It’s been around a while, but a lot of people don’t know a whole lot about the National Endowment for Democracy. The organization is in the news because one of its founders, Allen Weinstein, just passed away.

“I sort of wish the National Endowment for Democracy would pass away,” Ron Paul said in his latest Liberty Report. “I believe we would all be better off.”

The National Endowment for Democracy has been around since the early 1980s. It was established under then-President Ronald Reagan as the Cold War was going on to operate as the overt arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“That should have made us very suspicious of what was going on,” Paul said. The three-time presidential candidate and former Texas Representative Paul explained that the organization has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations like the labor group AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce since it was founded. The way the funding is spent is hard to trace, he said.

“It’s interesting,” Daniel McAdams, co-host of the Liberty Report, said in the episode. “If you remember back . . . in the late 60s, early 70s when Radio Free Europe was exposed as a CIA front, and it was a huge explosion. And then, one by one, more CIA front organizations were exposed worldwide. So when Reagan came in—and unfortunately the neocons glommed onto him—they pushed this idea, ‘Hey, let’s hide in plain sight.’

“The CIA’s fingerprints were all over it from the beginning. In fact, Weinstein’s famous quote was [paraphrasing], ‘Well, we at the NED do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.’”

Paul said the NED was motivated to keep the organization largely unaccountable. “It was more mischief, confusion,” he noted. “It was harder to trace. There are a lot of organizations involved that they fund. And they continue to do it.

“Of course, the irony of all this is most Americans and the people in Congress who don’t pay attention and say, ‘We’ve got to compete a little bit’ in this propaganda, even if they hear, ‘Well, they get involved in radio propaganda’ and these different things.”

Paul then raised concern about the efforts of this organization to spread democracy.

“In the true sense of the word, democracy is the worst reason for us to exist, let alone be an aggressor to promote ‘democracy,’” Paul said. “They want you to think that these countries would be better off if they had democratic election of leaders. But what if they haven’t had democratic elected leaders for 6,000 years. Are they all of a sudden going to adapt?”

Watch the full episode above and check out more episodes of the Ron Paul Liberty Report here at Truth In Media.

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