kevin Hesset, has announced, yes, we want to do this.
We want to have more involvement.
And if you look at the balance sheet of Intel, it's not doing well.
So I wonder if there could be any maneuvering there.
Maybe this is the main thing is it's a sneaky way or pretending it's an honorable way to bail this country out.
But anyway, it looks like we're involved and it looks like some people believe it should keep going.
I see it, and I complain about it because I think it's a significant step between what I refer to and many others refer to as corporatism.
And we have so much of that where the corporations run things and they have their lobbyists in.
As an example, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, the educational industry, and all these people, you know, are very, very much involved.
But it's not socialism.
It's not communism.
And some people say, well, maybe it's fascism.
And it really isn't any of those.
I think it's what we've been living with is corporatism where the corporations take over.
And so often the criticism of our policies today will be that look at what these people who believe in freedom, that Liberty Group over there, they think in free markets.
The whole thing is, is we haven't had that.
We haven't had sound money.
We don't follow the Constitution.
You know, all those problems that we have.
But they keep saying, you know, it's a terrible situation.
But so the corporations are really running the show in many ways.
And yet we do well compared to so many other countries.
But that's changing because our dollar is getting weaker.
Our foreign policy is losing credibility.
And I think things like this, where there's an emphasis now on sovereign wealth funds, that they will be doing a lot more of this so-called pseudo-investment and ownership of the company.
It's probably not accidental that Intel is having financial problems.
And maybe that's what's really behind the scene.
And I think what I see now is this is corporatism that has threatened us, and people are waking up, and people know about the pharmaceuticals.
A lot of people know about the military-industrial industrial complex.
And there's a group now when you have more, a closer relationship of actually ownership.
I think you're treading on the doorstep of fascism.
And that, I think, is very, very dangerous.
And they're not sneaky about this.
This is an open thing.
They think it's a good idea.
But if they believe in free market capitalism and freedom of choice, they wouldn't be endorsing corporations.
They wouldn't endorse this corporatism either.
So corporatism is a little sneakier.
People don't really realize that they have so much power, but it's used against us who believe in free markets.
They say, well, look, your free markets aren't working.
Well, what's not working is corporatism and inflationism and a deeply flawed foreign policy.
So all those things are coming together.
So just I want to just mention this: that they literally say that they would like to do more of this.
And I think people should talk more about why did we put $8.9 billion behind a 10% position in Intel who's having financial trouble.
So this is an information people need to know, whether it's on foreign policy or monetary policy, to really make a good judgment.
So that's my little tidbit today on economic policy.
And we want to go into our first subject, and that is the issue of the flag burning, which was something many years ago.
I had a vote to cast on that subject.
And this article says Trump signs an order to criminally charge those who burn U.S. flag in protest.
So it looks like protest is the problem.
And that's skirting on the grounds of First Amendment rights and why do they want us to do it?
And if there is disruption, who should be in charge of it?
So there's a complexity there.
But so often, what we find is when people get into this, it's a very emotional issue.
Patriotism rides very high in the flare in the flag between more or less sacred, and we have to be cautious about how we handle it.
Yeah, I know it was an executive order that Trump signed yesterday, and it does feel an awful lot like an attempt to deflect people's eyes from things that are upsetting his base.
You know, the Epstein files, what's happening in Israel and Gaza.
This is, I think, probably supposed to be sort of a feel-good move to get people on board.
But then again, these aren't the 1980s anymore.
And as you say, in the late 80s, the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is a form of expression and protected by the First Amendment.
So we're sort of going back to that again in a sort of jingoistic way.
If we can put that first clip up, this is from The Guardian.
I just clipped this when they first came out yesterday afternoon.
Trump signs order to criminally charge those who burn U.S. flag in protest.
Now, this is interesting because he's going to try to circumvent the Supreme Court decision.
And I go to the next one, you'll see what he said.
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday instructing federal prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals who burn American flags during protests.
The order tells the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bundy to look at cases where people burn flags and see if they can be charged with other crimes like disturbing the peace or breaking environmental laws.
And the purpose of that is to get around the 1989 decision by the Supreme Court in Texas versus Johnson that ruled that destroying the flag is protecting political expression under the First Amendment.
Now, we do have a clip to hear what President Trump was talking about when he signed the EO.
If we can get that clip up, and let's listen to that whole clip.
You might want to put in that earpiece, Dr. Paul, while we're queuing up this clip here, that first clip.
Let's listen to what President Trump had to say about it.
And to what the penalty is going to be: if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing.
You get one year of jail.
If you burn a flag, you get and what it does is incite to riot.
I'll tell you that language, by the way, did that incite to riot.
And you burn a flag, you get one year in jail.
You don't get 10 years, you don't get one month.
You get one year in jail, and it goes on your record.
And what the penalty.
Go to the next clip.
I'll just finish with this intro part, Dr. Paul.
Because Michael Tracy, who we both know, is very insightful.
He manages to get people irritated with him on all sides.
If you put that next clip up, he noticed something very interesting in this executive order.
He said, What are the odds that Trump actually read his own executive order?
It doesn't impose one year in jail if you burn the flag.
It makes flag burning a higher investigative priority to see if other crimes incidental to the flag burning can be charged.
It specifies no jail terms.
So he may not have even read his own executive order.
They say the flag was used to incite disruption and violated to some degree.
It's hardly going to be treason or what else.
But if they do that, how do they get the federal government?
Oh, this is just so much more big government, centralized government, a new federal law, and we're going to put you in jail for the and the main goal here, and I think the president recognizes it, is an expression.
People want to express their frustrations over.
But if it's a local, it should be a local issue, you know, and they should deal with it.
But even then, they can take this into consideration whether they were just expressing themselves and they were causing a riot and different things of that sort.
But I think that this whole thing is, you know, so far overboard in emphasis that the more they do this, the more they incite people.
Well, I want, look at the publicity you could get, you know, for our issues that we want.
So it's a it's it's a it's a really a uh I challenge to patriotism.
Do you understand patriotism and what does it mean?
And if you can, because we don't, that's all we talk about going to war and supporting the troops because you want to be patriotic.
And so it's, it's the flag is the issue.
And then again, what what uh how would they handle this?
Because people don't want to talk about this either.
What about what have we used the flag for since 1945?
Yeah.
I mean, the flag, why don't they talk about sovereignty?
We've delivered it to the United Nations, to Israel, all over the place.
And then we have this moral and financial responsibility.
Now, that's a serious matter.
And then they're going to dwell on the fact that somebody, you know, burnt this flag, which is which is pretty bad, you know.
I mean, it's just there.
But I think it backfires on the people who object to it because the objection, you know, gets it out in the news and they get some of their publicity that they think is important.
Yeah, you know, our good friend John and Nisha Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute.
And I forgot to make a clip of this, but he has a great, he has a great column out today about this.
And I did put it up on the Ron Paul Institute website as well.
But he talks about this as a smokescreen for more authoritarianism.
I'm just going to read a couple of sentences.
I should have put them up, but I forgot to do it.
He's talking about attacks on speech.
He said, what the left enforces with trigger warnings and deplatforming, Trump enforces with prosecutions, cultural rebranding, and militarization.
And this is a great point he makes.
They are snowflakes of a different political persuasion, but the result is the same.
Dissent is silenced.
History is rewritten.
And only the approved narrative remains.
And he says, let's not confuse patriotism, love for, or devotion to one's country with blind obedience to the government's dictates.
That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.
That's powerful there.
And that's what they should be.
John is great.
Yeah.
John and Nisha are great.
But you know, the funniest thing about this is sort of the punchline of the whole thing.
Yeah, and as you said, neither of us thinks flag burning is a neat idea.
It's kind of dumb.
There certainly are better and more effective ways of protesting or making your position known.
But the funniest thing, the punchline of this whole thing, if you put the same, if you put that next clip up, he actually literally took a page out of Hillary Clinton.
It's to the T.
And Glenn Greenwald points it out.
He said, among the latest aspects, among the lamest aspects of Trump's flag burning executive order is how tired it is.
Politicians have been demagoguing this dumb idea for decades.
Hillary championed a ban on flag burning when she started running for president in 2005 with language identical to Trump's.
And as he points out there, including her bill calls for up to one year in prison.
So Trump, thinking that he's going to wave some red meat, actually took a play out of Hillary Clinton's playbook.
That should challenge some people's obsession with what they think is patriotism and reassess what they're talking about.
You know, it is a distraction.
And I tried to point that out.
I mean, there are so many things that abuse the rights of the people.
And that's what we should be talking about and what the flag could mean, living in a free country.
But that, once again, is what the people versus the government.
This is just big government, whether there's economic policies or what.
It's building more power into the military.
Ongoing Crimes Exposed 00:07:37
But I think it's a shame that so many people go along with this and don't ask the question.
This is hardly the biggest issue on the table today.
But besides, it's gone through the Supreme Court.
Or twice, I think.
Two versions of it have gone through.
Well, I think, I mean, I've even seen some people on the right criticizing this as a bad idea.
So who knows?
Maybe he meant well, but who knows?
So the second thing we want to tackle today is a new poll that came out.
Of course, we always like polls, especially when they go in the direction that we think is positive.
Now, this one is a mixed bag for me because it's interesting to watch the shifts in opinion, but I don't necessarily, I wouldn't ask the question this way.
But put this one up.
This is a new critical issues poll for the University of Maryland.
And it says Americans are now more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis.
Wide gap emerges between younger and older Republicans, even.
Now, this is the University of Maryland critical issues poll.
And of course, it was written up by our good friend Dave DeCamp.
If you go to that next one in a way that is very digestible, thanks, Dave.
A new University of Maryland critical issues poll has found that Americans are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis.
And I highlighted this, a historic shift in U.S. public opinion that comes as the U.S. government continues to support Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.
The poll found that 28% of respondents sympathized more with Palestinians and 22% said they sympathized more with Israelis.
Sympathy for Palestinians is stronger among Americans ages 18 to 34, with 37% of them saying they sympathize more with Palestinians and only 11 sympathizing more with the Israelis.
So public opinion in the U.S. continues to shift radically and it's skewed more heavily toward the younger generation against Israel because people, again, are seeing in real time what's happening.
They're seeing children starve and they tend to not like that.
You know, this also involves the emotions of people because what's mixed in here is religious beliefs.
And these religious beliefs can be the most important thing there is.
So whether it's Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and yet there's still, you know, I think there's room to offer up the principles of non-aggression in all those religions.
But right now they're sort of mixed up.
You know, when you look at the evangelicals, you know, I can't quite figure out, you know, why they wouldn't be outraged by this.
They'd have to say that the news, which we believe is not controlled exactly by the libertarians, we're expressing, you know, a concern about what's going on over there.
So there's conservatives and liberals, you know, following the libertarians on this, you know, how atrocious it is.
And that, I think, is something that we have to recognize.
But I think it's always going to be solved by a principle of non-aggression and natural law.
We don't have to sort out the minutia of all the different religion because there's more similarities.
Maybe they're buried, but within most religions, you're not supposed to kill people.
I guess there's some religion someplace just going, yeah, we'll chalk that up.
You just killed somebody.
It's not done that way.
But I think that I sort of like this poll to show that I sympathize with young people.
And the young people were saying, we don't need this because I think it's such a foolish thing because I always claim it isn't the young people don't get to declare the wars.
And they get together.
I said, they don't get together.
And the young people of two countries get together and say, wouldn't it be a pretty neat thing if we'd have a war, like they were playing a football game?
It doesn't work that way.
Yeah.
And the reason I think for me, at least, the poll, the question is unfortunate is because I don't think you need to take sides.
And I think you've said that.
We don't have to sympathize with either side.
Obviously, when one has so much more predominance of power and is using it in a way that we disagree with, you would tend to emotionally sympathize.
But what about sympathizing with the United States and the American taxpayer and our moral fiber?
But you talk about a non-aggression principle.
And that's the area where the United States does come in because the U.S. sending bombs and bullets, weapons, and money to Israel to commit these heinous crimes.
That's aggression on our part, too.
So as non-aggressionists, we oppose the aggression of our own government, enabling the aggression and the murder of the Israeli government.
You think about why Americans are increasingly feeling more sympathetic to Palestinians and Israelis.
Well, here's an excellent example, an excellent, in a horrible, horrific term from yesterday.
And I'll put this next one up.
This is Alex Jones.
He put this out on X, and there's a video there we will not show on this program because it's among the most horrific things I've ever seen.
But Alex Jones says, live on air, Israel bombs civil defense teams as they try to retrieve the body of journalist Hossam al-Masri killed in an Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital.
Ongoing crimes before the eyes of the world.
As Netanyahu says, the first bombing of the hospital and the second later of rescue workers was a complete and total mishap.
Also, the truth theory is real, said Alex Jones.
So what they did is they bombed.
Now, first of all, bombing a hospital.
Remember when they were accused of bombing that first hospital, Dr. Paul, they said, we would never do such a thing.
Now they've bombed every single hospital in Gaza.
But so they went in and they bombed this hospital.
They killed a journalist.
The medics and his journalist colleagues came to rescue those and to take the bodies away.
And that's when from close-up, they fired a missile or an artillery round in, and you can see it easily.
But go to the next one.
This is, I think this is from the article in anti-war.
I could be mistaken.
But two strikes hit Nasser Hospital in Con Yunus in quick succession, medical officials said.
In videos, journalists and rescue workers can be seen rushing to the scene of the first one before a massive explosion hits an exterior staircase where journalists are often stationed.
In all, 20 people were killed.
Head of the Gaza Health Ministry reported.
Netanyahu said it was a tragic mishap.
But in all, Dr. Paul, they murdered five journalists, and that brings the total to well over 200 journalists that Israel has killed in this war, which, as someone pointed out, and I didn't put the graphic up, is more than every single war we've been in since the Civil War combined, is how many journalists have been killed.
And 1,400 medics, I should say, by the way.
Journalists Slaughtered 00:04:33
You know, we talked a little bit about the different groups, religious groups and political groups coming together.
And right now, I see groups coming together with a predominant view, and that's what is necessary to have a political change.
It's not getting one person in Congress to say something, which we should always work to bring coalitions together.
But I see the individuals that I alluded to, like religious differences and social differences.
And right now, they've come together in a way, and the predominant view is now going against this type of activity in Israel.
And I think that's very meaningful, and I think it's going to play a major role in it.
Because I think that is something that I witnessed and learned later on about Vietnam.
Just think of all that went on for years and years.
What about where the information was not revealed to us in Afghanistan, the Middle East?
I mean, you can go on and on, even at this time, Ukraine.
But you have to get a dominant viewpoint where the politicians, that's about the only thing you can wake them up if you wake the politicians up.
Hey, it looks like we're getting a lot of grief at home.
And then they have to decide to change the position.
But right now, the politicians are very, very slow in changing the people who are in charge of our foreign policy to quit sending the money to where the slaughter is occurring.
It's good that you mentioned religion because I think it's important for people to understand that there are plenty, I would say, a very large group of Jews in America who say, who are against this on the left and the right, progressives and more conservatives, who say this is a distortion of our religion.
We value human life.
What's happening there is going against our religion.
And you're hearing those voices more and more.
So it's certainly religion does play a role in people who feel like it's being exploited for bad purposes.
And that should be pushed in the other direction.
It should bring people together and look at the things that could be commonplace and where we have to live.
But you know, when the individuals and governments say out of it, there's so many examples in history and in geography that different factions actually live next door to these different factions that we see now, you know, fighting these wars.
And they would get, they worked out their differences and they became neighbors and other.
And I think that is, if we had less government mandates and less government stealing money from the people and enslaving them into fighting these wars, just think of the, you know, I don't know what the numbers are, but they're atrocious in Ukraine.
The numbers are horrible there.
And I think something like Ukraine, I would tend to add the casualties up as one group because they're both fighting thunder and avoid the whole subject of how did NATO, what kind of a role did NATO play on this?
And they don't talk much about that.
I do want to thank Georges for that $25 contribution to the show.
We appreciate that.
Sometimes it does help to humanize what is an otherwise inhuman act.
If you go to that next clip, you can see one of the journalists who were slaughtered yesterday by Israel.
It's a young woman.
She's definitely not Hamas.
Hamas does not allow women in their ranks.
So any claim that she is would be wrong.
But she's a mother.
Her name is Miriam.
And she's a mother and a journalist documenting what Israel was doing, a voice for her people.
And she was slaughtered yesterday at the Nasser Hospital.
This next one may even hit a little closer to your art, Dr. Paul, if you go to the next one.
This is the gentleman on the left is a surgeon, I believe, and his wife is a journalist.
Right after they finished making this video, they were also slaughtered by Israel yesterday.
So these are real people, and they're doing real jobs in Gaza until their lives are ended prematurely with an Israeli, but you can't really say Israeli because these are American weapons that are killing these people.
And it's absolutely heart-wrenching.
Boy, that is for sure.
Thanking Viewers 00:00:59
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to close out now to thank everyone for watching the show.
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Over to you, Dr. Very good.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
And I deeply appreciate your support.
And I also want to remind everybody that the problems are not complicated, and the answers are not complicated.
If we could just galvanize enthusiasm for a simple goal: do whatever we can to promote peace and prosperity and not to use aggression against other people to try to make them live and think like what we other people do.
That would solve a lot of our problems, and that's what we'll continue to work for here at the Liberty Report.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
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