Former presidential candidate Ron Paul warned of increased attacks against free speech Wednesday during an interview on the Alex Jones Show.

Read the full transcript here.

“You know, when I left Congress a couple years ago I listed several things that I thought were the greatest danger to us and the top one was freedom of expression, the First Amendment…” Paul said. “Because if we are not allowed to express ourselves it makes it so difficult for us to compete with the propagandists from our government and from the media.”

Noting the importance of truth-tellers in a free and open society, Paul highlighted the government’s current stance towards whistleblowers and those who challenge the status quo.

“We are so hypocritical when it comes to our government because they pretend that we should support the issue of knowing the truth, knowing what’s going on with government, and we even write laws to protect the whistleblowers who are telling us the truth,” the former congressman added.

As mentioned by Paul, a federal employee who worked for a whistleblower protection agency was fired earlier this month after blowing the whistle on the group’s questionable practices.

“Now we have numerous whistleblowers that are put in prison if they tell the truth,” he continued. “The real irony is, the chairman of the agency that is supposed to be in charge of protecting all the whistleblowers, he got fired because he told the truth about the whistleblower program – it really doesn’t work.”

“This is getting worse…”

Paul also pointed to the recent death of tax activist Irwin Schiff, who recently died in federal custody while serving a 14 year prison sentence.

“Just recently, when we read about the death of Irwin Schiff, he was actually imprisoned and killed by our government because he spoke out about the unconstitutionality of the way taxes were being collected,” Paul stated.

“[But] he did and [when] he was 77, they put him in jail for 14 years and literally I think killed him, you know because it was a death sentence, a life sentence and he didn’t [even] get his medical care, so that’s how ruthless the government is.”

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