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As 25,000 US National Guard troops from across the country are deployed in a Washington, DC, that looks like a ghost town, surely one of the strangest US presidential inaugurations in history will take place. With DC as literally a military-occupied zone, protecting an empty city for a virtual inauguration, is this all security theater? A warning? A taste of things to come?
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Dr. Ron Paul, libertarian and former Congressman, about Big tech censorship, threats to freedom of speech, and his being caught up in the social media purge which resulted in him being temporarily censored on Facebook. Ron will discuss the power of social media censorship to silence platforms like Parler, sitting presidents like Donald Trump as well as any voices outside the mainstream. He will also discuss how the Joe Biden cabinet is packed with people who, while decrying the violence of Trump supporters storming the Capitol building, have been involved in real coups around the world in previous administrations.
Benito Mussolini said that "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." When surveying modern events, along with events over the last century, is this not the major problem that we face today?
By Ron Paul
With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the US Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups. Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however. Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died. Take returning Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, for example. More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared. Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded - after thousands of civilians were killed. As we were unfortunately reminded during the last four years of the Trump Administration, the personnel is the policy. So while President Trump railed against the “stupid wars” and promised to bring the troops home, he hired people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to get the job done. They spent their time “clarifying” Trump’s call for ending wars to mean he wanted to actually continue the wars. It was a colossal failure. So it’s hard to be optimistic about a Biden Administration with so many hyper-interventionist Obama retreads. While the US Agency for International Development (USAID) likes to sell itself as the compassionate arm of the US foreign policy, in fact USAID is one of the main US “regime change” agencies. Biden has announced that a top “humanitarian interventionist” – Samantha Power – would head that Agency in his Administration. Power, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council staff and as US Ambassador to the UN, argued passionately and successfully that a US attack on the Gaddafi government in Libya would result in a liberation of the people and the outbreak of democracy in the country. In reality, her justification was all based on lies and the US assault has left nothing but murder and mayhem. Gaddafi’s relatively peaceful, if authoritarian, government has been replaced by radical terrorists and even slave markets. At the end of the day, the Bush Republicans – like Rep. Liz Cheney – will join hands with the Biden Democrats to reinstate “American leadership.” This of course means more US overt and covert wars overseas. The unholy alliance between Big Tech and the US government will happily assist the US State Department under Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with the technology to foment more “regime change” operations wherever the Biden Administration sees fit. Finish destroying Syria and the secular Assad? Sure! Go back into Iraq? Why not? Afghanistan? That’s the good war! And Russia and China must be punished as well. These are grave moments for we non-interventionists. But also we have a unique opportunity, informed by history, to denounce the warmongers and push for a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy.
Washington, DC has been turned into a war zone for this week's "virtual" presidential inauguration, with 20,000 National Guard troops and mass closures of bridges, roads, and the Metro. Is there a real threat of another "insurrection," or is there some over-hyping going on?
The choice that every individual must make, and the resulting civilization (of lack of civilization) that results from the choice, is always the same. It's either peace, voluntary cooperation and exchange -- or force, violence, politics, and war. Every epoch is marked by the choices that are made.
We're very pleased to have Jeff Deist, President of the Mises Institute, join us to discuss ways of dealing with Big Tech censorship. Be sure to visit https://www.Mises.org  Corporatism = Government & Corporation Marriage, Free Markets = Government & Corporation Divorce1/14/2021
 By Chris Rossini There are always authoritarians mixed throughout the human population. These are people who have chosen to believe they should be the boss of, not only themselves, but everyone else as well. The most notorious authoritarians have always been tied to government in some way, since government is force. But authoritarianism is not exclusive to government. People in any field or occupation can have the same lust to dominate as any politician can. But again, because of the nature of government being force, authoritarians are usually drawn to it like a magnet. These misguided individuals are difficult because they never want to leave anyone else alone. In their minds, they can't leave others alone. They're supposed to tell everyone else what to do. This can be quite daunting at times, especially when authoritarians have a lot of believers that want to be told what to do. This reinforcing relationship of the blind leading the blind will then drag society as a whole into a downward spiral. Fortunately, there are always limits, and it's important to keep in mind some key thoughts, especially when the downward spiral escalates:
Now, as liberating as the above is, does this mean authoritarians are a non-issue? No it does not! Authoritarians are actors in this world, just like everyone else. As such, they choose their values and beliefs and then act on them. Those actions create consequences and results. Those consequences, because they come from misguided beliefs and actions, produce bad results for everyone else. Much of human history, and especially the 1900's has been dominated heavily by authoritarian ideas. Hundreds of millions have perished as a consequence of those misguided ideas and subsequent actions. Those ideas, in case you haven't noticed, are still believed and embraced by many individuals today. They want to believe that authoritarian ideas can produce different results. They can't. So, authoritarians are a serious issue, always. The antidote to a bad idea is a good idea: individual liberty. When the ideas of individual liberty dominate, the authoritarians have to take a back seat, and society goes into an upward spiral. Authoritarian ideas are never gone. They are always a choice for people to accept and embrace. So the best that can happen (in any time period) is that authoritarianism is kept at bay. And the only way for it to be kept at bay is for enough individuals to accept and embrace the glorious ideas of liberty. 
After the January 6th mob ruckus inside the US Capitol building, the US House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rushed to put together articles of impeachment (again) for President Trump. Trump, they claim, led an insurrection on that day and must be held accountable. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley recently wrote in The Hill of the dangers of lowering the bar for impeachment. Do the House Democrats have a point that Trump must be removed from office days before he is removed from office, or is Impeachment 2.0 as much of a farce as Impeachment 1.0?
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