Free Republic

Behind the high-minded rhetoric surrounding many government programs, there often (or even usually) lies some grant of special privilege to a powerful business interest. The most well-known example, of course, is ObamaCare’s individual mandate creating a guaranteed market for insurance companies. However, the most common hiding place for corporate welfare is the Pentagon. Hawkish politicians love sticking gifts to big corporations in the yearly National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). So it is no surprise to find an example of cronyism in the Fiscal Year 2018 NDAA, which the Senate is expected to vote on this week.

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views. **snip** The notion that YouTube would want to economically punish a former US Congressman for sharing his views on US foreign policy – a topic that he is unequivocally qualified to speak about – is absurd. Furthermore, *the “review requested” marking on one of Paul's videos reveals that they were initially flagged by users before YouTube's moderators confirmed that the videos were unsuitable for a broad audience.*

Ron Paul's sell-off prediction just got more severe. The former Republican Congressman from Texas believes escalating dysfunction in Washington will create even more pain for Wall Street. "A 50 percent pullback is conceivable," Paul said on "Futures Now" recently. "I don't believe it's ten years off. I don't even believe it's a year off. " According to his calculations, it would cut the S&P 500 Index in half, to 1212, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average would collapse to 10,837. Paul noted that there's a lot of chaos in Washington right now, with an "unpredictable president" and those who...

Donald Trump gets elected and the Left protests by setting fires in the street: They form a “Resistance” and continue to riot for months, forming a “Resistance” whose members throw punches, attacking their “enemy” with their fists, sticks and bike locks stuffed in a sock. Celebrities who have joined the movement throw oil on the fire saying increasingly stupid things like they want to burn the White House down. And suddenly every Democrat pol is so angry they have seemingly lost the ability to control themselves and the air turns blue with their F-bombs.The Left forms “The Resistance” made up...

Ron Paul has an article on his site written by Mike Whitney entitled SETH RICH, CRAIG MURRAY AND THE SINISTER STEWARDS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE. It is an excellent read, being very informative into every aspect of the Seth Rich murder investigation coupled with facts surrounding the case. It is the best I have read thus far. In addition I found a video in which Seth Rich is speaking! In this video he is actually asking questions about Election Commission voting. Here it is: https://youtu.be/xGZLqNgLZ8M Published on Jun 7, 2017 video of Seth Rich asking questions about voter fraud...

Thursday on the “Ron Paul Liberty Report,” former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) suggested the chemical weapon earlier this week blamed on the Syrian government could be a false flag. He went as far to say there was zero chance Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to blame because it wouldn’t make sense for him to use chemical weapons at this point in time. “I looked at The New York Times to get the explanation, and they said ‘Worst Chemical Attack In Years In Syria, U.S. Blames Assad,'” Paul said. “So it is all over and done with? But it is not...

Ron Paul claimed on Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Liberty Report” that all signs point toward Tuesday’s chemical attack in Syria being a false flag operation. “Before this episode of possible gas exposure and who did what, things were going along reasonably well for the conditions,” the former Texas congressman stated. “Trump said let the Syrians decide who should run their country, and peace talks were making out, and Al Qaeda and ISIS were on the run.” “It looks like, maybe, somebody didn’t like that so there had to be an episode, and the blame now is we can’t let that...

Senator Eric Brakey is a resident of Auburn, with five generations of family roots in the town of New Gloucester. He was elected to the Maine State Senate in 2014 at the age of 26, making him the youngest State Senator in the state and in the nation. Senator Brakey received a majority of votes in all five municipalities, making him the only Republican challenger to win a majority in Auburn since Olympia Snowe’s 1976 State Senate race. Senator Brakey is a leader in the state house and serves as the Senate Chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee,...

When my mother struggled with cancer, her appetite dropped to nothing. In my state, medical marijuana is legal, so the doctor prescribed it to help her appetite. To say it worked would be an understatement. Within a couple of days she was eating normal amounts and felt hunger for the first time in a week. With the drug, she was able to maintain her weight and strength. She stayed with me during her treatment but went home to dad some as well. On one of her trips home to dad, she ran out of the medical marijuana and went to...

Donald Trump met with former banker John Allison (shown) on Monday in a meeting that was largely ignored by the mainstream media. It remains unclear whether Allison was being interviewed for the job of secretary of the Treasury or was just giving Trump some advice from a free market perspective.Either way, it’s a breath of fresh air in an era where statism and excessive hubris (the idea that mere politicians and economists can guide, even stimulate a $20-trillion-dollar economy with monetary policy) has reigned for decades.Right after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina in 1971, Allison joined...

Former Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently gave a speech identifying the Federal Reserve’s easy money/low interest rate policies as a source of the public anger that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Mr. Fisher is certainly correct that the Fed’s policies have “skewered” the middle class. However, the problem is not specific Fed policies, but the very system of fiat currency managed by a secretive central bank.Federal Reserve-generated increases in money supply cause economic inequality. This is because, when the Fed acts to increase the money supply, well-to-do investors and other crony capitalists are the first...

The desperate flailing of a mainstream-media struggling through the five stages of grief continues as no lesser unbiased foundation of the fourth estate than The Washington Post pushes ahead with its "fake news, blame the Russians" narrative for why their candidate failed so miserably. Citing "two teams of independent researchers" (who surely have a substantial libel litigation provision) who found "Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery... echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal," the Jeff Bezos-owned website names Drudge, Zero Hedge, and The Ron Paul Institute and countless other outlets among the "useful...

Republican Sen. Rand Paul said on Wednesday that polls showing Hillary Clinton with a lead over Donald Trump are "designed to suppress turnout." "You know, I think sometimes polling is done to dampen election turnout so when Trump says the thing's rigged, I'm not sure exactly what he means and I'm not sure I always agree with him," Paul said. "But I do think that when we say over and over someone can't win that is a form of rigging in the sense it is designed to suppress turnout." Trump has repeatedly said that the election is "rigged" in Clinton's...

Last week’s announcement of a record-breaking US aid package for Israel underscores how dangerously foolish and out-of-touch is our interventionist foreign policy. Over the next ten years, the US taxpayer will be forced to give Israel some $38 billion dollars in military aid. It is money we cannot afford going to a country that needs no assistance to maintain its status as the most powerful military in the Middle East. All US foreign aid is immoral and counterproductive. As I have often said, it is money taken from poor people in the US and sent to rich people overseas. That...

Ron Paul Institute Senior Fellow Adam Dick, in a Wake Up Call Podcast interview posted on Friday, argues that Libertarian Party presidential and vice-presidential nominees Gary Johnson and Bill Weld have drug the term “libertarian” through the mud with their advocacy of anti-libertarian positions on matters ranging from their choices for Supreme Court appointments to PATRIOT Act reauthorization to foreign intervention to the use of terror watch lists to outlaw people possessing guns. Dick addresses the Libertarian presidential ticket during an in-depth discussion of his new book, A Tipping Point for Liberty: Exposing and Defeating Leviathan Government. During Dick’s...

The historic U.K. vote to leave the European Union is a sign of a major global meltdown, not just a watershed that marks the end of a unified continent, former Rep. Ron Paul says. "I think [the EU] will become nonfunctional," Paul told CNBC's " Futures Now " on Tuesday. "It really is coming to an end. It doesn't mean tomorrow or the next day, but people are going to be really unhappy. The end is coming, but it isn't coming because of the breakup," he added. Paul attributed the fallout to "bad fiscal policies" around the globe. He said...

Neoconservative by birth, Bill Kristol, apparently thinks the libertarian moment is over. Kristol was in San Francisco yesterday and appeared at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for a "conversation with" event. He fielded questions from the audience and also the moderator neocon Kori Schake, mostly about Donald Trump. At one point, he named a list of non-mainstream Republican candidates that had their moment in the sun and then faded away. This included Ron and Rand Paul. "We beat back Ron Paul and Rand Paul," he said. Implying that they were nothing but a footnote in Republican history.

May 31, 2016 Jeff_Berwick It seems barely a day passes now without some big name person warning of imminent collapse. The latest is Alan Greenspan. In an interview on Thursday he told Fox News that Venezuela is now under martial law and that “America is next.” He said that what was happening in Venezuela was inevitably going to take place in the US. I agree with this. In fact, we said this exact thing just last week with our article, “Venezuela Descends Into Chaos… Europe and US Next.” Funny enough, a few brainwashed sheeple said we were crazy for saying...

Former Texas Republican Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul confirmed in an interview with the Fox Business Network that he will not be supporting Donald Trump for United States president. He said in jest that he’s waiting for Trump to become a libertarian. When asked if there’s anything that Trump could say that would help change his mind, Paul replied that he wouldn’t know what to believe since “he’s all over the map.” The entire four-minute interview is embedded below: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) This is different from his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who said he will support the GOP nominee,...

It’s always a sad day when someone you admire tremendously, who has entertained and challenged you for years lets you down and reveals themselves to really stand up only for themselves instead of the ideas of freedom they claim to support. Reason Magazine highlights some deeply discouraging remarks from Penn Jillette, the libertarian co-host of the extraordinarily great Showtime show “Penn and Teller’s Bullsh*t”: Are there any groups you won’t go after? We haven’t tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tackled Islam because we have families.