A Conference For Peace And Prosperity
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
Last week I was one of the featured speakers at a conference in Texas hosted by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Ron Paul himself hosted the events. He will be 90 years old later this year and is still speaking out through a daily TV show and a weekly column.
The other main speakers were David Stockman, who was President Reagan’s budget director; Tom Woods, host of a leading national podcast; Jeff Deist, head of a company called Monetary Metals; and Daniel McAdams, a foreign policy expert.
Many of my Focus columns have been picked up and re-published on several popular national websites, and I was honored to be asked to speak at this conference, which had attendees from all over the country.
Stockman was elected to Congress from Michigan and served just four years before being asked to join Reagan’s cabinet. He has been a very successful financial advisor over the years and has authored several books.
He told the conference that he has just written a new book giving specific details on how to cut more than two trillion dollars from the federal budget.
He said the trendlines show we will double our $37 trillion national debt in ten years or less. If we let that happen, social security payments and other incomes will buy very little.
Tom Woods is a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. from Columbia. He has one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, and he has had both me and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs on his show several times. In his speech, he told how he and millions of others, especially young people, have been inspired by Ron Paul’s message and campaigns in favor of economic freedom, limited government, and especially opposition to unnecessary wars.
Jeff Deist formerly headed the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, working with students and scholars on economics education. Now he is with Monetary Metals, a company that pays interest on gold its clients own.
Deist is also a political historian and he gave an interesting talk on how most of Donald Trump’s conservative populism and anti-war views came out of what is sometimes called the Old Right of the 1930s and 40s on up to the America First books, speeches, and television campaigns of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s.
Daniel McAdams, the foreign policy expert, gave a talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of President Trump’s actions so far. He applauded the efforts of the president toward ceasefires in Israel and Ukraine.
He expressed great concern about sending more bombs to Israel, the ending of the ceasefire there, the bombing of civilians in Yemen, and the actions against free speech for peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
In my presentation at the conference, I quoted the popular Jewish podcaster Dave Smith, who said Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was “horrific and inexcusable,” and that going to war in Iran would be “insane.”
The so-called neo-conservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz – neither of whom ever served in the military – were the leading cheerleaders for the war in Iraq.
Now, neo-cons want us to join Israel in a war against Iran. The conservative columnist George Will once wrote that neo-cons were “magnificently misnamed” and that they were really “the most radical people in this city,” meaning Washington, D.C.
Libertarian conservatives are afraid that Trump might go along with Netanyahu in a war against Iran because Miriam Adelson supposedly gave $100 million to the Trump campaign and several other Jewish billionaires also gave millions in return for promises to support Israel in any and every way.
In 1956, Israel demanded that the U.S. join it in a war against Egypt over the Suez Canal. Mitchell Bard wrote in The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned that he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”
Eisenhower did this only a week before the 1956 election.
We have not had a president with the courage to stand up to Israel since then. In fact, our foreign policy in the Middle East today is Israel First, and has created much animosity and even hatred for the U.S. I said in my talk that our Congress would have condemned any other country if it had killed as many thousands of little children as Israel has in the last year and a half.
Also in my presentation, I explained my vote against going to war in Iraq despite tremendous pressure to vote for it. I wish I had mentioned that I also voted to get out of Afghanistan many years before we did. If we had gotten out many years earlier, the 13 U.S. soldiers, including a young man from Gibbs, who were killed at the end might still be alive today.
