NATE BLAKESLEE: You retired from Congress in December, though most people would not describe what you’re doing as retirement. You are creating a new online news channel, you’ve got a new book out, you’ve got a new institute. Where does all the energy come from?

RON PAUL: I get energized by two things. One is the interest that young people have shown for the ideas that I have been talking about for a long time. That gets me excited because I’m reaching a group of individuals that might have an opportunity to change things for the better. And the other thing is the issues themselves. I see what’s happening today as a sort of end stage of many trials and errors in our own country, and worldwide. We’ve had so many different forms of tyranny since the beginning of time and they lead to nothing but trouble. And I just see that having coming to an end. The Soviet system has collapsed. Now we’re dealing with the American empire, and it’s not doing well because we’re not able to continue it financially. So I see that coming to an end. And I see Keynesian economic interventionism coming to an end, and an opportunity to try something that the nation’s founders tried, and that was to emphasize personal liberty and property rights.

NB: Tell me a little bit about the Ron Paul Channel, which I gather is going to be an Internet venture. Why do we need it?

RP: You don’t get the views that I’m expressing on evening television, you don’t hear them in the leadership of the Republican or Democratic Party. And yet there is this seemingly very strong desire from young people to hear more about it. So it is a wonderful opportunity for me to continue to do what I’ve been doing all along for 30 years.

NB: I know a number of your fans and followers are also fans and followers of Fox News. Tell me why Fox News doesn’t fit the bill.

RP: For peace and prosperity to exist you have to have a noninterventionist foreign policy. You have to go back to what the founders advised, and that was nonintervention, mind our own business, free trade, friendship, and don’t get involved in internal affairs of other nations. We’re doing exactly the opposite. I would say that all the major news networks disagree with me on that.

NB: Where do you get most of your news now?

RP: From the Internet, but I also try to get all the ordinary news people are hearing, because I’m trying to figure out what they’re being fed. This is very important. For instance, when we approach a time when it looks like we’re going to war, most Americans are very much opposed to this. This was certainly true of the Persian Gulf War and the Iraqi war and Afghan war. People naturally don’t want to go to war. Then all of a sudden propaganda convinces people that Saddam Hussein is Hitler, and he’s going to invade us next week and drop bombs on us. That takes some conditioning. That’s why I think we have to have an alternative, and people aren’t hearing that from regular television.

NB: Let’s talk about something that’s in the news right now: the revelations about the National Security Agency’s various spying programs. Is NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a hero? Should he be prosecuted?

RP: I think he should get a medal. He’s doing something that he knew was very dangerous, but I believe he was well motivated. He wasn’t turning anything over to an enemy of ours—he turned it over to us, the American people. There are times when I think our government thinks we are the enemy, and that’s why they’re spying on us. A consequence of 9/11 was to destroy our civil liberties and destroy privacy. [Snowden] released information, just like [1970s Pentagon Papers leaker] Daniel Ellsberg. There were a lot of mixed feelings, but I think that the American people are waking up, and they’re more likely to call him a whistle blower. It was even worse for Daniel Ellsberg. A lot of people suspected that maybe they lied us into Vietnam, but he revealed the truth. The more powerful a country is and the more likely it is to be an empire, the more they resent having the truth told. They want to hold this empire together, so the truth has to become treason.

NB: What grade would you give your old colleagues in Congress in terms of oversight? Should they have blown the whistle themselves on the NSA programs?

RP: They should have never voted for the Patriot Act, they should have never voted for the FISA court, they should have never funded any of this. They’re derelict in their duties. But then again, does each individual member of Congress know the extent of what the government is doing to the people? No, not really. I wasn’t a bit surprised to hear what NSA was doing, but did I have the concrete facts and could I go to court and say this is what they’re doing? No, I couldn’t do that. But since the early seventies I’ve been arguing the case against government invasion of our privacy. They started first with financial privacy, and then ten years ago or so they had medical privacy destroyed with the HIPAA legislation, which means everybody has access to your medical records, especially the government. So this is a continuation. To find out that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA spy on us is not a surprise, but it was still disappointing how massive it was.

There’s no way in this electronic age that the government is going to keep those secrets. We have a significant tool that we can combat this with, and it is the Internet, and that of course is what I relied on in the last national campaign I had. The enthusiasm was built not because