All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 17, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:08
High Crimes On The High Seas

President Trump is bragging about blowing up a third boat in international waters near Venezuela, claiming they are loaded with US-bound drugs and are commandeered by "narco-terrorists." His own Drug Enforcement Administration disputes the claim. Also today, "neutral mediator" Donald Trump has OK'd a $500 million weapons package to Ukraine...paid for by "NATO." Finally, Pam Bondi strikes out on Free Speech.

|

Time Text
Deception Near Venezuela 00:04:45
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing fine, ready and rare and to go and we have lots of things we could talk about if we're talking about how the government's messing things up.
It seems like there's a bunch of that going on.
And a lot of deception going on.
I can't quite figure out what the truth is of all this that matters.
But anyway, we want to start off with an issue that we've talked about before, and that has to do with Venezuela.
I think it was just last week we talked about a ship being blown up, not with due process, but just because somebody thought we ought to blow up a ship because they might have had marijuana or something on the boat.
And there was a lot of support for it.
You know, the people who like to see bombs and explosions and things and not deal so much about how we get involved and entangled.
I would say we're entangling ourselves in Venezuela because now another story comes out today that actually it wasn't researched and brought up against their will.
It was actually a little bit of bragging.
Trump says the U.S. has bombed three boats near Venezuela.
I don't see an apology.
I don't see anything to guarantee exactly how that has to do with our national security.
But nevertheless, we're there.
And so last week it was one boat, but now three boats have been blown up and shot.
And it's actually, it's not hidden.
You know, it's like, this is wonderful.
Look at it.
We'll even show you how we can do this.
So to me, that's sort of sad.
I would say that there's sort of some misunderstandings about our foreign policy.
It certainly doesn't reflect the attitude that so many people now are moving in the direction of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And we will keep plugging along because this we so often over the years, Daniel, have talked about the various places as they were evolving, whether it was the Middle East or Ukraine, say, don't do this, don't do this.
And lo and behold, we start another war.
And of course, we've been messing around with Venezuela for a long time.
So once again, it's expanding.
Someday there's going to be a few people get annoyed with our intervention and react to it.
Maybe financially.
Who knows?
That might be the answer to what they find annoying to them when we march in and say, don't you let that boat go.
You know, you might have marijuana on there.
And I'm exaggerating there, of course.
But anyway, I don't think that I don't think this is necessary.
I think it's wasteful.
I think it could expand.
We don't have the money to do it.
And yet the people don't seem to be that worried about it.
Daniel?
Yeah, well, the problem is a lot of the pro-Trump drug warrior types think this is a very masculine way to do things.
Just take them out.
But in fact, it's not only not masculine, it's illegal.
And you can put that first clip up.
Dr. Paul, you introduced it.
Trump says the U.S. has bombed three boats near Venezuela from anti-war.com.
He told reporters Tuesday he's, quote, knocked off a total of three boats in the Caribbean as the U.S. military campaign near Venezuela continues.
He previously announced the bombing of two boats near Venezuela that he claimed were carrying drugs without providing evidence and released the footage of the strikes.
Quote, we actually knocked off three boats, not two, but you saw two.
So the idea that you can just blow up a boat because you suspect there are bad guys on the boat, and they very well may have been bad guys and they may have had drugs on the boat.
But, you know, Dr. Paul, our good friend Jacob Hornberger of the Future Freedom Foundation, put out an article on September 15th that I think makes a good point.
And people are going to shriek back in horror at the title, but I think it's accurate.
Why shouldn't Trump be convicted and impeached for murder?
And this is what Hornberger says in his piece.
You can take that down.
Why Trump Should Be Convicted? 00:07:42
Here we go.
So the U.S. Code provides that a murder of a foreigner by an American citizen on the is a federal criminal offense.
The pertinent sections are 18 U.S.C. Section 1111 and 18 U.S.C. Section 7.
And Hornberger continues: The U.S. Constitution provides that the president shall be removed from office on impeachment and convicted of high crimes.
It goes without saying that murder is a high crime.
And I think Hornberger makes a very good case there.
Is it okay for the president to murder people he suspects of crimes?
And I think that is a big problem, Dr. Paul.
We saw it in the past with Obama when he killed some Americans overseas, but now we're seeing it again, and a lot of people are cheering this on.
Well, we better double check.
Maybe we'll be said to be using hate language and get ourselves into trouble.
But this is just a terrible thing.
It's more and more.
And now that I think about it, and I have been thinking about it since I was in high school, wondering what was really going on with Korea.
And then it was later on Vietnam.
And then it was later on the Middle East, on and on.
And I think there's several steps that happen because sometimes we hear the one incident that it's painted as an attack on America.
And therefore, to be patriotic and powerful, you have to respond or they'll push us around.
But I think generally, Daniel, it starts with an executive order.
So they're generating something in the deep state and the people who make a lot of money, they can generate that.
And that's why the individuals that can put these executive orders out, mainly the president, are a part of it.
Now, people say, what are you running?
You're crazy.
The president's not part of the deep state.
He's revealing the deep state.
But when you look at the Middle East and some other places, executive orders are very important to them.
And then that's not enough.
He's the president.
What else can he do?
Well, guess what?
They have a goal.
And then all of a sudden, there's money, endless amount of money for these wars, whether it's the Middle East or Ukraine or wherever.
And who's responsible for that?
Well, it's the Congress.
The Congress just pours it out how much you want.
And the deep state and the people making money, they're happy with that.
And then is it endorsed by political demagogues?
They come in and build up the spirit.
And the people, people get outraged.
Hopefully, we're trying to change that attitude.
They get excited and say, boy, let's go, let's blow them up.
One isn't enough.
Blow them on, bomb them out.
And then they come up with all kinds of things.
I guess the closest thing that they could come to pseudo-justifying what they want to do are drugs.
You know, they're bringing drugs into this country, which doesn't justify what's happening for sure.
And it's that distortion that galvanizes the people and say, oh, yeah, fentanyl is coming in.
It's all their fault, not the fault of the people who buy the dumb stuff.
So I think there is a sequence.
It happens each time that I remember, and I remember too many of them because it's happened too often.
And we have not been very successful in stopping these wars.
It seems like they engage in the war, they do it for years.
Sometimes 20 years they'll do this.
Maybe we ought to quit.
And the one that they're, you know, quieting down and stopping one war, they're getting ready to start the next one.
So it's this war fear that we have to deal with.
So I see what we're talking about today is the beginning of expanding, you know, a conflict in the South America part that we have no business dealing with in this manner.
And the other point, Dr. Paul, is that Venezuela sends virtually zero illegal narcotics to the U.S.
It's not the source of the narcotics.
Most of it comes from Colombia.
But if you go to that next clip, this is from the same article.
The Trump administration has claimed that Maduro, that's the president of Venezuela, controls the Venezuelan gag trend Diaragua, but that contradicts a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment.
Now, we talked about this last week, I think, Dr. Paul.
This is from the assessment.
This is from a memo from April 7th, 2025, from the Director of Intelligence.
The Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to end operations in the United States.
And the article continues: The Trump administration launched the campaign against Venezuela, and this is important: despite the country's willingness to cooperate on prisoner swaps and deportations.
Maduro said on Monday, communications with the U.S. have been thrown away, though he said the two countries are still in contact to facilitate the return of Venezuelans from the U.S.
It sounds to me, Dr. Paul, like what the administration is trying to do was construct a narrative to justify taking military action in the Western Hemisphere.
They think it's going to be a big seller.
It's going to detract people away from, for example, the Epstein files and from the debacle debacle in the Middle East and in Ukraine.
This will be a popular one.
It'll be a real kinetic war on drugs.
But I would point out that, as usual, one of the sane voices there in an otherwise completely silent Congress happens to be Senator Rand Paul.
If you put that next clip up, this is Senator Paul's statement about the strikes on the ships.
He said, the reason we have trials and we don't automatically assume guilt is that what if we make a mistake and they happen to be people fleeing the Venezuelan dictator off our coast, it isn't our policy just to blow people up, even the worst people in our country.
If we accuse someone of a terrible crime, they still get a trial.
Imagine that being considered a novel idea, Dr. Paul, that Senator Paul has to point out something that should be so basic and basically understood by Americans.
Yes, and this means that as long as they can do this and put it together, and I think that involves lying, they shouldn't be able to lie.
And I keep thinking in comparison to the excitement about hate crimes, there must be some hate involved in here, even though that's a Fictitious thing that they're talking about.
But I think this is just an example of another chance to get it.
But then again, if we think about this in practical terms, Daniel, even from their point, the only thing I can come up with in a practical reason, what they're thinking about, they're thinking about money.
And they know we don't have any money, but they have to stimulate things.
But if it's national defense, you know, the time that I was in Congress, you know, there were very few.
Sometimes it was nine to six who would vote against some of these things.
NATO's Financial Motive 00:14:51
But now there's a few more.
And I think there is a shift coming on, but they will not, they don't, they don't give up.
They keep doing this and they figure that they can get away with it.
But where does the money come from?
Why do they keep doing that?
But I would say that it also benefits the financial institutions and the ability for the Fed to continue monetizing the debt that is saving us and giving us our national security.
It's always national security that they say, and they're going to provide safety for it.
And it's all just nonsense.
But Daniel, once again, and we've talked about it, this can't go on because it's a failed system.
It's sort of like, how long can communism go on?
Well, it failed not because there was a nuclear exchange.
It was failed because their system wasn't workable.
And our system is not workable, but they don't know.
They don't believe that.
They figured just right now they're dealing with this budget.
We could just get this budget passed and then we can get by.
And they don't know how they're going to do that.
And that's why I think you're seeing the markets getting rockier and rockier every day.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, this hasn't been a great foreign policy week so far, Dr. Paul, because the second story we're covering today is at least as bad.
If you go to that next clip, the Trump administration clears first arms packages for Ukraine funded by NATO allies.
And this is a scheme to give more weapons to Ukraine under the auspices that we aren't giving them free money like Biden did.
No, we're selling the weapons to NATO.
And who's NATO?
NATO is the U.S. funds over 70%.
But anyway, President Trump's War Department has approved the first weapons package that will be sent to Ukraine under a new NATO initiative that involves U.S. allies funding the shipments of weapons into the proxy war.
So far, the Allies have pledged $2 billion for the prioritized Ukraine requirements list.
Sources told Reuters that Elbridge Kolby, the War Department's policy chief, has approved as many as two $500 million shipments for Ukraine.
So what that means, Dr. Paul, in real terms, is that the United States is going to provide a billion dollars worth of weapons that are going to go to Ukraine and they're going to be designed to kill Russians.
So on the one hand, you see Trump acting as if he's the moderator.
He is an objective observer.
He's not involved.
And on the other hand, he continues to send weapons to one side to kill the other side.
You can't have both of those things being true at the same time.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And, you know, even when this was first denounced, you know, what they were going to do and they were going to all agree to it, you know, how much money would you bet on some of these agreements?
Because, you know, the countries are the countries that should be doing the most if they're really worried about Russia coming into their country, they should be taking care of it.
But no, we hide behind NATO.
And of course, we heard a lot of things.
NATO was not the best outfit that our new administration liked.
But it's being enhanced.
It's going to be stronger.
Everything has to go through it.
But it's not going to become real strength because there is no money.
These other countries aren't going to pay unless we give them the money and they go through the charade.
And I think the first thing I wrote down this morning when I was looking at this, this is all a farce.
And it's not going to solve any problem.
It's going to make everything worse.
And they're sort of in a daze.
I don't know how they can blind themselves to the financial consequence of what we're doing and also the moral consequence and the peace consequence of what this type of policy will do.
And this has been going on for so long.
And yet it gets pretty tough someday to say that most Americans, if they had all the information, they say, yeah, I like the idea of peace and prosperity.
That sounds like a pretty good idea.
You mean it's achievable?
Sure, it's achievable if you take it into consideration that we have to do something with our government.
They can't let our government pretend they're going to take care of us and make us safe and secure.
And it won't cost them anything.
It won't work.
Well, we want to thank Georges who put in 25 bucks in the kiddie.
And he made a good point that meanwhile, Israel started an offensive of fire in Gaza that we're not hearing about, of course.
But the other issue of Dr. Paul about these weapons to Ukraine, now, first of all, if I were Russia, I'd be irritated.
If the shoe was on the other foot, Americans would be irritated if Chinese weapons were being sent to Mexico to kill Americans.
I don't think America would stand for it for a minute, but that's what we're expecting Russia to stand for.
But the other thing is this, I think this whole thing is a charade, Dr. Paul, because there aren't any weapons.
And how do we know this?
Well, we learned from the Israeli sneak attack on Iran that in the course of about three or four days, the U.S. blew up 30% of its entire supply of FAD missiles, an entire year's supply of THAD missiles.
And we're short on all the other weapons.
That's why we're not seeing any of the defensive weapons in Ukraine anymore because they don't exist.
So a lot of this is a charade.
It's to make it look like they're doing something rather than do what Trump wanted to do at the beginning, or at least he indicated he wanted to do when he said, this isn't my war.
He could have walked away, but he's somehow incapable of just letting go.
It must be his ego or something.
But the weapons aren't there.
The money's not there.
This whole thing really is an awful charade.
But the question always comes back to me: why aren't we doing better to convey what we think is so clear-cut, so proper, so laurel, so constitutional, so much in tune with honest financing.
But demagoguery and the special interest and a deep state, they seem to be still in charge.
But even the deep state will be threatened when this whole thing comes down.
So I think that we have to deal with that.
Now, are you ready?
I was just going to say, it's just like you with Iraq.
You were right from the beginning.
And when everyone else realized this about five or six years later, they didn't give you credit.
They didn't say, oh, Ron, you were right all along.
I got fooled again.
No, they never do that.
So it'll be the same with this, being opposed to this war.
Which means they're controlling the scenario.
They're controlling the media, which is very, very important.
But I can't think, you know, the internet will help us.
The internet does help us.
Our message does get out more with the internet, but we have to change the basic morality of a lot of people to decide that lie, cheating, and stealing and killing is not the way to go and pretend free society.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, the last thing we wanted to talk a little bit about today.
Now, we touched on it with Tom Woods yesterday, but there's kind of a little bit of an update.
If you go to that, skip that one clip and go to the one with Pam Bondi.
I do think that she's one of the least impressive members of the president's cabinet, to be honest with you.
But this is a piece by Kyle Anselm that came out today or yesterday.
Trump backs Attorney General Bondi's assertion that hate speech is not protected speech.
Of course, we know that it is.
Go to the next one.
Now, here is that quote to refresh your memory.
The United States Attorney General, who should know better, said there's free speech and then there's hate speech.
And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.
We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.
Now, from that article, Bondi tried to qualify her remarks, saying that hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is not protected by the First Amendment.
That's not entirely true because they have to be specific and credible.
But the thing is, Dr. Paul, then they asked President Trump, well, what do you think about this?
It was a reporter that asked him about what Bondi said.
And he said, we'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly.
It's hate.
You have a lot of hate in your heart.
Maybe they'll come after ABC, he told reporters.
Maybe they'll have a go after you, which I think is quite frightening for him to say that to a journalist.
And I just don't think it's appropriate behavior for the president.
You know, this all started a couple years ago, and they did key in on the words hate speech.
They keyed it on the word of hate crime.
So any crime that existed or didn't exist, they want to create a crime.
They can say, well, it was motivated by hate.
And if there's two murderers and it's they prove or they prove or they suggest, oh, yeah, it was motivated by hate.
That person gets a different penalty than the person that, oh, no, I didn't hate him.
I just killed him.
You know, that's stupid.
But this is going one step further.
It's just going to be that, you know, hate speech.
It's going to be broadened in a very important era area.
And that is that, you know, what the people in charge are going to use to punish people.
And I think that it's pure subjectivity.
You know, yes, it's very annoying and people shouldn't deal with them.
People should throw them all out of office and do whatever.
But if they commit a crime, but you know, there is a time, and I try to find out exactly where this line is on hate speech.
And that doesn't mean that you can't say, you know, I really detest this and this and that.
And, you know, I hate hit that guy's guts.
But, you know, if you want to express yourself, you can't do that in a church or a synagogue or a mosque.
It's where you live.
You can say anything you want in your house, but all of a sudden, if you're saying it outside, it becomes different.
So it is a terrible space, but they motivate people to say, well, this was the most heinous crime ever.
They never deal with this on principle.
It's where the emotions are high.
And it's almost people say, well, you know, I sort of agree with you, but I'm not crossing that bridge because, you know, they'll come down hard on me.
But right now, though, there's been a few others criticizing Pam on the way she has responded to this, and they realize what's going on.
And it's sort of annoying that more of them come from the far left.
Now you have to say, oh, you guys just identify with the far left.
Instead, they don't understand that the principles of liberty doesn't pick parties.
It doesn't have anything to do with political parties.
It has to do with principles, that you shouldn't be able to lie or cheat or steal or kill people.
And we draw another line.
The governments can't do it either.
But that sometimes is so complicated that people don't, well, I don't know what you're talking about.
We have to, you know, get the people behind us because we know what's best for the people.
You know, all the years we had to endure the rule of Biden and then Obama, we had to endure the left going on about hate speech.
You know, it silences violence, hate speech.
And now the right is doing the exact same thing.
You know, and that's just the irony of the whole thing.
But what's particularly annoying with Pam Bondi's remarks is that she invoked Charlie Kirk as a reason why hate speech should not be allowed.
But if you look at that next clip, as this is going around X all over the place, this is actually Charlie Kirk himself back in May of 2024, completely disagreeing with Pam Bondi.
Hate speech does not exist legally in America.
There's ugly speech, there's gross speech, there's evil speech, and all of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free, said Charlie Kirk.
So it's really, I think, disrespectful to his memory.
And there are some right people on the right, Dr. Paul, who are on the right side of this.
I don't often praise Matt Walsh for a number of reasons, but I do have to say that yesterday he got this exactly right.
If you go to that last clip, this is Matt Walsh responding to Pam Bondi's tirade about hate speech.
And Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire said, get rid of her today.
This is insane.
Conservatives have fought for decades for the right to refuse service to anyone.
We won that fight.
This is about the printing of the flyers, by the way, not the speech.
Now, Pam Bondi wants to roll back for no reason.
The employee who didn't print the flags was already fired by his employer.
The stuff is being handled successfully through free speech and free markets.
This is totally gratuitous and pointless.
We need the Attorney General focused on bringing down the left-wing terror cells, not prosecuting Office Depot, for God's sake.
That's something we talked about with Tom Woods yesterday, Dr. Paul, about she was going to prosecute this Office Depot for one employee's bad behavior.
So good on Matt Walsh for coming out on the right side of this one.
Markets do protect against this problem.
Right.
And, you know, I think in a way, this is used in a broader sense about going into war because the populace has to have a reason to hate the enemy.
And so often the enemy deserves some discipline.
And if they attack us, we're going to attack back.
You can have self-defense.
But no, the enemy has to be hated.
And over the years, even the worst authoritarians are usually portrayed even worse than they are.
But it's always emotional.
It's subjective.
That is why this is so wicked, because it opens the door.
The government has too much leeway in getting away with it.
Government Leeway in Truth Definitions 00:02:49
Just think of the leeway they have in deciding what is true.
Now they're deciding what is hate.
So the truth is, just think of how casually they can say, if you mention Article 1, Section 8, you can't do this.
And they say, what are you talking about?
No, you can't do anything.
It's not in Article 8, Article 8, Article 1, Section 8.
And then they go on.
And I said, and besides, if you still are wondering what to do, why don't you read the 9th and 10th Amendment?
Then I'd read the 9th and 10th Amendment to them.
But it doesn't phase them because this is a scam.
This is a lie.
And this is, and it's the damage they do is equivalent to conspiring to bring about a war for the wrong reasons.
And at the same time, believing that they are the patriots.
And so it's a battle between nihilism, you can't find truth, and those of us who still seek truth and believe that we can move in that direction.
Absolutely, Dr. Paul.
Well, I'm going to sign out.
I will let our audience know, first of all, that we appreciate you for coming on and watching the show.
We should be back in our normal studio setup tomorrow.
We had some personnel problems that prevented us from functioning normally, but I think we'll be back to normal tomorrow.
So we hope you'll come and join us at that time.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I'm going to close by following up on a statement I just made.
And that has to do with how do you sort all this out.
And I think if you had a clear understanding of the private property of private ownership of property, you could solve it because, you know, it's where you are that really counts.
So if you say, well, I have a right to get out on the street and cause all kinds of commotions and yell and scream and disrupt, you know, in a disorderly fashion, that invites difficulty.
But if you have a community which is on private property, you could have the rules and it would be legal.
It would be good.
It would emphasize property and how this sorts us out.
So, you know, it's, but I see signs that whether it's a church or whatever that we say that you're attacking what they can say and do, and just because you said it at a church, you're still making hate speech.
So I really think people who wonder how to solve this problem should look carefully as they can at the principles of private property and how that can sort this difficult subject out.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection