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Jan. 13, 2026 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
34:11
Trump To Iran Rioters 'Take Over Your Institutions!'

President Trump is turning up the "regime change" dial to 11, with social media posts urging Iran's waning riots to ramp back up and overthrow the government. Trump promises the rioters that "help is on the way." It seems the "no regime change" President has become fully enthralled with regime change. Meanwhile, US military assets are heading toward the Middle East.

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Time Text
Iranians Keep Protesting 00:11:31
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to 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 well.
Excellent.
And things aren't doing well in the Middle East.
I get so discouraged.
Do they know we exist?
Do they ever listen to what we say?
Yeah, well, I think so.
It's just that they're not owning, they don't own the media.
But we will continue because there's this ongoing war, and sometimes we're behind some of this stuff.
And one thing I know is when you look at the money being spent, this country would not have poverty if you were allowed to keep the people were allowed to keep all their money to spend and take care of their families instead of these, what is it, millions, billions?
Now we're talking to trillions.
And just the other day, Trump says, what we need is more money to spread around.
Let's increase the military budget by 50%.
What's that going to be?
Oh, 1.5 billion?
No, trillions of dollars.
And to me, the big disappointment is the American people can't comprehend it.
Sometimes I think I can't quite comprehend $1.5 trillion.
It seems like they'd have to be up all night trying to figure out how we don't have that many friends to give the money to.
But the process of there, and of course, the one thing that you can expect to suffer will be there'll be more debt.
There will be more inflation.
There will be more deficits due to this and more mischief and more wars.
And you'd think, hey, that sounds like a pretty good thing.
Where'd you get those ideas?
Well, you know, they've been around.
The founders understood a little bit about this.
Matter of fact, that's why they gave us the gold standard and a few other things and said we shouldn't be engaging ourselves in wars like that.
But anyway, it looks like we're doing it again.
And right now, today we want to talk about what's going on with Iran, a dangerous spot, I'll tell you that.
Oil, this is from Zero Heads.
Oil spikes after Trump urges Iranians to keep protesting.
Says help is on its way.
Oh, he wants the protesting.
I wonder why he want to do that.
I wonder, you'd think maybe he wants calm and then negotiations and diplomacy and work out a contract where we could go travel back and forth into Iran.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
But it seems like, why does it look like?
Could it be possible that he sort of want to benefit from this agitation that's over there?
And the Iranians, if they keep protesting.
And I think you came across some information that might hint that there may be some shenanigans going on with this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Trump is definitely from yesterday.
He's upping the game.
We'll talk about later new tariffs that he's aiming.
But he put out something this morning that's even more unhinged in a way.
And if you put that first one up, as you say, oil spikes after Trump urges Iranians to keep protesting.
Now, protesting, I think, is an inappropriate word here because they're not protesting the rioting.
But nevertheless, he says help is on the way.
Trump on Tuesday morning called on Iranians to keep in the streets where clashes with security services have spiraled and turned violent, but in some locations have waned.
We talked about that yesterday.
He's told Iranians to take over your institutions, which is essentially a call for a coup or armed insurrection.
So, this is the anti-coup, the anti-regime change president directly calling for a regime change.
But not only that, he's offering certainly implicitly, but I would say explicitly for the United States to physically become involved.
He says, But now, Trump is doing a typical thing of quickly ratcheting up the pressure.
Go to the next one.
Here's exactly what he put out this morning: Iranian protesters, patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions, save the names of the killers and abusers.
They will pay a big price.
I have canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killings of protesters stop.
Help is on its way.
MIGA.
Nobody knows what that means.
Is it?
What does the I and MIGA mean?
I don't know.
Maybe it's Iran.
Maybe it's another country.
If you leave it up again, President Donald J. Trump.
So what he's doing, I think, Dr. Paul, is I think he's hoping as these protests wane.
And the reason they waned yesterday is because the Iranians have been able to cut off the internet and especially the Starlink.
Because these are externally trained, as we talked about it yesterday.
Initially, these were economic protests and they were non-violent.
But then in came these trained Mossad Israel is openly bragging about sending in Mossad troops there, Mossad and CIA-trained agitators.
And they're coming in and they're killing law enforcement personnel in Iran by the dozens, actually by the hundreds.
And there's so many gruesome videos out there of them doing it.
So it's kind of ironic here in the U.S. and we have this ICE thing going on and all this.
Can you imagine if rather than some dopey blue-haired girl sitting in a car, you actually had gangs of people killing hundreds of ICE law enforcement personnel, we'd be up in arms.
But that's exactly what Trump is urging people to do in Iran.
And I think what it is is he's desperate for them to overthrow because he's promised Netanyahu just a couple of weeks ago, okay, we're going to overthrow Iran, we're going to overthrow it.
But he's hoping that they'll do it for him and he won't have to do what he promised Netanyahu.
But what happens if the people he's trying to reach out to, Trump reaching out to, who are these people doing?
Get their names and take care of them.
We'll take care of them.
But what happens if they're doing this and they happen to be a very honest citizen and it finds out that our policies and our bullets and our money is really a culprit in it?
Because just think of all the wars we've been in since World War II.
We've dropped a lot of bombs.
And how many citizens have been killed over that?
How many military people have been killed too?
Because we have provoked these coups and takeovers.
So we're always involved.
So if truth were available to us, somebody said, I think that's a good idea.
I think we should do this.
And when you think about what they did when they bombed that little boat that was supposedly carrying drugs, two survivors are clinging to the boat for life.
What are the orders from the boss?
Kill them.
Kill them all.
That makes me ill.
Yeah.
That's so remote from civilization.
And so this whole idea that he's now instructing these people to get the names of the people that are saying no to our tariffs and demonstrating against us and pretending that they're the bad guys.
I think it's so remote from what's really going on.
War is a mess.
And I think that it's made much worse the longer it lasts.
And it's certainly getting messy over there right now.
You know, a lot of people will criticize us for letting him off the hook.
But I do honestly think that Trump is being played right now.
I think that the neocons have got the wool over his eyes.
People like Ratcliffe, who's an absolute Israel-first neocon running the CIA, and they're feeding Trump information, garbage in, garbage out.
They're feeding him information to lead him toward military conflict.
It doesn't excuse Trump.
He should get informed, better informed on his own, but it's hard.
I'm sure he's living in a bubble.
So, but that's what's happening.
And one of the ways they're doing it: so, Trump has said to the Iranian authorities: if you keep killing people, the United States will come in.
Our military will come in.
So, what's the incentive of the neocons?
Pump up those numbers.
You got to get those numbers higher.
You got to show more and more people killed.
It's exactly what happened in Maidan, if you remember.
Pump up those numbers.
And so, we're now starting to get the information about how they're pumping up the numbers.
And a lot of it has to do with the NGOs and their reporting.
This also was the case with Libya, by the way, where their numbers were artificially inflated, leading to the U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya.
But now, one person who I believe is definitely feeding Trump disinformation really should be the enemy of MAGA, but instead, he's become the de facto foreign policy advisor to Trump.
Skip ahead to Lindsey Graham.
Let's listen to what Lindsay was literally wetting his pants with glee this morning.
He is so thrilled.
He says, President Trump is certainly not Obama.
In my view, he's Reagan plus when it comes to protecting America's vital national security interests.
There's no bigger threat to world order than the Iranian Ayatollah's religious Nazi regime that wantonly kills its people, supports international terrorism, and has American blood on its hands.
The deathblo-atolla is going to be a combination of this incredible patriotic bravery of the protesters and decisive action by President Trump.
The protesters go to the streets unarmed, which is absolutely untrue, by the way, risking their lives because they believe Donald Trump has their backs.
Now, you can see here, Dr. Paul, how he's cajoling Trump.
You're better than Reagan, even, but we know you've got their backs.
Anyway, back to Lindsay.
The tipping point of this journey will be President Trump's resolve.
No boots on the ground, but unleashing holy hell, as he promised, on the regime that's trampled every red line.
A massive wave of military, cyber, and psychological attacks is the meat and bones of help is on the way.
So he's redefining what Trump said.
Now, go to the next one.
He continues by saying, This is Lindsey Graham.
What am I looking for?
Destroy the infrastructure that allows the massacre and slaughter of the Iranian people and take down the leaders responsible for the killing.
The Iranian people's long nightmare will soon be over.
I'm so proud of President Trump.
Make Iran great again.
That's Lindsey Graham.
Well, the evidence is there, and the president should be paying some attention to what's going on.
But I wonder what Graham would say.
What if we come across a very decent, maybe average person in government for Iran getting together with somebody in our system of government, and they actually have a conversation?
Just a little hint.
What do you think we could do to move toward peace?
Because this is just moving to war.
And regardless of what the understanding is and the motivation, we're moving toward a war.
Moving Toward War 00:05:54
And it looks like people benefit from it.
So that is a reason why, you know, when we drop the bombs and innocent people die, or we look at innocent people that are victims, say, oh, yeah, we missed those two.
We'll get them anyway.
I mean, that is sickening.
Yeah, and uh, it's it's to me to add on to how sickening that part of the policy is, it's sickening, it's sickening for the American people to put up with it and look at it.
But then again, we struggle to find out information and emphasize it and spread the information.
So, a lot of people in this country have a lot to do other than trying to understand these difficult problems and then how helpless they themselves might feel.
I mean, this polling shows that there's a lot of sympathy for what we're talking about.
Sure, absolutely.
And that is a great deal of frustration, but still, I am a strong believer that the only way things change is you get the people thinking differently.
I talk about a prevailing attitude that the attitude should be, you know, there's a prevailing attitude that shifts in Ukraine.
You know, less Americans are wanting to send billions and billions of dollars.
So, the attitudes can change, and that's why you know education is so positive and why this warmongering stuff is so dangerous, especially when they have the strings of power, which is the media.
Yeah, and again, I mean, we've emphasized here that the number of people killed in Iran will determine whether Trump acts.
So, the neoconst incentive is to get those numbers high.
Well, our good friends over at the gray zone, Max Blumenthal, we know them well.
They've spoken at our conferences, good friends, and they also do very important work.
Well, Max and his company and his guys cracked the code here.
Go to that Max Blumenthal post if you can.
So, he's found out that the control over who the numbers that are being reported are actually not people on the ground in Iran, not neutral observers.
No, here's what Max said this morning: Western media is relying heavily on two NGOs for death counts and data from Iran.
Now, listen to this, Dr. Paul.
Both are based in Washington and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.
So, the two sources of information on how many are getting killed are funded by the very same regime change outfit in the U.S. government.
And don't take Max's word for it.
Here's the 990s.
This is one of the main organizations.
Go to the next one reporting deaths in Iran.
This is the human rights activists in Iran, which is a misnomer because they're actually in Fairfax, Virginia.
And you can see here on the upper left, this is a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy government grants a million dollars that they received in 2024.
So, you know what's going on.
You know, the reporting is completely corrupted by the fact that they're being paid by the neocons to report on how many deaths.
And the more deaths they report, the more likely it is for the U.S. government to go in and have a regime change.
Should we put a call into Elon and see if he'd visit with us and discuss this?
You think, yeah, that what happened to Doge?
I thought they were defunded.
Yeah, well, you know, maybe it's just cheaper this way, sitting in a hotel room or a fancy house up in this area of Washington, D.C., and having this such great knowledge that they can put out and it's issued and it's believed by so many people.
And you don't have to risk going over there and actually becoming an investigator looking and finding out who's doing what.
It's cheaper that way.
They're saving money and putting it in the pockets of somebody else that's not saving money.
Exactly.
Well, here's the Gray Zones piece that just came out, I think, this morning.
If you go to the next one now, by the way, this photograph is all around on X.
These are the so-called peaceful protests.
And it does remind you of my Don, doesn't it, Dr. Paul?
When the peaceful protesters were on the streets shooting at the police officers, that's exactly what they're doing here.
These are obviously trained by Western intelligence services.
Anyway, the Gray Zone puts out a piece.
Western media whitewashes deadly riots in Iran, relying on U.S. government-funded regime change NGOs.
Now, go to the next one.
Western media has ignored, and this is what they always do.
They've ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by the protesters.
Videos published by both Iranian state media and anti-government forces are revealing public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torturing of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces, and fire stations, and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities.
Now, I've watched all of these things, Dr. Paul, those videos are readily available if you're interested in seeing the other side.
But this is the important thing, again, Western media has focused almost exclusively on violence attributed to the government.
But in doing so, they've relied heavily on death counts compiled by Iranian diaspora groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which we thought, as you well pointed out in your last comment, we thought they were out of business.
Why We Missed Ukraine 00:02:36
They're not out of business.
They're still doing everything they were doing with the same amount of money.
You know, getting rid of it is proven to be a very difficult job.
We finally see it and we realize that the way we gather information and run international affairs is wrong.
But the bigger problem is, why do we get involved?
Why do we get involved in these little wars that become big war?
Oh, this is which we have to do this.
We have to protect our investors.
And we'll be out of there in six months and the world will be more peaceful.
Yeah, they do that, but it never works out that way.
It never works out that way.
The wars, and they get away with it because one thing the founders wanted to do was war was serious and people had to speak out.
And you couldn't do this unless there was a declaration and then you explain it and what you had to do to end the war.
But none of that exists anymore.
Matter of fact, it turns the people in into people like when we were trying to stop these things, you know, they'd use words like unpatriotic and things like that.
It's a dumb lover.
Why aren't you supporting the troops?
And of course, finally, when people start to wake up, it looks like it's too little, too late.
But I say, no, it's never too late because you want to stop.
If you can't stop the Ukraine thing from occurring in 2014, maybe we can use that to stop it someplace else.
But so far, we're not very successful with that.
You know, as one winds on because they are, you know, go bankrupt over it, they just go and look for another place to start another enemy that we have to take up, take upon them because otherwise they could come here and do us damage.
It looks like they do.
They come here and buy a condo up in Virginia and start participating in the war efforts.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And right now, I mean, I don't want to, you know, give Trump necessarily a pass, but I don't know what he could do right now if he did have a change of heart, thinking that maybe these guys are kind of giving me a snow job here.
Maybe this is fake.
Who's he going to turn to?
There's no one around him.
It's just like it's actually even worse than before.
There's no one around him that he could call to say, hey, is this all true?
You know, and it's he's in a box, he's in a bind.
So, but the other thing he did now is there's a second thing we wanted to talk about before he really went all out this morning.
Was yesterday he had a little fit.
If you put that next one up, effective immediately, this is Trump's post on True Social.
Tariffs and Their Impact 00:04:50
Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America.
The order is final and conclusive.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
So, Dr. Paul, he's now just slapped a 25% tariff on dozens, if not more, countries that are doing business with Iran.
You know, we've heard it said many times, and the founders understood this when goods and services cease to cross borders, usually the military does.
And it happens that way.
So, we're looking for trouble.
This thing, this has been almost magical for the people who disagree with us on tariffs, because most people now, I think they've won it over.
I haven't seen any polls, but maybe the people will wake up and find out that taxing people, taxing the American people to deal with trade with Iran and say that anytime you want to send in something, the taxpayer of the America has to pay it.
And they, to me, just are astounded when they find this.
But that can seem to last, but they say, Well, we had a lot more income.
We took it from the American people because they had a little bit of cash saved up and they bought the products anyway.
So they do this and they say, Oh, well, we have so much money.
We might even get rid of the income tax.
We'll just do more tariffs.
It'll be magic.
I'll tell you when they, when they start talking like that, it should be an alarm call for people to just be careful on what you believe, on what the government's telling us.
And the tariffs we were told were just a way to make revenue.
They weren't supposed to be punitives.
They weren't supposed to be sanctions.
Well, this is what they've become now.
And if you go to that next one, this is Aaron Matei, who's also with the Gray Zone, a good friend, a great guy.
He captures it perfectly, Dr. Paul, because China, this is all about China.
And Aaron writes on X this morning: China is Iran's largest trading partner by far.
So because the neocons surrounding Trump want to overthrow the Iranian government, Iranian civilians get higher prices via crippling sanctions.
And, and I highlighted this, and American consumers get higher prices via U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made goods.
So, this is a punishment not on Iran, it's a punishment on the American people.
They do this, and tragically, they were able to manipulate this.
And it comes across as, well, he's doing something for us.
And Biden wasn't doing this.
And now we're having more money, and the economy's up, the stock market is up.
I'll tell you what, there's a lot of things that goes on in economic policy that you can't say, well, we did A on Monday and on Tuesday something good happened and say, all of a sudden, oh, we have a new policy here.
And I just think anytime that we expand the power and authority of the government or running up debt or printing more money, that no matter how it looks in early stages, it's not a benefit.
It's an undermining of economic policies.
It's an undermining of personal liberty.
And people say, well, that's too complicated.
Just say that you, as an individual, we all as individuals should have a right to our lives.
And we should have a right to declare ownership of what we earn instead of assuming that we're just a puppet for the government and the government will do what they say.
And that's why they still strongly believe.
And here they are running around.
I don't think they're thinking about a draft, but they're thinking around, you know, checking up on the list.
They don't want people to forget that who owns them.
And they claim the government owns them.
And this is a form of slavery.
And even if you don't have official drafting, you do it through the taxes.
You tax people and the people suffer.
So, and then they convert it.
It's amazing they convert and say, oh, you know, that's how you get out of wars.
That's how you get out of recessions and depression.
You get to have a war.
And then people have to go and get shot at, and then they're working again.
It's really crazy.
Yeah, it is.
Well, I want to go shout out to our live viewers on X.
We just started to broadcast live on X yesterday, I think.
There's 4,500 of you out there watching us, and we really appreciate it.
We hope you'll tune in every day to the Liberty Report.
Live Viewers Everywhere 00:09:15
But we've got a couple more things to cover with the Chinese.
They're not happy about this.
This is Trump in a bind because he thinks that he's punishing Iran.
He's actually punishing the American people, but he's irritating the Chinese a lot because he just was able to get out of this trade war issue with China, and now he's put himself back in.
Now, this is the Straits Times, which is close to the Chinese government.
If we can put that clip up, they are fuming.
Go to the next one now.
They are mad.
This is the Straits Times at the Chinese paper.
With Iran in his sights once again, the duty would see Chinese shipments.
The duty would be the additional tariffs.
Would see Chinese shipments to the U.S. incurring levies exceeding 70% higher than the effective 57.5% tariffs in place before Mr. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping struck a trade deal in October to de-escalate their trade war.
It remains unclear which countries with Iranian business links Mr. Trump might target, and he has not named to China.
The U.S. president also made offhand remarks threatening that threatened to spend U.S. foreign policy, upend U.S. foreign policy without acting on them before.
Now, this is a professor at the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in China.
He says, China will go back, please.
China will call Mr. Trump's bluff.
I can assure you that Trump has no guts to impose the extra 25% tariffs on China.
And if he does, China will retaliate and he will be punished.
Just like, well, this is a different.
So, anyway, he's saying this is a professor at Chinese University saying they're not going to take this lying down.
It's what they're saying.
No, and I wouldn't expect them to.
It will come back.
So, this to me means that it shouldn't shock us and surprise us.
Maybe there's some military preparations going on for whatever reason.
And that's I'm alluding to the other article that we have here: that U.S. cargo planes have flooded the Persian Gulf since the 1st of December.
So, what are these preparations all about?
You know, that costs a lot of money to do this, but they're looking at it as an investment.
They're looking at their safety and sovereignty, and they're looking at spending it that way.
The people, you know, whether it's our country or their country, I think the people do get short-changed.
Yeah, that's a great point because Larry Johnson, our good friend, also speaker at RPI conferences, and we hopefully will have him back this year.
Retired CIA, he has a sonar 21.
If you watch the show, you know about this.
I read it every single day, and I do put some of his stuff up.
But this is important, Dr. Paul, and I'm glad you brought it up because a lot of people are watching what's going on in Iran and saying, well, it doesn't look like Trump's going to attack because there isn't a single carrier group in the area.
Well, it turns out, as Larry writes, U.S. cargo planes have flooded the Gulf since the 1st of December.
So while he's not moving a carrier group in, Dr. Paul, he is airlifting tons of military equipment.
Go to the next one now.
Multiple reports from open source information intelligence sources, which are flight trackers and media outlets, including Israeli, European, and international sources, describe dozens of heavy transport aircraft, C-17s and C-5s, departing from U.S. bases, the UK and Germany, heading toward Persian Gulf hubs.
The activity ramped up notably in early January of 26, i.e., right after Netanyahu left, I would add to Larry's point.
The movements are most likely preparations for an attack on Iran.
So it looks like that's what they're, we can put up just one more second to see.
Yeah, no, Larry says no exact daily or total count is publicly confirmed by the Pentagon, but the scale is described as quote a major redeployment or quote heavy airlift, often in the range of dozens, 20 to 50 individual aircraft movements, though some may be round trips or rotations.
So they're moving massive amounts of military equipment, Dr. Paul, in preparation striking Iran.
It looks like subtly they want to reassure the American taxpayer and everybody else that we are prepared.
You know, we're prepared for any military confrontation around the world.
And the one comment caught my attention because I thought, I got to think about a geography for a minute.
But here they were, where are they flying into?
They can't fly into Iran or China or whatever.
Oh, they have located there.
There's a military, largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East located in the desert approximately 35 kilometers, 22 miles southwest of Doha Carter.
We have them everywhere.
Everywhere.
Yeah, everywhere.
I think that's when the Iranians hit last time.
So it looks like they are definitely moving toward war.
The Americans don't want the war.
It's very clear, as you said earlier, Dr. Paul, the polls are absolutely obvious that Americans don't want it.
There's even a small group only within the MAGA movement that wants it.
But you have a lot of propaganda coming out, and people always seem to fall for it.
You know, one comment on that.
What can you do?
Well, we think peaceful demonstrations are good.
Sure.
The demonstrations, which were not always peaceful in the 60s, finally ended the craziness in Vietnam.
So you could say, well, let's get the good people to go out and say enough is enough.
But the whole thing is, and you showed it in your opening statement, that maybe one of our government groups will get involved and organize it and, you know, blackball it, you know, black and give it a black eye.
And this would be terrible because if it could be more spontaneous in a free society, but all we do or we see what's happening is that they're more likely to have to have the government restrict our First Amendment rights for speaking out.
We've seen that already.
Exactly.
Well, I'm going to close out.
And if you put that very last clip up, I'll just remind you that time is running out.
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We pledge to continue to bring you the news from the Ron Paul perspective.
Over to you.
This sounds like encouraging news.
There's people out there.
We wonder whether they're there, but they are, and they will come out.
And I think we have done a little bit better job explaining to people that we do have some expenses that we have to take care of.
And I just think that the American people, when they are offered something clear-cut, liberty versus authoritarianism, sound money versus bogus money, all these things, peace over war.
If you accept the basic principle of non-aggression, that you can have more of that.
The economic policies of people that live with free markets are always better off.
There's always more peace and prosperity.
The greater amount of freedom people have, the harder it is for them to have it destroyed and they stay alert to it.
And does that mean that I think, oh, well, you just do what we say and next year there'll be perfect peace forever.
I absolutely know that isn't the case, but there's no reason for the insanities that go on where now we're able to drop bombs and have dropped bombs killing tens of thousands of people.
It doesn't make any sense.
So yes, we advance intellectually and electronically and invention-wise tremendously on how our lives have been improved.
But we don't seem to improve ourselves in learning how to get along with people and putting some type of a moral barrier up there to allow these people to come in and take liberty and twist it around and give us what we have today.
So I want to encourage everybody to continue to support liberty and peace because I believe that is the best way to go.
Thank you very much for tuning in today.
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