Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,
Former congressman Ron Paul is outspoken. When he retired from Congress, he called lawmakers psychopathic authoritarians to their faces. He’s also called Donald Trump an authoritarian and asserted Hillary Clinton could have run as a Republican. And just last week, Paul took aim at the foundational structure of American ‘democracy.’
In a recent episode of his web show, the Liberty Report, Ron Paul discussed the Department of Homeland Security’s decision last month to take a more active role in U.S. elections. Secretary Jeh Johnson said he was “considering whether elections should be classified as ‘critical infrastructure,’ affording them the same kinds of enhanced protections that the banking system and the electrical grid receive,” POLITICO reported.
The potential move came on the heels of the notorious DNC leak in July, which exposed intentions within the Democratic Party to manipulate the primary race against Senator Bernie Sanders. Politicians and the media quickly blamed the hack on Russia, failing to cite conclusive proof of their allegations yet spawning the narrative that the Kremlin and other foreign threats could compromise U.S. elections.
On his show, Paul took issue with the notion that the Department of Homeland Security, an agency riddled with incompetence and failed objectives — case in point, the TSA — is capable of securing U.S. elections.
Speaking on DHS’s decision to become more involved in the process following the DNC hack, Ron Paul offered a scathing indictment of the federal organization, arguing it will capitalize on troubling events to seize power:
“They may have false flags and they may do a lot of things, but no matter how an emergency comes up, they’re going to make use of it. And the use of it isn’t to say ‘Hey, how are we going to protect the American people?’ Are they worrying, when they talk about doing something about rigged elections, [that] the votes are counted? No, they’re making sure that the votes aren’t counted and they’re irrelevant and the government has all this power.”
Ron Paul speaks about rigged elections from personal experience. In 2012, when he ran for president within the Republican Party, he was silenced by the media and the political establishment. Primaries and caucuses in Maine and other states showed irregularities, and at more than one caucus event, the lights were simply turned off when Paul supporters stood up to Republican leadership. At another caucus, police assaulted and arrested them.
“The elections don’t matter. This is a ritual that we go through,” Paul observed last week. Instead, he referenced a seemingly omnipotent power much more influential than the ‘will of the people.’
“My belief is that the control is the Deep State, and people have to realize that,” he said.
Michael Lofgren, a former Republican congressional aide, has written extensively on the Deep State and describes it as “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
Lofgren continues:
“The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.”
Lofgren notes the financial system is also under the influence of the Deep State and that certain areas of the judicial system, namely, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, are manipulated by the opaque, shadowy apparatus.
As Ron Paul observed:
“Those powers are already there and I think those individuals who are behind the scenes who really find out what the policies are going to be, regardless of who’s in office, know exactly what we argue: that this place, our country, and our financial system and foreign policy is very precarious and something terrible is going to happen.”
One of those things, he argued, is the continued usurpation of civil liberties:
“This is where the real enemy is right now. Sure, we have to have a national defense. But I don’t agitate and read and study and try to change people’s minds because I think somebody is going to invade us. I want to change foreign policy so we are less in danger. But really, the greatest danger since 9/11 has been the taking away of our liberties. Our civil liberties have been undermined. This will only add fuel to the problems we have already.”
He concluded:
“We do accept the notion that our elections are rigged, but we certainly don’t come down on the side of believing that the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA will unrig our elections.”
“It is a distressing thing to think that — [this is probably a] true statement — no matter what you do [with] your vote, whether you vote or not, the Deep State is in charge and that is what we have to deal with.”
Nevertheless, Paul remained positive:
“But it is good to be politically active, to preach this message, to show people exactly what the government’s doing to us and why we should be involved.”
“But of course, the whole purpose, in the end, has to be that we change our economic philosophy, we change our attitude about protection of our civil liberties, and we change our attitude about getting involved in the internal affairs of other nations, occupying other countries, and being involved in nation-building. If we do those three little things then, believe me, the world would be much more peaceful and we would all be much more prosperous.”
Something really terrible happened to our country over the last half-century, give or take a decade. Coincidentally (or not), it seems to have started about the time I showed up in the world (early 60s.)
As I told an old friend just yesterday: I don’t think there are a lot of true coincidences.
Follow my logic with this.
My grandfather, descended from a “Sir” knighted by Queen Victoria and the “son of a pioneer” (as family folklore goes) had his roots planted firmly in Colonial soil with a small community in Virginia named for his ancestors who settled on the land grant from Victoria. I had the privilege as a young lass of 14 to sleep on the porch* of one of those grand colonial homes tucked away in the Smokey Mountain Ridges of western Virginia, knowing that my presence in the world was resultant from the same person who built and lived in that grand red brick home with the white columns. To a young gal from bumfuque nowhere who had been raised to believe her father’s WWII POW status elevated him above all men because he “sacrificed” for the country this rich British country gentleman had left his homeland to help create, there was a profound message in hearing the silence of the Virginia mountain forest around us in the cool of the early August morning in 1977.
Forty years down the line, I think about all that has happened to our country since I stood on that back porch watching my aunt turn a few blankets and a mat into our resting place for the evening, perfectly content to lie down beside her and gaze at the stars and talk until we both fell asleep. Completely without fear, I wadded a couple of extra T-shirts up for a pillow and drifted off to sleep wondering why that very nice old couple who now owned the home stayed in that home, keeping most of it sealed off for economic reasons.
At that time, Vietnam was beginning to fade as “the military topic de jeur” and everyone was hoping that Watergate was finally over. There was talk about this peanut farmer from Georgia who might become president and my aunt and I rode back from my summer in Norfolk with my cousin (her son), who married into “old Virginia stock” and gave me a glimpse of what eastern culture was like. In the olden days of the 70s, a country girl from Missouri could be shown an opera, see the crowded beaches of Virginia and historic sights around Colonia Virginia on a shoestring budget. Then, on a whim, you could travel to the nation’s Capital to stroll the Mall and ride the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument so one day, my aunt had taken me there, as well. During the subsequent drive back to Missouri from the little cove in Virginia, my aunt and I noted growing numbers of hitchhikers as we drove across Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee. We would NEVER have picked them up, but we made a great game of my putting chunks of ice into little plastic bags (had Ziploc bags been invented then???) with a note taped on saying “We know you hope we have a ride, but we can’t fit you all inside. Since we know the road is hot, just have some ICE, it’s all we got!” My aunt would slow to around 40 mph when we got near a group and I would carefully slide the bag out the window so it would skid along the pavement instead of banging into someone’s head. Crazy, huh?
(Imagine how quickly I’d get shot or arrested in today’s environment.)
I may add to this later, but for now I just wanted to point out the extreme shift I see through my very own eyes in our nation’s social, geographic and interpersonal character. And when I say geographic… I really do mean geographic. The low hills in Missouri where my aunt lived as a young woman in the 1960s is now a cavern that has been strip-mined for kitty litter clay. It is now a wasteland that holds several ugly kitty litter shipping industrial buildings and hundreds of cars which bring low paid workers to the site daily.
So, following my meandering logic… The colonial home in Virginia still stands, I hear, part of an effort to preserve historical sights for no other reason than that they are old and “somebody” once slept there. But the country itself is going through chaotic shift (perhaps even a turning) from rational thought and behavior that has allowed everything that made this country even exist beyond the crazy ramblings of a few white men who wanted to stop having a king tell them what to do… turning from calm reasoned thought toward an insanity brought on by the arrogance of the do-gooder-wannabe-brigade (can I Copyright that term?) until we no longer know how to even say what we mean because we aren’t even sure of what we are allowed to say or think.
I’m not saying that I am to blame, but it does seem quite a coincidence, doesn’t it?
*my aunt and I were invited to sleep inside in a guest room, but insisted on the opportunity to breathe the same air as our adventurous ancestor. In this way, my aunt taught me how to limit one’s intrusiveness as unexpected guests, as well as how to preposition oneself for an early morning continuance on one’s journey.
Something terrible is happening to the entire world. But it is terrible and wonderful at the same time. On the one hand, 7 billion people get to experience life “in all its glory”. I have to believe that in general, from a spiritual perspective, this is a good thing. But when dealing with such large numbers, each individual sect of society also grows to very large numbers. It is the sect of society that succumbs so easily to manipulation that worries me…. And the sheer number of people who have both the means and the desire to manipulate worries me more. And to what end? Manipulating groups of people simply to enrich oneself is nothing new to humanity. But this manipulation where the end result seems to be a dumbed down servile population of unquestioning, obeying drones? To what end does it serve?
RP should know, he never changed anything in 30 years of yammering about the FED.
Don’t be a dick. At least he tried. What have you done about it?
I Resent that comment
Puppets on strings “one and all” and we the public bicker amongst ourselves over trivialities going nowhere while the masters snicker with glee of planned war mongering and land grabs and our mentality of wealth being nothing more than mere digits on a screen. (sic)
Well Ma…they damn sure are trying to confiscate our weapons ….must be a reason for that
“He never changed anything in 30 years of yammering about the FED”. You ( and your shit congressman ) helped him how?
“Ron Paul never did anything” is the stupidest fucking statement imaginable.
Fine, sum up what he did Steve. How did he stop any of this shit sandwich?
Daddy Steve ,what’s wrong with you ? Need a hug ?
Washington needs some serious changes.
If nothing matters, why do you post here?
Per the comment in the thread by someone from NJ, that was hopefully not directed at me as that would violate his own rules about not shitting in each other’s yard.
The teacher appears when the student is ready.
Ron Paul’s raising the alarm for the last three decades may have gone unheard because we didn’t know enough, not that he is/was a bore. I know I didn’t have near the understanding then, pre-internet, as I do now. One man in the House of Representatives was a big shot up until the foundational link to gold was removed from our currency. Now the entire Congress ain’t much – it’s all about the bankers. The spice must flow.
Now Ron Paul makes sense.
Ron Paul will forever be known as one of the last great Statesmen of this era. He is a man of moral conviction and integrity. His tireless pursuit to awaken as many sheeple as possible to the corruption and deception perpetrated on the commonwealth by the parasitic class is a true testament to this great mans resolve to embrace the truth and share it with those that remain asleep. His positive demeanor and continual optimism to restore this countries founding principals provide inspiration and hope to us all.
I voted for Perot. Anyone else willing to admit that?
Maggie
I am always the bad guy when it comes to RP around here. I have always contended that his message was great BUT and that’s a big but he was controlled op just like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, etc.
The massage was spot on from RP but he was/is completely ineffective and did nothing to stop the shit sandwich but talk. He is a very good talker, I will give him that.
Now they will down me once again for telling the truth……Oh well.
I just realized Ron Paul and Ross Perot have the same initials.
RP.
Things that make you go hmmm.
Oh, I never got a massage from either of them.