March 19, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
15:11
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It started to dawn on a lot of people, even people who are not paying attention, say six months ago, that the war in Ukraine is a big deal. | ||
| It's not what they told us it was. | ||
| It's not good for Ukraine and the people who live in that sad country, and it's not good for the United States, or for that matter, for the West. | ||
| In fact, it's likely to be, in retrospect, a turning point in the history of the West, and not for the better. | ||
| Who could have seen this coming? | ||
| Who could have known, say, 10 years ago that actually U.S. activity in Ukraine was not an effort to bring freedom to the Ukrainians, but was actually a massive intel operation designed to draw the United States into war with Russia for reasons that are even now not clear? | ||
| Who could have seen that? | ||
| Well, actually, one person did see that 10 years ago, and that person was Ron Paul. | ||
| But don't take our word for it. | ||
| Here he is in 2014. I speak more from the perspective of the United States taxpayers, and it doesn't serve our interests. | ||
| We've already spent $5 billion over the last 10 years trying to pick and choose the leadership of Ukraine. | ||
| And then we participated in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, and this is when this recent stuff really stirred up. | ||
| But we've been involved too much, and I take a non-interventionist foreign policy position. | ||
| It's not our business. | ||
| It doesn't serve anybody's interests. | ||
| It's part of the same thing. | ||
| It's the thing that led us into the disaster in the Middle East. | ||
| A lot of people die. | ||
| A lot of money is spent. | ||
| And we're still suffering the consequences of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| And there's the threat of the war in Syria. | ||
| We don't need another threat. | ||
| The American taxpayers don't want it. | ||
| And our government thinks they can get away with, well, I know the people don't want a war yet, but we're going to play games and we're going to threaten Russia and we're going to put on sanctions. | ||
| And they fail to recognize that we have $500 billion of investments in Russia. | ||
| Russia has $450 billion invested in the West. | ||
| And all we're doing is trying to stir up more trouble. | ||
| Makes no sense whatsoever. | ||
| So it makes a lot of sense for us to mind our own business and let somebody over there solve their own problem. | ||
| Be honest. | ||
| Be honest. | ||
| Were you paying close attention to Ukraine in 2014? | ||
| We weren't. | ||
| Most people weren't. | ||
| And as a result... | ||
| This country got dragged, without even knowing it, into one of the pivotal conflicts in modern history, to our grave disadvantage. | ||
| The question is, how did Ron Paul, former congressman from Texas, how did he get that right? | ||
| How did he know that? | ||
| Why did he know to pay attention to Ukraine, and not just Ukraine, to monetary policy, to the state of our economy, to the state of our country, to the state of the West? | ||
| How did he know before the rest of us knew? | ||
| Maybe because his principles haven't changed in about 60 years. | ||
| So we thought it would be a good idea to spend a little time with the man himself to allow him a victory lap, a well-deserved victory lap, but also to probe a little bit on how did you see things that nobody else did? | ||
| So we are honored, truly, to have former Congressman Ron Paul in studio now. | ||
| Dr. Paul, thank you very much. | ||
| Tucker, great to be with you. | ||
| So I've spoken for you just a moment ago, but let me just ask you directly, how did you, how in 2014... | ||
| Did you see what so many others, including me, did not, that this was a very big deal? | ||
| what was happening in Ukraine and that it might end very badly for us. | ||
| Sometimes the people who are running the operation gives you an idea like Victoria Nula and Jeffrey Syatt. | ||
| You think, what are those people doing? | ||
| But they're such an example of bipartisanship. | ||
| They can work with both of them. | ||
| And they're the worst kind of warmonger. | ||
| But all you have to do is you don't have to know all the details. | ||
| I'm always, I've tried to be very cautious, is, you know, especially in economics, well, this, this, and this, that. | ||
| And next month, there's going to be such and such happen. | ||
| In Austrian economics, we're taught that you don't know exactly when things are happening, but you can see things coming. | ||
| You know, it's the same way you might be able to see our foreign policy coming if you want to go back and observe what happened at the beginning of the last century, you know, with the progressive movement. | ||
| So the hints are there. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| I think what has helped me over the years is I'm curious. | ||
| Most people are, but a lot of people aren't that curious. | ||
| I want to know why it happened, because still the question I have, you know, like reason things happened. | ||
| Who's going to benefit? | ||
| Who benefits from these bombs being dropped? | ||
| Who benefits? | ||
| So I'm very curious. | ||
| And then I don't try to know everything because I think that timing and elements and all this. | ||
| But I'm always impressed that there are people awakening. | ||
| They wake up and they say, you know, this whole thing about Audit the Fed, that came out of a speech I gave to University of Michigan. | ||
| And that was early in the presidential things. | ||
| And it was the crowd, those college kids. | ||
| And I worry because I'm going to a liberal cabinet. | ||
| I don't know what they'll think of me. | ||
| And they started saying, in the Fed, and they took out Federal Reserve notes. | ||
| And they were buying a burning Federal Reserve note. | ||
| So I figured... | ||
| Somebody's missing the boat because these kids know a lot more than they're giving credit for. | ||
| I've changed my mind totally and completely because there are a lot of bad examples in college. | ||
| There's a lot of junk going out there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A lot of bad professors. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| I've heard that, yes. | ||
| A lot of bad professors. | ||
| So I'm very impressed. | ||
| Young people have a more open mind and sometimes with a blanket accusation, which I should be cautious with. | ||
| I much rather talk to Young people who are curious than the people who belong to the Chamber of Commerce. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Because the Chamber of Commerce people symbolizes the lobby. | ||
| Of course they do. | ||
| And they have economic interests that prevent them from thinking honestly. | ||
| I had that experience. | ||
| I was just saying off air at one of your speeches probably 20 years ago. | ||
| I'd never seen you speak before. | ||
| And you went off about the Federal Reserve. | ||
| And I remember thinking, what a weird, what an esoteric subject. | ||
| I knew nothing about it. | ||
| I thought only crazy people cared. | ||
| But again, I was completely ignorant about monetary policy at the time, and I was shocked by how much the crowd loved it. | ||
| They were completely tuned in. | ||
| They thought it was really important. | ||
| Why would the average person 20 years ago have a better sense of that than, say, me, who was paid to follow the subject but wasn't? | ||
| How did people know? | ||
| I got it from literature. | ||
| You could read about it. | ||
| We didn't have the internet. | ||
| We didn't have the radio or TV giving us good information. | ||
| But it was out there. | ||
| For one group that helped me a whole lot was Leonard Reed, the Foundation for Economic Education. | ||
| I knew him, and he was a true believer. | ||
| He was a dignified person and very likable. | ||
| And he talked about process, how you reach people. | ||
| But he was... | ||
| Very, very libertarian in his own way, but he was sort of an intellectual, and he influenced me a lot, so I read everything he did, and he did a lot of literature, but the follow-up of that was, of course, the Mises Institute, and I was part of that, and I think, see, I think they're important people. | ||
| I know people on TV are really important. | ||
| Oh, so important! | ||
| So important. | ||
| But there are a lot of people that are important. | ||
| I think the ideas are the most important. | ||
| And they come and go. | ||
| But the ideas make all the difference in the world. | ||
| I mean, I look at the need for the ideas on how our country came about. | ||
| You know, Thomas Jefferson and others that knew exactly what they were talking about, but we don't have many Thomas Jeffersons around anymore. | ||
| But there's more people, there are influence there, but there are more, but the underground, you know, the silent majority, the remnant, you know, I believe in the remnant both in a philosophic and a religious sense. | ||
| When things deteriorate, There's always somebody there that's going to gather together 10, 12, 15, 200, or 500. They gather together and they talk about the real things that are important. | ||
| And the remnant, I think, is much bigger than anybody ever realized. | ||
| And I think when I walked into those stadiums, I don't know how many times I would say, where did these people come from? | ||
| I was totally amazed. | ||
| I thought the same thing. | ||
| Because, you know, I remember... | ||
| My goal was never to be in politics. | ||
| I had no desire to be in politics, but I wanted to use politics to spread a message of personal liberty. | ||
| That was my goal. | ||
| So that was the whole reason that I got involved, and evidently there were other people looking for the same thing. | ||
| I was impressed with how many people there were, and I got to the point where I thought young people basically were being ridiculed and made fan of, and they still get it, and some of them deserve it. | ||
| But they're still young people, very good and intellectual. | ||
| And, you know, even back, it's been a while since I was a candidate, when I would mention the Rem They knew exactly what I was talking about. | ||
| People who gather together for ideological reasons. | ||
| And it's no, you know, it's nobody looking for, you know, to be a good lobbyist and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And Washington is so bad that somebody said, how did you ever survive it? | ||
| I said, well, I just said that I never became an... | ||
| Optimist. | ||
| I never said, I'm going to cure the world. | ||
| I thought the ideas were important, and that's what I wanted to do because I was very selfish, because I thought it made me feel better talking about something I believed in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then when I saw some kids at... | ||
| Berkeley and other schools getting up and saying, and the Fed, and the Fed. | ||
| Well, liberty is not dead at all. | ||
| I think it just gets reignited. | ||
| And I think we're in the early phases of that. | ||
| But I also believe we have to go through rough, tumble times because the price always has to be paid. | ||
| The price, in a sense, how do you liquidate the debt? | ||
| You know, we can't walk away from that debt. | ||
| But how do we liquidate the debt? | ||
| The market? | ||
| We'll liquidate it. | ||
| And the way the market liquidates it is what they'll demand is like the person that wants $50 hourly wages. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You print money. | ||
| And every time you print money, the value of the dollar goes down. | ||
| So the value of the debt goes down. | ||
| Just a theoretical thing. | ||
| If you double the money supply and prices go up. | ||
| 50%. | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| But if you do that, the real debt goes down. | ||
| So it's a theft. | ||
| It's a tax. | ||
| It's evil. | ||
| So you inflate your way out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what will happen. | ||
| Because what won't happen... | ||
| It's the people who are going to get together and all of a sudden say, Ron, you need to go back. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| We need to go back and get more people. | ||
| We do have some very good people in Congress, but they're pretty lonely too. | ||
| They're very lonely. | ||
| But I think I tell people you're not going to get 1,200, 2,400 new members of Congress. | ||
| The system is so embedded with bankruptcy and corruption that that's not going to work. | ||
| But I'm still an optimist because I think where it counts... | ||
| Where the people are studying and understanding, and they were ahead of us. | ||
| I figure they were ahead of me because they said, you know, and the Fed, it's fiat money. | ||
| And so they're well along the way. | ||
| And it's more available now than ever before, this information. | ||
| So I always figure that if somebody will listen, I'll talk. | ||
| But like I said. | ||
| I, in a way, do this for a sort of selfish reason because I want to do it. | ||
| I get some benefit, you know, emotional and philosophic benefit by doing it, but never as much as I expected. | ||
| I mean, I always got more than I ever expected because there's more people out there wanting to change their mind. | ||
| I mean, I still get hundreds and hundreds of letters. | ||
| The neatest story I get are young people writing to me that they've started their own organization. | ||
| And there's, you know, a freedom organization. | ||
| And they're very creative. | ||
| At the end of my speeches, I used to talk about, if you're listening and you agree with this, I think you have a higher moral responsibility than somebody that just doesn't know what's going on. | ||
| You have the responsibility to put it out there. | ||
| A lot of them took me at my word, and they have started their own organization. | ||
| You know, and I think you can't stop it. | ||
| An idea whose time has come can't be stopped by armies. | ||
| And I strongly believe that. | ||
| So ideas are powerful. | ||
| And I sort of, you know, I didn't ever want a political career because the goal of it, the thing of it is, if you want to be chairman of the banking committee, you don't bash the Fed. | ||
| I've noticed. | ||
| But I think every issue we deal with, you can look at it the same way, whether it's personal liberty, whether it's the foreign policy or whatever, or monetary policy. | ||
| But the foreign policy is the big deal. | ||
| Before I ask you about that, I just want to follow up on one thing you said. | ||
| You said you speak to the remnant, and no matter how bad things get, there is always a remnant. | ||
| Of people who understand what's going on and who find each other, which I love. | ||
| And I think it's true. | ||
| But you said it's not just a political or practical consideration for you. | ||
| It's also a spiritual principle for you. | ||
| What did you... | ||
| Well, I think my spiritual beliefs, which I don't carry on a sleeve... | ||
| I know, but I know they're sincere. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organism. | ||
| Societies are defined by what they will not permit. |
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