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July 30, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
59:04
Rand Paul: Trump, Tariffs & The Tyranny of Centralized Power - SF623
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Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Brand and Russell Conspiracy Theory.
Trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Wherever you're watching us, make your way over to Rumble.
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From Tim Paul and Tim Cast and Crowder and Mug Club and Glenn Greenwald and Dave Rubin and a whole host of other Rumble content creators.
If you're watching the Snakex or YouTube, you're ultimately going to have to come over here if you want to watch my conversation with Senator Rampaul.
And it's an interesting one.
Thanks, Tim Cast, for the raid.
Thank you, Mug Club, for the raid.
And we'll be throwing to the quarter in at the end of this show.
In this conversation with Senator Rampaul, we talk more broadly about the principles of libertarianism and whether or not the systems of government as they currently are can deliver anything other than continuity for systems of power.
It's a brilliant conversation and I found myself agreeing with Rampaul on a lot of issues except for using the metrics of materialism and consumerism as the metrics by which we might evaluate our own success.
Let me know in the comments and chat what you think whenever anyone pulls a bunch of statistics that tell you, actually, in the old days, everyone only had a dollar a day and now life's fantastic.
You're happy.
What do you mean you feel down?
You can lay on your back at home lowering your own genitalia into your mouth.
I don't know why that's the image I went for.
As you know, I'm suffering from mental illness.
Anyway, wherever you're watching this, get over to Rumble.
Let's get into the conversation with Senator Rampaul right away.
Thank you for joining us, Senator Rampaul.
It's a pleasure to meet you in person, sir.
And it's a pleasure to meet you at this peculiar junction in American political life where it seems that whatever was wrought by the unusual and anomalous emergences of Donald Trump and the reskinning of the Republican Party is now undergoing a further analysis as the second term in government sort of deviates and warps.
Do you think that the big, beautiful act as it is now is what will come to define Donald Trump's presidency?
Or will it be the Epstein list that which has, for me, become a kind of synecdoke now rather than an actual list that means, are you any different from the former administration?
I think if we step back and we look at the Trump administration and Trump in history, the big debate will be over executive power.
And this isn't a new debate.
We had it with the kings of England.
We tried to form a republic where we limited the power of the executive.
But Donald Trump has grabbed up a lot of executive power and is operating through emergency.
So basically, one of the big items I think he will be remembered for is tariffs.
But it's not tariffs being done through Congress.
It's tariffs being done by a royal edict or executive edict.
And these edicts really aren't passed by Congress.
They're simply him taking up this power.
It's working its way through our courts.
And we've had one federal court already say that he can't do it.
And we'll see what happens when it gets to the Supreme Court.
He's using a law that was used to allow him to do sanctions on other countries.
He's using it to create tariffs.
But if you look at tariffs, they're simply a tax.
And in our Constitution, we have a very specific rule that says taxes must originate in the House of Representatives, go to the Senate, and then come back and be passed.
The tariffs are never being passed by Congress at all.
He's completely done an end run around Congress.
I think the debate over how much power the executive has will be what he's remembered for.
He's doing it in the hiring and firing, too.
So the Supreme Court and the other courts are upholding his ability to hire and fire.
And I think that's a good thing.
On the issue of tariffs, I think the court will ultimately rule against him.
So I think the entire regime of tariffs that is out there, there's a possibility that the legal rug is torn out from under them and that there will be a legal prohibition on what he's doing.
That would be extraordinary.
And I don't think many people are talking about it.
That is fascinating because I was unaware of the maneuvering that was required in order to execute these tariffs or that it wasn't explicit in legislation the way that it's currently being engendered.
But the kind of maneuvering that we're used to in Washington, you know, as observers, comparable to I was talking to Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday and she explained how the legislation around cryptocurrency has no initial bill doesn't afford the ability to create centralized currencies, but there's another bill that ultimately won't get passed through the Senate.
And when I was listening to the sort of game of politics, as described by the Congresswoman, what you say now echoes it, that there is an ulterior and secondary politics that takes place.
And I suppose, in a way, when it comes to the obviously unique figure of Donald Trump, what we're experiencing now is what the limitations of his power and personality are.
And specifically on the subject of tariffs, do you regard that ultimately then as a tax on American people?
Or do you see it, as he appears to frame it, as an opportunity to cudgel foreign partners and control them and assert American authority in power and serve the American people?
Without question, tariffs are paid by the American consumer.
Even when the business is taxed, the tax of the person bringing it in, most of the time that's Americans.
So Americans make clothing in Vietnam.
They make it in China.
It comes over here.
They're largely American companies.
So if you want to tax cell phones being created in China that Apple makes, you're taxing an American company.
And the president wants it both ways.
He sometimes says we're going to punish China, but then he also says if Tim Cook doesn't listen to him, he's going to punish Apple.
If they take their phones to India instead of from China, they make them in India, he'll punish them also.
But then he's no longer talking about punishing China.
He's talking about punishing Tim Cook and Apple.
Ultimately, they're taxes on Americans, without question, they are revenue.
They're brought into the treasury.
And the vast majority of them are paid by American companies that are importing these goods into America.
And then the consumer pays this because if I am making coats, ski coats, and they were $55, They're now going to be $65 because they cost more to make.
I have to pass it on.
Everybody passes along taxes to the consumer.
So ultimately, the consumer will pay for these things.
It's interesting.
It seems like, in a way, it's very difficult to hack the system that, in a way, whether it's the Epson list or the imposition of tariffs, at least superficially, as a kind of a weapon against foreign trading partners or other powers, ultimately the system has methods for sustaining itself that mean that the forfeit is always paid by the consumer.
And do you think that alludes to a deeper crisis in America?
Because sometimes there's this level of conversation that seems to me like we're discussing sort of stratagems.
And I know it's not abstract.
I know it's sort of literal and legalistic, but do you sense concurrently there's a sort of crisis in the American psychic and spiritual life as people begin to recognize that the sort of populist MAGA promise can't really be delivered precisely because of what you've explained, even with this one example?
I think ultimately nationalism and populism is sold by having an enemy.
Some enemies are very easy to conjure.
Some enemies already have some bad attributes and we can play those up.
So China plays the perfect role.
They do things that aren't particularly savory.
They steal intellectual property.
They are protectionists themselves.
And so it's very easy to say, well, China, we must do something about China.
But then they extend it to others and they say, well, this is easy.
We must have this villain and these foreigners must pay.
But really, the Americans pay.
The average American goes to Walmart, shops at Walmart, saves about $1,500 to $2,000 a year because of international trade.
So they are richer.
So really, instead of saying, I'm going to get China, you need to say, oh, that guy that makes $30,000 a year that has a pickup truck and two kids and barely gets by and has no money left at the end of the month, no money after rent and gas and all of that, that's the guy that's paying $2,000 more because he has to shop at Walmart because they have the best prices.
But the prices are going to go up by $2,000.
That's the guy getting ripped off.
But it's built upon this whole sort of fallacy that if I buy something from you, that somehow someone's getting ripped off.
The truth of the matter is this.
There is no trade that is not mutually beneficial.
So if I want to buy advertising on your show, you can't force me to do it.
I only buy it because I like your product or I think I get to a lot of consumers.
So it's voluntary.
Nobody buys ads from you on your show is being ripped off.
But what if I do a big circle around them and they're all from China and I say, well, we have a trade deficit with China.
You're all getting ripped off by China.
But each individual trade was mutually beneficial.
So if let's say a million people buy a TV at Walmart and all the TVs are made in China, that's not true, but let's just say it's true.
Each person that went in there paid $600.
They gave $600 willingly because they wanted the TV more than their $600.
Walmart wanted the $600 more than their TV.
So it was a voluntary trade.
All voluntary trades are beneficial.
But how can a million people have a voluntary trade where they buy a TV from China and they're all happy because they gave up their money voluntarily?
And then you draw a circle around it and say, oh, well, they're all made in China.
We got ripped off.
How can a million voluntary, positive, mutually beneficial trades be summed up as being ripped off?
It's a fallacy.
No one's being ripped off in trade.
In fact, we've become extraordinarily rich through international trade from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but really even after World War II, if you look at prosperity, prosperity has been doing this, which leads to the other fallacy.
They say, oh, the middle class is being hollowed out.
The middle class is being ripped off by trade.
The middle class is worse.
We don't have manufacturing jobs.
If you look at household income from 1970 to the present, 50 some odd years, household income is being doing like this.
The lower class is getting richer.
The middle class is getting richer, and so is the upper class.
The middle class isn't being hollowed out.
If anything, they're moving up into the upper class.
The one group in America that's growing more rapidly than any other group is those making $100,000 and more in constant dollars.
So it's based on fallacy.
The whole notion that we need to protect ourselves and have impediments to trade, it's a fallacy and will make us poorer.
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If it's not true, then what is the advantage to doing it?
What is being concealed by the Propagation of this fallacy, even though I would say, when you describe that, which you obviously do really well, and thanks for making it simple and using examples that I would identify with from my own business life.
I'm what I would contest is about you know quite what might seem quite abstract and ontological ideas about the nature of freedom and why people are buying a TV in the first place and what America has become about and even the fact that the sort of nominal term has become consumer rather than citizen, which I guess is a step up from subject, which is, I guess, what you guys ultimately threw off when you departed from this particular accent.
But what I suppose is a more pertinent question before we get into how does America identify of itself?
What is this sense of looming crisis?
What is it?
We can't deny it just by sort of pointing to a graph and saying the average household's got more of this and more than that, because most people feel like, hey, in the 1980s, a firefighter could feed a family of four.
And people don't feel like that no more.
That's like, you know, none of us, all of us are, you know, operating in subjectivity, Senator.
So I guess first start with what is being obfuscated by Trump's claim that the common enemy is Chinese exploitation?
They have something, a fancy name is called the availability heuristic.
That means that things are more available or teachable.
So for example, if you turn on the news tonight on an old-fashioned television, which I don't really recommend, but if you do, you'll see mostly bad news.
And so you'll see violence and you'll see crime.
But really, if you say, how many of my fellow men are committing crimes, it's really 1 to 2%.
So 98% of your fellow men are actually good and living peaceably.
And yet we think crime is everywhere and we get inundated with its availability.
It's the same way with thinking we're not doing as well as our parents or grandparents.
Oh, the 1950s.
Oh, the halcyon days.
Everything was so great in the 1950s.
Well, you know, a lot of people didn't have air conditioning in the 1950s.
A lot of people didn't have central heat.
The houses were this big.
The houses are now this big.
The best way to look at it is in long-term trends.
There's a great website called humanprogress.org.
It's associated with Cato.
And in it, they look and compare us to times past.
So 1820, sort of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
For all of human history, as you come along the x-axis of time, and this is prosperity and this is time, you're going along time.
We lived on the bottom.
We lived on the x-axis.
All of mankind lived in utter and complete poverty.
98% of people in 1820 lived on less than $2 a day.
That's the definition of extreme poverty.
And it went on forever.
That's the story of human history until you get to 1820.
The Industrial Revolution hits and prosperity explodes.
So I was married in 1990.
98% of people in 1820 are in extreme poverty.
In 1990, only 34% of the people in the entire world, not just America, not England, Bangladesh, India, you mix the whole world, 30% lived in poverty, 1990.
Fast forward, 35 years, less than 10% of people live in extreme poverty, $2 a day, constant dollars.
This is an extraordinary story, and no one's hearing it because people will get on and prattle on about the middle class is being hollowed out and we're all going to hell in a handbasket.
The story of, and the optimism that should come about where we are in history, I tell the kids all the time, I speak to young people, I say, never been a better time to be alive.
Best time ever to be alive.
People are more tolerant.
People are more open to who you are.
You can be who you want to be.
People don't care for the most part.
Never been a better time to be alive.
People are more prosperous than they've ever been, but it's the opposite of what people believe.
Everybody believes we're going to hell in a handbasket.
Well, of course, I can't speak for everybody.
And sometimes I contest whether or not I can accurately or at least articulately speak for myself.
But I must, in the strongest possible terms, afford you that I strongly believe the opposite.
Whilst I can't dispute the facts of material success generated by industrialization and mechanization and our ability to maneuver matter and create consumer markets, I sense and intuit, and forgive me for not having the data sets, but we are in a time of extraordinary crisis.
And I would describe the nature of the crisis thusly, that power is being centralised.
When I say power, I mean the ability to make decisions globally, whether it's through bureaucracies like the WHO, who thankfully have lost a little of their power due to Secretary Kennedy and Trump's relatively recent decision, or NATO or the UN or the EU, sort of bureaucracies that are largely unelected, although I recognise there is some democratic process amidst them.
In addition to peculiar NGOs about whom I know less, but I know that they are incredible resources and repositories for enormous wealth.
In addition to sort of deep state power, indeed, it's difficult by the, it seems that true power has an ability to obscure itself.
And I think people understand this and sense this.
I think people feel that power has migrated away from them, that we don't have sovereignty in our own lives, we don't have sovereignty in our communities, and that this trend, rather than the trend you described, which sounds like sort of a glorious carnival and a march towards utopia, is not what most people are experiencing.
They're experiencing a centralized authority that's obfuscating its own power.
I don't disagree.
And I would say that you can become materially more successful and spiritually poor.
Yes.
You can be richer in a material sense and poorer in that sense.
With the question of power, what I would say is you're absolutely right.
Power is more centralized and it is to be feared and should be feared, the centralization of power.
This has been the struggle of man, really probably from Roman times, but more specifically to us from the time of Magna Carta on.
It's all been about trying to restrict the power of one person.
It used to be a king.
We set up our constitution to make sure our president wasn't a king, but the president has grown in power in the last 100 years.
From Woodrow Wilson on, we've had extraordinary power go to our presidency.
So I'm not saying don't fear it.
What I would say is that is the battle.
That is the battle of politics that I engage in every day, trying to battle against the centralization of power.
Yes.
Remembering what Lord Acton said, that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But also Knowing that despite the ill effects of big government and of centralization of power, despite that, the power of freedom, what freedom we have left, it's so encouraging and so beautiful.
The individual spirit of creation.
I mean, look, when I think about the times we live in, I see that picture.
And I'm just the picture of the rocket coming back from space into the metallic arms and being caught by Elon Musk's ingenuity and incredible creativity.
That is the time we should be proud of.
Food.
We just grow so much food.
In fact, our problem is too much food now.
We got too much food and it isn't all good either, but we have so much food.
But our biggest problem is too much food now, not too little food.
We're going to have to interrupt that conversation now.
If you want to stay with us, click the link for the rest of this conversation.
I tried to edge Senator Rampaul towards an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, and I think he sort of tacitly offers one.
He thinks that China's being used as a kind of bogeyman.
He says he would no longer arm Israel.
These seem to me to be the kind of things that people are interested in, or he sort of actually he was kind of, I would say, prevaricated somewhere.
But in general, it's a really brilliant conversation.
In fact, in full, it's an excellent conversation.
Click the link if you want to join us for it.
For all of human history, there was never enough food.
Obesity did not exist until almost 50 years ago, unless you were royal or of some sort of inherited money.
Obesity is a terrible problem.
And I think I'm beginning to understand the nature of this discourse.
We are using metrics that are deliberately designed to present a narrative of success and progress.
This narrative, by design, obfuscates a deep, deep crisis.
I'm not a person of the left or of the right anymore.
I disavow those redundant terms.
I believe we're in a spiritual crisis, that people have lost their connection to God at the level of the individual and perhaps at the level of the entire culture.
And if there is no God, then none of us have a true metric or trajectory by which to measure success anyway.
If a kind of opulence, pleasure, the accruing of fat cells is to be the graph by which we evaluate our glorious kind made in the image of the Creator himself, then of course we can all marvel at carpets and armchairs.
But it seems to me that America is becoming a nation where people are captivated by screens and sugar and stimulation and pornography and masturbation and false idolatry.
And it seems to me that the reason I admire you, in fact, so much is because you are one of the few people in politics that seem to have this sort of gift for pragmatism and to identify this is what the problem is.
I'm not saying we should all be sort of caught up in theology the whole time.
But what I am saying is that if we use metrics that seem designed to anoint material success rather than an evident decline, we're not going to have the conversation that we need to have.
So even if when we say why, when you say that Donald Trump is being disingenuous when targeting China as the problem, what is he doing that for?
Is he doing this because he's foolish or is he doing this because he's trying to draw attention from some more serious problem?
Right.
Going back just for a second to the material versus the spiritual, you know, in the 19th century, sort of the beginning of what became the existentialist, you know, there was a saying, if there is no God, all is permissible.
And that's kind of what you're saying.
It's the hedonism, all of this lack of spirituality, the lack of sort of oneness with God is a modern problem.
And it's been going on a while.
But they are different sort of problems.
And I think I don't deny that that problem exists.
I don't deny that there is a problem.
But I would say from the beginning of our republic, our republic was founded in a way with the understanding that you needed virtue, basically that democracy required virtue.
All of our founding fathers talked about it.
If you go through a list of 20 founding fathers, there's always the words virtue there.
And even now, people think about it.
And I often will ask young people this.
I'll say, well, how many of you would go out and steal if it were legal?
Nobody raises their hand.
It's sort of a tough question to ask, but really, most people wouldn't steal.
And you think about it.
Why don't you steal?
Why don't you go to the grocery store and steal?
Because you think it's wrong, not because you're afraid of being caught for most people.
Now, there may be a small number of people who don't steal because they might get caught and go to jail.
Most of us don't.
So a peaceful society, there isn't enough police to police us.
We have to be self-police.
So there has to be a regard for right and wrong, a regard for virtue.
And I think all those are important.
And I think the argument for whether or not we're in a crisis of losing that, of losing our mooring to any kind of virtue or right or wrong is very valid.
And I agree with you completely.
But I don't think that part of that argument has to be that materialism is all bad or that everything is going on is wrong.
Because the thing is, is that young people need hope and they should be given hope and the hope of that my future will be brighter than the others.
So I'm not a pessimist in that sense.
Do they need to understand that where there is a crisis?
I think a lot of young people do.
If you look at the statistics, particularly young males, you have more of them going and finding religion, more of them going to church.
So there is more of that, more people looking for a way.
But I don't think it's one or the other, that we can't admit that there is material success.
And maybe the material success has gone to our head, which is part of the spiritual problem that we're having.
And I forgot what the other question was.
It was something about Trump on tariffs again.
Yes, it was to sort of conclude the idea that if he's setting up this false notion of exploitation via Chinese economic mastery, then if that isn't true, what is it that he is obscuring us from and why is he?
I think he believes it.
I think he is sincere.
I think he is honest in that.
But when I was a kid, high school, early college, there was much fear of the Japanese.
Everybody's like, oh, the Japanese bought 30 Rock.
You know, Rockefeller Center was owned by the Japanese.
They're everywhere.
They're going to buy our houses, our farms.
And it's completely changed now.
They invest in our country.
They're one of the biggest investors in our country.
Nobody's harping about the Japanese.
In Georgetown, Kentucky, the Japanese have a plant, Toyota.
14,000 Kentuckians work there.
They make between $70,000 and $120,000 a year on an assembly line.
They all have health insurance.
They're all pretty materially happy with that.
And nobody's like wanting to kick the Japanese out.
So we go through these waves.
And right now, it's the Chinese are the villains.
The Japanese were for a while, but now we've kind of decided: look, they own bourbon.
They own one of the biggest bourbon companies in Kentucky, too.
There are people now that we coexist with, and it's good.
But they didn't get rich at our expense.
We're both getting rich.
Everybody's getting richer because of trade.
Nobody goes to Walmart and makes a trade that is a bad trade.
All trades are, by definition, if they are free, are mutually beneficial.
So trade's not a bad thing.
And that's, I'm fighting this thing, and it's an uphill battle.
If you look at my Twitter account, I get a lot of hate on my Twitter account every time I talk about trade because everybody says, oh, you're wrong.
We got those damn Chinese.
We got to prevent them and do all this.
And they believe in this fallacy that we're getting poor.
The Chinese got richer over the last 50 years, but so did we.
It was more noticeable because they started out at the peasant level.
They started out with no money 50 years ago and they've grown tenfold.
We've grown maybe one and a half times, but we all got richer through trade.
And it's this abstract but important notion, is trade a good or a bad thing?
We used to all think it was a good thing.
And now people are thinking, oh, let's become insular and not trade.
Well, like America, as always, I think, and you mentioned Woodrow Wilson earlier, and perhaps that was a sort of a pivotal moment in America's entry into that conflict, which again, I suppose, defined the industrialization of war itself.
I suppose that America has always had this conversation regarding isolation and the emergence of making America great again is ultimately, would you agree, about putting America first.
And when you talk to people about whether it's USAID or the ongoing support of wars, it seems that one of the common refrains is not solely about trade, but about putting the priorities of American people first.
Now, even when dealing with the sort of giddying tangle of bureaucratic language, it seems to me evident that at the forefront of the political process, the peculiar machinations of DC, it's very difficult to put the life of ordinary Americans of what their quality of life is.
And to the point where almost we have to sort of spin to them, no, no, no, look, you've got dishwashers now or whatever it is that we're sort of for whatever palliative we're offering to the American people.
It seems to me that what Americans want at the moment is a kind of isolationism.
Isn't that what America first means?
Americans don't want to be involved in wars.
They don't want to be in a trade deficit.
They don't want to be in debt either personally or nationally.
I'm all for staying out of foreign wars.
You'll not find any more person more anti-war than I am.
But it's not because I think we need to be isolated.
I would still trade with everyone.
And in fact, there are times when I don't think we should be selling arms to people.
I voted against selling arms to Saudi Arabia, to Bahrain, to Qatar.
We're involved in too many damn wars and too many arms.
We're just, we're the arms merchant of the entire world.
I'm against that.
But that doesn't mean I don't want interaction.
So I wouldn't sell arms to Saudi Arabia, but I wouldn't stop trading with Saudi Arabia.
I wouldn't sell arms to Qatar, but I would not stop trading with Qatar.
And in fact, I think, yeah, I'd still trade with Israel.
But no arms.
Well, I have introduced legislation to reduce how much we give to them.
We give them, we signed a 10-year agreement to give them like 33 billion.
And then on top of that, we give them another 10 or 15 billion.
We don't have that money.
It's fiscally irresponsible.
It makes us weaker.
So we shouldn't be doing that.
I've been against that.
On arms, I've been a little bit more open to it, but I'm not happy that the war goes on and on and on forever in Gaza.
The war needs to end at some point.
And there is a point, and Israel has to figure this out probably on their own to a certain degree.
There is a point at which so many people die that you create more terrorists from their aggrieved relatives than actually exist.
But I'm not saying they didn't have a right to respond.
October 7th was a horrific, you know, bloody massacre, and they had a right to respond to that.
But it is at the point where Gaza has still got 2 million people.
It's an utter freaking disaster.
Somebody's got to say, it's time to rebuild.
It's time to stop.
And I think the only possible practical outcome to Gaza is Arab, there needs to be an Arab police force there.
Israelis can't stay.
I'm not for putting the Americans in the middle of that mess.
But I would say to the Arab League, when you're over there talking to Saudi Arabia, I would say Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, all these countries, you guys send 10,000 soldiers and be the police and y'all start helping to rebuild it.
And the new government needs to agree to live in peace with Israel.
Dozens of people have been arrested around the UK at protests in support of prescribed group Palestine action.
The Metropolitan Police said 55 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act at the demonstration in Parliament Square and eight were arrested at another demo nearby.
Those detained are alleged to have been displaying placards in favour of the group which was designated as a prescribed terrorist organisation earlier this month.
There were also arrests in Bristol, Truro and Manchester.
In Britain, pick a cause that people are getting arrested for.
People are protesting in Eppin, near where I'm from, because of migration-related issues.
People are getting arrested in London because of Palestine-related issues.
And people are getting arrested everywhere for free speech.
It seems like the majority of Americans are against war, funding war and arms, trading, the machinery and bureaucracy of war.
And yet it seems near impossible, regardless of what administration with whatever mandate enters office to curtail and to cease that.
And I think that what that makes a lot of people feel is that there is no meaningful mandate derived from the electorate, that the sort of the inertia of power continues uninterrupted, no matter who's in office.
I think the closest to anyone who was going to interrupt the military-industrial complex and the monetary gain of all these arms merchants making money was Donald Trump and still is.
But the Bushes weren't.
The Bushes were part of the military-industrial complex.
He got us involved in the Iraq War.
Huge mistake.
Trump has actually talked about a lot of things that libertarians believe: less war, less intervention.
He hasn't always fulfilled it because he sometimes made mistakes in who he appointed.
John Bolton is the king of the neocons.
He's the king of the interventionists.
There's never been a war he never wasn't interested in getting involved with.
And that was a huge mistake.
I told Trump not to appoint him.
Bolton writes in his autobiography, he says, oh, Rand Paul, God damn it, Rand Paul, he kept me from being Secretary of State.
And I did everything I could, but Trump still appointed him to be head of the National Security Council.
And he advocated.
I don't understand it.
It doesn't make sense.
It's inconsistent with what Trump says he believes and what I support in Trump, is that Trump's been the best Republican in my lifetime as far as advocating for the least amount of intervention in war.
What he says oftenly is as much as I could have written it, or my father could have said it many times in his speeches.
But then in the application of it, he's allowed people to infiltrate around him who aren't necessarily advocates of less war or less intervention.
Do you think that the Epstein list is hoopla, or do you think, as many Americans do, that it's a kind of indicator of a sort of deep, what do I want to say, rhizome of subterranean connections and corruption that transcends different administrations?
I can't profess to have inside information about the Epstein tapes.
What I can tell you is that the distrust of government is well deserved.
That I've been poring through and trying to get records about why we funded the research in Wuhan, China that I think became the pandemic.
I've been advocating for four years.
I've gotten nothing.
Almost everything I know, I've started to get something now, but everything we know, and I wrote a book about this, Deception, the Great COVID cover-up.
But in the book, almost all the information I got was through freedom of information from outside sources.
Outside sources were better at getting information by suing the government than I was as chairman of a committee now.
Oh my God.
So coming January this year with the new administration, I gave subpoenas to 14 agencies.
And these are now friendly people.
I know most of the people at these agencies.
And yet six months in, it's taken me six months and I'm still trying to get information.
I've recently gotten some and I think I'm going to have a breakthrough in the next couple of months.
I do think that there was a cover-up.
And I love the way, or a conspiracy, I love my favorite is, you know, people think, oh, if you believe in a conspiracy, you're an absolute nut and a fool.
And I said, well, George Carlin described this the best.
George Carlin said, it's not necessary to believe in a conspiracy, only to believe in a convergence of interest.
So the way I imagine the COVID conspiracy is, you might have 250 people involved in the COVID conspiracy, all worked in government, and maybe they never met each other.
But their convergence of interest is, holy shit, we don't need a, we funded this.
If word was out that I reviewed this and I funded it, so it's like, I'm putting this at the bottom of the stack or I'm erasing this.
And that's what happened.
So it was a conspiracy where some of them knew each other and some of them were involved in a cabal, but most of them had a common interest of cover up because 15 million people died and they made the foolish decision to fund this.
And it's extraordinary what we have found.
Almost everything is from whistleblowers and from freedom of information.
There was a major Murphy who worked in DARPA, which is part of our defense industry research.
He revealed that the research that led to this was applied for in 2018 by the people in Wuhan, China.
They didn't get it in 2018, but it was almost exactly what COVID began.
What it became was what they had applied for in 2018, but nobody came forward.
So there were other people on this 2018 project.
There was a professor in North Carolina.
When he saw that COVID had this special furin cleavage site to let it enter into cells, why wasn't he ringing up Fauci and saying, holy crap, they did it.
They did it.
They finally did what we asked for the money.
We got denied the money because it was too dangerous.
They did it anyway.
This mirrors what our research proposal was going to do.
And yet he met with Fauci in February of 2020.
He's been at the White House.
How come he never mentioned anything?
15 different agencies heard this proposal.
And when they found out that the virus had this special cleavage site, they should have been going, holy cow, last year I heard a presentation from the same people in China wanting to do this.
And now the virus just coincidentally starts in Wuhan, China, and has the special cleavage site in that they were proposing doing in an experiment in 2018.
Nobody did that because there was a conspiracy of cover-up from people all had a convergence of interest that said, we don't want anybody to know that we were forewarned and we still made a stupid decision to fund this research.
Yes, if you met Lee Harvey Oswald at a shooting range and he was practicing shooting from a shop window via branches and trees at a grassy knoll.
It's just a coincidence.
Although ironically, he was likely not working alone.
So this convergence of interests, I wonder, it seems to me that one can stimulate environments where interests converge near continually.
And I suppose that what the again, I'm not particularly interested in the licentious aspect of the Epstein list.
I'm more interested in what external forces might generate the convergence that you're describing around COVID, which this convergence again became rather broad when one examines the subsequent wealth transfer, the ability of governments to regulate.
That must have irked you some as a libertarian to see this authority legitimized at such an extraordinary scale.
And I wonder if really what COVID provided was a window into the ordinary mechanations of power rather than an anomalous event, i.e.
it was just a concentration of what happens more broadly, continually.
Yeah, and but I think it's evidence of where the distrust of government comes from and I think has built up over time.
As a libertarian, do you believe that in a sense, given that the systems themselves are not really geared towards individual freedom, but towards centralized freedom and the legitimization of centralized Freedom through increasing crisis, whether that's a pandemic or war, which is sort of in a sense a self-generated crisis between human tribes.
Do you feel that the systems themselves have to markedly and radically change?
And do you sense that, in fact, the technologies that are emerging now could either legitimize further centralization through surveillance and forms of monitoring or could actually legitimize a sort of a libertarian paradise where there was maximal democratic control?
And do you see the potential of a convergence between ideas that come from libertarianism, individual freedom, and anarchism, which are sort of, I don't mean chaos anarchism, I mean maximal democracy localized where possible?
That's 16 different questions from that.
I'm sorry I did that because I think we were coming to the end of the interview.
I can't really remember the last four.
But anyway, as far as libertarianism underlying things, if you go to the Epstein tapes and you say, is there any principle other than the licentiousness that intrigues people about who was on the island, how rich they were, and justice.
Well, the one thing underlying this that libertarians have complained about for a long time is they use the RICO statute and conspiracies to gin up penalties.
So what they do is they say, it's sort of like what they did to Trump.
Libertarians hate.
They went to Trump and said, oh, you committed a lot of bookkeeping errors, 43 bookkeeping errors.
They were misdemeanors.
Oh, the statue of libertations went out.
So we're going to change the statue of libertations, but then we're going to bundle them all together and call it a felony and give you 40 years in prison.
So I don't know all the details of what Gislaine Maxwell was charged with, but ultimately it's a grouping of things.
And it's sort of this conspiracy to do sexual trafficking.
Well, if it did exist, there has to be a lot of evidence of who are the people purchasing this.
And the only other one is Jeffrey Epstein.
So it doesn't sound like much of a conspiracy.
It's still bad and wrong if she was doing this for one man, but it sounds like there were other people.
Why were none of them charged?
And I think people have a sense, they may not understand the law, but they have a sense of justice.
Well, shouldn't these other people, did they escape justice because there was some special treatment going on?
And I think that's what people dislike most about the law.
They like the unfairness of the law fare against Trump, but then they also like the unfairness of, well, if I did this, I'd be in jail for 20 years.
And now all these rich people got off because they were rich and they had a connection.
So I think the unfairness of that resonates with people.
But there is a libertarian principle underlying it that we don't like RICO.
We would repeal RICO because we see people with minor drug offenses all get stacked up.
And all of a sudden, the guy's got 20 or 30 years in prison.
And four other people are selling drugs testify against this one guy and he gets 20 years in prison.
You know, this has happened with a lot of different cases that libertarians get upset about.
Sorry to interrupt this conversation with Senator Ram Paul.
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Yes, because in that way, I suppose, Senator, the example you gave of a scientist that would have awareness that this research had been applied for, recognise the hallmark and signature of the research in the COVID virus, then not be able to testify because of his own shame and culpability.
It seems that the generation of shame and culpability is an accompaniment to the explicit systems of government, that there is an occult or at least clandestine aspect to power that ensures that people in positions of power can be leveraged.
I suppose that might happen plainly through lobbying and through PACs and even through relationship.
But it seems that when it comes to true power, global power, there's a set of systems that are used to almost sort of spiritually manage people through shame.
So there's an inherent aspect to power that is involved with corruption and abuse of power, because I think the natural tendency of men and women is to accumulate power, but along with that comes corruptibility and also becomes the abuse of power.
And then sometimes react to that abuse instead of reacting to the power.
So for example, in our country, for a long time, people said money rules politics.
We need to regulate how much money you're giving to politicians because rich people are giving money and they're buying the elections.
My father and other libertarians would put it this way.
They said, it's not so much the giving that is the problem.
It's that they have the power.
Rich people wouldn't give them any money if it was a small constitutional government.
Our government in the 19th century wasn't worth buying.
In fact, most of the action was at the state legislative level because that's where power was.
It was dispersed.
So there are many regions to disperse power and to make it more locally.
One, because the less centralized, the less abuse.
But the other thing is, is purely a fiscal reason.
The only government that seems to have no limits to how much they spend is the federal government.
The state governments are salsa.
They don't have a central bank.
So they have limits to their borrowing power.
And most states, even the worst of them, other than maybe California and Illinois, tend to have balance between what comes in and what goes out.
But if you want to see governments that exactly balance their books, city council, county government, they all balance their books.
So when we're talking about where it should be done, so let's say you want to help people and you think the government should give them food stamps so they can eat.
Well, you know where food stamps should be paid for?
At your county level and it should be a county tax.
We pay for it at the federal level.
And so what we have is just something that's wildly the wrong kinds of food, too much food, able-bodied people getting it.
At the county level, someone would make people come in.
And if they walked in and they were healthy, they'd say, you're done.
Go out and get a job.
You don't get food stamps.
Would that mean that the county would have the ability to leverage taxes?
How would they generate this revenue?
Counties have taxes.
So do you think, so in a sense- Thank you.
Part of the libertarian creed then is the maximal devolution of power.
Absolutely.
And that government's a necessary evil.
That's what Thomas Paine said.
And the reason he said that is that you have to give up liberty to form government.
Without any government, I'm completely free, but I also might be free to hurt you physically or steal from you.
So we set up a government to stop some physical violence.
We set up a government to stop fraud.
But the more government we get, the more you have to take of my labor.
So what I earn is, if I make shoes and I sell shoes, what I earn is mine.
I give up a certain amount of it to government, but I'm giving up some of my liberty when I give to government through taxation.
So every bit of taxation is a loss of my liberty.
So government is a necessary evil.
And in knowing that, I want to give up a smaller portion of my income because I want to have a smaller government.
So if they tax me at 70%, I'm 30% free.
If they tax me at 5%, I'm 95% free.
So for us, the level of taxation is the level of freedom and being left alone from government.
I like that metric.
Feudalism offers the same pledge, by the way, of course, you know, in order that you don't get attacked by barbarians, you have a king and barons, and you are taxed and you are a serf.
And I wonder if there's just sort of almost a semantic maneuvering that takes place when you change it to government rather than tyrant.
I also agree with you with the principle of minimal impact, minimal government.
But in a sense, do you concur that if we pulled that thread, you would ultimately unweave the flag herself that you can't have nation without centralization?
Perhaps some.
So I'm not against a central government and not against having one.
I just want a very small central government.
I want the least we can possibly have.
I want it so small you can barely see it.
And if I have to be governed and if I have to give up taxes, I'd rather give it to the local government.
So would I. And I would rather have them do it.
It used to be this way, even in our country.
Well, I started my medical practice in 1993 in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
When I showed up and I opened my office and showed up, one of my patients was a woman.
I was probably 30 and she was probably 70.
And she was in charge of the Bowling Green Welfare Office.
And it's funny, you think, well, someone in charge of the Bowling Green Welfare Office, she must have just been a huge liberal and thought nobody should work.
She was a hard ass.
She believed everybody should work and she patrolled it.
But if your son was a quadriplegic from an accident and the people didn't have any money, she knew that we were going to take care of them.
She wasn't hounding you that your quadriplegic son needed to go out and work.
What she was is, if your son was a football player and he just finished high school and he's not going to college and he's sitting around on his butt all day, she would make him work.
So there was a hardness to it.
We did welfare and it was community level.
Even before there was government welfare, people took care of people in the community.
Communities always sort of took care of their own.
People think, oh, we have to.
Well, what would happen if the government weren't involved in health insurance?
Well, they weren't until like the 1960s.
And do you know what?
People were always treated in the hospital.
My dad practiced medicine at some point in time with no government insurance.
And it was part of a responsibility.
In fact, we call it a privilege to be, I have hospital privileges.
It's not a right for me to practice there.
I get the privilege.
But in order to do it, I agree to work in the emergency room for free.
Now, usually you don't work the hours anymore, but what you do, it used to be you'd actually work a shift.
Now what you do is if you come in and you don't have any insurance and money and you got a stick in your eye, they send, they call me and I come in and see you whether you have money or not.
But that happened before there was government insurance, before there were any laws.
It was an obligation of the community.
But it was better when it was local and then it got worse the more and more federalized it became.
And now, literally, when food stamps started, it was for unwed mothers with four kids.
You can understand how an unwed mother, four kids, she can't work.
She's got to take care of the four kids.
And now you've got healthy young males getting food stamps and it just shouldn't happen.
There are plenty of jobs.
There are jobs everywhere for young men who will work in the hot sun and willing to work hard.
Now, it seems like that the principle that motivates government centralization is without this central authority, we cannot serve the people.
That's the explicit claim, but it ultimately seems like the sort of accruing of power for power's sake.
If there were to be sort of a true radical proposition would be to localize power wherever possible.
That's like the guiding principle to that the government should sort of dismantle itself.
I suppose the counterclaim is, no, the tendency of the government to accrue power is shared by corporations and commerce.
They would be the ones that would accrue this power.
So what regulation is required and what would become the cohesion that even ensures that there is such a thing as nation?
And where are those principles derived from?
So there are people who want power for power's sakes because it's a tendency of mankind.
It's a failure of mankind.
Then there are people who want it, that corporations want it to use the government for their own power.
Woodrow Wilson was an ideologue.
He was a person who used, and many of the ideologues who want power use war as an example.
So he ran on in 1912 of staying out of the war.
He wins again again in 1916, gets us in the war, and then immediately starts arresting people.
Eugene Debs is arrested and thrown into prison for 20 years, probably gets TB while he's in prison.
The Republicans finally let him out.
I think either Coolidge or Harding lets him out.
Was he a conscientious objector?
20 years for encouraging people not to sign up for the draft, basically, and giving speech in support of some socialists who were for this.
But we did terrible things.
One of the worst eras in our history for freedom of speech and freedom of association, freedom to be able to dissent and criticize the government was right after World War I and right after World War I. World War II wasn't so great either.
We imprisoned the Japanese.
We had concentration internment camps for the Japanese.
So war has been the health of the state, but it hasn't been to the health of the individual or the individual freedom.
But it's gotten worse over time.
And it used to be after the war, maybe we get some freedoms back.
Same with borrowing.
Borrowing got great during World War II, but then government got a little bit smaller and we went back to a different curve.
The pandemic is like another war.
War on the pandemic or on the virus.
Spending went through the roof.
The economy was shut down.
But really, it became, and this is the thing I blame Fauci mostly for, it became about submission.
It wasn't the science.
The left would say, follow the science, follow the science.
But it turns out virtually everything he told us wasn't true.
The masks didn't work at all, particularly the cloth masks.
So when they told, if you were 75 years old and your spouse has COVID and they tell you to wear a cloth mask and go into feeder, they've told you the wrong thing to do.
They've told you something unhealthy to do.
Now you're going to get COVID.
Maybe you die.
It's the wrong thing to do.
When they told you to stay six feet apart from people, it turns out the virus can spread 30 feet.
If you're in a choir practice and it's a room a little bigger than this and there's 30 people singing, you can get it without touching the person 30 feet across.
So it was actually more infectious than they said.
And so they gave you bad advice there.
But it should have been, if you're 100 pounds overweight and you're 55 years old, don't go to choir practice.
But if you're six years old or 16 years old or 26 years old and healthy, you can go.
And most of you have already had COVID.
And the other thing they lied about or didn't tell the truth was once you've had COVID, you're not going to die from it.
You may get it again, but even a lot of people who got it naturally never got it again.
People who got vaccinated got it again and again and again.
But the thing is, is that they didn't tell us that we had protection, that we wouldn't die.
To this day, the government has never admitted, if you've had it, can you get it again and die?
I think it's virtually zero.
People got it again and died.
Now, very elderly or people with a lot of other diseases, maybe.
But really, most of the country over 65 got two vaccines, got COVID two or three times.
They're not going to die from it now.
And they should tell us the truth so you know what to do.
Fauci subsequently acknowledged that the six feet was an arbitrary figure, of course.
And I can't, this tendency to mask a bad motivation.
you just leave when you need to, of course, don't be, you know, on my account.
You'll have to vote pretty soon.
How are we doing on the vote?
This tendency to mask a...
This tendency to mask.
This is a single-part question.
You can answer, but I'll try and do a one-part question.
I don't know why I taught you.
You never asked one of those.
That would be an anomaly.
would be a ridiculous anomaly.
What I'm trying to understand is why Crisis is, When you were talking about war and when you were talking about the pandemic, crisis is a subjective position.
It wasn't a crisis for everyone.
It wasn't, well, as the Chinese saying outlines, it was an opportunity.
But people for whom it was not a crisis have no motivation not to generate a permanent state of crisis.
And I think that what we're entering into and perhaps have been in since 9-11 is a successive crises used to legitimize opportunity.
And the problem is, of course, big government is what's able to legislate and create the conditions, the framing for this opportunity.
But the main beneficiaries, and I would say outside of government, they're corporate and commercial.
And as Mussolini said, it's this terrible alliance that we have to most fear.
So how do we then manage, Senator Paul, the tension that clearly exists, that there is a requirement for some sort of organization, but that when that organization is centralized in the way that it has become, it has become almost demonically corrupt.
Well, the Chinese may have first said it, but then Rah Emmanuel famously repeated it, let no crisis go to waste.
A crisis is a time when government can consolidate power.
The Patriot Act, which reminds me of how when something is named something, you get the opposite.
So almost every name of legislation, you have to look beneath the surface to find out that the Patriot Act is the most unpatriotic of acts, that it took our freedom, that it invaded our privacy.
But you're right, ginning this up.
So for example, the COVID vaccine.
Do we need it now?
Does anybody need it?
I think probably no one needs it.
Now, I don't want to say no one because there might be some debilitated people who are very sick who it might be recommended.
But I will say, is there a self-interest in the vaccine manufacturers to have it on a list and to require it for children?
In Europe, they finally decided virtually all of Europe, they don't recommend it under age 12, the COVID vaccine.
I would go further.
I think probably you're healthy in under 40 or 50.
And then I'd also ask you if you had COVID.
You've had COVID.
It may be that you don't even need anything else, anymore vaccines at all, probably if you've had COVID, because they need to show what are the statistics.
But what do you think Moderna's position is?
What do you think Pfizer's position is?
They are self-interested.
So one reform I've offered, and it's been steadfastly opposed by people, is that if you're a scientist and you're on the vaccine committee, you should have to reveal whether you get royalties from Pfizer or Moderna.
Oh, my God.
That's something really simple.
Yeah.
And I haven't got it passed yet because people will object to it, mostly on the Democrat side.
But I continue to try to get there.
Oh, it is a reporting request.
Tell us if you work for these companies.
Tell us if you gain money.
And Anthony Fauci's response was, the law says we don't have to.
Oh, my God.
And my response to him is, I will change the law.
And by golly, I'm continuing to fight.
And I will eventually get the law changed.
Thank you, Senator.
Thanks for coming here today.
I hope that the vote goes well.
Thanks for your transparency and clarity and expertise, wisdom.
And thanks for the endeavor of conversation.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks, man.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
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It helps me financially and also sort of spiritually.
I don't only judge myself by the metrics of consumerism, but when I think about it, I am rather fond of luxury in a variety of areas, but I'm working on it spiritually as best I can.
And I hope you are too.
See you tomorrow.
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