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Dec. 19, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:52
Col. Macgregor's Dire Warning For 2026!

Col. Douglas Macgregor joins today's Liberty Report with a dire warning for the coming year. Spending, inflation, and the looming threat of wars have the warning signs blaring red. Our leaders seem incapable of leading this country out of the gathering storm. What can we do to right this ship? Is there hope? Please consider a year-end, tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute while we have matching funds: https://ronpaulinstitute.org/donate/

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Welcome Back, Doug 00:15:10
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, we have a very special guest.
He's been with us several times on our activities and very supportive of RPI.
But most viewers probably are familiar because they're familiar with our station.
But he's a retired colonel, Colonel Doug McGregor.
He's well known in military circles for using his brain instead of authoritarianism that might not lead to good results.
So, Doug, we're real glad to have you today.
And I know you do a lot of these programs.
So, I hope it's not painful for you today.
But welcome to our program.
No, listen, Dr. Paul, it's great to be with you.
And, you know, I can't say enough about you.
You know, it's impossible to pay you the tribute that you deserve for all that you've done.
Just stay with us and keep doing it.
That's most important.
And Daniel, how about a welcome for Doug?
Well, it's always great to see you, sir.
As Dr. Paul has said, you've been so gracious with your time, not only with the Ron Paul Institute, but with everyone, because I don't know how you do it, Doug.
I don't know how you I know you're probably just too nice to turn people down, but you're on probably five or six shows a day, and I listen to every one of them.
So the country appreciates what you're doing for us as well.
Well, thanks.
I hope that's the case.
Although sometimes the feedback is not all that nice, depending on the subject.
Tough medicine is difficult to take.
Good.
Let's start off with something that you have posted recently.
You have done a video, which I think is fantastic.
A lot of people have already watched it, but I hope a lot more will soon take a peek.
Tell us about this video that you have out.
Well, we produced this a few weeks ago.
For some reason, people are only now beginning to find it.
Maybe that's because the Google algorithms are suppressing it and X has found ways to suppress it.
I don't know.
But a lot of people seem to think this was designed to be a response to President Trump's recent comments when he came on ostensibly to tell us about Venezuela and then essentially lectured us on what a great success all of his policies have been.
It wasn't really designed to be that way, but we were on the right path, I think.
We called it the Great Betrayal.
And we were trying to get people to understand just how much damage we've done to ourselves financially, which of course is a topic that you've been talking about forever, Dr. Paul.
But we thought that we would try to cast it in a new light.
And so we included some comments in there that we hoped people would appreciate, because it's hard to understand why a house that cost $11,000 or substantially less than that, along with a lifestyle and a standard of living in 1970, was Really, quite good.
And today, the same income of $11,000 costs $50,000.
And you wonder, well, how did this happen?
And, well, I guess it's okay.
We've kept up with inflation.
We've kept up with the debasement in our currency.
We were trying to get the point across to people that that just isn't true, that the middle class is being largely destroyed.
And that's not entirely Donald Trump's fault, as we all know.
But we were trying to get the point across that he's the latest in a series of people, all of whom have behaved in very much the same manner, regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans, and hoped that by illustrating this and demonstrating it, that people would come around to understanding that they're not going to get anywhere by going to the ballot box and picking one of two, both of whom end up doing the same thing anyway.
Well, Doug, I'll say, sorry, I watched the video, and as you know, you've met my son several times.
My son is 25, and he works in a good job, but this video was made for him and his generation who went to the university.
They have degrees, they have good jobs, and they look at this and they say, and I didn't get it at first.
I'll be honest with you, Doug, I didn't get it at first.
But then the way you presented the numbers, because yeah, things were cheaper back then, but you didn't make as much money.
It all works out fine in the end.
It's more expensive now, but we have higher salaries.
Well, you pointed out in that video, which is critical, and it speaks to the younger generation.
No, it's not working that way.
As you say, a house is 15 times more than it costs, and your salary's only gone up three or four times.
There's this huge gap, and you have an entire generation of young people now.
I think they say the median age for buying your first home is 40.
Well, how the heck can you settle down with a wife and start having children when you can't start till you're 40?
And so what you're doing, I think, in this video, and we will have a link, of course, to it in our video.
And everyone should watch this, especially young people, but everyone should watch it.
What you're saying is that we are, you have to connect the foreign policy, the economic policy, the finance, and also something within ourselves, our moral character, and we're in big trouble if we don't wake up.
So I guess that's not a question, but that's how it struck me when I did watch it.
Well, we were also trying to demonstrate how this problem with immigration, particularly illegal immigration, obviously, has been weaponized against Americans because they don't seem to grasp that you're talking about hiring three aliens or illegal aliens, even legal immigrants for the price of one American.
So how does this help American citizens?
How do we ensure that Americans earn a living wage?
How do we ensure they have a standard of living which is commensurate with the needs of the nation?
Well, we don't.
We're ignoring it completely.
And then, of course, on top of this, you have this nonsense overseas, this constant warfare that drains the treasury along with a lot of other things, does nothing for the country, certainly doesn't do anything for our national security.
If anything, it makes it worse.
How do you get this across to people?
And that's what we were trying to do in the video.
And as you point out, it has gotten a good reception, but it seems as though a lot of people are only now finding it.
It's been out there for a little bit.
So hopefully more people will see it.
So whatever you can do to proselytize on behalf of this thing, we'd deeply appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Do you have a follow-up?
No, no, no.
Sorry.
You know, this reminds me of one of the debates I was in in the presidential debates.
And I remember the announcer came and it was an announcer what we were going to be debating.
They said, well, last debate we had, we talked about economics.
This time we're going to talk about foreign policy.
And I personally resented it because I said, how do you divide those two up?
You're either fighting over getting something that doesn't belong to you, or you have all these consequences, you know, from spending all the money because there's an economic consequence.
So I think it's one and to both.
And I don't see how I just thought it was a bit silly.
And that's why one thing you have looked at this and it is one thing.
It isn't, you can't divide it so easily and say, well, we only need the military experts and take care of it.
It's a very much of an economic issue as well.
Well, that's right.
And the mathematics across the board is undeniable.
You can't print $38 trillion and escape the consequences.
Eventually, the bill is coming due.
And people don't seem to understand that a third of all the dollars ever created in the history of the United States were printed from nothing over the last 22 months.
So this bill is coming due.
And the wars overseas in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or Venezuela won't rescue the economy.
They'll just tank it even faster.
So how do we get this across to people?
That's all I know.
I mean, we've got to stop this effort to extract wealth from the people that are productive and transfer it to the people that are connected.
And that was the other point.
People don't understand how our economy has been financialized and that the billionaires that are currently calling the shots in this country and certainly shaping the environment for policymaking on the Hill or in the White House, these people have become billionaires with transaction fees.
These people aren't creating anything.
They're not producing anything.
We're not talking about Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller.
I mean, however much we may or may not have liked them, they created things.
They built things and they created employment and they enriched others.
It didn't all end up in their bank account and the bank accounts of people that work for them.
No doubt.
We do well with being a society of influencers, don't we?
Yeah, and you know, that's the other thing.
And I'm glad you brought that up.
You know, what are we doing when the people that are first in line for free housing, free health care, and free money to a large extent are not even citizens of the United States?
I mean, that just doesn't make any sense.
This government continues to do what its predecessors did, which is steal from us.
They steal our time.
They steal our standard of living and they steal our purchasing power.
I don't know what we can do except get the word out and try to get people to understand that, you know, these plantations that we talked about, you know, the digital plantation where we're the product.
They harvest our attention, our data, you know, our private lives.
They tune algorithms to direct our thinking, to push our buttons emotionally, you know, while we work for free building their empire.
And then you have the debt plantation run by Wall Street, student debt before you can buy a beer, housing debt for 30 years, credit card debt for groceries.
You know, a man in debt is a man who's afraid and he won't speak up.
And I think that's what they're betting on.
And then finally, you have the tax plantation.
You work half the year for the government.
What do you get?
You don't even get good health care in many cases.
You don't really have safe streets, not a border.
One of my roommates at West Point took his daughter to New York City where she was going to enter a school up there.
And he said he was just appalled at everything he saw.
The people on the street, he wanted to take his daughter home.
And she insisted, no, let me try this.
Well, she spent a semester there and came back.
It's not safe for her.
This is beyond belief.
This is not the America that I was born into.
It's not the America I want my children or grandchildren to live in.
You know, I think you've used the word empire.
We know what it's like to have one country, you know, dictating to many others and sort of engulf the world at times.
And I'm not hesitant in using the word empire to demonstrate what's been going on for many decades.
And it's not one party that does this.
And yet, empires all end.
All the previous ones have ended.
There's six or so that ended it, but they generally end the same way.
And you've already mentioned on the danger of what we're doing.
And they end financially.
And that is they either destroy the value of money all the way back to Roman times.
They failed like this.
So I think we're in a moving in that direction.
And there has to be some benefits from that, but it's also so dangerous.
But I just am believing that this empire is in the midst of ending.
And that's why the tinkering and the adjustments and different managements and worrying about a quarter point interest rates by the Federal Reserve is the biggest issue of the day.
I think it's much bigger.
I think it's this empire that is on its last legs that might be the big deal.
Well, World War I destroyed the British Empire.
The British say, oh, no, that really didn't destroy us.
No, actually, it did because they were spending 14 times the gross domestic product to fight it.
And they went broke at the end of it.
You know, I remember reading a comment from Churchill back to Lloyd George in 1920 about Iraq.
They thought that they had discovered this oil gold mine in Iraq.
And he finally said, look, we need to get out of Iraq.
This place is terrible.
It's not just a question of dealing with unhappy Turks and remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
We're spending more in Iraq right now than we spend on the national health budget in Great Britain.
Well, that was the British Empire.
The British never had to enter World War I, didn't have to fight it.
And then everybody says, well, you didn't have any choice with World War II.
Well, you always had a choice as to how to handle those things.
And the British, they fought Napoleon for almost 20 years.
And frankly speaking, they had periods of time where they essentially enjoyed a brief armistice.
And then when they were more healthy financially and the situation was favorable, they came back.
And ultimately, it took time, but they defeated Napoleon.
Nobody thought in those terms at the time.
And so they bankrupted themselves.
They destroyed the empire.
And then we walked in.
We inherited the whole thing.
And we are making precisely the same mistakes that they made.
So you're absolutely right, Dr. Paul.
Everybody, whenever I speak, I always have people in the audience.
There's always a college student or graduate students, what should I read?
You know, you've said a lot of interesting things.
What do you think I should read?
I say two books.
Number one, read Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
Absolutely read it.
And focus on that chapter on Great Britain because that's the closest analog to ourselves.
The other thing is read Stalin's War and understand how shamelessly we were manipulated during and after World War II.
Those two things together can explain brilliantly why we are in the position we are now.
But, you know, most people look at that and say, well, you know, Doug, that's a very long book.
Constitutional Hypocrisy 00:09:58
Don't mess with us.
So, Dan, you know.
One good point you make is that we are, you know, suffering at the hands of a government of grifters and liars.
And your great address, and it's again, you've got to watch it, everyone.
You make some great points.
And one of them that I really liked is this, and it demonstrates what a bunch of grifters and liars, unfortunately, are running this show.
The dollar is backed by faith in a government that has lied us into every war for the last half century.
That is an excellent way of bringing together the foreign policy and the domestic policy.
Wars are the ones, are the things that have killed the dollar to a large degree, not exclusively, but to a large degree.
There are consequences.
But Americans are told to wave the flag and support the troops without questioning.
And I think your excellent presentation has raised some big questions as to how wise that is to do.
Well, you know, the biggest problem, though, again, and this goes back to what Dr. Paul's been talking about for decades, when we went off that gold standard, which was supposed to be a temporary fix, naturally, we created an opportunity for politicians they should never have been allowed to have, and that is to simply print money we didn't have, to print and create fictitious wealth that we did not have.
Now, what did that mean?
Well, it meant that when it came to fighting wars, we didn't have to raise taxes.
All we had to do was print more money.
And the reason we went off the gold standard, as we know, is that we were broke at the end of the Vietnam War.
LBJ had sent us deeply into debt.
Nobody wanted to default.
Nobody wanted to face the music.
And that's really the other part of it.
All these people in Washington, and Dr. Paul knows this, they're fugitives from accountability.
They don't want to be held responsible for anything.
Look at this vote that Thomas Massey just led in the House.
And they voted it down.
This was an opportunity to impose constitutional restraint on the President of the United States and his desire to march into Venezuela.
Nobody voted.
Well, I shouldn't say nobody.
Some people voted for it, but it didn't pass the House.
Why not?
Well, it's another example of, I don't want to be held accountable.
I don't want to be viewed by my constituents as disloyal, unpatriotic.
And oh, by the way, my donors won't pay me what they're paying me now if I don't go along with this.
You know, I don't see any good ending to this.
Do you, Dan?
No, not at all.
And you bring up a great point, and I've heard it in many interviews, that the people on Capitol Hill now, they're getting paid to do this.
They're making money from their donors.
They're making money from the lobbyists.
They're making money from their stocks and all those little tips they're getting when they're buying stock.
This is a grift machine, and it's taking America for a ride.
And one example, and you sent this over this morning for a few people to think about, that Trump signed the trillion-dollar military spending bill, which is going to include hundreds of millions of dollars more for Ukraine, among other things.
So they're not even slowing down the spending.
In fact, they're speeding it up.
And each dollar they print, of course, makes that dollar worth less value for the working men and women of the country.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because this supposedly new national security strategy is a joke.
The actions make a mockery of the whole thing.
There's no evidence that anyone intends to change anything.
And that includes, obviously, Donald Trump.
You know, I had This explained to me because leading up to the war in the Middle East, I introduced an amendment in a committee because I was on the Foreign Policy Committee.
And I made them vote for it, which made them very, very angry.
But then they lectured me, the chairman of the committee, who was supposedly, maybe because he was a typical conservative, and he explained to him, he says, Dr. Paul, we know that you know a lot about the Constitution, but that part of the Constitution about the necessity of declaring war, he says, that's synach anymore.
We don't even follow it.
And I thought, that explains it.
They've just, they're blunt about it.
They've rejected it.
Most of the time, they pretend that if 99 times out of 100 they vote against the Constitution, if one time the Constitution defends their position, then they say, well, this is constitutional.
It's that hypocrisy.
Just, you know, it's so disturbing.
But I also mentioned this throughout a lot of times to Daniel.
I says, hypocrisy is one way when you expose the hypocrisy, people do wake up.
And I use COVID as an example, the hypocrisy of the people ramming all those regulations out of the throat.
But when the people knew the ones that wrote the bills, don't bother it.
So I think it's a good tool to use.
Well, hypocrisy is rampant when vice pays tribute to virtue.
And we see the selective use of the Constitution when it suits members of Congress, that is the Senate, the House, as well as the President.
But otherwise, they've opted to ignore it.
This has been going on, though, as you know, for a very long time.
I was trying to talk to somebody about Lend-Lease, and they asked me, well, what was Lend-Lease, which tells you where we are in our history.
And I said that FDR, without consulting Congress or receiving permission of any kind, simply sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow in July of 1941, right after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, to essentially promise Stalin anything he wanted for nothing.
And effectively, that's what we did.
We shipped over vast quantities of material and equipment and locomotives and tanks, you name it, aircraft.
All of this was done free of charge.
Whereas at the same time, we were bankrupting Great Britain and the Empire because we said anything we send to you, you have to pay for it in gold.
So we succeeded in bankrupting the British Empire and saving communism.
That's a hell of an outcome for a war, especially since the British were really supposed to be allied with us.
People don't get it.
They don't understand it.
And they don't understand that the Constitution, as old as it is and as imperfect as it may be in many ways, is still the best device to protect us from the kind of abuse and lying and deceit that we're subject to right now.
Of course, the irony is that Harry Hopkins was a communist, as we discovered later.
So I did promise our viewers that you were going to identify the problem.
I think you've done a wonderful job.
By the way, the Great Betrayal is the name of the video, and we're going to put a link in here so you can watch it.
Wait till we're finished, please.
But I'd also promised them that you had some ideas on what we can do because people tend to feel a bit of despair.
Yes, we see it.
We get it.
There's a problem everywhere.
And I've heard you on several shows talking about things that we can do, things that the government can do to start trying to right this breaking up ship in the storm.
So what kinds of things can be done, Doug?
Well, there are a couple of things.
The first thing that I became involved with in last year was developing a new organization, a new nonprofit called the National Conversation.
We had our first major meeting in Dallas on the 4th of October.
The idea behind the national conversation was, well, we need to build momentum for a third way, for potentially a movement away from the uniparty towards a new political structure, potentially a new party.
And people said, well, Doug, you know, this has never worked in the past.
I said, no, that's true, but it has worked on occasion.
And I reminded them that until John Brown decided to stage his raid on Harper's Ferry, the Republican Party had a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected to dog catcher.
So I said, you don't know what will happen in the future, but I think we've reached a point of no return now in our history.
People are beginning to figure out that it doesn't make a great deal of difference what you do at the ballot box.
You get the same bad outcome.
But it's not enough to say that.
You've got to go around the country and talk to people and listen to what they have to say.
And one of the things that we want to do, we started in Dallas, but we want to do it across the country.
We'd like to do it about once every 90 days or 120 days, but preferably 90, is go to another location.
It could be Salt Lake City in Utah.
It could be Cleveland, Ohio.
It could be anywhere you want to go, Charlotte, North Carolina.
We want to come and hold a essentially convene a conference, invite hundreds of people there, Americans.
We're trying to make it as inexpensive as possible.
We're going to have some speakers, but then we want to hear what the person sitting in the audience thinks.
So we're saying that the speakers are not just there to lecture.
They'll say something for 10 minutes.
And then we want to give people the opportunity to interact with the speakers because we want to find out what Americans really think.
Now, I could sit here and anybody can and say, well, I think I know.
But I've learned over the years that you've really got to ask people for their opinions and ask them what they think and ask them, what do you want to happen?
Because when they begin to say, this is what we want to happen, that's when they begin to really look for people who will deliver it.
And they're increasingly persuaded that the people that are supposed to deliver are not going to do it.
Doug, we're going to have to close down now.
And we really appreciate you attending and participating in this today.
Great Seeing You 00:00:42
Hopefully we'll have some of our viewers check in and find out more thoroughly exactly what you've been doing.
And I want to personally thank you for all the support you've given RPI.
And it's just great seeing you on our program.
And we appreciate that very much.
And hopefully we'll be able to do this again.
Well, supporting you, Dr. Paul, is an honor and a pleasure.
So we will always do that.
And I don't know of anybody that's working with us right now that does not hold you in the highest possible esteem.
Well, that's very nice.
Thank you.
Have a good Christmas.
Okay, very good.
And I wanted to thank all our viewers today for tuning in.
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