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Sept. 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:38
Israel Wins TikTok?

n today's Responsible Statecraft, Kelley Vlahos writes that the US government forced sale of the popular social network platform TikTok will chiefly benefit the government of Israel. Israel had long complained that Gen Z was disproportionately critical of Israel on TikTok. The forced sale to ultra pro-Israel businessman Larry Ellison has already reportedly resulted in a shift in tone. Is this a US government violation of the First Amendment?

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Larry's Empire Expansion 00:06:49
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Very well, thank you.
Nice morning this morning.
Nice weather.
Nice weather, too.
Yeah, exactly.
Except I'm glad I don't live in Washington, living in a political weather system like that.
That's a storm.
With that, a bad hurricane.
Plus tornadoes.
But anyway, there's a lot of news out there with the government closing down.
I said, oh, that's good.
We want to go on this.
Is this going to work out for us?
Oh, no, we're not going to cut down.
We're going to cut down.
Nobody can visit the Washington Monument.
So they'll play those games and they'll be back and forth on it.
But for sure, nothing much will be achieved there.
There'll be some compromises made by spending more money and printing more money, and the debt is going to go up.
Now, that is a really risky prediction.
But anyway, we want to start off with talking a little bit about TikTok.
I don't know much about TikTok.
I never use TikTok.
I don't know what they do.
But I know they're political, and I know it's a big deal.
And I know a lot of people wanted it because, you know, not too long ago, they were trying to get rid of it because it was doing too much harm to us.
And now, guess what?
We end up buying it or potentially buying it.
Wow.
But our friend Kelly Vlajos starts off, she says that Larry Elson and a constellation of billionaires.
I don't know why these bad people have so much money.
Maybe they steal it.
Who knows?
Well, in a way, it is because it's all done through the inflationary system.
That's theft.
We finally get their way.
She says they're buying the very apps they wanted to kill a year ago for being too pro-Palestinian.
So, you know, this battle between the Palestinians and Israel is something else because it looks like it's a powerhouse of 99% and the victims are 1%.
But nevertheless, it has stirred up some animosity coming from people.
We didn't know they would speak out so much.
So the Palestinians have had a few people speak up for because we don't think it's right to see on the evening news every night what the Gaza Strip looks like.
It's so sickening.
But this whole thing about TikTok, and we don't have probably ownership, but we have ownership in reality because to me I see this in the big picture of having the empire and maintaining the empire.
And it looks like right now there's been, it looks from the first take on all this trading.
I think the headline for Kelly was, Israel wins TikTok.
I didn't know they had that much money.
Well, it's interesting.
Now, TikTok is a social media platform.
I've gone on it.
I don't spend a lot of time.
The vast majority of their short videos, the vast majority of them are silly things.
But they're the younger generation, that's the way they communicate.
The Gen Zers, the Zoomers, they call them.
That's how they like to communicate.
The vast majority of what's on there is not political at all.
But a lot of what is on there happens to be, that is political, happens to be sympathetic more toward the Palestinian side in this conflict.
Now, the numbers, the polls that we've talked about on the show over the last few months play out this idea that the younger generation does not hold the same sympathies for Israel that the baby boomer generation held, right?
So, things are shifting in terms of preference.
So, the idea was they've got to do something about this.
And Israel itself has said, We've got to do something about TikTok.
We've lost these young people on TikTok.
We've got to turn it around.
So, it turns out they basically, and this is the reason that we are talking about it, because otherwise it would be a private business sale that would be none of our business.
But the U.S. government got involved.
Remember, Congress passed a bill to shut down TikTok.
We've got to take it out, shut it down, don't let the kids own it at all.
Because, under the guise of the Chinese are stealing our information, those evil Chinese.
So, it turns out what the real goal was is to get rid of the pro-Palestinian taint.
So, what they do?
Well, they sold it to Larry Ellison, who is, and if you go to that next clip here, a year ago, powerful, here we go, there's the first one.
Go to the next one.
A year ago, powerful critics in Congress in the tech world were complaining that TikTok was promoting anti-Israel messagings and were suggesting it needed to get shut down.
But, Dr. Paul, they found out there's a better way.
They decided to force the owners of TikTok, the Chinese owners, force them to sell it to Larry Ellison and a consortium of like-minded people.
As you know, Dr. Paul Larry Ellison made his fortune doing business with the CIA, who's very good at stealing your data.
He's the second richest man in the world.
But here's the most important part, Dr. Paul: He is the single largest private donor, keep that up, please, to the Israeli defense forces, and he's referred to the state of Israel as his own state.
So, extremely, extremely pro-Israel, he and his group, and now they've gotten control of TikTok.
So, what we're saying is there were members of Congress that went along with a legislative effort to make it illegal, to keep them out.
Yeah, keep them out.
So, but now, if this is this looks like it's going to switch to an opposite, and the president is, you know, he tells us where he is.
But what I'd like to ask all those people that voted a month ago to close it down, whose side are they on now?
You know, and that's a mixed question because, you know, your position, you stated from the beginning, is we shouldn't even be involved and getting out of it.
But that is, but I'm thinking the hypocrisy, and I can be certain that the people who went along with this, the solution to this is we make it illegal for them.
Musk's Marketplace Coup 00:07:15
And they don't allow them to come to this country, which is a blanket statement in the wrong direction and not dealing with the principle, leaving it to the marketplace.
So, I think that this is going to aggravate things on the long run.
It may look like a total victory for Israel.
The way the headline says, Israel wins TikTok.
Is it a permanent win?
I would say politics is never permanent.
Well, you make a good point about the hypocrisy because that's what this whole thing is.
These same conservatives that are now around Trump circles, they're the ones complaining when the Biden administration used the force of the state to influence, let's put it this way, influence social media to ban conservatives, to ban people who were opposed to the lockdowns and the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates.
They were the ones on the end of being a victim.
They did not like the government getting involved.
And now we have a clear-cut case of the U.S. government getting involved in the so-called private sector and forcing a change of ownership in a private company because the U.S. government did not like what was being said on that platform.
That is pure hypocrisy.
You know, Kelly writes one sentence that sort of backs up my assumption that this is not an ordinary free market business deal.
It's so far removed because she said that the $14 billion deal is being called a fire sale by some observers.
Musk paid triple that for Twitter in 2022.
But, you know, the one thing is Musk loses a lot of money and next day he has a gimmick and he gets that back and plus some.
This highly suggests that this transaction is more about geopolitics and ideology rather than a financial game for investors.
That's the big difference.
And how can you deal with investors?
The investors and the marketplace and many times consumers, they dictate what's going to go on.
And we've seen some of this, but the consumer, they say, oh, if we don't do this, you know, the bad people will get control.
But I thought a lot of good people closed down some big businesses for good reasons because they didn't like their attitudes and what they were really doing over and above producing products that customers wanted.
So I think that they don't understand the market and the people who are seeking power, if they understand it, they want to stop the market from working because that's when the people speak.
And big government, their big job is suppressing the ability of people to speak out.
Yeah, the thing that people may underestimate, particularly older generations, I would include myself in that, as sad as I am to say it, is the impact of TikTok as a news dissemination device.
Now put that next one up.
Dr. Paul was reading from the $14 billion sale.
Go to the next one there if you can.
This is incredible, Dr. Paul.
This shows the power as people move away from broadcast news.
They don't trust it.
Aside from its more than one and a half billion regular users worldwide, and I highlight this, TikTok has now become where 30% of Americans get their news.
That's powerful, Dr. Paul.
Now, not only will American companies like Oracle, which has numerous government tech contracts spanning defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies, have access to TikTok's user data, it will also have control of the algorithms that manage the kind of news, the messaging and images that all of those users will see.
This is a massive coup, I think, against free speech because of the involvement of the U.S. government in this.
That, of course, is a big deal.
And that brings back my point that I wanted to make one of the highest points on my farewell speech when I was leaving Congress, was, you know, we have to have a First Amendment.
Without it, you can't do anything because it's that freedom to speak out and not be punished for it or not have the sources of information owned and controlled by the government.
I mean, if you don't have that, you can't have a country.
So, yes, all the amendments, I think, are well thought out.
But if you have the freedom of speech and you're able to argue your case without being shot at or killed, that's a different story.
Yeah, and if you look into Ellison's other media holdings, he just bought CBS for his son.
Thanks, Dad.
He also owns Paramount, the big movie theater, the movie industry.
I think he's about ready to buy CNN.
So this individual is massively, massively influential in the media anyway.
Now his partners in this, Safra Katz and Jeff Yass and others, and this is all in the article, which of course we highly recommend from Kelly.
They all are fanatically pro-Israel as well, fanatically pro-APAC.
So you see a real coup in TikTok that's taking place now.
You know, we're talking a lot about the disappointment and how the very wealthy, the trillionaires now, you know, operate.
And it's fodder for the people who are socialistically inclined, you know, truly fascist in a way.
But I think the big problem there is to criticize, we're criticizing the system.
But others will say, well, yeah, that's what we told you would happen with free enterprise, the free markets, and property rights.
And it has nothing to do with that.
It's the absence of what we believe in.
And yet the enemy of liberty are the ones that are using the technology, the technique of saying that we, you know, it's sort of like we are the isolationists, you know, and isolate ourselves from liberty, which isn't the case, you know.
But they get away with this.
But I can see why that would be so easy to persuade, you know, idealistic, immature idealism where they say, he's absolutely right.
We agree with them.
They're complaining about what happened.
Look at what happened to free market capitalism.
This is where we end.
And it's not quite so simple.
Absolutely.
Well, let's finish out this article.
Put the next one up.
This was not a free market transaction.
This is exactly what you just said, Dr. Paul.
Said Milton Mueller, a professor at Georgia Tech specializing in digital governance, is what he said in Newsweek.
It is a politically determined restructuring, said Professor Mueller.
Some might say, Kelly continues, with the constellation of GOP and MAGA supporters in the reported investor mix, this has the makings of a new Trump-friendly megaphone.
Venezuela's War on Drugs 00:14:33
But it is so much more.
In essence, like Safra Katz says, the big winners will be in Israel, is how Kelly concludes the article.
Now, if anyone suspects that we are overplaying, and maybe Kelly's overplaying it, it's a catchy headline.
Israel wins TikTok.
Well, let's turn to someone who overtly, overtly admits that he's won, and that's Bibi Netanyahu.
He had a big meeting over the weekend with pro-Israel influencers, and he said it, as he does directly.
He said it basically, this is a big one for us.
This is our weapon.
Let's listen to him.
If we need to queue that up at the 57-second mark and listen to the remainder of what Netanyahu is saying, you might want to grab your earpiece, Dr. Paul, and listen to Bibi.
Here we go.
You know, the weapons change over time.
You can't fight today with swords.
That doesn't work very well.
And you can't fight with cavalry.
That doesn't work very well.
And you have these new things, you know, like drones, things like that.
I won't get into that.
But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we engage.
And the most important ones are on social media.
And the most important purchase that is going on right now is class.
TikTok.
TikTok.
Number one.
Number one.
And I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.
And the other one, what's the other one that's most important?
X. X. Very good.
And, you know, so we have to talk to Elon.
He's not an enemy.
He's a friend.
We should talk to him.
Now, if we can get those two things, we get a lot.
And I could go on on other things, but that's not the point right now.
We have to fight the fight, okay?
To give direction to the Jewish people and give direction to our non-Jewish friends or those who could be our Jewish friends.
Are we going to succeed with everyone?
No.
Will there be a strong counterpart?
Yes.
See, he wasn't too worried about losing, you know, when the subject of evangelicals came up.
He wasn't too worried.
That's my estimation.
He didn't seem to be too worried, you know, about this.
It's more important to control the social media, control what people hear from, and a much bigger deal than just worrying about the Christian community.
So he's sort of preparing for this, and unfortunately, he wins a battle here.
And it's interesting, you use the word battle because that's exactly the kind of language that he uses.
This is a battle.
This is a war.
This is a struggle.
Now, for Americans, that should seem alien because we view free speech as sacred.
It's not a battle.
It's a battle.
The only battle is to get government out of it.
Well, of course, Israel's not like that.
They have heavy government censorship.
But he's very clear.
He said, TikTok, number one, we've got to get that sale going through.
Obviously, he feels like he's going to benefit from it.
And then comes X. X is one of the few remaining free speech platforms out there on the social media.
And yes, there is some ugly speech there.
But as you always say, we don't have free speech to talk about the weather.
But he's clearly focused.
He is going to focus and turn his guns, as he literally said, turn his guns on X. He's not satisfied.
He wants to keep going.
And regardless of your view on the Middle East, you should be disturbed by someone who views speech in those terms.
Right.
So we're two from here.
I didn't understand completely, and maybe you understand it better, about X.
I guess that's just an additional target that we have to look at and control.
Maybe they may be our enemy, but we're not going to offend them at this moment.
We've got to talk to Elon.
He's our friend.
We've got to get him on our side.
Meaning we have to get him to censor people who say things we don't like.
That's what he wants to do.
I think.
So anyway, I think we can probably move along to Venezuela.
think we've covered Netanyahu meeting with these influencers and you know people should hopefully as you would say Dr. Paul the free market will out Hopefully that an idea's time has come can't be stopped and there'll be a competitor out there.
Young people aren't stupid.
If they see that it's being manipulated by a certain perspective, I think they're going to find another place.
And there are a few out there, so hopefully they'll do that.
What makes that point?
I don't follow the beer market very much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When the ad offended the young people, they quit.
I can't believe it.
I don't remember the beer company, but it was huge.
And they made them change their tune.
Without the government.
It was just, but nobody wants to depend or explain that.
Oh, no, if you don't have the government, you always have tragedy.
Well, if you have less government, the tragedies dissipate.
The same thing happened with Cracker Barrel just a couple weeks ago.
Remember, they tried to change the logo and make it all weird and postmodern.
People said, we're not going to do this.
They changed it back and apologized.
So it does work.
It does work.
So hopefully young people understand that.
Now, let's go to the next one, because this is very concerning.
Really, really concerning.
U.S. preparing possible drone strikes on drug cartels inside Venezuela.
Now, I wish I'd had a picture of the build-up of military.
I think I showed it last week.
But yeah, this is from Zero Heads.
starts out weeks after U.S. officials told the New York Times that the real goal of the military buildup in the Caribbean and the strategic strikes against drug boats was regime change.
A new NBC News report citing four unnamed sources, including two U.S. officials, now says the U.S. could be nearing a strike phase, targeting drug cartels inside Venezuela.
Dr. Paul, I think there's a simpler word for that, which is war.
Boy, that's for sure.
Yeah, striking inside.
The whole thing is, this drug war from beginning to end, all the way back to prohibition of alcohol, people seem to never learn a lesson.
You know, when you think about it, when nobody has the evidence to show that Venezuela is a real threat to the American people because there are drug dealers down there, we don't even know how many are there, how much gets up there.
But the estimates are that maybe not too much comes out of Venezuela.
And yet they'll still design this off and get people really riled up about it.
You can't let our kids do that.
Well, you know, if you look at the statistics, and I've repeated this before because it should wake people up, is that there's still twice as many people die from alcohol.
More people drink alcohol, but there are some, but people aren't being shot at.
Al Capone isn't going around with machine guns and tearing up a town.
Well, go to that next one because this is a little bit more about it.
And this is disturbing because the U.S. is spoiling for a fight down there.
Last week, Venezuela's vice president, Del C. Rodriguez, released Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro's letter to President Trump.
In it, Maduro vehemently denied involvement in narco-trafficking, calling the allegations fake news propagated through various media channels.
He further offered to engage in a direct and frank conversation with your special envoy.
NBC asked for a comment from the Trump administration about the strike plan, receiving this previous statement from the president.
We'll see what happens.
Venezuela is sending us their gang members, their drug dealers, and drugs.
It's not acceptable.
As you rightly point out, evidence is contrary to that, at least in terms of the drugs.
We don't get them from Venezuela.
But the media will occasionally maybe ask a question, but they're not very good at their work.
There's so many inconsistencies.
During wartime, especially, there's been a lot of this stuff on how much propaganda is repeated thousands and thousands of time on what the real problem is in Ukraine.
They never met NATO, except they see NATO as the solution.
Well, if you would just put more money in a bank, you could buy more weapons from us, and then you could sell them to the Ukraine people.
And we wouldn't have to be there.
We'll be just a middleman and make the money.
It's so bad that it bewilders me.
But then I'm happy when I see the people wake up on certain items that excite them and they can close down a business by just saying, you guys offend us.
Why don't they get offended from some of all the money we waste and all the people we kill and all the cities that we have blown up?
When you look at whether it's Ukraine or Gaza, I mean, it's our money.
It couldn't happen without our money.
And fortunately, one of these days we'll run out of money and we'll run out of our killing machine and we'll run out of our empire.
Yeah, that'll be the day.
You know, this does have the flavor, in my opinion, of Iraq, of Libya, and the others.
This is a made-up threat because even we've talked about it on the show.
Even according to our own U.S. intelligence community assessment, this Terran de Aragua, what have you, narco-gang, doesn't even exist.
It's something that's basically made up like Saddam's WMDs, like Gaddafi's Viagra, all made up out of the clear blue to justify strikes that have already been determined.
They want to strike.
They want to use drones inside Venezuela.
So they've made up this whole narrative.
And of course, there are a lot of people that still like the drug war, even though it's been the most failed war in our history.
They still like the idea of blowing things up, people that are bringing drugs in.
So I really do think, Dr. Paul, this has a flavor of the Iraq war and all the lies that brought us into it.
Well, you know, a nice idea of sending more weapons there, the drones.
They added that President Trump has not yet approved it.
The operation.
My comment there was, but will.
But will.
He's already proven it.
He shot up a couple ships and killed a few people.
And no questions allowed to be asked.
Where are the reporters on that kind of stuff?
Yeah, you know, I was on an interview last week.
We talked about this.
And I said, I mean, I think actually if they wanted the PR value, they would have had more PR value to capture those ships, show the drugs, look at what these bad guys are doing.
We've got to stop them.
People would be all for it, I think.
Yeah, but it would be proving the opposite.
Could be, yeah.
Oh, we didn't find any.
Could be.
Oh, we'll fill up next time.
Could be full of empiñados or something.
Who knows?
Anyway, I'm going to close out now, Dr. Paul.
I think we're done for a Monday morning.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
You know, looking at the news today is a bit bewildering, a little bit discouraging.
But it looks like the world is being engulfed into all these wars.
And unfortunately, I come down with an opinion that says that we have a lot of responsibility for this because I don't believe if our money was available for these wars or the weapons, there would be a lot less wars.
But right now, it's a stage for world war, as far as I'm concerned.
Here we had a neat little war going on in Ukraine.
Why weren't they satisfied?
Well, they're not as excited about that anymore.
We've killed enough people up there.
And now we want to go to the Middle East.
We've been there a long time.
And we're talking about going back into Afghanistan and the Middle East and the Middle East war between the Palestinians and Israel.
That's ongoing.
That's not going to go away.
But no, we need another one.
So let's pick on Venezuela.
There are a bunch of bad people and they're smoking marijuana.
Not quite that.
But if they're not dealing in those other drugs, that's what it is.
And anyway, it just seems it's the lack of information that the people don't get.
And we want the First Amendment to work.
It doesn't seem to be working.
We just did a program on looking at something, and that is distorting everything that's going on information.
So I think that the Middle Eastern war in Ukraine is misinformation, and that's why it's so bad when large industries and very wealthy people and factions get control of government.
I still see the bigger problem is that of the tolerance that people have for allowing government to grow with the hopes that they will benefit from some of the promises made by government.
I don't think you should, as individuals, very much very believe, very often believe in the government.
That doesn't mean they're all bad and they will never tell the truth.
But basically, if they're asking you for your support for another government program that will expand government, expand spending, expand printing of money, you ought to just say no to that because that is one way of stopping this.
And one of these days, we'll have to make a major decision regarding that dilemma.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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