Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested a United States war with Mexico last week during his interview with Juan Hernandez, who Carlson introduced as having been an advisor to former Mexico President Vicente Fox. In the interview focused on the prospect of state- or national-level legalization of heroin production in Mexico, Carlson emphatically asks his guest, “Why shouldn’t we consider it an act of aggression, an act of war, for the country that is the primary — and no one else comes close — supplier of this deadly drug into our country to consider making it easier to bring that drug here?”
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
George Washington grew hemp at his Mount Vernon farm in Virginia. Many other American farmers of his era also grew hemp, including fellow Founder and Virginian Thomas Jefferson. This was long before hemp farming was prohibited in the 20th century along with the growing of high-THC cannabis commonly called marijuana.
In a sign of the return of some lost liberty to America, hemp was once again grown and harvested at Mount Vernon this year. The reintroduction of hemp plants at Mount Vernon was made possible by a change in United States law included in the 2014 “farm bill” allowing colleges, universities, and states’ agriculture departments to grow hemp for research purposes in compliance with state laws.
Over the first five years of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity’s (RPI) existence, John McCain, the long-time Republican United States senator from Arizona, has often been a focus of the institute’s attention — though quite a bit less since his sickness removed him from much of his involvement in politics. This focus stems from McCain having been an exemplar in the US government of adherence to nearly the opposite agenda as the agenda supported by RPI Founder and Chairman Ron Paul.
While Ron Paul worked in the US House of Representatives and founded RPI to advocate for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home, McCain was advocating for war abroad and restraints on liberty at home.
Many people are expressing shock about President Donald Trump announcing last week that he was revoking former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan’s security clearance. Trump’s action even violates Brennan’s First Amendment right to free speech, some people claim. Nonsense, responds Patrick Buchanan this week in an insightful editorial. Nobody has a right to a security clearance, argues Buchanan. Indeed, Buchanan proposes that the best course is to revoke routinely many Americans’ security clearances.
In July of 2016, Nick Turse wrote at The Intercept about “1,700 Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and other military personnel” who were then “carrying out 78 distinct ‘mission sets’ in more than 20 nations” across Africa. This military activity is in line with the increased United States military focus on Africa that Turse described three years earlier in his Tom Dispatch article “The Pivot to Africa: The Startling Size, Scope, and Growth of U.S. Military Operations on the African Continent.” By October of last year, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford was acknowledging the US had “a little over 6,000 forces … in about 53 different countries” in Africa.
This week at The intercept, Turse provides an important update on one aspect of the increased focus on Africa — a US drone base under construction in a remote Niger location that is “the largest base-building effort ever undertaken by troops in the history of the U.S. Air Force, according to Richard Komurek, a spokesperson for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa.”
President Donald Trump says he wants to improve relations between the United States and Russia, and he met in July with Russia President Vladimir Putin largely in a purported effort to move toward this goal. Yet, the Trump administration continues to send more US troops and military equipment to along the Russia border, including in Norway. Around 300 US Marines were deployed to Norway in the final days of the Barack Obama administration. Then, last week, Reuters reported that the Trump administration will soon more than double to 700 the number of Marines in Norway and that some Marines will be stationed closer than before to Norway’s border with Russia.
Reading Rutherford Institute President John W. Whitehead’s Monday editorial “From Boston to Ferguson to Charlottesville: The Evolution of a Police State Lockdown,” I wanted to find out more about an arrest Whitehead mentions took place over the weekend in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. Following a link in Whitehead’s editorial to a Daily Progress article by Allison Wrabel, I found that John Miska, a local individual who was arrested for defying some of the draconian restrictions government imposed in the city last weekend, provides a heroic example of resistance to the police state and martial law conditions about which Whitehead warns in the editorial.
“Do you think that President Trump is a neocon?” That is the first question host Jason Burack asked guest Ron Paul, who is chairman of the Ron Paul Institute and a former United States House of Representative member, in a new Wall Street for Main Street podcast interview. “Probably not in the true sense of the word,” replies Paul, “but that does not mean that he isn’t influenced by the neocons,” which Paul says Trump “obviously is.”
Interviewed Tuesday at RT, libertarian communicator Ron Paul weighed in on social media companies’ purges this week that have affected individuals including popular talk show host Alex Jones and Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams. Paul argues that purges undertaken by social media companies often are motivated by a desire to silence people “challenging the status quo,” instead of the purported reasons social media companies offer related to “terms of service.” He also chides the companies for doing “the work for the NSA,” or the National Security Agency, in conducting mass surveillance.