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Sept. 4, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:32
Sparks Fly At NatCon5 Non Interventionist Conservatives Storm The Breach!

For the first time in the otherwise pro-interventionist National Conservatism conference, a faction has broken through the noise to contribute some important signal: you can't call yourself "America First" if you continue to support US intervention in the Middle East. Led by The American Conservative magazine Executive Director Curt Mills, the cats are out of the bag,

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Why We Left Google 00:15:14
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, sir.
How are you?
Doing good.
Good.
Excellent.
Anyway, we'd like to talk about foreign policy, starting off with this.
I could talk about gold, but gold is healthy, a little selling today.
but no major, major changes in the escalation of the dollar price of gold, which is the devaluation of the dollar.
That continues, and the foreign policy certainly plays a part in this.
And we're going to be talking about foreign policy, which we do quite frequently.
And that's where they waste a lot of money, and they're getting a little bit worried because they're running out of money.
But we found an interesting article put out over the weekend, and it was written by Kelly Lajos.
And he said the major conservative split over Israel spills out into the open at the NATCON, which is the National Conference on Foreign Policy.
And National Conservative Magazine and others.
So this is a revelation that they would be conservatives in a lot of issues and march lockstep together and they'd get along.
But there was a special place that we have felt it, you know, where the pressure is put on, yes, you can be a conservative, a libertarian, constitutionalist, and all these things, but you can't be treating Israel equally.
You know, it's a shame that they get the most unequal treatment, and we're complaining about it because we think it's not necessarily good for the United States or for peace.
And yet there's a lot of money flow into the Middle East.
So this is one thing that happened.
But they had this conference.
And evidently, guess what?
A real argument, a real debate broke out on whether this conservative group shouldn't have another look at our position with Israel.
That's something we've been indicating, not because we are pro- or negative with Israel as much as we are pro-American foreign policy.
That's our legal, moral responsibility is to maintain peace and offer that peace and prosperity to other people.
So this argument broke out.
I consider this very significant that is out in the open because a lot of people have been feeling this way.
And it's people who have not wanted to hear this.
But now that this is a significant event, I think a lot more people are going to join because there's people that were on the side of the argument.
A new look at this are significant.
And I think more people will start looking.
Well, you know, I think it's about time we looked at our relationship with Israel.
Yeah, this is a trend that we've been watching really closely this year.
And it's something that was first reflected in the polls.
We've talked about it so many times on the show, but the Pew Poll that came out in the spring showing that young Republicans, Republicans 40 and under, do not support our current policy toward Israel.
And then you've seen that repeated in Gallup polls.
We just talked about one, I think, last week.
So it's sort of a bottom-up kind of thing.
Americans are just tired of this relationship.
And the next step would be among the so-called intellectuals.
And I think that's what we saw happen.
And Kelly wrote this up.
I think it was yesterday in Responsible Statecraft, an article about kind of this breaking out in the open at the National Conservatism Conference, the NatCon 5 is what it's called.
And here you can see in Responsible Statecraft, here's the article and I highly recommend it.
Major conservative split over Israel spills out into the open at NATCO.
Now go to the next one.
Kelly wrote this up.
Don't look now, but foreign policy divisions among the conservatives gathered at the annual National Conservatism Conference are no longer contained.
Today they finally spilled out like gushing hot lava or whatever metaphor is best.
All over breakout session being of today means yesterday, Wednesday.
Go to the next one.
And this is what it's all about, okay?
For many realists and restrainers, and that's what Kelly and her crew over at the Responsible Statecraft consider themselves.
We consider them allies in this, include themselves in this annual event, dominated by new right conservatives who are a bit diverse, but at this confab largely support state sovereignty, traditional values, and the idea of a nation, today was a bit of a victory.
For years, NATCON, launched in 2019 by Yoram Hazoni, a staunch pro-Israel nationalist, had largely stayed away from foreign policy.
A rare panel on China here, one on NATO there, interspersed with overwrought conversations about the threat of Islamism here and in the U.S. and abroad.
So my take on NatCon, Dr. Paul, when it was launched in 2019, was Hazoni, I think, is an Israeli citizen, extremely pro-Israel.
I think NatCon itself, the concept of national conservatism, was launched to keep conservatives in the U.S. on the Israel reservation.
You can talk about foreign policy.
You can talk about the field wars elsewhere, but don't touch this.
This is sacred.
Now, the importance of what happened yesterday with this debate, and we'll get into exactly what occurred, but the importance is that now this taboo has been broken.
And so conservatives no longer feel constrained to carve out one section of foreign policy that they can't criticize.
Criticize, I mean, from the American perspective, American foreign policy.
And that's significant.
You know, one thing that I think has helped stimulate this debate is the fact that it is involving our First Amendment, because on the universities, which many people, because they get federal money, that the federal government owns it, and some people want to control it more than others.
But this administration has decided that anybody that is demonstrating, you know, pro-Palestinian, they have to dictate how this is going to be used.
So the issue became the First Amendment.
Can they do this?
Of course, the first principle of the Constitution should be we should be sending all this money to the college so that we can blackmail it.
That means that people believe because we send a lot of money that we own them.
But that's the way our foreign policy and economic policy has operated.
And right now, that same theory works with the tariffs and all.
So this was one thing that I think incentivized people.
People looked at this and said, yeah, but if they were in a neutral position, then all of a sudden they see some of the horrors, the stories coming out of Israel, that all of a sudden, especially many of the young people woke up.
That doesn't seem to be fair.
And I think that's the groundwork sitting in the background for a conference to come up and all of a sudden see something come out almost spontaneously.
I don't imagine they had a meeting and said, this is a strategy.
This is what we're going to do today.
We're going to have an explosive debate going on.
Maybe they did, but I don't know.
But anyway, it came out, but I think they were saying the money issue is another thing.
We're running out of money.
We can't continue to do this interventionism.
And the people finally rebelled.
And I think interference in the First Amendment to dictate to universities, they had a good point, but they missed half of the point.
We could avoid that by not subsidizing so many people that we think we have an obligation to control because we send them the money.
Exactly.
Well, the first shots fired at NatCon 5 were fired by Michael Brennan Doherty.
If you can put that next clip on, now he's with National Review, and he makes a very good point here that is somewhat anathema to the people who had previously been gathered.
I should clarify it that way.
Now, Doherty said, from this day forward, when you hear the word isolationist, you must understand that its function is only to deprive you of your constitutional inheritance, which is a say in our foreign policy and when we go to war or not.
So he's saying, don't call us isolationists when we want to have a say in whether we go to war or not.
That was a real shot across the bow, I think.
You know, I've been fighting over the definition of that word for a long time because they use that, conservatives use that as something very beneficial.
But the whole thing is, we should never accept the criticism because that's almost the opposite of what liberty defends.
You're supposed to have, you know, more true.
The founders talked about trade and travel and interrelating with other countries, but here they have called that isolation to make it sound bad.
And I think if you want isolation, are the people that have started the wars and started the wars?
And now I think all this activity of control of trade is too much intervention.
But we want that, but it has to be voluntary.
All these things that they do with the government force, whether it's medical or foreign policy or whatever, they say, well, who's going to do it?
Well, maybe it could be done involuntarily.
They don't distinguish that they all question the fact: are we going to accomplish this by voluntarism, but both sides agree on it before they even start fussing about it?
Or are we going to continue to go and pretend the isolationists are the ones who don't want to do our bidding and join in in these wars?
If you don't want to fight a war, you know, we've opposed all these wars, and yet they still called us the isolationists, and they were the ones, they were the ones that were really isolating us from the world and our money.
And our money, especially.
Well, thanks to Georges for putting in $20 for today's show.
His comment was truth to what we're saying.
We appreciate that.
Well, here's where that was a warm-up act in a way, Doherty was, and he made a very good point.
But here's where it got juicy is when Kurt Mills.
Now, Kurt Mills is a great guy.
He's executive editor of the National Conservative or the American Conservative Magazine and really has done some great stuff.
We'll put this next one up.
Now, here's what happened, Dr. Paul.
There was a debate between Kurt Mills and Max Abrams.
Max and I used to be friends actually before he, I think, kind of went off the deep end.
But so this is an interesting debate.
So at ground zero of this question is the U.S.-Israel relationship and it's causing a conservative schism, which played out quite viscerally in a debate Tuesday between Kurt Mills, editor and executive director of the American Conservative, and Max Abrams, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University.
It was hosted by Daniel McCarthy, of course, another friend of ours, former editor of the American Conservative, now at the modern age.
Now, go to the next one.
This is going to be a little bit confusing for me to read, but I want to get the order right.
So it's Responsible Statecraft pointed out, Max Abrams said that realists and restrainers have become insane in their wrong-headed analysis since being right on the failures of the post-9-11 wars.
This was a narrative pushed through the NATCON conference that these Americans were too traumatized by the failed wars to see clearly.
So just leave that up while I explain this.
So it's a little bit convoluted.
But what Abrams is saying that you guys were so right about how these wars were terrible that you can't see the reality that we actually need more of these wars.
And so Daniel Horowitz, RM conservatives is handled, he said, well, yes, because of this trauma, adult non-interventionists can't see clearly to the way of the future in the Middle East.
So because of the trauma, non-interventionists can't see clearly the way to the future.
This is Horowitz, he said, the way you break this trepidation and fear, i.e. non-interventionist instinct, you break their stuff and you leave.
Horowitz says, that is what America first means.
You break it and you leave.
And I wonder about that.
Dr. Paul, does that strike you as making any sense?
America first means you go to the Middle East, you break stuff, and then you leave.
Yeah.
And then when they decide to do something about it, they send more money and whatnot.
So it compounds and continues on and on.
But they do not do what they claim.
Well, we're intervening.
Yeah, look, we intervene in Vietnam, you know, to bring them to westernize them.
And they did eventually get westernizers to agree.
But it was after we left.
That's when it improved.
But, you know, I wanted to note this, Max Abrams, who took a position in this debate.
And his position, of course, was, you know, not our position.
He was fighting the non-interventionist.
But I think he represents the real philosophic competition.
He comes from the university.
And the universities are the ones, so many of us have complained about, not for 10 years or 50 years, a long time, 100 years, where there was a shift in education.
But right now, even that is being challenged.
The universities, you know, the best and the most expensive universities, people are deciding they aren't so good.
And people are saying, well, you don't even need that now.
You can get by without it.
The really brilliant people just stay away from it completely.
They drop out and start a business.
That's just a few people.
But you know, this whole idea that Horowitz said, well, what you do is you go in and break stuff and leave.
Well, that is the opposite of someone who unfortunately discredited himself, but before that had a pretty realistic view of foreign policy, and that was Colin Powell.
Because remember the pottery barn rule.
If you break it, you buy it.
If we go somewhere and break stuff, then we have to buy it.
And of course, that has been our foreign policy.
Audience Shifts Questioning 00:05:38
We go there, we break it.
As you've always said, we blow up the bridges and then we pay to rebuild the bridges.
So that's what he's saying.
We got to keep doing this.
And I just don't think that it resonates as well.
But here's now here's what Kurt Mills said.
Now, he went up before the debate, I think it was, and he gave a pretty tough speech.
If you can put that next one up, Mills first brandished a brief against Israel and, quote, the lobby that some would say was particularly gutsy with NatCon organizer Yoram Hazoni in the room.
Mills blasted at Israel as, quote, perhaps the world's historic case of the tail wagging the dog.
As former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has taken to labeling it a vassal state, calling the shots in the world's most powerful empire, and that regime change in Tel Aviv, his words, not mine, is necessary.
That is Kurt Mills quoting Steve Bannon.
Now go to the next one, and here's what Kurt said.
I don't want to talk tactics at all.
I seek to talk strategy.
Why are these our wars?
Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities?
Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking?
Why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it's advanced by Vladimir Zelensky, but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu?
Why should we accept America first, asterisk Israel?
And the answer is, we shouldn't.
That's a very powerful little sentence right there.
Why are we doing this?
But then again, we're talking about something you can find some positive things about happening.
The debate is not on the table.
And it also, once again, points out the point that ideas have consequences.
Good ideas can't be destroyed.
You know, you can't buy them and sell them and interfere.
Then all of a sudden, there's a bunch of people out there talking about non-interventionism for various reasons, of course, but it's a much healthier debate going on now than it has been for a lot of years.
And it's a real challenge to the college system, the educational system.
But of course, that has been controlled by the government.
So it's a big vehicle for them to propagandize and get hold of the brains of the young people.
But fortunately, we have met a few young people.
They've come to our conferences either.
They do for sure.
That are very much in tune with what we're talking about.
I want to thank Doubting Thomas, who also kicked in $20 saying truth on RPLR.
We appreciate that.
But, you know, after that striking little paragraph from Kurt Mills, you would have expected half the audience to get up and walk out, which would have happened, I think, five years ago.
You would have had booze, you would have had jeers.
You would have had people getting up and walking out, and Kurt would have never been invited back.
Well, this is interesting.
Now, this is what Kelly wrote about this.
She was there.
Now, go to the next one, because that didn't happen.
And that's what's interesting.
He said, go to the next one.
Kelly wrote, the questions from the audience were 90% sympathetic to Mills, though it was difficult to know what the audience was thinking.
Shifting body language, mumble grumbling, and stray bursts of encouragement registered for both sides at any moment.
Now, this refers to the debate between Mills and Abrams.
There was some audible support when Abrams declared that Palestine must not be given a state, lest it be construed as a reward for October 7th.
So still, it's important that the audience, 90% of them, were sympathetic.
That means that they were thinking the same thing as they sat in the audience.
So the whole purpose of national conservatism as a conference was to keep conservatives on the pro-Israel reservation.
Well, they've broken out of the reservation, and now they're roaming through the streets.
Yeah, that reminded me about being in debates and what kind of reaction I would get by advocating our non-interventionist policy.
But we didn't get 90% of people cheering, you know, the issue.
But I feel positive about the whole thing because eventually I believe we made inroads with that argument, and the young people did shift.
It was just not quite ripe enough.
Now it seems to be ripe for looking at our foreign policy differently.
You know, in the past, they wanted to prevent this kind of debate because they didn't want it to happen.
And the way they prevented it was accusing people of being anti-Semitic if you question our relationship with Israel.
And now that's fallen by the wayside because they realize it can't be true.
There can't be millions of anti-Semitic people in the U.S.
And they also realize, I hope at least, that this is a debate about the United States.
It's not a debate about Israel.
You can support or oppose Israel, but you can have a debate on whether we as a country should backstop, should support everything that a foreign country does.
It wouldn't matter if it was Martinique or wherever.
And I think that's something that's happening now.
And hopefully it continues to happen in a respectful way without any slurs being used because I think we need to have this conversation.
And I'm pleased to see that it's happening now in a place that may be least expected.
You know, the other thing about the politics of this is that if you vote against an appropriation for Israel, they'll come down hard on you.
Bipartisan Pressure Builds 00:03:55
Not like they used to.
Not like they used to, not like you had to do it.
They would come down real hard on you.
At the same time, they'd come down hard on you, but they weren't figuring out why they're doing this.
They don't quite understand that this thing doesn't work that way.
And they would do this, but it never seemed to work out.
Now they will not only not come down hard on you, that eventually, you know, there's a shift.
And that to me was the exciting part.
And I think this has some good, really good vibes in here.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
Well, there's not a lot of good vibes in the next story, Dr. Paul, because, I mean, I almost hesitate to discuss it because, I mean, this could be in the category of, there they go again.
If I could do my Reagan voice, go to the next one now.
We saw this on Hedge.
Johnson, Thun, and Trump on collision course over approaching shutdown.
Now, remember, we just had this battle.
Then we had the big, beautiful, not beautiful bill.
And now, instead of solving the problems, we're back again.
They can't pass appropriations bills.
So we're going to have to have another continuing resolution because the money runs out at the end of September.
But there's good news coming because they can't sustain this.
And that's why they will have to shift their gears.
But it was pretty depressing because when they went through and had these preliminary votes and all, guess what?
It was bipartisan support.
And did they accept any of the cuts that some of the conservatives in the House proposed?
No.
How many people stood up to, you know, there's one in the House that stood up.
And boy, he's been blasted.
But eventually, I think he will be, if he already hasn't, he'll be vindicated for taking a stand that he did have because it doesn't make any sense.
You think, where are their brains?
Yeah.
You know, how can you spend billions and billions of dollars doing this, undermining our liberties and causing these economic crises going on?
But we continue to do it.
And then it's always bipartisan.
And even when they talk about cuts, they're not talking about a real cut.
They don't defeat a request for a real cut.
It's a real cut in a proposed increase.
And then they brag about it.
So, but it's going to come.
They have preferred to have real cuts down by paying off all the bills with fiat money.
And that is a tax because you're cheating.
It's by fraud.
You take counterfeit money and get people, I paid your bill.
Here it is.
But the American people now are waking up on this, just like they're waking up on foreign policy.
And I like to see the connection of the two because just think of all the boondoggles that we've come across, you know, with the foreign policy.
But that one universally is almost like more support, you know, because the conservatives and now the Democrats who used to stand up against some of this foreign policy spending, they're becoming some cheerleaders for it, you know, to continue this.
So it's a mess, but the law of economics will rule and it will stop.
I think it's already stopped because we're paying all our bills with counterfeit money, and that's leading to the problems that we have, which I believe will get much worse.
You know, this really is like Hollywood, how they make endlessly and increasingly so horrific sequels of movies.
You know, we've seen this.
Team Player Politics 00:04:01
Everyone is jumping into the same role that they always jump into.
And not to criticize any individuals, but everyone is playing the role.
The Freedom Caucus is playing their role.
We're not going to vote for this.
There's no way we're going to vote for this.
And then at the 12th second before midnight, well, okay, we'll vote for this.
You know, you'd have the same thing.
So the Republicans control the White House, the House, and the Senate.
They can't seem to get their act together and actually do their jobs.
They can't seem to pass appropriations bills in proper order.
And if we had a decent opposition party, which as you famously say we don't, if the Democrats could pull their heads out of somewhere, they would really be able to smash the Republicans on this for just not being able to run.
You've got everything, everything that you wanted.
You've got all three.
Why can't you just simply do your job?
You know, it would be something that I think could be very, very damaging to Republicans come the midterms.
But I don't think there's anything better alternative being offered.
So what are they going to do?
You know, every once in a while, there'll be a bill that they will fight out longer than even common sense would dictate.
And that is, you know, there's a 15-minute vote that sometimes extended to 20 or 30 minutes or two or three or four hours.
I mean, they'll do anything.
I remember one night there was one holdout or several or maybe a couple, but they were holding out.
And the strategy was to go up the ladder till you finally got the leader of the party to come.
And the ultimate, the ultimate argument would be, are you going to be a team player or not?
The team player was it, because that meant you were unpatriotic toward the very element that you're a member of.
Yeah.
But I always thought that was ridiculous of you.
Team player.
Team player.
I'm not on your team, buddy.
The team is, as you said, and Madise says, the 700,000 people who elected me.
That's the team.
Yeah, there you go.
So, George has given another 20, we appreciate it.
Read Randolph Bourne.
That's pretty good advice for people.
But I'm going to close out.
If you put that very last clip up, I'm going to close out by mentioning something to our viewers.
We wouldn't do this for any other organization.
But as you know, we read anti-war.com daily and we talk about Dave DeCamp and all the good work they do daily.
Well, this is their fundraising season.
I think they do it three, four times a year.
They've tried to raise a little bit of money.
And so we encourage you to go to antiwar.com and keep them going.
Keep them churning out news, peace news that keep us going every day.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I'm going to read one sentence here dealing with the effort to get the government established so it will continue to do harm.
It says that this article says, Republicans are locked in an increasingly messy internal battle over how to keep the federal agencies funded.
And that's the whole thing.
It's never, how are we going to reduce the size and scope of the government, the interference, the harm that they do?
And it's just notorious.
And when I think about, you know, I talk about, you know, the natural laws, you're not allowed to cheat, steal, or kill.
But our government does that.
How many?
I think 70 or 80% of the American people believe the government lies to us.
So to me, that's good news.
They're waking up.
But it's sad also that that is happening.
So this is one thing that goes on.
And they continue to do this.
And it just seems like when it comes down to the bottom line, that vote after three or four hours at two in the morning, people say, are you going to be a team player or not?
And they capitulate for various reasons.
Or they'll have somebody call them from their district.
And there were a few times I had calls to the House floor hoping that I would vote for weaponry that made no sense to me.
Long Way From Sovereignty 00:01:40
I still don't see some of that weaponry they continue to owe for is it's sort of like World War II stuff.
I don't understand all the technology, but I know under technology, that means that you don't have to have a lot of bombers or aircraft.
So I think the effort should be narrow, narrow to what the responsibility of government should be and what the people should ask for.
And that is the protection of liberty, protection of voluntary action between all units of government and people, because that would solve a lot of problems.
The founders intended it to be very, very much like a free society where people made their own minds, and that meant personal sovereignty.
People don't think you'd be individual being personally sovereign means you have a right to your own life.
Oh, no.
But they don't understand that.
The first, the income tax tells you, you don't have a right to your income.
You think it's yours?
No.
Take your income, work hard, and we, the government, will tell you how much of it you can spend and what are the conditions of you spending this money.
So that is a long way from having personal sovereignty.
And I think that's what the Constitution and what America should be all about.
Let us all be individuals making up our own mind for what we want and how we want to take care of our lives and our family, recognizing it can best be achieved without the initiation of force and violence.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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