 A lot of you were here in this room, just a little bit over a year ago, and at the time it felt almost like a dissident meeting. You're coming out in the country and you're driving down these back roads and finding this place in the fog. It's a beautiful venue and we really appreciate it because last year they were the only venue around Lake Jackson area which would even take us, which would even have an event. So round of applause for Hidden Oaks, for taking it. And so this year they were the only venue around Lake Jackson which would guarantee us an event without masks. And that includes the Browse of Sport Community College, which I'm sure a lot of you helped to pay for with your taxes. So who would have thought a year later now, here we are, excuse my language, but man the sons of bitches have really kept this thing going, haven't they? I mean it's just unbelievable. Now we've got the fourth booster, we've got Omicron variant, we've got these new Biden travel restrictions, and we see what they're doing in Germany and Austria and Australia. I mean how many of you would have woken up even two or three years ago and thought you know a couple of years I won't be allowed to fly to Australia and go on vacation? Probably wouldn't have thought of that. So there are revolutions happening all around us, silent and otherwise. They're happening under our noses. And of course the Ron Paul revolution is having its own ramifications and so we're here to think about that and learn a little bit about that because revolutions don't always take the form of bullets and tanks and planes and a new government. I think some of you are probably familiar, we did a show on this recently, the great 1938 essay by Garrett Garrett, it's called The Revolution Was. And so Garrett was writing in the late 30s about FDR's revolution. So when he says the revolution was, what he meant, it passed tense, the revolution had already happened, it was behind us. And people weren't even aware that it had happened. Of course FDR had gone off the gold standard and created social security insurance and created giant new bureaucracies and all kinds of other things which radically changed America forever and really constituted a revolution. So there's a line in Garrett's essay which I think is so important for us today. I'm going to quote him, he says, you do not defend a world that is already lost. I think that's very profound when we think about Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 when we think about our own situation today, we have to understand we're not talking about going back to something. We're talking about building something anew. That's just where we are. And so, but we have to learn and think about the principles of the Ron Paul revolution when it comes to building that something anew. So when Garrett Garrett thought in the late 30s, you know, my world, he was born in the 1880s, he thought my world is lost, FDR has ruined it. For those of us who are more contemporary today, people let's say my age, you know, there was a very quiet revolution, our world was lost actually, I'm going to argue in the early 2000s when George W. Bush was president. Now a lot of us think of FDR and Wilson and Kennedy figures like that, Obama is transformative presidents, we think of the dumber ones like W. As caretaker presidents, let's just say, not true. The early 2000s constituted a revolutionist country. Now let's not forget, in 2001, only 20 years ago, 20 years ago, it's nothing, it's a blink of an eye. When George W. Bush entered office, there was about five trillion dollars worth of debt. Okay, it was still mathematically possible for us to wrestle that to the ground just 20 years ago, would have required some very unpleasant political things with entitlements and all that, but it was possible. It was still possible at that time. The Fed's balance sheet was well under a trillion dollars at the time, so it was a very different world. Over the next few years between, let's say, 2001 and 2004, a revolution happened under our noses, and it happened in about four different areas, they were all exceedingly unholy in retrospect. And the first one was, of course, the monetary revolution. The tech stock bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s had crashed, and Alan Greenspan essentially doubling down on his 1987 actions, the Greenspan put, he essentially said, from now on, we are going to do whatever it takes to prop up equity markets nominally, right? That's now the unwritten job of the Fed. So forget unemployment, forget inflation. The Fed now exists to prop up equity markets, and that's been the case ever since. We saw that in spades in 2007, 2008, of course, and ever since then. So that was a revolution in monetary policy, a silent one. There was also a revolution in the surveillance state. After 9-11, we had the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we had TSA, we had people like John Ashcroft and John Yu in the Bush administration coming up with the unitary executive theory We had U.S. citizens held without charges, without due process, without habeas corpus. We had renditions, remember that word? We had unlawful detentions of people. So that was really in the criminal justice and surveillance sense of our country. That was really a quiet revolution, and Americans accepted that without a shot fired. And we're still paying for that today, of course. The Patriot Act, who can forget that. But there was also a foreign policy revolution in the early 2000s. 9-11 happened, and the Bush, Wolfwoods, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Axis went into full effect. And they decided we're not even going to have a pretense anymore of saving the world for democracy like Woodrow Wilson. From now on, wars don't have ends. Wars are everlasting, they are continuous, and it's our job to police and promote American hegemony, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. And we're going to be in the Middle East forever and ever and ever, just like we are in Korea forever and ever and ever. So a quiet revolution in foreign policy. And the final revolution that happened under our noses during those early W years, the first term, was a fiscal and entitlement revolution. Some of you may remember, I know that Dr. Paul remembers, a Medicare Part D bill, championed by a real low life named Billy Tozan, who went on after leaving Congress to become head of pharma at about a million dollars a year. So Billy Tozan helped shepherd the Medicare Part D prescription drug bill through Congress, and of course that is going to cost more over time than Medicare itself did, the original underlying bill from the 60s, which was considered revolutionary. In other words, drugs cost more than doctor visits. So basically, the revolution, which occurred with Medicare Part D, the vote was taken at 5.53 a.m., on November 22, 2003. Final vote 220 to 215. I don't have to tell you which side of that run was on. But basically, that told the world that a new revolution had occurred and that the United States was never, ever, ever going to seriously deal with its entitlement problem. But in fact, it was going to go the other direction and send that problem into hyperdrive. So now everybody knows that entitlements never will and cannot be paid. The whole world knows that, including our foreign creditors to an extent. So there were revolutions happening in the United States in the early 2000s. But even as bad as 9-11 was when we all had that sinking feeling in our stomachs that morning, it wasn't so much that we were afraid of terrorists. And what they might do, we were afraid of what our government was going to do in response. And we were right to be afraid. But as bad as that was, as dark as that time was, as terrible as W was, just seven or eight years later, 2008, and then again in 2012, we got the Ron Paul revolution out of that. We got pushback. Okay, we had someone campaigning for president on a platform of monetary policy. That had never happened in U.S. history since the gold standard years. I mean, even amongst economists, monetary policy was considered this backwater. And yet Ron Paul was able to turn this into a populist turn of phrase, end the Fed, end the Fed. How simple, how brilliant that was. The other thing he campaigned on was war and peace. When is the president talking about war and peace? We need to get the hell out of the Middle East, was what Ron said. End the Fed and get out of the Middle East. How much simpler, how much more populist could you be? And so without those dark years, I think of the early 2000s, I don't believe we would have had the Ron Paul revolution. And I think the Ron Paul revolution is part and parcel of the pushback we're seeing and feeling today around the world really. I think some of us in this room sense that there's a tipping point. There's something happening with this COVID narrative and they're losing control of it and it's unraveling. And I think this third booster and these new travel restrictions, I think they're losing a little bit. And so if you go back and you think about what happened before certain political revolutions, a lot of people say, without Barry Goldwater's loss, his bad loss, by the way, you would never have had Ronald Reagan. Maybe that's true. Maybe without Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the early 90s, maybe we would never have had Donald Trump, whether that's good or bad. So sometimes the effects of the wheels we set in motion today are not felt for 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years. And sometimes they're not felt till after we're gone. And that's just something we all have to accept and understand and have courage and have good cheer and have optimism. Because the Ron Paul revolution is dead only if we allow it to be dead. And if we transmit it, especially to the younger people, then it lives on. And it could take effect in ways that we can't even imagine today. So I asked a good friend of mine, Daniel McAdams, to outline what we might call the Ron Paul doctrine. What's the Ron Paul doctrine? What's a blueprint that we could give the world politically and economically and in terms of war and peace for going forward in the future? Much like Mises gave us a blueprint in liberalism, much like Rothbard gave us a blueprint in the ethics of liberty. And so we're excited to have Daniel. We're very excited that Glenn Greenwald is gonna join us via remote from Brazil. I think he's been a very brave and steadfast voice on pushing back on the media narratives and Ron and Daniel's show really represents a form of alternative media, a very important form that we all need in this world of ours.