With its status as the Beltway newspaper of record, with its budget of some half a billion dollars, with its 750 or so employees, what a surprise that the Washington Post feels threatened by a tiny truth-telling think tank like the Ron Paul Institute. But obviously they do feel threatened. So threatened, in fact, that they recently published an article claiming that the Ron Paul Institute -- along with such notable company as the Drudge Report, Counterpunch, ZeroHedge, LewRockwell.com and others -- is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to publish "fake news" to undermine the Hillary Clinton campaign and, presumably, as in Dr. Strangelove, pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. RPI's Daniel McAdams joined another blacklisted "fake news" site, RT, to discuss the WaPo report... read on...
The Washington Post has a history of misrepresenting Ron Paul’s views. Last year the supposed newspaper of record ran a feature article by David A. Fahrenthold in which Fahrenthold grossly mischaracterized Paul as an advocate for calamity, oppression, and poverty — the opposite of the goals Paul routinely expresses and, indeed, expressed clearly in a speech at the event upon which Fahrenthold’s article purported to report. Such fraudulent attacks on the prominent advocate for liberty and a noninterventionist foreign policy fall in line with the newspaper’s agenda. As Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob G. Hornberger put it in a February editorial, the Post’s agenda is guided by “the interventionist mindset that undergirds the mainstream media.”
On Thursday, the Post published a new article by Craig Timberg complaining of a “flood” of so-called fake news supported by “a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy,” To advance this conclusion, Timberg points to PropOrNot, an organization of anonymous individuals formed this year, as having identified “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.” Look on the PropOrNot list. There is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity’s (RPI) website RonPaulInstitute.org listed among websites termed “Russian propaganda outlets.” read on...
In the smoke of Washington's transition battle there remains the issue of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. What is to become of him? Will the US still seek to put him on trial for blowing the whistle on the illegal and immoral activities of the Obama and Bush Administrations? Turn back the clock to 2010 when Wikileaks first appeared on the scene and one-by-one Members of Congress called for Assange's head. US Rep Ron Paul saw clearly the value of the organization and stood on the Floor of Congress to defend all the whistleblowers. Since then he has consistently championed those who shine the light on the activities our government would rather keep in the shadows. Watch Ron Paul's historic 2010 speech... read on...
We've spent the year urging fixes to what is wrong with our foreign, domestic, and monetary policy. In today's Liberty Report we prefer to discuss things we are thankful for. Dr. Paul recollects his childhood, how he is grateful for the opportunities he has had through his life, and more. We are thankful also for our Liberty Report viewers. Watch the episode here... read on...
What does the Trump era hold for the liberty movement? For those who are pursuing peace and prosperity over the war and poverty of the neocons and elites? Do we have anything to cheer? Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger joins today's Liberty Report with his take... read on...
As Donald Trump takes the reins and we all prepare for the next four years, the need to translate rhetoric into reality comes to the fore. Trump spent the campaign repeating a phrase that horrified the elites – especially the foreign policy Establishment – even adopting it as his official campaign theme: “America first.”
The elites were aghast because the phrase evokes the legacy of the biggest anti-interventionist movement in American history: the America First Committee, a coalition of conservative businessmen and progressive activists (including the socialist Norman Thomas) who not only opposed US entry into World War II, but also pointed to the authoritarian tendencies of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which they feared would be exacerbated in wartime – as indeed they were.
Smeared by pro-war liberals and their Communist party allies as “Nazi sympathizers” — in the same way antiwar activists were later accused of being pro-Communist, pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-terrorist, etc. – the AFC has not fared well with historians, who, for the most part, are Roosevelt partisans, and globalists in any case. The America Firsters are the original “isolationists” the War Party warns us about, “dangerous” subversives who saw that in the quest for a “world order,” Americans would lose their old republic. read on...
Two weeks after Donald Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton, the imperious and imperial neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist understudies may finally be losing their tight grip on US foreign policy.
The latest sign was Trump’s invitation for a meeting with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, on Monday. The mainstream media commentary has almost completely missed the potential significance of this start-of-the-work-week meeting by suggesting that Trump is attracted to Gabbard’s tough words on “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Far more important is that Gabbard, a 35-year-old Iraq War veteran, endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries because of his opposition to neocon/liberal-hawk military adventures. She starred in one of the strongest political ads of the campaign, a message to Hawaiians, called “The Cost of War.” read on...
There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination.
Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.
Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the US government.
In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works. read on...
Is there a silver lining in the recent presidential election for those who value liberty, peace, and prosperity? The answer is a surprising "yes" - but only if we play our cards right. Mises Institute president Jeff Deist joins the Liberty Report to discuss the pros and cons of the current political landscape... read on...
Although Obama’s effort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by taking Mosul on the eve of the election failed, there is a good chance that Mosul will fall to the heterogeneous coalition that is attacking it. Be that event in six weeks, six months, or a year, the United States and its allies will rejoice over the event as if it is the death knell of the Islamic State (IS). They will be wrong to do so, showing again how deeply ignorant they are of the Islamist enemy and the religious war it is waging against them.
IS has lost in Palmyra, Anbar, Ramadi, and other territories, and yet its troops are putting up their hardest fight yet in Mosul. Why? Two reasons: (a) IS leaders prematurely declared the caliphate, ignoring Osama bin Laden’s guidance that the lasting re-creation of caliphate was impossible until the United States was driven from the Arab World; if he was alive, he would probably add Russia to that guidance; and (b) because in the minds of IS leaders, fighters, and their supporters, everything, good or bad, comes from Allah; victory is from Allah, and defeat is a trial sent by Allah to test His followers’ faith and perseverance. While far from irrelevant, IS’s defeats in 2016, in Islamist minds, are in part a consequence of a IS leadership mistakes, but overwhelmingly because Allah did not grant them victory at this time. read on...
