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Aug. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:09
Natali Morris - 'How a Former Leftist Journalist Rejected the Uniparty'

Co-host of the popular Redacted podcast, Natali shares with RPI her transformation from partisan to non-partisan...

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Time Text
A Great Pleasure 00:03:38
What a great pleasure to introduce our next speaker.
Once again, a fantastic journalist who is not afraid to cover issues that the mainstream will not touch.
She started out in the tech industry, working for CNET, CBS, PC Magazine.
But today she's very well known for her extremely popular podcast known as Redacted with her husband, Clayton Morris, who used to work for Fox News.
We highly recommend everybody in this room will love that show.
It's already very popular.
If you don't follow them on YouTube or Rumble, please do so.
She frequently has us as a guest.
Dr. Paul has been on Daniel multiple times, and she even invites me back many times.
So what a great honor to have her here with us today.
Ms. Natalie Morris.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's really truly an honor.
I do a podcast out of my basement with my husband and we only really talk to each other.
So to me, to see that you're all real is such a privilege.
I wanted to start my speech by saying this week I saw JD Vance answer a question about which historical figures he would have dinner with.
And he chose Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, and President Trump.
And I have kind of a nerdy answer to that.
If anybody were to ask me who would I have dinner with, I would choose President Calvin Coolidge.
Now, okay, somebody got the joke.
So what's funny about that is Calvin Coolidge was painfully quiet.
He was a man of so few words that it made people really uncomfortable.
There's a great anecdote that he was sat at a state dinner, much like this, next to a woman who said, I bet my best friend that I could draw three words of conversation out of you.
And he said, you lose, and went back to his dinner.
So this dry humor is one of many reasons I have this history crush on Calvin Coolidge.
I think he had the spirit of Ron Paul 100 years ago.
In truth, I really romanticize all small G government politicians, so much so that my husband Clayton and I named our dog Grover, not after the Sesame Street monster, but after Grover Cleveland, who was known as the veto president.
But history tends to forget these small G government politicians, and it makes me crazy bananas that we idolize the big government politicians like FDR, who, in my opinion, was one of the worst presidents in history.
Not only did he steal.
Oh, we're applauding that.
OK.
Okay.
Thank you for saying that.
Not only did he steal from Americans, he also imprisoned the Japanese.
He proposed a 99% tax rate.
Can you imagine what he would have done with that?
Thankfully, Congress stopped him.
And after he was elected, he began what was called the 100 Days, which was a record-breaking barrage of new legislation that gave him unprecedented power.
Now, his power grab was so blatant that the Supreme Court started to rule against him, and they only stopped when he threatened to pack the court.
That's why I would so much rather celebrate the quiet, awkward types like Calvin Coolidge.
Instead of expanding government, he cut taxes four times, delivered a budget surplus every year.
He took when he was the governor of Massachusetts 118 government agencies and shrunk them into 20 without scandal.
Media's Role in Europe 00:15:11
Can you imagine?
Yes, let's applaud that.
I think that's amazing.
Now, he gave up the presidency in 1928.
These were his parting words.
This is a direct quote to incoming President Hoover.
He said, you have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors.
Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have.
If you keep dead still, they will run down in three or four minutes.
If you cough or even smile, they'll start all over again.
Hoover did not take those words of advice.
So I ask you, can we elect a man like Cavan Coolidge today?
Steady, wise, but no media presence.
Now, journalism students, they're taught to ask this question.
They understand that charisma on camera often eclipses competence.
The classic example of this is the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon on TV.
It was one of the first televised debates.
And those who watched it on TV reported that Kennedy won because Nixon was sweaty and antsy.
He refused the makeup.
Those who listened to it on the radio reported that Nixon had won because they were able to listen to the substance.
And so journalism students studied this, and we are told, do not mistake flash for competence.
Yet, after I finished journalism school, I still fell for the power, the star power of the Clintons and the Obamas.
Last night at the reception, someone said, oh, but you were raised in California.
You're a California liberal journalist.
So it's not really your fault.
Which is a kind way to give me an out, but I do think that I should have known better.
In graduate school, I specialized in media studies, and I worked as a research assistant on the best-selling book, The Culture of Fear, which many of you may have read under Barry Glassner, who was one of those kind of fancy academics because he was on Oprah and he was in Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore movies.
The culture of fear became a part of the national lexicon.
It was a cultural acknowledgement that the media lies for its own benefit and makes us afraid of the wrong things.
Two of the things that I worked on were Halloween candy and pedophile priests.
Those are my two research projects.
Most people think that Halloween candy has like razor blades in the apple.
That's actually not true.
The only documented case of Halloween candy killing a kid or hurting a kid was like the mom's boyfriend.
It was inside the family.
There's never been strangers trying to hurt kids with Halloween candy, but that is a very popular media spun fear.
Another one is pedophile priests, that the media will make it out that it's only a Catholic thing and it's not.
And they boil it down.
We accept these boilerplate explanations of things because the media does this for their own benefit.
Now, at the time, the fact that the media lies was a leftist argument.
It was an academic argument.
So how do we go from that in the year 2000 to the year 2025 when you're called a right-wing conspiracy theorist for saying the media lies?
How did they do that to us?
It's something that I think about all the time.
This place where questioning the media is called crazy and trusting it is sane.
Maybe it's as simple as Trump said fake news.
They had to hate Trump.
So they love the media.
As a result, I think it's many reasons.
But I think we should all agree that a healthy distrust of both the media and the government is the starting point of a free society.
After graduate school, I kind of accidentally went into broadcast journalism.
I was discovered by Adam Curry, who you may know as one of the original MTV VJs.
And he was one of the first podcasters.
He saw me on a show called Cranky Geeks, which I really like that that was my introduction because I am a cranky geek.
And after that, I went to CNET and CBS bought CNET.
So I found myself with very little TV experience on the Tiffany network.
And that's where I met my husband Clayton.
He was an anchor on Fox and Friends at the time.
Now, as a good San Francisco liberal media elite, I naturally hated Republican politics, but I still fell for a guy on Fox News anyway, against my better judgment, because he's very charming and handsome.
And I convinced myself he must be secretly liberal too.
Even though when you watch him, and this is something I admired about him right away, is that he was always an independent.
He never really, even covering the culture wars, which are so divisive, he was able to sort of be measured.
And I learned a lot from him.
But still, in the first decade of our marriage, I was this committed California liberal married to a Fox News anchor, which is a weird way to live.
But I would watch Clayton while I was home with our babies on Fox and Friends, and I would just see, you know, Dandon Gino, like, no, he's wrong.
They would call Russia Gate a nothing burger.
I thought that was so lame because Rachel Maddow told me to.
It was very partisan way to live.
But looking back now, I see, and I'm just so convinced, and I'm annoyed that it took me too long to see this, that Fox and Friends and Rachel Maddow are on the same side of the different, a different side of the same coin, really.
Because after I studied the wars of the last two decades and after we left broadcast news, I had this epiphany.
Why do both sides of cable news attack each other for the culture wars, but not the real wars?
So why would Fox and Friends work themselves into a froth over Hillary's emails or where the Obamas went to dinner or who their friends were, but they didn't cover the body counts of those two demons?
I don't understand it.
If they really hated Obama and Clinton, wouldn't they cover Obama's drone wars?
He literally droned children.
He decided to call anyone who was of military age a combatant.
These were kids.
These were teenagers.
Why wouldn't Fox take that over who he went to dinner with?
Why wouldn't they, instead of Hillary's emails, cover her push for a war with Libya based on a lie?
Why didn't they do that?
Likewise, you know, when President Trump became president the first time, the liberal media didn't cover how he escalated the war in Somalia.
Instead, they gave us RussiaGate, which again is why I've become so convinced that they are a uniparty.
We all know that partisan culture wars are theater, but the partisan cable networks are the same.
They are aligned.
There's no daylight between them.
And if we don't see that now, they have identical support for Ukraine and Israel, then we'll never see it.
I went from CBS to NBC, and my last show ended in 2016 when I was pregnant with my third child, which I was glad for because my third pregnancy was not super fun.
I was thrown up in the makeup chair a lot.
Clayton left Fox the next year and we went independent and built our own business.
Now, it feels like we left at exactly the right time when we see the network news floundering in their own deceit.
And I do shudder to think what would have happened if we had stayed.
Now, the gentleman from the Netherlands says he can't get on mainstream press.
I actually think that's a good thing because they have such a low audience.
I do admit the Scheudenfreud.
I love watching the ratings go down, knowing that I left at a good time.
And I hope that you have independent press in the Netherlands who will take you on.
No, okay, well, you can come on Redacted, and we'll see what we can do.
Okay.
In 2009, thank you.
In 2019, we moved to Portugal and we thought, oh, let's just go abroad for one to three years.
And at the time, again, I was very liberal.
And liberals love to talk about how much better Europe is than us.
Like, oh, we're so colonial.
We're so racist.
Europe's better.
They don't know why Europe's better.
Think Europe is better because, well, they have better butter and skincare and not Trump.
And none of those things are really true, except maybe the butter.
But their politicians are worse, in fact, in my opinion.
In fact, at the school in Lisbon where my kids went, they said, oh, we have a wait list from what they call Trump exit, which is families fleeing from Trump and Brexit.
And the irony is that these people are leaving a free country for Europe, which is not free, chasing ideals that they don't understand.
And I can make fun of these obnoxious types because I was one of them.
But you know the type.
They spend two weeks abroad and they come home with a scarf and this superiority complex and like, oh, in Europe they do this.
So they don't understand Europe.
They just hate their own country.
Europeans aren't better than us and neither is their skincare.
They're equal to us in their struggles, but they're poorer in their freedoms.
And yes, our freedoms here are being eroded by the day, but we can still fight where Europeans cannot.
Our gum still has some flavor.
When we started redacted, it was during the lockdowns in Portugal.
I could not go for a run in my own neighborhood.
We got a dog.
I could walk the dog with one child at a time only.
We had police, yeah, police on the beach telling you you can't walk on the beach where we had 10 feet apart.
You have to walk on the sidewalk, which is this big for whatever reason.
They would stand there.
They would watch surfers be arrested for going out and surfing.
Is COVID in the ocean?
No, but those were the rules.
But once the pandemic restrictions were over, politicians in Europe then went on to crash their own economy for the war in Ukraine.
And we saw the plight of the working class go from bad to worse.
Here's one example.
We bought a house in 2021, and the bank said, well, you can have a fixed interest rate at 1.8% or an adjustable rate at 0.6%.
And we thought, well, why wouldn't we lock it in?
1.8 is cheap.
But it wasn't at the time because most Europeans took the cheaper rate.
In fact, 95% of them did.
And the banker said, well, you should take the adjustable rate because we're at peace.
We've been at peace for 20 years.
We're not going to have anything happen.
This is 2021.
The next year, 2022, we have the war in Ukraine.
The rates quadrupled for Europeans.
So think of 95% of Portuguese with an adjustable rate mortgage.
These are doctors, lawyers on fixed income, all of a sudden couldn't afford their own mortgage because it had quadrupled overnight.
And it was really something, though, to see there were protests in the streets, but a Ukrainian flag in the marina.
So this was Europeans publicly supporting the very lie that was stealing from them.
And they couldn't see it.
Now, this is only going to get worse in Europe, unfortunately, for the time being.
Ursula von der Leyen's recent 2 trillion Euro budget will compound these problems.
And there is no Congress to stop her.
At least here, we can fight over the big, beautiful bill, although in my opinion, we didn't fight hard enough.
But in Europe, if Ursula wants to tank the economy, she can do it.
And there is nothing to stop her.
The joke in Europe is that each country has a government for their government, which means the people have virtually no power or choice.
Now, in the U.S., we can still elect our leaders.
And when they fail, as Professor Sachs said this morning, they go into major jobs at universities.
In Europe, that's bad, right?
It's bad.
But in Europe, when they fail, they fail up into more powerful positions.
Ursula von der Leyen lost every election she ever ran.
Did you know that?
But she was still installed to the Bundestag via the party system.
And she is the president of the European Commission.
Antonio Costa, while we were still in Portugal, he was the prime minister.
He resigned over a green scandal.
He is now the president of the European Council, or co-president.
Mark Rutta resigned as prime minister of the Netherlands over a no-confidence vote that would have removed him due to his failed liberal policies.
Where is he now?
He runs NATO.
How do they have these monsters in power?
So seeing this up close cured me of this illusion that Europe was better.
Its leaders are not visionaries, except present company excluded, sir, which I'm very, I will be cheering you on.
But these are monsters with unchecked power.
Unfortunately, they are media darlings, though.
When I say a media darling, I mean someone the press turns into a superstar and then fawns over without a shred of critical thought.
So call out some people who you think are media darlings, like Jacinda Ardern.
Definitely Justin Trudeau was a media darling.
Obama, right?
Nobody else, media darlings.
People we think are evil, but the media loves them.
Who?
AOC.
Yes, thank you.
Media darling.
Okay, but what I came to see is that Europe's political class was not mine to fight.
Europe was going to have to decide for itself whether to reclaim its freedom or go down with its leaders.
So in 2024, I realized that I didn't want to stay with a sinking ship that I had no say in as an immigrant.
If Europe wanted to steer itself towards the rocks, then I didn't want to be trapped in a system where I'm not a voter.
I was an immigrant and I couldn't do anything in a place that is now punishing journalism and free speech.
So that's when I knew it was time for us to return to the U.S. and fight our own fight.
And, you know, I left thinking the U.S. was the worst place in the world.
And I came back knowing it is one of the best.
It's one of the places we still can fight.
There's still a fight left in us.
Thank you.
But here at home, the fight is no less urgent.
President Trump, he won on a promise to end the wars.
But while that hasn't happened, the lies that sustained them are still alive, and so is our work at Redacted.
The government keeps expanding its powers despite his promises.
And while the rest of us are distracted by shiny object arguments on X, we have to think about the world we leave our children.
Which again brings me back full circle to my historical crush on Calvin Coolidge.
History has largely overlooked his legacy, but Europe actually had a Calvin Coolidge-like character whose memory they haven't merely overlooked, they've dragged it into disgrace, working hard to shame and erase him.
I'm speaking of Portugal's Antonio Salazar.
Now today, his name is mud.
It's whispered like Voldemort.
You don't even say it.
But like Coolidge, he was frugal, modest, and skeptical of power, whereas Coolidge is merely overlooked.
Salazar's Shadow 00:02:19
Salazar is actively maligned in the history books.
At school in Portugal, my children were taught that he was a cruel man who wanted his people to be poor and only wanted to hold on to power.
They blame him for everything that the secret police did.
He was not the secret police.
In reality, they're called the PDE.
He clashed with them and when their actions he thought overstepped.
But history paints it as if he was the secret police.
The truth is he was preoccupied with keeping people out of debt and keeping people out of war.
Portugal doesn't get the reputation that Switzerland does, and it should, because Portugal did stay neutral in World War II, but he's never given credit.
And in fact, if you've ever been to Lisbon, you know the tower that's over the river there called the Cristo Re.
It was a gift to Portugal for staying out of World War II.
And it felt to me like it was a mockery every day that I could see it because I don't think they're going to get another one as long as they are shackled to the EU and NATO.
Now, Salazar actually was coerced into joining NATO.
And when he did, NATO gifted Portugal the iconic Lisbon Bridge.
It was named the Salazar Bridge, a name that he never wanted.
But today, his name has been canceled.
They stripped it away from the bridge, and they call it the Benticinco de Abril, which is the 25th of April, the day that the people overthrew the government.
Salazar was dead by then.
So he had nothing to do with it.
But in canceling him, they canceled the very idea of a leader who refused glory and distrusted power, was obsessed with peace and fiscal responsibility.
By erasing that, they erase the possibility of even having a leader like that.
They don't have to come to terms with the fact that they were once an anti-war fiscal responsibility country.
They can pretend it never happened.
And I think that's what we're missing on both sides of the Atlantic.
President Coolidge put it this way.
He said, I think the American people want a solemn ass as a president, and I think I'll go along with that.
I think Europeans would very much like a solemn ass leader too, but instead they keep ending up with leaders who are just plain old asses.
My prayer for both continents that I've called home is that we learn to recognize and elect a few more solemn asses for our own sake.
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