05/06/15 – Charles Goyette – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
You heard a little bit of laughter in my voice there.
It wasn't from the onion thing.
It was because I was thinking of when I was younger, driving a cab around, I would pass out copies of Ron Paul speeches from the House of Representatives, you know, printed out.
And I would I would tell the people in my cab, look, check it out.
I know you think I'm crazy.
I probably am.
I'd tell the people in my cab, check it out.
There's one good congressman.
No, I know.
I know you would never believe that there's one good congressman.
But actually, there's one good congressman.
And here's his great speech that he gave.
Here, read this.
And that was because I didn't have a radio show at the time.
Wished I had one.
Anyway, so yeah, I've been loving Ron Paul since 1997.
And you know who also loves Ron Paul?
It's Charles Goyette, our good friend, formerly the most independent talk show host in America and author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red, Blue and Broke All Over.
And my good buddy, he's at CharlesGoyette.com.
Welcome back to the show, Charles.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's always great to talk to you.
I'm doing great.
So you love Ron Paul, do you?
Hey, you know, he needs to, the name Ron Paul, you know, I get a lot of this.
You probably do, too.
Somebody said, oh, you're doing something with Rand Paul.
I go, no, Ron Paul.
And so I don't want the, you know, I don't want the Ron Paul's accomplishments to kind of get diluted and confused with some of the other stuff that's going on in politics.
And now that he's no longer, you know, in Washington, I think it's a good time to kind of chisel into stone what Ron Paul's accomplishments have been and the motion that he gave to the freedom movement in this country.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, so when I'm going back to the early 2000s talking about him, he was basically the best kept secret of every libertarian in America.
It was like there are two or three libertarians in every neighborhood, and they all loved him, but nobody else had ever heard of him.
Right?
So it's like, oh, wow, check it out on C-SPAN.
Ron Paul's talking.
Everybody shut up.
It's Ron Paul.
But he was this kind of, I don't want to say a fringe figure because he's not fringe really, but it's just the amount of exposure that he ever got.
And then what happened was he ran for president, and that changed everything.
Those were pretty heady days in 2007 when he became a presidential candidate.
It was galvanizing times, wasn't it?
I mean, what about that moment when Rudy Giuliani, the long-since-forgotten former mayor boy of New York, tried to call him out in one of those presidential debates, and Ron said, I demand you retract that.
And Ron leaned in, and he raised his finger, and he said no.
And people across America are going, wait a minute.
Hold the phone.
Hold the corn.
There's somebody different in here.
That's never been allowed in a presidential debate before.
So those were pretty exciting times, and he awakened a lot of people.
And a lot of them were students and young people at the time.
You think about that.
2008, that was seven years ago.
Those are people starting to move into positions of more influence and impact in the world around them, and it remains to be seen yet what impact the Ron Paul revolution will ultimately have, but it will certainly have one on the national conversation in this country.
And now, so he's my favorite legislator in all of world history, and it's not because he did a lot of reforming and this and that while he was in there, because as he's explained before, he'd have had to trade those votes for a lot of other votes, and he's not really never was in a position to do that.
So as a critic once wrote to the Houston Chronicle, he always just went to Washington, D.C., to write articles, give speeches, and vote no, and just try to set an example as best he could.
And then when he ran for president, I think we all kind of knew that it would have taken an honest media, willing to give him a fair shake as much as they're willing to give Michelle Bachmann or any of these other coops who they're more than fair to, and it would have taken maybe much more than that for him to really have had a shot at the nomination in the presidency, running in a Republican Party, and in a country where he could have probably got the raw numbers of people to support him, but how to get them all into the Republican Party in time for the primaries and the caucuses and in an organized way, that's kind of a different issue.
I don't know how possible that ever was, but it doesn't matter because ultimately either way, it was the greatest speaking tour on behalf of the enlightenment principles that this nation was founded on, in part, that ever happened.
You've got two issues going there, really, and these both play a part in Empire of Lies, the documentary that I'm going to do about Ron Paul and Empire of Lies.
I was going to ask you about that in a minute.
Yeah, but you know, they both play a part because first of all, I want to take dead aim at the lapdog press that you identified, who tried to bury the news of the Ron Paul revolution.
In the course of doing some preparatory work, I look back at an interview that Ron Paul did with Bill O'Reilly in 2007, and it's very plain to see.
I mean, we have the benefit of plenty of hindsight.
Besides being informed by some wisdom from the libertarian perspective and the historical precedence, we now have eight years' benefit of hindsight, and you watch this interview, it's available on YouTube, virtually everything Bill O'Reilly said was wrong, wrong, wrong, and everything that Ron Paul said was right, right, right.
And you look at this, and still O'Reilly's making $30 million a year or whatever, and still bloviating from the lead chair on cable television, despite the fact that he's been wrong, wrong, wrong about everything.
But the whole lapdog, the whole statist media should be the shame of the American people, and it is particularly, it's very visible, it plays out large in the story of Ron Paul's candidacy.
You get guys like Bob Schieffer at CBS News, the disdain with which these people would treat Ron Paul for daring to question the governing classes and the Washington consensus.
And so there was Bob Schieffer, and he could barely constrain his contempt for Ron when Ron would challenge something that we all know now in hindsight we was right about.
But oh, Bob Schieffer, he visibly swooned when George W. Bush appeared on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a flight suit.
Oh, and he helped propagate the lies about weapons of mass destruction.
These guys are wrong, wrong, wrong.
But the contempt, I'm going to show it.
Maybe I won't even play his comments.
I'll just show the disdain, the hateful, disgusting look on Bob Schieffer's face when Ron Paul refuses to go along with the Washington consensus on Meet the Press.
It is a sight to behold, Scott.
Yeah, no, I remember that one well.
Bob Schieffer, I think, was at least as bad as the very worst of them.
But back to the greatest speaking tours on behalf of liberty and, as you mentioned, real history, sound economics.
That never happened ever.
And how much things change.
Like I said before, nobody ever heard of this guy before.
And then in hearing of this guy, they heard of libertarianism and not some kind of wishy-washy, Cato-y libertarianism.
But we demand the abolition of the central bank and the empire libertarianism, right for exactly what the people want to hear.
It's like you mentioned with the Giuliani thing.
The reason people were so shocked is because they know that no politician on that level would ever tell the truth about what the government is really doing with us.
And he's this kind, old, grandfatherly sort of a guy, and he's perfectly happy to tell you exactly what he thinks you need to know, regardless of your feelings, but only because he loves you.
Only because he's trying to help.
And some people, they just latched right on to that.
I know I can trust this guy.
Here's a guy who clearly is not a liar, unlike the rest of them.
And then Giuliani says, well, I've never heard such a thing in all my days.
And so they run a press conference the next day or two, and he says, here's some reading that his Giuliani-ishness might want to actually consider so that he could be informed.
And maybe he ought to read Chalmers Johnson, and maybe he ought to read Michael Scheuer, and maybe he ought to figure out what drives suicide bombers.
And here's an academic book from a University of Chicago professor that's actually looked into the matter.
And maybe he ought to do a little reading and become informed.
Oh, it was wonderful, Scott.
It was a great time to give these guys their comeuppance and to see people kind of flock to the banner of a truth teller for a change.
Yeah.
And then, you know, this is kind of a problem for liberals.
Some of them figured it out, but others really knee-jerked that, you know, how dare this, you know, right-wing Republican congressman from Texas be better on all this stuff than all of them.
So, hey, as long as Barry's doing the bombing, it ain't too bad, right, guys?
Yeah.
Anyway, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with the great Charles Goyette, talk all about his brand-new project.
Well, I'll spoil it.
No, I won't.
Hang tight, guys.
Just a sec.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm me.
This is my show.
On the line I got my good friend Charles Goyette.
So we're talking about how much we love Ron Paul and how grateful we are for his awesome campaigns for the presidency and all the libertarianism that he's spread and the evil of the media overlords who successfully, to a degree, froze him out and all the rest of that.
So, Charles, tell me, what are you doing about it?
Well, I tell you what, I'm going to do a documentary about Ron Paul, and it's not a biography.
It's not about who his playmates were as a kid or where he met his wife or anything.
I'm sure those things are all interesting to people, but I'm going to do a documentary about Ron Paul that actually deals with the nature of the state.
And, in fact, it's called Empire of Lies from that great quote of Ron Paul's that will make it in all the quotation books that truth is treason in the empire of lies.
So I'm going to do a documentary.
The target date for release is sometime during the primaries when people are paying a lot of attention to politics this time next year.
And to do it, to fund it, I thought, Scott, it was absolutely important to keep this thing independent.
And so I turned to the Ron Paul supporters, the libertarians, the grassroots freedom movement in America.
As you know, I've got plenty of years of experience in the media business in corporate America.
And in deciding to do a Ron Paul biographical documentary, I knew the one thing I didn't want to do was go to corporate funding, go to the big media institutions, because with that you lose control of the story, and I didn't want to make their weak or watered-down story.
So I started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the documentary, and the documentary is called Empire of Lies, and you can find it online.
If you go to Kickstarter Empire of Lies, you can find it right there.
And so that's what I'm doing.
And we've had great people in the freedom movement supporting this effort.
Dr. Paul, in fact, has agreed to a private dinner with the top contributors to this effort, people that are really writing a check to the documentary project.
So I have a private dinner with him, limited to a very small number of people, the 20 leading contributors, because it will give people a chance to actually talk to him and interact with him instead of going to some big dinner somewhere.
We've got people that have given books.
Tom Woods is sending autographed copies of his book.
Lou Rockwell has autographed copies of his last book.
David Stockman said, how many do you want?
And I said, well, maybe five or ten.
He said, I'll send you 20.
Do this documentary, he said.
So I've got a lot of people who have contributed things, just as kind of thank yous and sort of rewards for participating in the funding of a documentary.
And we're just bursting at the seams to start principal photography.
We have to finish the fundraising here over the course of the next month.
All right, now hang on.
I want to play this clip real quick.
Until now.
I've had a lot of other groups doing this, with some reluctance, either my position or the individual's ability to understand the philosophy.
And that's where I felt comfortable, because I've known you now for a couple of years and way back in radio times.
And I've read your books.
And in these last two years, we've gotten to know each other very well.
And we've done a lot of work on podcasts as well as radio ads, not five or ten, but into the hundreds.
So we have spent a lot of time on this.
So one thing that I know with certainty is you know the philosophy.
The media.
All right.
So, yeah, the media.
Yeah, no, the philosophy.
So that was Ron Paul telling Charles, this is why I chose you to do the documentary.
Yeah, and it's funny.
He's been approached over the years many, many times by all kinds of people to do a story like this.
People think it's commercially attractive, and it is.
But, you know, not all of them are really driven by spreading the message of liberty.
And that's clearly my interest as it is his.
So, yeah, I'm really honored that he's agreed to participate in this with me.
Yeah, well, and now so here's the thing.
Back to the point is the reason that Ron Paul is so important isn't because, you know, us libertarians, we're some wacky little sect, and this guy agrees with us on everything.
So, hey, let's have a barbecue or whatever.
The point is that he's right on all the most important things in the world, which are all of the worst things that our government is doing, torturing people and murdering people and starting wars and backing their enemies and fighting their friends and acting like madmen all the damn time.
And like we were talking about before, what's so great about this guy is somehow he's in the House of Representatives.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he delivered about a third of the residents of his precinct as an OBGYN.
So he had this safe district, and he was able to get up there and tell the damn truth that no one else will say about this empire of lies, as you put it, the most important issues of our time.
Yeah, it's a wonderful thing that he did, and, you know, I suppose one of my great joys in producing this is to be able to contrast what he said versus the authorities, versus the governing classes, versus the Washington consensus.
So, you know, there you get, you know, there you have, oh, I don't know, you got Ben Bernanke saying, well, the housing market, no, American housing market's never gone down, it's never going to go down, you know, just as it was teetering on the brink.
And then when it fell, he said, well, we've stopped the plunge.
You know, the hemorrhaging is over, and it was just getting going.
And then you had, you know, Alan Greenspan going, well, I didn't see it coming, and nobody saw it coming.
Well, of course people saw it coming.
The Austrian School Economist saw it coming.
Rod Paul not only saw it coming, but he wrote about it.
And so I'm providing, you know, the video clips of him on the floor of the house, talking about here's what's going to happen to American housing, and here is why, and here's the pretend solution that they will try it out.
But, you know, it's not just about that.
I mean, it's issue after issue after issue.
You know, it's Rod Paul standing alone in Washington versus the Washington consensus.
And over and over and over again, the authorities, the empowered ones, the chosen ones are proven wrong, and Rod Paul is proven right.
And he's going to go down as a pivotal historical figure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, let me know if you ever need a hand finding these clips, because I know they exist, of Ron talking specifically about the bubble in housing in the 90s, in the late 90s, and perhaps I think even before the dot-com bubble broke in the context of, and then once the dot-com bubble breaks, then we're going to see an increase in what we already have as a housing bubble.
And I know this is right, Charles, because it's the only explanation for the fact that I was good on this stuff back then at the turn of the millennium, that not only is the dot-com thing a giant fake bubble, and also, yes, I read J. Edward Griffin, and that helped, because there's a lot of Mises in there, but it was mostly because of Ron Paul and his speeches, that housing is a bubble too.
And, you know, I remember giving that advice to people who were buying houses, that you should wait until the bubble breaks and they go down.
I didn't realize it was going to take eight years, I guess, go ahead.
They were more or less at the bottom of the bubble at that point compared to how bad it got.
But anyway, you know, I know that just because that was how I knew that.
I was reading the Ron Paul, you know, weekly essay that he put out.
I would play his recorded message that he would leave on my little pirate radio show, and there he was explaining the boom and the bust, and how they switch from market to market, which one they inflate, and this and that, and all that.
And that was back, you know, 15 years ago now.
Oh, crap, music's playing?
Hang on, I'll turn that down.
See, I told you, I always blow the second break.
So anyway, yeah, man, that's the whole thing about this, is if you find an early clip of Ron Paul being right about something extremely important, keep looking, because you'll find an even earlier clip of him maybe being even better than that on it.
You know what I mean?
Like, I found great clips of him talking about causing terrorism against us in 98, but I found even better ones from 97, that kind of thing.
And then it's so easy to find the governing authorities, the ones that show up on the evening news, the ones that are invited to all the right places and given all the right offices and the high appointments and are set for life at the people's expense.
It's very easy to find them to contrast with Ron being wrong about everything.
Yeah, you'll never have a problem with that.
You could just get the interns to help with that and don't worry about it.
No special expertise required for that.
Just go back through the archives by date and then just plug the tape in and you got it right there.
But anyway, so yeah, man, this is great, and I appreciate the timing of it and all of that, and I do think it's real important.
I guess one more thing about that is that the way the media would have it is, boy, Rand better become more moderate instead of his kooky father and become more appealing to the center and this kind of thing.
And, of course, that's 100 percent wrong.
I mean, what appeal he has is that he's Ron Paul's son, and the more he defends his father's positions, the more he's right about everything.
His father being outside the consensus, as we've been discussing, is the mark of – it's a mark of how correct he's been all along, and people can examine on the specific issues themselves.
But anyway, so he needs to certainly maybe, I don't know, be reinforced, I guess, in the idea that running more like his father instead of less actually would increase his – improve his fortunes and endear him to people who – the people who supported his father and then some.
Well, there's been nobody like Ron Paul in my lifetime, and I don't expect that there will be another one like him for a very long time to come.
Yep, that's true.
All right, well, listen, so everybody go to CharlesGoyette.com, and you can find out all about this.
There's a YouTube – I put it out on my Twitter feed.
You can look at it, Empire of Lies Kickstarter campaign.
Just Google that, Empire of Lies Kickstarter campaign.
It is the official Ron Paul approved, as you just heard there, authorized documentary, and it is, again, on the issues, the most important issues, the bubbles, the wars, et cetera, and all of that from a radical libertarian perspective and a great piece of campaign year propaganda there.
So help support if you can.
Please help support.
Thank you very much for coming on the show, Charles.
Good to talk to you again.
Great to speak with you, Scott.
Thank you.
All right.
That's the great Charles Goyette.
Again, his great books are The Dollar Meltdown and Red, Blue, and Broke All Over that are both classics.
I mean both.
They're seriously really good, worth reading twice kind of material there.
And the Empire of Lies Kickstarter campaign, it's there on YouTube and at CharlesGoyette.com.
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