Ron Paul Liberty Report - Daniel McAdams - "The War on War Reporting."
Aired: 2026-05-02
Duration: 22:18


=== Thanking the Audience and Setting Themes (05:57) ===

[00:00:06]  All right, everybody.
[00:00:11]  Hope you all got some breakfast.
[00:00:15]  Anyone drive a long distance to get here?
[00:00:19]  How are those gas prices?
[00:00:22]  How do you like that?
[00:00:26]  You know, I always think we've been, we spent several months planning these conferences, and I always like to come up with a theme, and I'm working on it in my mind through January.
[00:00:37]  And I had an idea of what I thought we should do.
[00:00:40]  And I even talked to my wife, who does our logos, by the way, and all of our stuff.
[00:00:44]  I think this is probably her best work.
[00:00:46]  My son said, Make Netanyahu more green.
[00:00:51]  So that's a good input, orange and green.
[00:00:54]  And so then February 28th happened.
[00:00:56]  And I said, Wow, okay, we can't talk about what I was going to talk about.
[00:01:01]  We got to talk about this war.
[00:01:03]  And then I spent a couple weeks, we put out the logo, we put out the info.
[00:01:08]  And then I thought, Oh no, what if this war ends?
[00:01:10]  I mean, I want it to end.
[00:01:12]  I really want it to end, but what if it ends completely easily before we start?
[00:01:17]  That's going to be rough.
[00:01:19]  So it hasn't ended, guys, and it's probably going to.
[00:01:23]  I mean, this is a weird thing that you may experience.
[00:01:26]  I follow a few Telegram channels that I trust.
[00:01:30]  And every morning, the first thing I do when I get up is I reach over to my phone and I look.
[00:01:35]  And one of them is DD Geopolitics.
[00:01:37]  And I recommend that if you don't follow it.
[00:01:39]  And actually, the morning of the 28th, I pick up my phone, and there's like 300 new.
[00:01:44]  post that they put up.
[00:01:45]  And I thought, oh no, something's happened.
[00:01:47]  So I go through that every single day.
[00:01:48]  I get up.
[00:01:49]  Oh, we haven't bombed again.
[00:01:51]  I didn't check this morning.
[00:01:52]  We may have started again.
[00:01:54]  Um, but this is about our 20th conference at the Ron Paul Institute.
[00:01:59]  Uh, we started doing it in 2016.
[00:02:02]  Um, we've done, uh, this will be our 10th year in Washington, D.C., uh, which is amazing to me.
[00:02:09]  We didn't get to do one in 2020.
[00:02:10]  I think you all know why.
[00:02:12]  Um, but our next one in D.C. will be over the Labor Day weekend.
[00:02:15]  It's not in D.C.
[00:02:17]  It's, it's, uh, near the Dolas Airport.
[00:02:19]  So if any of you guys, uh, want to make it out, um, it's always a fun event, just like this is a fun event.
[00:02:25]  They're very different events.
[00:02:27]  They feel like my children in a way.
[00:02:29]  Um, this one is more calm and relaxed, and the D.C. one is a little bit more formal.
[00:02:33]  Um, but I should welcome everyone to Ron Paul Country, as I do every year.
[00:02:39]  Uh, this is Ron Paul Country.
[00:02:40]  This is the heart of Brazoria County.
[00:02:43]  Uh, this is where I like to joke back when I worked in Dr. Paul's, uh, congressional staff.
[00:02:49]  This is where he got Kim Jong Un level numbers when he ran.
[00:02:53]  So, it was always nice to see that 90%.
[00:02:57]  And it wasn't so much true over there by when we got the NASA area because they weren't, they didn't start out being big Ron Paul fans, but we ended up getting along with them pretty well.
[00:03:09]  So a couple of thank yous.
[00:03:11]  I want to, of course, thank the host committee and you can see them in the reserve chairs and you might want to look into it next time.
[00:03:18]  They are the people, I mean, conferences are very expensive to put on.
[00:03:22]  And these are the people who come up and help us finance it beforehand because most of the things you have to pay for earlier.
[00:03:28]  And so I would like to actually give them a round of applause.
[00:03:38]  Great and generous people.
[00:03:41]  And of course, I do want to thank our speakers.
[00:03:43]  And I see Professor Pape over there.
[00:03:45]  And I'm sure Joe Kent is here.
[00:03:47]  And I know Brian is here.
[00:03:49]  The speakers are here giving their time freely to us.
[00:03:53]  They're donating their time, they're donating their lifetime of expertise and experience, and for our benefit.
[00:03:59]  So, I want to thank those people as well.
[00:04:08]  And of course, what a great audience to have.
[00:04:12]  We thank all of you for being here.
[00:04:13]  If you weren't here, it would be a very lonely afternoon for us.
[00:04:17]  So, thanks for everyone who came out.
[00:04:19]  Appreciate all of you.
[00:04:24]  Those of you who do social media, love to have you post things.
[00:04:27]  Just tag Ron Paul so I can go by later and remind myself of what happened.
[00:04:32]  But it's always fun to do that.
[00:04:34]  Love having pictures up there, and it's wonderful.
[00:04:38]  I do want to recognize one individual, and I did this last night as well.
[00:04:44]  But we have among us, I'm sure there are many, but we have one among us, a very special hero, and that is Mr. Phil Turney.
[00:04:53]  Are you here, Phil?
[00:04:54]  There he is.
[00:04:58]  This man is the survivor of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, one of the last survivors, and a true American hero.
[00:05:05]  Thank you, sir.
[00:05:24]  And not only on the day of the attack, but the things these gentlemen had to suffer for the decades that followed, not being able to say a word about it, every word they said being misconstrued.
[00:05:39]  It's an unbelievable story that thankfully, one of the few positive things we're finally able to start talking about in a real intelligent way without name calling and those sorts of things.
[00:05:50]  So, one of the things when we do a Ron Paul conference, now I used to do a lot of speeches at the Mises Institute when my friend Jeff Deist.
[00:05:57]  was in charge.
[00:05:58]  And I got to actually sit and write a proper speech.
[00:06:00]  Um, so what I do when we do these is more of like reflections.

=== New Polls on Impeachment and Disappointment (02:12) ===

[00:06:04]  And one of the things I'm really interested in is the media.
[00:06:07]  Um, I, I was a journalist in, in, uh, in Europe for about 10 years.
[00:06:11]  And I follow journalism and I follow the media very closely in sort of looking at how they cover things.
[00:06:18]  And so I want to give a couple of thoughts on the media.
[00:06:21]  But first of all, one of the things I turned to this morning, I saw a new poll that was up.
[00:06:25]  I was on X this morning.
[00:06:27]  Uh, and it was about impeachment of President Trump.
[00:06:30]  Now I'll preface this by saying, That the people who had TDS the first time have ruined it for those of us who wanted him to do well, who were happy that he was elected, who are not Trump haters by some sort of weird thing, as there are a lot out there.
[00:06:46]  But those of us, I think, and probably a lot of you in the room share this a profound disappointment with what's happened over this first year or so.
[00:06:53]  So I will preface this by saying this.
[00:06:55]  But a new poll came out about impeachment.
[00:06:59]  Now, I thought the impeachments previously when Trump was in office were absolutely absurd, the whole Russiagate thing, as we know.
[00:07:05]  Was completely bogus and made up out of whole cloth.
[00:07:09]  All of that was garbage.
[00:07:11]  But a new poll came out.
[00:07:12]  55% of all Americans favor impeaching President Trump.
[00:07:18]  21% of those are Republicans, which you say that's not a high number, but those self identified Republicans, you know, that is a significant amount if you've lost 20% of the people that voted for you.
[00:07:28]  But here's the thing, this is why I wanted to mention this morning.
[00:07:30]  Here's the thing that really struck me.
[00:07:34]  71% of Gen Z People believe that President Trump should be impeached.
[00:07:39]  Now, this is a group that he carried, I think, more, uh, more than any other Republican president.
[00:07:46]  He was able to appeal to young people, uh, in a lot of support for him.
[00:07:51]  So when you see that, that says a lot.
[00:07:54]  You've lost, you've lost this next generation of Republican voters.
[00:07:59]  And I don't know that there's anyone there that can get it back.
[00:08:01]  And that'll be a tragedy for the Republican party.
[00:08:04]  Not that many of us care, but certainly if I was in charge of things and I was thinking about November, I would worry about that.
[00:08:10]  And I would worry about 35% approval, which President Trump has right now, which is extremely low.

=== The War on War Reporting (14:01) ===

[00:08:17]  I think probably the lowest.
[00:08:18]  He would say it's the greatest ever, but it's not.
[00:08:24]  So that brings us to the war.
[00:08:26]  Probably the most unpopular war in American history.
[00:08:30]  The second Iraq war, I believe the numbers of support were in the mid to upper 70s when it started.
[00:08:40]  Two or three years of steady propaganda that Saddam did 9 11, he roasts babies, he's about ready to hit New York City, the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud.
[00:08:52]  So they had a chance to sort of seed the fields with all of the propaganda.
[00:08:56]  Well, at this administration with this war, they didn't even try to make a case.
[00:09:00]  They didn't even bother to tell anyone.
[00:09:02]  They certainly didn't bother to tell Congress.
[00:09:06]  So when that happens, you get an extremely unpopular war, which this is by any measurement.
[00:09:15]  And you also have constantly moving goalposts.
[00:09:19]  Remember, this was supposed to be one of those humanitarian wars.
[00:09:23]  We were helping the people in the streets.
[00:09:25]  They were ready to overthrow their tyrant if we just give them a little push.
[00:09:29]  Well, that's, of course, what Netanyahu told President Trump on February 11th when he was in Mar-a-Lago with the head of Mossad.
[00:09:37]  You know, they sort of twisted his arm and told him this will be a cakewalk.
[00:09:40]  We remember that term from the Iraq war.
[00:09:42]  This is going to be easy.
[00:09:44]  Couple of bombs, the people will rise up, you know, and it'll be wonderful, just like Libya.
[00:09:48]  Oh, wait.
[00:09:50]  So it was humanitarian.
[00:09:52]  And then it was back to the, you know, it's hard to follow these, back to the nuclear issue.
[00:09:58]  Then it was as if you woke up on Easter morning, you're ready to go to church like I was, open the effing strait, right, on Easter morning.
[00:10:07]  Well, the strait was open before you bombed.
[00:10:10]  So we're now at a situation where we have to continue the war to fix the things that were started by the war itself, which is the strait being closed.
[00:10:18]  And of course, it's not closed, but the Iranians have realized that they have a strategic asset now that they hadn't thought of before, and they put in a toll booth.
[00:10:27]  So we have, and now we're almost in desperation time.
[00:10:32]  President Trump a few days ago posted an AI picture of eight girls.
[00:10:37]  They looked like models.
[00:10:41]  They did not look like Iranians, but they looked like models.
[00:10:44]  And he said, Iran, you've got to free these girls.
[00:10:47]  They're about ready to be hanged for the protests.
[00:10:50]  So he was attacking Iran for humanitarian reasons for supposedly hanging or being about to hang these eight girls when he and his Department of War murdered 175 girls in that school, and they knew what they were doing.
[00:11:06]  They were using AI to target.
[00:11:08]  Any of you that have followed it would know.
[00:11:11]  Uh, uh, we know that Hegseth, the Secretary of War, um, said, uh, you know, no more NIST or Nice Guy.
[00:11:17]  We're gonna take a lot of the restraints off of our war fighters.
[00:11:21]  Uh, and so that missile, that double tap strike that was launched from a U.S. ship, uh, killed 175 girls.
[00:11:29]  Um, but the main thing I want to talk about is the war.
[00:11:33]  On war reporting.
[00:11:36]  And there, I think there are several fronts in this war.
[00:11:40]  Now, there's the Israeli war on war reporting, and that's a little bit different than ours so far.
[00:11:47]  But in the last three years, Israel has killed at least 262 Palestinian journalists alone.
[00:11:53]  262.
[00:11:55]  There's never in history, not in all the wars in history combined, have that many journalists been killed.
[00:12:01]  And the numbers may be different, but apparently in Lebanon, they've killed 22 so far.
[00:12:08]  They almost killed Steve Sweeney, if you follow him.
[00:12:11]  He is an English journalist that works for RT.
[00:12:14]  He was live on camera when the Israelis dropped a bomb and nearly killed him.
[00:12:21]  A couple of days ago, Israel killed Amal Khalil, a young, beautiful young Lebanese journalist.
[00:12:27]  They killed her in a double tap strike.
[00:12:28]  They had her stuck in a house.
[00:12:30]  They hit it twice and killed her.
[00:12:33]  So that's one kind of war on war reporting.
[00:12:35]  And now, with the use of combat drones, that may be even easier.
[00:12:38]  You don't even need to use a bomb.
[00:12:40]  You just zero in when you see a journalist and kill them.
[00:12:43]  So, thankfully, we're not there yet.
[00:12:46]  But what I would put forth to you all from my own experience, and you may have a different experience, I'd love to talk to you if you do.
[00:12:53]  I think this war has the absolute most abysmal coverage by the media in history.
[00:13:00]  Now, I was a little young when Vietnam was going on, but we do know that we had Walter Cronkite, he was giving reports of what was happening.
[00:13:09]  We had regular Pentagon briefings where they were telling you what was happening.
[00:13:14]  We're very, very much relatively open.
[00:13:16]  Of course, I'm sure there were constraints and there were things of that nature.
[00:13:19]  But you did get regular reporting, and the country by and large believed Walter Cronkite what he told them.
[00:13:27]  So, fast forward to the Iraq War in 1990.
[00:13:30]  You had had CNN just rising, you had a lot of journalism happening.
[00:13:34]  We saw a lot of pretty accurate reporting about how many tanks were blown up that day and that sort of thing.
[00:13:41]  And then you progressed until the Iraq War of 2003.
[00:13:47]  And if you remember, that was the advent of the embedded journalist.
[00:13:51]  A journalist would embed with a military unit to cover the war.
[00:13:55]  Now, at the time, I felt concerned because obviously that journalist either he wouldn't want to, he might not want to report some things that would reflect badly on his unit, which is understandable because you're with these guys and I guess gals all the time.
[00:14:12]  So I thought it might negatively affect the objectivity of the war reporting.
[00:14:17]  But nevertheless, we got a lot of reports.
[00:14:20]  We got a lot of information from that war.
[00:14:23]  The Ukraine Russian war in 2014, when it first started, I spent a lot of time on then Twitter, and there was a lot of information coming out.
[00:14:33]  I mean, you could easily glean things that were happening.
[00:14:37]  You could watch, you know, the Russian attack on Slavyansk taking over all these areas pretty well.
[00:14:47]  But for me at least, and maybe it's just me, I'm finding it almost impossible to get reliable information on what's happening in this war.
[00:14:58]  And there's a couple of things that I think have happened.
[00:15:01]  Now, one is the decline of the legacy MSM media, mainstream media.
[00:15:05]  Now, they brought it on themselves, we know that.
[00:15:09]  We've all, probably most of us in this room, have come to despise the CNNs, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the broadcast networks.
[00:15:20]  Because of their decades of lying.
[00:15:23]  So, we have that sort of baked into us already that we don't trust the MSM.
[00:15:28]  We've had the rise of independent media, which has supplanted, I think, the influence of mainstream media.
[00:15:35]  When you have people like, for example, Tucker Carlson, who left the mainstream media and is now actually even more popular with a bigger platform than he had on Fox.
[00:15:44]  And that's true with other people.
[00:15:46]  Judge Napolitano, for example, who's on our board and a good friend of ours, I think he has a larger audience now than when he was on Fox.
[00:15:52]  So, you have that.
[00:15:53]  And you have the further rise of the social media.
[00:15:57]  But I think that this war is the most tightly controlled war since the dawn of war reporting.
[00:16:07]  When the second Trump administration came in, well, you saw a lot of the expulsion of mainstream media from White House briefing rooms.
[00:16:16]  There was the famous thing where they were taking off their name tags and kicking out CNN.
[00:16:20]  And a lot of us, myself included, say they don't deserve it because they haven't been accurate.
[00:16:24]  But you have this sort of defenestration of the mainstream media, and you had a lot of independent alternative media coming in to take up those rooms, those spaces.
[00:16:36]  And you also had, so what you have a situation now is where trusted reporters now are able to deliver you the news.
[00:16:45]  And if you've watched any briefings, you'll see that when there is a CNN or a Wall Street Journal that asks the kind of question that journalists should ask, not just attack questions, but sort of, Basic queries.
[00:16:58]  Hey, you said this, but this.
[00:17:01]  Everyone in the administration treats them with disdain beyond what should be required.
[00:17:06]  There should be some, but you're fake news.
[00:17:08]  I'm not talking to you.
[00:17:10]  President Trump himself has insulted a lot of journalists about this.
[00:17:15]  So, so what you have is trusted reporters delivering you news.
[00:17:19]  And one of the thing, one of the outlets that I think of a lot is Axios and the reporting of Barack Ravid.
[00:17:26]  Now, Barack Ravid was in the Unit 8200, which is a propaganda outlet of the Israeli Mossad.
[00:17:33]  And somehow he gets scoop after scoop after scoop from unnamed sources in the White House, in Iran itself.
[00:17:40]  I don't know too many Iranians who are Delivering scoops to Mossad, former Mossad people, but it always dovetails with what the president wants.
[00:17:51]  And a lot of it, as we've noticed now, and it's become almost, I would say, comical if it wasn't so criminal, is the manipulation of markets.
[00:17:59]  You know, you have Good News Fridays, right?
[00:18:01]  Where Trump will say something, oh, the Iranians just called me.
[00:18:04]  They want to sit down.
[00:18:05]  We're almost up.
[00:18:06]  We almost have a deal.
[00:18:07]  Oil price, shh, stock market, shh.
[00:18:10]  It's great.
[00:18:11]  And then you have kill them all weekends, right?
[00:18:13]  I'm going to destroy their civilization, you know?
[00:18:16]  Destroy it.
[00:18:18]  And then Monday morning at 7 30 a.m. Washington time, you got good news Mondays.
[00:18:23]  Oh, we're sending people over to negotiate now.
[00:18:26]  So before the markets open, they go up.
[00:18:29]  So you have these trusted media who are delivering the message that the president wants, that the administration wants, manipulating markets.
[00:18:36]  There are some suspicious people in the White House who are making a lot of money on this manipulated markets.
[00:18:42]  I don't know who it is, Baron, but someone is.
[00:18:48]  So there are things that I think we should expect.
[00:18:50]  We, we would want to know, uh, where are the rescued pilots?
[00:18:53]  I mean, uh, this is a propaganda victory for the president.
[00:18:57]  Uh, now there may be reasons why we're not seeing them if they exist.
[00:19:00]  Uh, but you think that you'd want to show these great American heroes and we would all think, wow, that's great that they survived.
[00:19:06]  Where are they?
[00:19:06]  Where are the, where are the accurate casualty reports?
[00:19:09]  Do we really want to believe?
[00:19:11]  So every single U.S. base in the region, 13 or 14 bases have been either completely destroyed or, or are uninhabitable.
[00:19:20]  There has been combat operations in the area.
[00:19:22]  There have been drone strikes in hotels where U.S. military personnel are staying because they can't stay in their base.
[00:19:27]  We've seen the videos of that.
[00:19:29]  Why aren't we getting any casualty reports at all?
[00:19:33]  The Pentagon briefings, rather than giving us information, are an exercise in chest beating.
[00:19:38]  You know, you have Pete Hegseth, you know, going up there and saying, We've destroyed everything.
[00:19:45]  There's nothing alive left.
[00:19:48]  You know, and that's what we're having.
[00:19:50]  So obviously, there's a need for operational security.
[00:19:55]  There are things, obviously, you don't want to put soldiers at risk by telling us everything.
[00:20:00]  But what this is is narrative management on steroids, I think is what it is.
[00:20:05]  So it's very disturbing, I think.
[00:20:07]  And you have, of course, you have the Israeli model of media blackout, where if you post something, you can go to jail.
[00:20:15]  And we're not there yet.
[00:20:17]  But I would say, as we are adopting, unfortunately, the Israeli model of war, which is oh, we can't take out their military because it's buried under a mountain.
[00:20:27]  Well, let's hit a few hospitals, let's hit some schools, let's hit some kids, what have you.
[00:20:35]  We haven't adopted quite the Israeli model of media blackout.
[00:20:39]  Now, you do still have Fox News as an outlet for administration victory propaganda.
[00:20:44]  There's no Air Force left, no Navy left, except for those pesky little mosquito boats.
[00:20:50]  So it's very disturbing.
[00:20:52]  Personally, for me, it's very frustrating.
[00:20:55]  And I think it's doing a great disservice to the American people that the, that the, with the decline of the mainstream media and the rise and then I think manipulation of the so called alternative media.
[00:21:08]  And let's, let's be honest, even on places like X that are more relatively more open and free, there is still manipulation.
[00:21:16]  There is still algorithm adjustment.
[00:21:19]  You still, especially when something important is happening, you're getting a lot of slop.
[00:21:23]  That you don't want, even if you control, like I make lists that I can follow.
[00:21:27]  So all of these things happen.
[00:21:29]  So it's frustrating.
[00:21:30]  I think it's profoundly un American that we're not able to see what's happening.
[00:21:34]  Where, hey, we're $60 billion into this, probably at least.
[00:21:38]  We've got a $200 billion supplemental on top of our trillion dollar military budget.
[00:21:44]  President Trump says he wants $1.5 trillion next year.
[00:21:49]  Our interest on our debt is $1.3 trillion a year.
[00:21:54]  So it's actually right up.
[00:21:55]  There, with the military budget, and will only grow.
[00:21:58]  So, we need to know more about this war.
[00:22:01]  We need to know more about the economic consequences of the war, and we are just not getting that information.
[00:22:07]  So, I'm afraid I don't have a good news conclusion.
[00:22:10]  All I can do is share my concerns with you, and hopefully, we can do something.
[00:22:14]  We can see something that will change the situation.
[00:22:17]  So, thanks very much.