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Jan. 5, 2026 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:45
Venezuela 'Regime Change' How Long Will The Euphoria Last

The Republican establishment - and some of MAGA - is celebrating what appears to be a very quick victory against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Early "victories" are always enthusiastically celebrated. But we with all regime change, things tend to go south quite quickly.

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Time Text
Venezuela Indictment Update 00:04:56
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Good.
Doing well.
Good.
But we have some news that we need to talk about.
Enough of that, you know, all over the place.
But we have people in charge.
You know, they're going to clean up this mess.
And, you know, I thought we could talk about the new mayor of New York City and, you know, give him credit for being pretty shrewd.
I think he pulled one off.
How can you go come into America, call himself a radical left-wing socialist and get re-elected, get elected?
That's pretty amazing.
So I sort of think that he might have gotten some credit for just playing out telling the truth because they're all saying those wonderful things that they're going to do.
But we sort of had another story that we need to really talk about because it's a big deal.
It's a big deal for us, and that has to do with Venezuela.
Not that we haven't already talked about it and anticipated this and warned against it.
And we're still in about the same position because, you know, the big event happened.
Our troops went in.
They got the president out of there, arrested him, took him to New York for a trial.
Made all the right-wingers happy.
But this is to me something that is really very serious.
And they think this can, you know, as other wars that we've gotten into, the so-called wars, that, oh, this will be short, short and sweet.
You've made that point.
And maybe that's the way we're going to do it this time.
No real problem.
But for some reason, they linger.
You know, some of the ones that we worried about before they went in ended up 10 years, some 15 years, some 20 years.
It's just constantly going on.
But they never want to learn anything before it's happening because they're smart.
They're the politicians in charge, and they shouldn't have any problem with, we shouldn't have any problem with them.
Then, of course, we have leaders like Lindsey Graham, and he can guide us and tell us what to do and reassure us it's okay.
So I think we have big problems.
Yeah, I think so.
And, you know, for anyone who's been sleeping the last three or four days straight, you know, on the evening of the 3rd, U.S. troops went into Venezuela, as you point out, was the Delta teams.
They went and Delta forces, they went and they kidnapped President Maduro.
They took him out.
They took him out of bed, I guess, and his wife snatched him up and took him off.
And what's remarkable about it is that there was no battle.
No ships, none of our aircraft were shot down.
None of the Chinooks were shot down.
One of them was shot up pretty bad, I guess.
Trump himself even said it.
But they were able to get back.
No Americans died, which obviously is a good thing.
The only people who were killed, aside from a few troops, is Maduro's personal bodyguard unit.
Apparently, he had about 35 Cubans who were guarding him, and they did fight back, and they were all killed by the U.S. when they took President Maduro.
And as you point out, a lot of the right wing is cheering.
This is great.
It's a simple operation.
We were in for less than 90 minutes.
Out.
We're back.
Everything's achieved.
Now we're going to get our oil back that they stole from us and hid it under the ground.
But the one thing that, Dr. Paul, that strikes and it should strike people is it does set a very dangerous precedent.
Now, we shouldn't be under the illusion that international law is so important and everyone follows it.
But sometimes international law is for the benefit of all players, even the powerful ones.
You know, for example, the Geneva Conventions after World War I.
Well, those also benefited our soldiers in future wars and after World War II.
But in this case, it was described as a police action.
We don't have to declare war because it's a police action.
Look, we've got an indictment.
Our courts have put in an indictment on a foreign elected leader, and so therefore we're going to go get him.
Well, if that now becomes the way things are done in the international community, that could be a very, very messy precedent to sent, I believe.
You know, there's been a lot of discussion since this attack has occurred on was it technically legal?
Was it constitutional?
Was it moral?
Some argue that it was technically okay, even though it was the wrong thing to do.
Indictment as Diplomacy 00:04:54
And some have justified it by an explicit authority coming from our Constitution, which I have a little trouble with that.
And yet, the people wonder why these kind of things are happening.
And they worry about the details of going in there, which I think they should.
You know, why are we doing this?
And if it is a war, why don't they declare war?
All those things that we've talked about.
But I worry more about what is the consequence, not to the process of dealing with Venezuela, but what about the consequence of dealing with the citizens of this United States?
Because they're the ones who are being pushed around on this.
And now I see a tremendous boost.
Socialism has gotten its boost, but I don't worry about it.
Soviet communism proved to us what the people finally think of it.
But what worries me is this compromise, this getting together, getting the left and right together.
And the seizing of this oil and how ecstatic the business people are.
I think so much of corporatism, that's a soft term.
But what about the early stages of fascism?
Oh, you couldn't possibly use those words.
And yet, if you go back and see the rise of many dictatorships around the world, it's been a collusion with government and big business.
And a lot of people, you know, say, oh, yeah, the big business is too much involved.
But can you see the boost that they just got?
The business people got a boost of three to divvy up 300 billion barrels of oil if they know how to get it out of the ground.
So to me, it's that advancement to accepting government and big business as close partnership that I think I see clearly as a big, they've gotten a big boost on this.
You know, that's a great point that you're making because one of the complaints about Venezuela is that, well, they have state-run enterprises.
Their oil system is state-run.
Well, ours is sort of de facto state-run, isn't it?
Because these companies, they went into Venezuela many decades ago.
They took risks.
There are always risks when you invest in anything.
They took the risks in Venezuela.
They made some profits.
Several decades ago, the oil companies were nationalized and they went to court.
They took Venezuela to court, et cetera, et cetera.
All of these things happen.
But now it's all of a sudden our oil again, and our government has to use its own military to get back our oil.
But it's to the benefit of oil companies.
These are acting like state-owned enterprises.
But, you know, there's a lot of fuzziness in between here.
So when our companies get in there around as an example, that's the way in different places, big billion and big oil and big companies go in and make their investments, then things go wrong.
And then they expect the American taxpayer who made no money during this time, they're supposed to march down there and take care of them.
I think that principle is wrong.
I think the process is wrong.
But if you pick up and go into another country to make a buck, I think it's risky and they ought to know about it.
But if they know that somebody can draft off our kids or put the pressure on our kids here to pay the price of defending this oil and be willing to go to war over this, I think, and this is assumed, this is assumed, nationalization.
And they use that term all the time.
Administration, they stole our oil.
Iran stole our oil.
This sort of thing.
Well, yeah, they took it.
But is it a little less clear-cut as you pretend it is?
It isn't like you can say, well, here was a person come in with a machine gun and robbed a bank and they took our money.
It's not quite like that.
And ironically, I mean, if they do steal all that oil, the 300 billion barrels, and that makes its way into the global oil market all at once, what's it going to do to American producers of oil?
It's going to actually bankrupt a lot of people here that are not only the producers, but the downstream people.
Well, as to the operation itself, there are a couple of interesting things about it.
First of all, and I'm not the first one to say this.
Aleister Crook did a great interview on the Judges Show this morning about it.
Massey's Critique of Military Operations 00:15:02
It had a lot of the hallmarks of the Syria operation.
And that is where the U.S. had been involved for a while paying off the Syrian military to turn on Assad because they were very poorly paid and they saw no future.
And so the U.S. came with bundles of cash.
After all, you could just keep printing if you needed to.
And so that seemed to be a big factor with Venezuela.
Apparently, the vice president, who's now the acting president, had been in touch with the Americans through an intermediary, through Connor, exactly, actually, organizing this whole thing.
And that's why it went off without a shot being fired.
It was all prearranged.
It almost feels like a bit of a fake war in that respect.
But nevertheless, I have a couple of videos I wanted to put up because after it happened, Trump did several victory laps right after the operation.
And here's a couple of them that I think should be alarming to people.
If we put on, let's get our earpieces in, Dr. Paul, and listen to this.
We're going to play these two back to back.
Here's Trump right as the operation had happened.
But we can't take a chance after having done this incredible thing last night of letting somebody else take over where we have to do it again.
We can do it again, too.
Nobody can stop us.
There's nobody that has the capability that we have.
We can do it again.
We have to do it again.
There's nobody that can stop us.
That's almost, that's hubris, I think.
That's too mild a term.
Yeah.
And now here's the next one.
Now he's talking about.
Now, this is an interesting one now.
Someone put this together.
And it's very interesting because it's Trump after his Venezuela operation.
And then it rewinds to Trump just a little while ago in the past.
Let's listen to this.
We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
Our current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven absolute failure.
We will break the cycle of regime change.
We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt, and in Syria.
Regime change takes chaos.
You've seen how that works over the last 20 years.
That hasn't been too good.
Not a reckless interventionist globalism.
We're getting out of the nation-building business.
We're going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place.
It's unbelievable that Trump versus Trump.
We're getting out of the nation-building business.
No, actually, we're going to literally run this nation.
You know, I keep wondering why we make such effort to conquer the world so that we have enough oil and totally reject what is really an American tradition is the marketplace can provide the best standard of living and the most prosperity and the most peace.
And we're going out there starting wars.
How many lies were told to us?
But Trump is not the first president that has said this.
They all do it.
They say, back in time, Roosevelt Wilson.
I'm going to keep you out of war.
I'm going to keep you out of war.
So they don't tell the truth.
I wonder why they do this because they feel it compelling that they have to tell lies and fibs because it's so important.
And I think it's a sense of insecurity, of personal insecurity, and then they have a lot of greed thrown in there.
You know, they need us, and it looks like we could be attacked.
We have to take over.
And besides, we might get a little oil out of the deal.
So this on and on, it's just terrible.
They have no confidence on how a free society might work and has worked where it's been experimented with.
We could go to our own history.
We've had a lot of prosperity in this country, and it wasn't because we were in 120 countries occupying with military.
Well, Conway Rails on our super chats makes a good point.
And thank you for the $20 that you kicked in, Conway.
But he says it's truly disheartening that many libertarians, even some who align with Dr. Paul's non-interventionism, either silent or endorse the overthrow of Maduro.
Ron Paul is always right and consistent.
And I noticed that too on X. There is so much gloating, even a lot of libertarians.
Why shouldn't we take the oil?
Why should we let this socialist run a country like a socialist and all this sort of thing?
I mean, it's pretty remarkable.
It does remind me of right after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This is a success.
All these naysayers are so wrong, you know.
Yeah, and that's why I was trying to make the point that stealing this oil and protecting it has to be designed.
And is it a theft?
Well, if it's a theft to a country over there, you know, outside, that's one thing.
But for us to go to war over it, you know, we say nationalization, I think it's bad.
But why?
These are smart business people.
Why don't they measure it, economically speaking?
But they don't do that.
They expect the government.
It's one of these things.
You know, the welfareism at the lower end, there's a lot of dependency.
And I think business people, especially when you hear the noise about, I'm going to do this and this, and they depend on the government to come to their rescue.
Oh, yeah, if you need money, we'll take care of it.
We know how to print the money.
Just listen to us.
It will give you a healthy, free society.
Yeah, exactly.
It's pretty remarkable.
I wanted to put up, well, the other thing is, now, guess who's excited?
You mentioned his name earlier.
Lindsey Graham is super, super duper excited.
Remember, this is the guy that President Trump is palling around with instead of people like Thomas Massey.
Lindsey Graham is happy as can be.
Let's watch those two clips of Lindsey Graham.
Just ecstatic.
He can't control himself.
And guess what he's promising?
We ain't even gotten started yet.
Those two videos of Lindsey Graham, if we can, yeah.
Look at Lindsey.
He is excited.
I might want to put your earpiece in, Dr. Paul, and listen to Lindsay.
Could have done it.
And as to this commander-in-chief, he did something people talked about doing.
You just wait for Cuba.
Cuba is a communist dictatorship that's killed priests and nuns.
They preyed on their own people.
Their days are numbered.
We're going to wake up one day.
I hope in 26, in our backyard, we're going to have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narco-terrorist dictators killing Americans.
This is a big frigging day.
And everybody in the world is thinking differently than they were just a few days ago because of what you did.
Doesn't that mean that one of the next stops as a build-up or the system they want, why not start off with a mayor they don't like?
Because he's shrewd, but he believes these things.
Yet, oh no, we can't do that.
But that, I think, is not going to happen.
And I still think the failure, one of the most impressive things I've noticed in politics since I've been watching for a few years, has been the failure of Soviet communism and why it was, in many ways, it was uneventful.
You know, most people would know when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, but they're not going to know when Russia's communism collapsed and it was over.
And there were no nukes there because for 10 or 15 years, I've heard that noise.
It was drafted under those conditions.
They had nukes into Cuba.
Get ready.
And it wasn't necessary.
It was the failure of the system.
Instead, we joined them and we try to outclass them.
You know, we modify this control by government.
We call it something else.
We call it corporatism and, you know, helping the corporations get along.
But they do need help.
And we need more people like Lindsey Graham to help the people because it's so good for, you know, our prosperity and our safety.
We'll be much safer with people like this.
That's their argument.
And so Graham says Cuba's next.
You just wait.
But what he really wants is Iran.
And that's what he is claiming for.
Now, let's watch this next video of Graham where he's on.
Of course, he's on the Sunday shows every single Sunday, without a doubt.
And I don't know why.
But here he is threatening Iran.
So I pray and hope that 2026 will be the year that we make Iran great again.
That we make Iran great again.
He's pushing for an attack on Iran.
That's what he really wants.
And that's what Venezuela, I think, was.
You know, the slogan has been very successful and people love it.
And it's universal now.
Make America great again.
But I just couldn't help but thinking if I could possibly improve it.
And my suggestion is make America alert again to wake up and see what's going on before the war start, before we go bankrupt, before we have a revolution here and a civil war when we destroy the middle class with the destruction of a currency.
And people like we just had you play with guys like Graham.
He's not losing credibility in the conventional sense.
His credibility is gaining.
He's winning.
So I would suggest the American people should become more alert.
Should be alarmed about it because they've been wrong about everything.
Well, I want to do a couple of clips.
Thomas Massey, as usual, got it all right.
I'm going to skip those first, I think, three clips and go to the Thomas Massey post on X if you can.
Now, this is the thing now, Dr. Paul.
They had an indictment.
They indicted the president of Venezuela.
It's all legal.
It's all fine.
But you remember for weeks they were talking about, it's about fentanyl.
It's about fentanyl.
Oh, no, it's about they stole our oil.
Well, Thomas Massey points out, Attorney General Bondi says, here is the indictment, and it's available for everyone to read.
Thomas Massey says, 25-page indictment, but no mention of fentanyl or stolen oil.
Search it for yourself.
It wasn't even in the indictment.
That was a justification.
I'll go to the next one.
And Massey says, if this action were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn't be tweeting that they've arrested the president of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law.
And that was literally in there, Dr. Paul.
One of the points on the indictment was that Maduro had a machine gun.
He violated our gun laws.
How dare he?
Now, in the other one, I just want to put up two more from Massey because I think he gets it right.
Now, JD Vance, sadly enough, he has been trying to justify this on X for days now.
And Massey's having nothing of it, Dr. Paul.
He's having nothing of this.
He says, Massey says to JD Vance about the oil, it's not American oil, it's Venezuelan oil.
Oil companies entered into risky deals to develop oil, and the deals were canceled by a prior Venezuelan government.
What's happening?
The lives of U.S. soldiers are being risked to make those oil companies, not Americans, more profitable.
And that's basically exactly what you said.
Oh, hey, they look like they're converting me.
It's all about drugs.
So when are we going to Mexico?
I understand a few drugs come from Mexico.
Of course, a libertarian has a different approach to how to solve that problem.
And that will not come about very soon.
Well, here's something interesting because I know you've talked about it already today, but there's a lot that has to do with well-connected and especially the donor class.
Put on this next Thomas Massey clip because I think this is very important.
Thomas Massey says, according to Grok, Paul Singer, the globalist Republican mega donor who's already spent a million dollars to defeat me in the next election, listen to this, Dr. Paul.
Paul Singer stands to make billions of dollars on his distressed sitco investment now that this administration has taken over Venezuela.
So Trump's close buddy, donor class, Paul Singer, he's going to make billions now on this.
You know, I could just imagine people saying, well, what does this do to Thomas?
Does he lie awake at night agitated?
Oh, boy, this is something to worry about.
He probably Is relieved that he lives in a different world of politics and just watching them, you know, doing the stupid things that they do.
And he had the privilege and the responsibility of just telling the truth.
And he's doing a great job.
Yeah, you know who else always does a great job?
It's Glenn Greenwald.
And I felt a lot of dismay because of how people were so exuberant about this.
But Greenwald captures it perfectly.
If we can skip to his, if you don't mind, if I just read a little bit of what Greenwald had to say, because this is exactly what we were thinking.
He said, it's important to acknowledge how potent war propaganda is.
It's been developed over centuries and stimulates the most visceral tribalistic impulses.
The days and weeks after every new U.S. war or regime change operation are triumphalist.
We're always vanquishing the bad guys.
We're free, the repressed people of the world.
It makes everyone feel noble, purposeful, and most of all, brave and strong, even though they're not the ones fighting.
The media only shows the people who cheer it.
The costs are concealed.
The motives aren't questioned.
Patriotic pride swirls.
Big Trouble Ahead 00:03:47
It's been like this for decades.
During this initial burst of war intoxication, there's no persuasion or reasoning possible.
It's like trying to talk to a drunk person.
They're inebriated on the war glories of others.
Now, going to the next one, he continues, and this is long, but I think it's worth reading.
This dissipates only a few months or a year later when the whole thing falls apart, when it becomes obvious that none of the motives were benevolent or the ones stated, when only a tiny fraction benefit at everyone else's expense, when only the outcome is bloodshed, autocracy, and misery.
By then, most people who supported it won't admit they did, or they'll blame poor implementation or a failure to carry it through.
But those regrets don't matter.
By then, it's just time to sell the new war, and the war propaganda process starts anew.
This time, it's the good war, the one that will work, the one that will bring us prosperity and purpose.
And the only ones opposed are the ones who hate all that's good.
That's how a country stays in a posture of endless war.
See, people have to realize how politicians work.
And I talked a minute ago about, you know, the big event that I was aware of was the failure, total failure of the Soviet communist system.
Yet we keep going after it.
Why do people do this?
Well, the propaganda is always, you know, super good.
There's always amazing propositions on how well things will go.
And there was a book written a while ago by Patterson.
And she wrote about the humanitarianism with a guillotine.
And the warning: always beware of anybody telling you that they're going to take care of you, that they are carrying a gun and you're not.
And that's when we're in big trouble.
Big trouble.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, our first show of the new year.
And I'm going to close out with some good news.
As everyone knows, we did our year-in fundraiser.
We did reach our goal.
Thank goodness.
It was very tough, but toward the end, a lot of people came through.
But I got to call Dr. Paul from our very generous benefactor.
And he said, I'm really impressed that you were able to do this, that your viewers and the followers of the Ron Paul Institute are so dedicated to you and what you're doing that they put forth the money.
He said, I'm going to raise the stakes.
I'm not going to cut it off.
I'm going to give you till January 19th to raise an additional $25,000 and I'll match it.
Put that last clip on because this is what we're doing.
And he's asked me to do it.
He said, let's extend it till January 19th.
Let's do 125, which you will match.
So we're at 108,363 of 125.
We're about a little under $17,000 short of having that $125,000 that can be doubled.
So please help us get that $125.
If you forgot over the holidays to make a donation, now is a great time to do it.
It still, of course, is tax deductible, and we certainly appreciate your support.
Over to you, Dr. Wonderful.
And that is exciting that our viewers and supporters have come through with this because, quite frankly, we were in need of it.
And fundraising is very important, but it's also something that I think that I could be better at.
Supporters' Pledge 00:01:02
But I think we have great supporters.
I place a lot of confidence in that.
Whether it had been early campaigns or political campaigns and elsewhere when I would be worried, we don't have the money.
How can we do this?
Don't plan on that.
I had supporters that would always say, Ron, the money will be there.
You just go ahead, keep saying what you're saying.
So I've done that.
And I tell you, I really get annoyed with myself on one thing that I don't fully express my appreciation for those of you who have contributed for our campaigning and our efforts in this particular one that we're talking about.
But all a lot of you might have been supporters for a long time because I've been doing this for a long time.
But also, also, I know that the efforts and the spreading of the information always depends on people like you who are willing to spread the message.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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