In a video clip that surfaced Monday on YouTube, Republican presidential candidate and Texas Rep. Ron Paul is seen arguing strongly in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. The video was produced and distributed in 1998 by the far-right John Birch Society.
In the video, Paul predicted the demise of American freedoms to worship, bear arms and own property.
“They would confiscate our guns,” Paul said. “There have been proposals made at some of their conventions where they would literally repeal the Second Amendment.”
He was no less apocalyptic about the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. “If the United Nations has their way, there will be curtailment of our right to practice religion,” he warned. “They are not going to be believers in the right to practice our religious — as we have seen fit throughout this country.”
The John Birch Society’s narrator went even further, predicting that under a United Nations-dominated world government, “only approved churches, adhering strictly to government dictates regarding religion, will be tolerated. All churches desiring to remain independent of government compliance will be disbanded, their houses of worship converted to other uses or simply burned to the ground, and their pastors incarcerated.”
Watch Ron Paul speak in a 1998 John Birch Society video:
The Texas congressman, known for being a bold proponent of private property rights, did not disappoint.
“The right of private property ownership is severely threatened by our own government, but it’s going to be a lot worse if the United Nation [sic] gets involved,” he insisted. “There is no way that you can have the concept of private property right [under the U.N.]. They believe in welfare redistribution, socialist redistribution — everybody owns everything — and they would take from the wealthy and give to the poor to get an equal balance.”
The narrator sternly warned that in the future, “the election process will become the task of world government monitors. The U.S. Congress, president, judicial system, and state and local government shall exists only as a facade to assure American citizens they still have a voice in government.”
“Resistance will be futile,” he intoned later in the video. “Citizens who attempt to defend whatever freedoms they have remaining will join the victims of the inevitable brutality and bloodbath carried out by a tyrannical U.N. dictatorship.”
The video’s apparent purpose was to promote the continuing viability of the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, a House bill that Paul first introduced in 1997 — and which he re-introduced in 2009.
The video claimed the legislation, whose purpose was to distance the United States from the U.N., had 54 co-sponsors in 1997, but House records show only 14. It was referred to a subcommittee but never received a vote.
So far, Paul has found no co-sponsors for the bill’s 2009 version.
The John Birch Society co-sponsored the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, ending what some considered a long-term exile from the larger U.S. conservative political movement.
David is The Daily Caller’s executive editor. Follow him on Twitter
