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Sept. 3, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:35
More War Trump Orders US Strike On Alleged 'Drug Boat' In International Waters

President Trump claimed yesterday that a boat with 11 passengers that he ordered blown up in international waters near Venezuela was a drug smuggling boat. No evidence was given. What drives the US war on Venezuela?

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Something Big Happening 00:05:12
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Doing well.
Doing well.
And let's see how the country's doing.
Let's see how our wars are going.
I hope we're winning all the wars, but who knows what's going on there.
I know the war against the American taxpayer and American liberty is ongoing, and that's my major concern.
But I want to start off.
We want to talk a little bit about Venezuela.
I understand they have some oil down there and there's fighting going on.
We have warships down there.
So I'm sure you're up to speed on that.
So we'll deal with that.
But before that, I wanted to make a little few comments about the finances going on.
Most people know that gold has gone up a lot.
You know, there was a time in my lifetime, maybe your lifetime too, gold was $35 an ounce.
And now it's a little bit higher.
It's $3,500 an ounce.
And just this morning, once again, we heard that it was up $30 in one day.
So that tells you there's some excitement.
It's a good symbol, signal of what's really happening.
And that and the U.S. government debt, I think, are two important numbers to look at.
But some of the headlines I saw caught my attention.
One was the BRICS are buying gold secretly.
So something's going on there.
There's something big happening.
And then there was another one was talking about the Europeans, about their economic situation and how horrible it was.
And it was probably all pretty true, you know, on what's going on there.
But it never mentioned the U.S. economy and the danger we have.
But I thought, well, that's a good article.
But for some reason, you know, an event in the United States, the dollar is a big, big deal.
And I think when we talk about the deficits, $30 in one day for gold and ongoing gold up to $3,500 and gold by the European and other BRICS do it secretly.
What is going on?
My suspicion is that there's a lot of hint and a lot of problems that we have.
When I see and hear this, I keep thinking about a statement I read a long time ago in Human Action when Mises, for the first time, others thought in these terms, but he was very definite in describing what he called a crackup boom, where the instant is or the moment, whatever, when there's loss of confidence in currency and everything is up for grabs because they just don't want the money.
I think that, you know, when people talk about the German inflation in the 20s, and that was a crack-up boom because they just had to get rid of the paper money and just printing more just made the problem worse.
So I think that people should be concerned about that.
And more people should be concerned about what's happening in the gold market.
And this is something that will be dealt with.
It doesn't have to be put on the schedule because it's already on the schedule.
They say, what are you going to do about inflation?
Well, it's already over.
What do you mean?
What are we going to do about the inflation?
Oh, the inflation that you have to deal with has happened In the last 10 years, you know, with all the crisis we have, all we did was print more money.
So it's there, the consequences here.
But unfortunately, the consequence isn't enlightening very many people in charge that they should cut spending.
And so the problem is already out there to be dealt with.
And one of the reasons why we had a Republican president elected last year is because the people are starting to recognize that and they wanted somebody that was going to have a different approach.
But the few of us are a little bit disappointed that the spending that was promised and people expressing themselves how dangerous it is.
We haven't seen the results that we thought was possible.
I mean, right now, the Congress is getting ready to go back in.
They got out of town in the summertime because they couldn't handle some other political things.
But here they are coming back.
And they'd like to put the spending on the back burner.
But that is still there.
It's growing.
And they don't have an answer because the big spenders in the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry and all the people with their hands out, they're so powerful.
Blowing Up Boats? 00:07:43
It looks like it's going to continue.
But what these few things I read about here, those are big numbers that's telling people that something big is happening and it will end up in a climactic end.
And that may be tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
Most likely it won't happen tomorrow or next week.
But it's on the horizon and a lot of people are worried about it.
And unfortunately, the way I see it, the people who will suffer the most will the people who have been the most innocent.
And that's the middle in class, a middle-class income group, because they really weren't in the action, even though they may have been receiving some of the benefits.
So it's who's going to be hurt the most?
I think it's the poor and the middle class.
We ought to wake up.
So I wonder if there's anything going on international that we could start with in cutting some of this spending.
What do you think, Daniel?
Do you think there's any place where we can start?
Maybe a couple of those 800 bases.
You know, once again, the peace president, the Nobel Prize peace president, has gone overseas to kill people and blow things up.
And that's the big news today.
Yesterday, he ordered the military, the U.S. Navy, that's gathered off the coast of Venezuela to blow up a ship.
A small boat, actually, it was.
It looked like a fishing boat.
He claims it was a boat full of drug smugglers.
Go to that first one.
First clip.
This is how Hedge put it up.
Heggs says the Hegseth is flexing his muscles, Dr. Paul.
He's looking very tough now.
Hegg says to narco-terrorists, assets gathering in region after drug boat blown apart in missile strike.
He said this morning that Tuesday's military action against a drug-laden boat that deported Venezuela killed 11 trendy Aragua militants, warning that this is just the beginning.
A couple things here, Dr. Paul, that strike out in the beginning.
First of all, it is the merging of the war on terror with the war on drugs.
And that's what we're seeing here.
The Trump administration is really pushing this idea of melding the two as our war on both of them have failed miserably.
Someone had a great idea.
Why don't we just merge the two and try it again?
Launch it again.
Now, put it up if you can.
Now, that's the first thing that I noticed, Dr. Paul.
And the second one is after drug boat blown apart, how do we know that it was a drug-laden boat?
No evidence was presented, just a claim by the administration.
And the third is, how do we know that these 11 people killed on that boat were trendy Aragua militants, narco-terrorists?
We don't know.
Basically, the administration is saying, trust me, bro, we blew this boat up and there were bad guys on board.
Now, that may well have been the case, but nevertheless, I didn't realize it was a practice of the U.S. military to go blowing small boats up in the middle of international waters without any evidence or justification.
The one place where I see a lot of falsehoods trying to excite the American people because, you know, a headline here says narco-terrorists, you know, it's they who have caused all this problem.
And they blow this truck, the boat up and kill people, as you mentioned.
But, you know, the drugs are deadly.
I understand the drug problem.
And it's though they use that and it can mobilize people.
But really, I think one of the big things about Venezuela is oil.
I mean, I understand they have a couple barrels of oil left down there.
And maybe this is just another place where we're planting, you know, our military.
So it doesn't fit the American First foreign policy.
I just don't think that's demagoguing to say that.
I think it's exactly the opposite of what an American First, because, oh, well, but we're going to fight the war on fentanyl.
Americans are taking too much fentanyl.
Well, that is a problem, but that isn't the problem they're addressing.
Matter of fact, this is an error made in foreign policy.
It's an error made in spending policy and deficit financing.
And I believe personally, and many others believe we don't need another country to take over and fight and spend more money.
I think the bank is empty.
We don't have the funds to do this.
You know, Conway Rails kicked in $10 and we appreciate it.
But he makes a really good point here that the deport them all people don't seem to understand.
He says MAGA and even some libertarian folks that support the war against Venezuela ought to recognize that this new war will create a new border crisis at home, which is what's always happened.
That's why they came up here because of the sanctions and blowing them up over there.
Now, skip one and go to that Donald Trump.
Here's what Donald Trump had to say about it.
I'm not sure I'm going to read all this because it's another long one.
But he says, earlier this morning on my orders, U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified trendy Aragua narco-terrorists in the Southcom area of responsibility.
And he said they are operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the U.S. and the Western Hemisphere.
He goes on to say, the strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.
No U.S. forces were harmed in the strike.
Let it serve notice to anybody trying to bring drugs.
Beware.
And I'll go on.
Now, Dave DeCamp makes a couple of good points about this.
This is the claim that this was an attack on a narco-terrorist game, a gang, Trendiaragua.
But Dave DeCamp points out, Trump claims the strike targeted members of the Venezuelan gang, Trendi Aragua.
He also claims the gang is, quote, under the control of Nicolas Maduro.
Get this, good find from Dave.
That contradicts a declassified U.S. intelligence memo that says Maduro's government does not control TDA.
Now, go to the next.
This is from our own intelligence community, Dr. Paul.
This came out in April.
It's a longer think piece, Venezuela, examining the regime ties to Trend Diaragua.
Our own intelligence community concluded, if you go to the next one, you can see it in the headline.
Maduro regime probably not directing TDA activities.
While Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with them and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.
The intelligence community bases this judgment on Venezuela law enforcement actions demonstrating the regime treats TDA as a threat.
So his own intelligence community says he's not in charge of it.
He's fighting against it.
Yet we kill these people and we say Maduro is the one we're really after.
Venezuela's Permissive Environment 00:08:13
You know, they use the drug issue to stir up trouble and get the American people to go along with it.
We have to stop this monster from expanding and getting into our countries.
And they're willing to even lie about it, just as you point out.
They're misleading the American people.
But I think there's a bigger thing here.
I think let's say there is Venezuela doing this.
And does that, that in itself, does that justify what we're doing?
And I say no.
And I would say that if it does justify it, they're pure hypocrites because if they're going to protect us, you know, from these drugs coming in, they have to go, they have to support the prohibition of alcohol.
Yeah.
You know, because, you know, they were going to do all these good things with alcohol and they hardly ever use this example as, you know, as opposition to prohibition because the prohibition just doesn't work.
And this is what they do.
And I took a look for some numbers.
And, you know, in a recent year, I forget which year it was, 2021, 22, as an example, there were 178,000 people who died from alcohol.
Wow.
And 73,000, terrible, 73,000 died from fentanyl.
So half as much.
Half, half as much.
And the whole thing is, is they use it just as a tool.
But, you know, I talked about this when I was in Congress because I said, you shouldn't be surprised, you know, that they will not treat alcohol in the same words that they treat the other things because most of the people, you know, that pass these laws, they drink alcohol.
Yeah, they drink a lot of alcohol.
We were there for a long time.
So I just think that this is so misleading.
And they're talking about making a case for prohibition.
And nobody's going to say, oh, I'm for prohibition of alcohol.
I'm for prohibition of the government getting involved in wars that are more personal decisions.
There's something wrong with the people that make these bad decisions.
If this were true, you know, that it's government's responsibility, maybe people should have absolute control on sugar.
Yeah.
You know, maybe that would help save a few lives.
But that isn't the case.
And I think it's a shame what's going to happen.
And the alcohol, I want to put one other stat on there.
The leading preventable cause of death is alcohol.
Of all the deaths in the country.
And yet we're doing this.
And this is used to blow up a drug ship.
Allegedly a drug ship.
What are we doing down there?
And, well, it's disgusting, but it does go back to a principle.
And the principle was that of the non-interventionist foreign policy, because if we followed that, we wouldn't be doing this.
We wouldn't have been, you know, when we were up in Washington, remember when we were giving some helicopters to Colombia, and that was going to solve the problem.
You know, it's still all, they're just excuses.
But a lot of our foreign policy, what they call the real wars, are just excuses.
And sometimes there's an admission, they like continuous, they like slow and continuous war.
Use up the weapons and send in another bill in there and ask them to produce more planes.
It never stops.
But it will stop when the crackout boom hits.
Well, it wasn't the war on drugs was launched under Nixon, right?
Is that right, if I'm not mistaken?
Nixon was big in it.
Yeah.
And so this has been going on for a long time.
And we haven't, not only have we not won the war on drugs, it's as strong as ever, obviously.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be freaking out over fentanyl.
So it's a strategy over a half of a century that has not worked whatsoever, yet they keep doing it.
But I think, Dr. Paul, you just hit the nail on the head.
This is an excuse.
It's an excuse to expand the global U.S. military empire.
You know, when Clinton was involved with the drug wars, we expanded into Latin and South America.
When Bush, senior before him, we used as an excuse to go into take out Panama, take out Noriega and Panama.
It's always an excuse for U.S. military operations.
So it really isn't about the drugs at all.
It's about expanding the U.S. military empire.
Wasn't it Noriego we went down and arrested and put in an American prison?
Yeah, American prison.
Isn't that pretty bold?
Head of state.
And then the world was so much better off after they got him off the streets.
Well, they did a lot worse to Gaddafi.
He was also claimed that he was passing around drugs.
But now I want to go back to Dave DeCamp's piece, actually, because the other thing is, so there's this trendiaragua.
Excuse my Spanish is not great.
But then there's another organization that the U.S. claims that Maduro is literally the head of.
You go to this next one.
Representative Carlos Jimenez claimed in a post on X that the U.S. had sunk a boat belonging to the Cartel of the Sons, a term used to describe a network of Venezuelan government and military officials allegedly involved in drug trafficking, but does not actually exist as an organization, as in there is no such thing.
It's made up.
It's made up to pin it on Maduro, who I'm in no way defending.
However, I don't like the idea of us getting ready to attack.
Now, what I think partially this is about, Dr. Paul, is Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio has been sidelined as a top diplomat pretty much throughout the entire Trump administration.
He's always sending Witkoff or Kellogg or someone else to do the job that you would normally have a Secretary of State do.
We know that regime change in Venezuela is nearer and dearer to Rubio's heart than pretty much anything else.
Now, if you go to that next clip, Rubio was a staunch supporter of the first regime change effort when he was a senator.
And according to a report from Axios, he is largely driving Trump's current Venezuela policy.
Rubio recently announced that the bounty on Maduro's head was increased to 50 million.
And the Trump administration has designated several cartels, including the so-called Cartel of the Sons, specially designated global terrorists.
Again, there's emerging war on drugs, a war on terror.
Both failed.
Put them together.
So, anyway, here's this one.
We'll catch you, Dr. Walker because we just talked about it.
One U.S. official told Axios that the current operation against Venezuela could be Noriega Part II, referring to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the ouster of Manuel Noriega.
Maduro has vowed to fight if the U.S. attacks.
Warning on Monday, he will declare a republic in arms.
So, you know, on authority to do such things here, Pete Hagsteth had a comment.
His secretary of defense says the decimation of narco-terrorist cartel boat.
That's a fact, you know, boat from Venezuela is this is the catch and throats.
And this is, yeah, and I think this there's not a quota here, but Trump said to say that is the only the beginning.
Assets are gathering in a reason.
This is just the beginning of what they do.
And the word offense here, we have to go on the offense.
That's why he wants a department of offense.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and the people sleep away.
Assets Are Gathering 00:07:25
Yeah, because nobody likes drugs.
Nobody likes seeing people overdose in the streets, you know.
So it's away, but I think it is starting to divide the MAGA people, just like his, you know, his relationship with Israel and other things, because it's just not America first.
The problem with drugs is a problem that we have.
They're not bringing him over here, pushing him on people.
There is a problem with demand, as you know, a bit of their irony here because if it's true, Trump doesn't use alcohol.
Yeah.
He doesn't drink.
But so therefore, that sort of supports our assumption that it's a tool for using it, and it's not relevant to him and giving advice, you know.
So I always thought that was interesting that he didn't touch it, but he's doing more to cause trouble with the drugs.
Yeah.
So, well, George just kicked in $20 for the show.
We appreciate it.
And he added a quote from one of my two favorite social commentators in the 20th century, the other being Joe Sobrin.
He quoted H.L. Mencken saying, Even the cruel provisions of the Harrison Act have done nothing to reduce drug use.
That was back in 1920.
So there we go.
Now, the other thing I wanted to bring up, Dr. Paul, is this issue of Trump saying, basically, trust me, bro, it was a drug-laden boat.
They were narco-terrorists.
We had to blow them out of the water.
Well, this reminded me of something that happened back in April.
Now, go to that next link.
You'll remember this.
Donald Trump said, these Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.
Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis.
They will never sink our ships again.
And you can see the picture of a tribal gathering.
And he also included a film of them being blown up, as he included a film of the ship being blown up.
But the fact of the matter is, he was wrong.
He was either misinformed or he was lying.
The U.S. President Trump, this is a commenter I am Palestine back at the time.
U.S. President Trump announced strikes targeting Houthis in Yemen.
In reality, it was a tribal gathering of Yemen's men on the occasion of Ayd al-Fitr.
Sorry if I mispronounced that, but it's a high Muslim holiday.
This turns out to be how they gather for this particular holiday, as you will know from the next clip, which is not the same gathering.
It's just simply how tribal leaders gather to have a discussion.
Now, go back, and he claimed to the black and white, if you can, I don't usually go backward.
Exact same formation.
He claimed that they were planning an attack.
It was a lie or he was misinformed because what he did is he killed a bunch of innocent civilians with this strike.
And I suspect he did the same thing on this boat.
You know, if we get people's attention, they'll say, yeah, I think we better study this.
And then they'll deal with, how do we separate, you know, the good guys from the bad guys?
We should be involved here because they're using drugs or we should do this.
That's why a principle that deals with all the problems is much better.
Because if you say that we shouldn't be engaged in telling other people how to live and that we should be non-interventionist, we should be sending troops around.
We should not challenge other people's sovereignty.
As a principle, then you don't have to decide who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
Think of how many wars that we're involved with.
And I frequently have said, and on occasion it did happen, I said, we get involved and we give money to both sides.
They end up giving both sides.
And then the weapons sometimes, maybe frequently, end up being used against us.
So it makes no sense.
That's why the clear principle of non-intervention, I believe the founders would agree with that because they say, stay out of the entangling alliances.
And even some of our presidents would use those terms when they want to be elected, but they never follow through.
It was just a political stunt.
Yeah, that's true.
If you don't mind, I'm going to read just a couple of quotes from people on X who have some intelligent comments.
This next one is Martin Cowan, who is a libertarian in Georgia, an LP guy.
He said, Trump's murder of boaters near Venezuela is despicable.
It matters not even if they were drug traffickers.
That was Venezuela's business, not ours.
American due process requires indictment and trial.
Furthermore, there is no death penalty for drug trafficking in the U.S.
I think that's such an important point that he made.
Even if true, you don't get the death penalty even if you get a trial and are convicted.
Now, here's a professor I think down in Venezuela who made a point.
Victor, go to the next one, Edgio.
They did not detain the crew members and reveal their identities.
They did not show the drugs.
They didn't prove any connection with Venezuela.
But today, all Western media repeat Trump's lies, just as they repeated in 2002 about the lies about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Remember that the media are part of the empire's war machinery and that the first phase of a war is always cognitive warfare.
Great point.
The last one I'm going to quote is our good friend Max Blumenthal, who's been with us at several RPI conferences.
He says, as with Trump's bombing of Iran, his show of force and possible military assault on Venezuela, a country that poses no threat to the U.S., is taking place with no congressional input or approval and next to no public debate.
It's pure gangsterism.
And like the U.S. bombing of Iran, Trump has commandeered the U.S. military to carry out the agenda of a fanatical fifth column that wields outsized influence in Washington and dictates his foreign policy.
And I'm going to conclude, Dr. Paul, by going back to what you started at saying.
Why on earth are we so hot on disrupting and destroying Venezuela?
Well, go to that last picture.
As you said, and very, very well, Dr. Paul, this is the country sitting on the largest oil reserves.
The one on the far left, meaning the most reserves on earth, is a little country down there called Venezuela.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
You know, and even what you say there, it's not indicating that, well, they have oil.
They have too much oil.
We're short of oil.
We need oil.
It has nothing to do with it.
The people that want this think in terms of empire, you know, because as we gather more control around the world, and if Europe's in the shape it's in, and really we own a lot of those companies, two countries as well, because they don't pay their share of NATO and all that Mickey Mouse stuff that they do.
So it is something that they want us to believe that it's necessary, but they do not want to admit that it's Zoyo, it's empire building, it's weapons building.
And that they are least concerned, I believe, is the civil liberties of the American citizen, you know, in a lot of ways through economic terms and social controls and the wars that we fight.
So all of this, we should get more people to be more concentrating on the principles of personal liberty and the purpose of the Constitution.
Amen.
I'm done, Dr. Paul.
You can't.
Very, very good.
And I, too, want to thank our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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