Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/7/23 Dr. Ron Paul on the Long Deliberate War on Our Liberties

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

Dr. Ron Paul joined Scott to talk about his newest book, The Great Surreptitious Coup. They talk about how some of the big power grabs of the 1960s and 1970s by institutions like the CIA, FBI and Federal Reserve explain the mess we find ourselves in today. Then Dr. Paul explains what’s needed to get us back on track.  Discussed on the show: The Great Surreptitious Coup: Who Stole Western Civilization? by Ron Paul “Will BRICS Smash the Dollar?” (Ron Paul Institute) Former congressman and American hero Ron Paul is the host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report and director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Dr. Paul is the author of numerous books, including Swords into Plowshares and The Revolution: A Manifesto. Follow him on Twitter, @RonPaul. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got the greatest american hero ever dr rom paul of course former congressman and presidential candidate and he is the co-host of the liberty report every day with dan mcadams and with Chris Rossini, and he runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and he wrote a bunch

of books, The Revolution Manifesto, Liberty Defined, and the Fed, swords into plowshares, and he's got this brand new one out. It's called The Great Serptitious Coup, Who Stole Western Civilization? Brand new out. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Dr. Paul? Doing well, thank you. Good to be with here. Very happy to have you back on the show here. So listen, I have a couple of your recent articles I really want to talk to you about, you know, regarding money and the empire and all of that. But first of all, I want to ask you a little bit about this book. I did have a chance to flip through it a little bit, and I see you got some interesting stuff I didn't know about Genghis Khan and some other stuff.

You want to give us a little bit of a rundown here? So that's a neat story, especially how he was associated or they linked him to Jefferson after a struggle on investigation. But anyway, it's a neat story. Very cool. All right, but overall, so what's the book about? Well, it's surreptitious, which means it's silent. It's not like the coup that we pull off. Everybody knows about the coup in 1953 and around.

They know about the more recent one in 2014 in Ukraine. And we've done more, we have a record on. We probably have 150, if you count all the list. little ones all the times we've been involved. But I was thinking about, because so many people, in the last year or two people, they started asking, who stole Western civilization? And, of course, most people, including myself, we think of Western civilization and also the American Republic as being part of it, a significant part of the Western civilization.

And so I date the coup, not so much as one event as an ongoing event. And it's, you know, 125 years when we, you know, got involved in the progressive era started, and they started undermining and destroying much of what came out of the Enlightenment and our Constitution and the modern understanding of liberty. but nobody knows a date as we've talked about the subject people have to come up with different dates and I imagine it's open target pick any date you want because they're also significant I happen to key in for personal reasons because I was very much aware of what was going on in the 60s I had been drafting I was in an area where Kennedy,

came by the air base right in Kennedy, right in San Antonio, where I was the flight surgeon. So I was very much involved, and then it was, even at that time, I mean, I saw it as a total disaster, but I didn't place any type of significance on it compared to what I do now, because I think that was a big deal. And then all the side, the whole decade was a big deal and it continues to be a big deal because things change. And if you say, well, you know, our Department of Justice, our CIA and FBI and others have been participants in, you know, assassinations and killing of our leaders, this was going by without hardly notice. Even now, nobody places quite the emphasis that I do on it. But it also might fully explain, you know, what has happened

since then. Now look at the Department of Justice. But one place where I think, Scott, we're making some progress is back then, even I, who was, you know, very close to that situation, I took it for Gernard. It was Oswald. That was explanation. That was it. So it took me a while to, you know, figure out what was going on. But it is something that back then not many people thought about it in a big sense. And even now, except for one thing, in general, the American people have lost trust in their government because of an accumulation of a lot of nonsense. Maybe you're just into civil liberties. Maybe you're just into economic liberty where the government gives all these excuses and statistics and claim we have to do this and that. Then they get into medical things like

COVID. So people are starting to say, hey, this is something. But just think if you compare only the national security state coming out of, you know, the assassinations with Jack Kennedy or Robert Kennedy, Sr. or Martin Luther King, even though it's amazing we went through the 60s, it was a mess. It was horrible. But nobody was saying, oh, there's been a coup. We've lost control of our government. But it was eroding, you know, for years before. that, that was a big event, but I think it gave tremendous power to our CIA. A lot of people know it, but I don't think people are quite at the point where they realize that the only solution would have to be is to get rid of institutions like the CIA and the FBI because they destroy our liberty. They don't protect them. Well, Dr. Paul, when I was a freshman in high school Bush senior went to war in Iraq War I or the Gulf War and even as a 15 year old I noticed I took it as very important that he said specifically that he didn't need any authorization from

Congress to go to war and they ended up authorizing it anyway but he said he didn't even need them to he had an authorization from the UN Security Council and that that was the way things were now and I remember thinking that well that sure ain't right and I know that you were on the side of the people who said at the end of the Cold War that America should come home. Now the other side of the argument, of course, one, and that side of the argument has been that they're the one saving Western civilization. They're holding it down. They're holding back the hordes of the barbarian east and south and wherever and keeping us safe. So I wonder if you have kind of an idea of how things might have played out if they had listened to you, say you

had won in 88 and it had been up to you or at least if the non-interventionists had sway instead of the George H.W. Bush internationalist types back 30 years ago at the end of the last Cold War. The civilization had remnants to it and I think what the coup that I'm thinking about another group took it, illegal group took control of it. So not everything was destroyed. There's a lot of technology and all this available unfortunately it's used too often for wars than peace but that

that to me was a big a big event and of course the first time we went to war without a declaration was with Truman you know in Korea and that was the police action so they called it something else and you know

the little story that I tell when I was trying to fight that resolution given open authority you know to go throughout the whole Middle East. And when I said, I was on the committee, I said, look, if you guys want to go to war, you ought to have the courage to vote for the war, men may would win them, you know, or something like that. And so I introduced the resolution to declare war.

I said, you can be sure I won't vote for this, but you should do it if that's what you want. Boy, they went hysterical on that. And Henry Hyde, who was the chairman of the committee, he really, try to put me down by saying, well, well, we're wrong, Paul knows all about the Constitution that he thinks we should have a Constitution. Doesn't he know that that's anachronistic? We don't follow that part of the Constitution anymore. And I thought that statement says so much, and that is an attitude that was pervasive into Congress the time I was there. I mean, just think of, you know, free markets and different things that everybody,

in Congress practically, you know, 90% of them, they never heard of free market Austrian economics, and they never introduced the idea of non-interventionism and foreign policy. So this has been a devastating thing, but things aren't going as well because I think now that the important thing is that, you know, 70, 80% of the people don't believe what the government tells us. So we're on us. So this effort now to have a new lockdown, let's hope that we've done our job to let the people know what they really ought to be paying attention to it. And some days, I think we're way ahead, but then the other days I worry because there's too much of that mob psychology that goes on that people can get frightened into doing things.

Well, so to go back to the assassinations of the late 60s there, well, of all of the 60s there, if it had been, Ben Bobby Kennedy in 1971, would he not have also had to take us off of the gold standard? Was that a particularly Nixonian evil? Because I guess, legendarily, right, the Austrians predicted at Breton Woods that this is never going to work. You're going to have to give it up by 1971 or something very close to that, right? Yeah. And there's a little bit of argument. They probably weren't as well informed because that's one thing that I think in a positive way

is that our understanding of free market economics and sound money is better than what the founders were dealing with. So, no, they didn't have it, but the ordeal of doing it, let's say that I was put in a position like that, and the solution was getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Well, if you do that with one strike at the pen and do it in one day, you may be doing the right thing, but you also might start a civil war because so many people are locked in. And that's why there's some people who think maybe we should, the only argument I've ever heard up there is the Federal Reserve just doesn't have good manager. It's not that the principal's wrong, just bad management. And even now we're starting to hear about the nature of money, you know, just having a definition of the currency, the unit of account would go a long way.

And that was the reason where I was starting was repeal all the legal tenants. laws, you know, let the market decide what the unit of accounts should be. But there was no way it could be a smooth sailing. But then again, my argument for still doing something is if you prolong it and keep building up the bubble, when the bubble will burst, it's going to be a lot worse. So if we had, if we really had enough people to gradually get off the system, it, probably wouldn't work because the people are too dependent. But if they do this, you know, the people will rebel,

and there will be a real crisis coming. But the whole principle has to be changed and it has to be monetary. And, you know, one of the reasons why I picked up on that as an issue is when, in 71, when I discovered the significance of this, it's the whole thing. If you happen to lean toward limited government, and personal liberty, how is the enemy financed? Oh, yeah, we have rich people who have been able to abuse the system and become billionaires and you get to sorrosis and others and financing it.

But it's the whole system that depends on our educational system. Now it's our medical system. Now it's gigantic government and all that. So that is the engine, the engine of the inflation and how it goes. And then with our political, our military power and the power of the reserve currency, we can dictate and put pressure. And we've had a lot of success in doing that since World War II, which is beginning to crack. That's what I see is the big issue now, because it cannot be maintained, just like the gold standard couldn't be made, or the pseudo-gold standard. Brenton Woods, that's when I got interested in the 60s when a lot of people.

People were writing about this. It can't work. It can't work. It's going to collapse. And then when it collapsed, it really rang a bell for me because the Austrians, you know, were right. But it's been patched together again, and people have become more dependent. So we've been able to use sanctions and bombs and weapons and all the threats and get

away with a lot more than we deserve. And to me, yes, people say, well, we did better. we bought a better house and different things that happened during that period of time. But I tell you what, it's based on fake money, malinvestment and debt

the day comes when it has to be paid, and that's what we're seeing now, and that's where the rough time is going to come, because I think there is serious talk about substituting the dollar, but it's not going to be as easy as some people think. Some people think,

oh, next month the dollar and the dollar will disappear. I don't think it's going to be that easy because everybody else is so dependent on it. But the market will take care of that. And that's how that thing happened. The government no longer could support gold at $35 an ounce in 1971. So it was the market demanded it because we were running out of gold. So the market will work because the market right now is telling people, why are they, why is the, you know, corporations gouging us. Well, what we have to do this thing. They're not gouging us. You're just seeing the expression of you participating or being silent on what the government's been doing to our money. And this is, this has been

inevitable and it's still going to be. They can't manage what we have just by getting a different manager. And I said, well, we're going to make you the chairman of the Federal Reserve that it's not going to work because they, nobody can manage it because nobody knows what the interest rates should be. So it goes on and on. But the market, the market helps us out because we said it wouldn't work, you know, zero rate interest rates wouldn't work. And their goal is, well, we want two percent inflation, right, which was crazy. And now we have probably a lot more than they will admit to, and then when it gets to 15 and 20%, more people will wake up. And what our goal has to be is explain why big government, the printing of money and the people

who benefit and who gets the worst deal of the poor and the middle class, because it's nothing more than a regressive tax. Yeah. Hang on just one second for me. You guys know that I consider the Defend the Guard movement, led by the combat vets at bring our troops home.us and defendtheguard.us. to be the most important thing happening in American politics today. Simply put, this law would nullify the empire

by preventing the state governors from handing their National Guard troops over to the president for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the Congress. We've made great progress getting it out of committee and even past the state senate in Arizona. Help support Bring Our Troops Home and Defend the Guard at Bring Our Troops Home.us and Defend the Guard.us. and their director of field operations, Diego Rivera,

teaches a political leadership class that is the most effective training like it anywhere. He's still a soldier, only now his mission is peace. So heads up all you anti-war vets, we've got a mission for you. Find out all about their upcoming training sessions and help support at bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us. Hey, y'all Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org.

I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Bovard, Connor Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick Murpharlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spleat, Kim Robinson, and William Van Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Keith Knight's new Voluntarius Handbook. And we've got quite a few more great ones coming soon. Check out Libertarian Institute.org slash books.

It's a whole new era. We libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at libertarian institute.org. Well, Dr. Paul, I read in one of your recent articles here, and it was CBO numbers, I think you said that

they said that they expect the national debt to grow by as much as $115 trillion more on top of the 30, 32 it is now, over the next 30 years. And I got to tell you, I'm not really an economist or a math magician or anything like that. And I'm not really sure, but that seems like that can't possibly work. because even at some very low rate, which I don't know if we're going to have those or not, but even at a very low rate, interest payments on that much principle means that essentially every bit that they're taxing the American people for our blood, sweat, and tears is just going to pay the interest on the debt to some sovereign national government somewhere or some kind of thing. And then even then we might not be able to afford that, just the interest payments on the thing.

That time that you're talking by is going to be an explosion then, then it may, you know, be required immediate changes, which means that there could be a lot more military conflict. And just think of how many countries now are loading up with weapons and we're paying for most of them because they're still taking our dollars. So that's the deal. You take our dollars, but it's pretty interesting that Russia and Saudis got together on the price of oil. But that's the whole thing is political power dictates prices, and they think they can correct the problems and run things better. But they don't know. Again, if they come to me and they say, well, what do you think the answer should be? And I said, I have no idea what they should be.

I can guess at it. Because under these circumstances, you know, I imagine if you took 10 Austrian economists to enforce them like a guess, I imagine you could get anything from 5 to 15%. But what? Interest rates, because even today, even when they call the interest rates below zero, you know, the credit card interest rates were more what the market tells us, and they're very high. They're, again, our mortgage rates are going up. So there's a point where they do lose control. And that's the scary part of it because they don't leave the sure. It's not a lack of good people to run things, administrators. It's the fact that they can't do it.

They don't know how. Nobody knows those answers. That's why a free market is so valuable. It sorts this out because you have millions and billions of people, participating in the setting of interest rates and setting of prices in the market is something they should pay more attention to and I think one thing that we lack when we talk to young people about this is we don't use the moral argument of this is nothing more than counterfeit and fraud and it leads to these troubles and that to me is the big

issue that's going to get their attention but once again you know as well as I do that, you know, the choice then, if there's chaos coming, who's going to win the argument? Will it be the people who are seeking truth or the people who are the dialists? You can't find truth, so we'll be the truth tellers. So nobody knows exactly what will happen, but I don't know how massive violence won't break up because, in a way, all the street people we have now, it's, of course, related to our borders and a lot of the policies, but once again, the middle class is being wiped out, and it's just unbelievable what we witness now today, you know,

and how we handle things. So I think it's rough sailing, but I keep telling people, and you've heard me say, it's not really complicated if you do the right thing, if you opt for liberty and get rid of the thugs, get rid of the authoritarian and get rid of the corporatists who think that, Only they know what's best for us. That's the big job, and that's an intellectual job, an understanding of people. Right now, our universities are helpful to us.

We have to find other ways to get that messy job. Yeah. Well, Dr. Paul, you know, I guess I could imagine a hypothetical situation where he had competent people run the empire, but it's been Bushes and Clintons and McCain's and Bidens this whole time. and well at least since the end of the last cold war there and they seem to be you know not very competent stewards of the empire presuming they're trying their best to maintain it here and I guess the biggest example that is the rise of the bricks

so that's Brazil Russia India China South Africa and now many more of their friends joining and they lost Brazil but then they got them back there I guess And so this is really, you know, said to be, at least, sir, the biggest challenge to American dollar hegemony, that they are finding ways, I guess, as blowback against all of America's varied sanctions regimes, that they're just going to trade in each other's currencies and leave dollars alone. And then, I guess, the threat, and you and I've talked about this for many years, the threat would be that at the end of dollar hegemony, that basically the whole world gives up on the dollar and they all come flying home and then we have some kind of hyperinflation crack up boom type scenario here in the United States. Is that something that you think is likely at some point in the short or medium term at all?

Of course the answer is back to the clear and beneficial answer and that is just let the people alone give them their liberty back again. You know, and the one decent example of what would happen is looking at 1921. There was a bad depression. It was GDP went down 15%. But back in those days, they hadn't introduced Keynesianism. So they didn't have the bailouts. They didn't have the welfare.

But people suffered. I mean, there's a lot of liquidation of debt. Eliminate the debt and the malinvestment. And it was over in a year or so. But that's not going to happen. And so it's going to, it will get worse. But I think what we don't know is how human action will work on this. But if you can get bits and pieces of people working in a voluntary way,

let's say we just witnessed the fact that two different countries might team together for various reasons, either for their own benefit or to get to us. And it is Saudi Arabia and Russia getting together. And I think there will be more of that. And I think you alluded to that, that there'll be groups and things. And that would be all right. Maybe that's the way it should be. You don't want to wait until the United Nations reestablish order and say, okay, yeah, they're going to get rid of this.

We've just had another Broughton-Words agreement, and this is what we're going to do, and this is what the new money is going to look like. And they talk about that, too. It's going to be a digital money, and we'll have control of that. But when people ask me about what exactly should I do, how am I going to preserve my wealth? What do I do? How do I save my money? And they're talking about financial saving.

I said, there's a lot you have to think about and how do you preserve your wealth. I said, but the most important investment anybody can make is investing in the cause of liberty and to get more and more people to understand what we're talking about. Because you can have all the gold and land in the world, you know, but if everybody sees you as the enemy and the person that, you know, shouldn't have so much, it's not going to be very safe. So I think the whole principle of liberty and why it's so beneficial, I mean, this is the whole thing is the comparison of the two. And why shouldn't we compare one of the more libertarian societies with what happened in the Soviet system? Maybe it'll be in Argentina that will have a good example. It's hope.

Yeah. Well, you know what? I know you don't like it when I say it, but I'm compelled because it's the truth. And you always taught me to tell the truth, Dr. Paul. And that is, I hold you in regard as the greatest American hero for the simple fact that you taught the most people. about peace and liberty and real capitalist Austrian school economics, more and better than anyone so far. And we're all so appreciative of it. And I'm so appreciative of your time on the show today. Thank you, sir.

John, I know you're doing your part, so that's great. And it's great being with you again. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.