Dave Smith: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, as you said, there’s integrity there. Can you speak to the ideas that Ron Paul represents? He says some of the things he’s been right about. Maybe can you speak about the economics, the Fed, and maybe war and being anti-military intervention? Well, I think it all came from the same central thesis, which is that the highest political value ought to be liberty. And that the government, by its very nature, is an instrument of force and tyranny. And therefore, the more government you have, the less liberty you have. I think he was way ahead of his time in really calling out the corruption in DC and I think that’s one of the things, it’s a common through line between the Federal Reserve and government spending, and of course this crazy war industry that our country has. So there’s a lot of components to that. But essentially Ron Paul was talking about draining the swamp way before it was this dominate mass message. And I think Ron Paul in many ways he laid the groundwork in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Not saying that he leads to Donald Trump, but he laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be able to get up at the South Carolina Republican primary debate and look at Jeb Bush and say, “Your brother lied us into war.” You know what I mean? And to have the Republicans agree with him. These were a lot of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war and even mocked their liberal fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. And a lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did and people waking up to how messed up all these wars were. And I think that at least there were a couple of major things for me at the time. So I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul, it was in 2007 was when I first saw him, and then started obsessively reading all of his books. So I was young, born in ’83. So what did that mean? 23, 24 when I first met him. So I was a young guy, and at least for me at the time, there were two categories in my naive mind where, okay, there were the liberals who supported big government at home, but were skeptical about big government abroad or they’re skeptical about wars. And then there were the conservatives who said that they supported small government, limited government at home, but were always on the side of whatever the next war is. And at least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy who came along and said, no, I’m for limited government here and abroad. And it was kind of like a portal where you could access a different perspective on the world. And then once you saw that, you were like, “Wait, that’s actually what makes sense.” What is it exactly that all the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and even Milton Friedman and guys like that, and Thomas Sowell, and it’s like you want a constitutionally limited world empire? That’s what you guys stand for, because that doesn’t fit together at all. And so why is it that we were taking this as a given? Sowell, and it’s like you want a constitutionally limited world empire? That’s what you guys stand for, because that doesn’t fit together at all. And so why is it that we were taking this as a given? And then of course, the more you look into it, you realize that, okay, those two things do make sense together. And then also that in the initial wave of the original progressives, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR, these were people who were pushing big government at home and big government abroad. And that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. And to oppose that would be the Ron Paul worldview. And then the other thing for me, and this was my introduction to Ron Paul, and this too, to me was kind of a portal in a way. At least in my naive, not fully functioned brain or fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever, it was a way for me to get, I tapped into something that was outside the empire, and I had heard a lot. I was already against George W. Bush, and I didn’t like the war. I had already figured out, I think this war in Iraq is bullshit. And I think that we were lied into it. And so I kind of got that. And then there were liberals and left-wingers who I knew. I grew up in New York City, so I was very familiar with the left-wing perspective who are critical of George W. Bush for fighting the war and signing the Patriot Act into law and things like that. But I had never really heard anybody break it down the way Ron Paul did when he basically was like, “Look, there’s a reason why these terrorists hate us, and it’s not what they’re telling you. They don’t hate us for our freedom.” I remember the way Pat Buchanan put it, which I always loved, he said, “Dick Cheney makes it sound like Osama bin Laden stumbled in the deserts of Afghanistan. He stumbled onto a copy of our Bill of Rights somewhere.” And he was like, “Oh my God, they’re free. Look at this speedy trial. Are you kidding me? What is going on here? They can own guns and their women can wear mini skirts.” And that just made people so angry that they were ready to suicide bomb themselves. That makes no sense at all. And then Ron Paul was just like, “No, look, here’s the thing. If we think we can just go around the world killing people, propping up dictatorships, putting our military bases in the Muslims holy land and not engender hatred from that, then we do that at our own peril.” And I thought it was such an interesting kind of… it had always been, I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and to me it was always a given that America’s number one we’re the force for good in the world.…

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