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Sept. 3, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:14
Ray McGovern : China/Russia/Ukraine and Nukes
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024.
Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment, and we will examine in as much depth as we can at this moment the recent very serious attack on a military educational institute not far from Kiev, carried out probably by two.
Ballistic missiles launched by the Russian military.
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Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend.
Not very long ago, there was a major assault on, well, the Russians say it was a military training facility.
The Ukrainians aren't being specific about what it was, but 40 people are killed, and I think it's 41 now, and more than 180 were injured.
What do we know about this attack, Ray?
Well, Zelensky has already complained about it, has said that these figures, 41 killed and hundreds wounded, he said that there was no chance for people to get into the shelters because the early warning radar or the early warning siren didn't go off in time.
That suggests to me that these were hypersonic missiles against which there is no defense.
Even Biden admitted that at one point two years ago.
I asked Colonel McGregor, I said, do you think these were hypersonic?
He said, well, yeah, they probably were.
But, you know, Ukrainian air defenses are so shabby these days, they could have been something less and still hit this target.
It's a major target.
This is a major Russian retaliation for all the things that have been going on, especially the recent doings in Washington.
Do you think that President Putin has lost his patience with what has been going on in Kursk?
Do you think he is caving to right-wing pressure, or do you think that this is just the next step in his very slow, very methodical, very inexorable, seemingly unstoppable movement to win back eastern Ukraine?
Well, it is unstoppable.
He is in the Katberg sheet.
I don't think he's going to be provoked by things like invasions of Kursk to change his mind.
Now, that doesn't mean that the Russians aren't worried about what the U.S. and the Ukrainians might intend to do in the short term.
And I mean, of course, before November 5th, when the election takes place in the United States.
So the Russians are doing all they can to remind people, look, we have tactical nuclear weapons, too.
And I see that as a preemptive, a kind of, well, a kind of a move that would remind the Ukrainians that, you know, if you ask the U.S. to use just a little mini tactical nuke, that's crazy because we have them, too.
Don't even think about it.
Do we know if this was a military target, as the Russians claim, or if it was just an educational institute and a hospital, as President Zelensky claims?
Well, the Times has already said that the cadets, the trainees were lined up and had no chance to disperse or seek shelter.
It's not a matter of trusting the Russians.
The New York Times is not very trusting the Russians, but the New York Times pretty much confirmed that this was a military educational training center.
It's been a traumatic weekend in terms of events.
We'll get to Israel in a minute, but what is your take on the German elections?
Which showed a startling success for the new far-right party in two of the German provinces.
Well, it was not really a surprise that the AFD would win 30%, 33%, as it did in Terentia and Saxony.
The big surprise was...
It's an offshoot of the old Morabund.
Linker Party, the left party, and it garnered 16% of the vote, more than the ruling parties in Berlin, all put together, 16% in Florentia, and if you put that together, 12% in Saxony, but there's also a remnant of the Die Linke in Saxony, 5%, so there's 16% in both regions.
And the AFD differ on many things, social policies among them, but they're united against further involvement in Ukraine.
They want to have a more respectful and more decent relationship with Russia.
So, in the bottom analysis, it would seem to me that Schwarz, his government, is very short-lived now.
I don't think it's going to last very much, not probably even until All right.
So the elections of which you speak were regional elections, like a state legislature in the U.S. as opposed to the U.S. Congress.
What is the name of this new party?
And can you translate it into English after you give the name in German?
Well, no, the name is the Alliance Sana Wagenknecht.
Now, Wagenknecht is not so difficult for the Germans, okay?
More than that, she's incredibly popular.
I mean, she's smart as all get out.
She's reasonable in many respects, and she has resurrected what was left of the Dylenke party.
I heard from one of my friends, who's a pretty high-level official in her Bundes, in her alliance, Now, the other side of it, of course, is this is a fraction of the German population.
Altogether, maybe 6-7% of all the voters in Germany.
But it's a harbinger of things to come.
And on Ukraine, I think it's kind of the death knell here, not only on Ukraine, but on the prospect of the U.S. having persuaded Shorts to put in the equivalent of intermediate, short-range, and even longer-range.
Nuclear missiles in Germany starting in 2026.
In my view, that's over because these people are wising up to the fact that they shouldn't be so subservient to the United States, particularly on Ukraine.
Tell me about AFD.
Well, AFD is a right-wing sort of thing.
Their big thing is immigration.
I don't agree at all, and neither does Sarovagenknecht on their very extreme views on immigration, but they're not as...
If you read the New York Times today, you know, they're still singing the praises of the Christian Democrats.
The Christian Democrats are finished, as far as I'm concerned.
They didn't win many votes at all in either of those regional elections.
So the AFD is a power to contend with.
Scholz this morning said...
Well, I don't know if you can make that stick in Saxony and Thuringia.
I don't know if you'll even be able to make that stick in the rest of Germany as the new elections come up.
There are more regional elections before the...
And so we'll have to see how it pans out.
But the Germans already said they run out of money.
They're not going to give a lot more support to Ukraine.
And now this is sort of the coup de grace, in my view, not only for German support for the Ukrainian misadventure, but also for Scholz, who has shown himself to be inept.
Also, over the weekend, President Erdogan announced that Turkey wants to join BRICS.
Now, how could there possibly be in BRICS and NATO at the same time?
Well, only Erdogan could do that.
You know, it's like having two wooden legs on either side of the Bosporus, for example.
You know, he's very clever.
The big thing here is what it shows about NATO.
NATO is splitting apart.
You've got not only what I mentioned in Germany now, you have the French paralyzed by the last election there, the snap election that Macron called.
You have Hungary, you have Slovakia, all out of step with what's going on.
And so the notion that NATO is united is never before.
With the Finns and the Swedes, give me a break.
They're not.
And what that will mean for Ukraine is substantive, because without an alliance that can claim with some credibility to be united, it's going to fall apart.
And the question is still, in my view, what happens between now?
And November 5th, how will the US try to rescue Ukraine out of this mess?
And you know my fears about what the US might resort to.
What are your views about the interests that China has in the Russia-Ukraine war?
I think that when Jake Sullivan invited himself to China, What he was trying to do is sound out the Chinese to see if his logic, that Blinken and his logic that China can be sort of kept away from Russia, can be cajoled into not supporting Russia.
He wanted to see if that was still true.
It was never true during his tenure.
And so I think the Chinese would say the Middle Kingdom gave him the middle finger, okay?
And what Jake Sullivan has had to learn from the Chinese is that if there's trouble, if the balloon goes up really drastically in Ukraine, the Chinese will be likely to do more than issue serious warnings as they used to do in the 60s.
They're likely to stir up trouble in the South China Sea.
Well, they claim territory that the Filipinos and the others are challenging them on.
In other words, the prospect of a two-front war.
I think the Chinese disabused Sullivan of any notion that the Chinese would, so to speak, stand or sit idly by while the balloon goes up in Ukraine and the U.S. raise the ante there.
The Chinese wanted to influence the ability of the U.S. to help the Israelis fight Hezbollah.
Might they just stir the pot in the South China Sea and tempt the Secretary of Defense to get one of his aircraft carriers out of the Mediterranean?
Well, there are two carriers at last report in the Mediterranean-Persian Gulf area right now.
I don't think the Chinese really care much about aircraft carriers.
They're sitting ducks.
That's why the Chinese only have one such aircraft carrier.
So I could see the Chinese diverting attention.
By stirring up some trouble, even in the Taiwan Straits, I think that's less likely than the South China Sea.
But the whole idea is the Chinese read the Riot Act and said, look, Jake Sullivan, if you think that Russia and China can be split apart here so that you can deal with Russia first and then come after us, you know, we read your strategic documents, you know.
We know what the Pentagon says.
China's the main enemy.
That's us, right?
And they're going to get Russia first.
Give me a break.
We're together, and we're not going to let you do that.
And so, you know, all this business is about enhancing nuclear capabilities.
The U.S. is saying, well, we're going to go after China and North Korea as well as Russia now, so we have to enhance our capability.
Well, the Chinese are worried about that.
But it's a very volatile situation.
And the Chinese and the Russians are trying to say to the U.S., look, don't even think about nuclear weapons.
We can match them, but we don't want to have to do that.
Here's what Jake Sullivan had to say about his own trip to China.
I think he's still in China when he's saying this, but he was about to depart.
Chris?
President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly.
And the outcomes of the Woodside Summit and the work we have done since then demonstrate that.
That we are working to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict and that we find ways to work together where our interests align.
What the heck is he talking about?
I don't know.
You know, he's just trying to reassure people he got everything under control, and that's far from the case.
Now, I worry that with the inexorable, your word and mine too, march of Russian troops to the West, with the ease with which they are going, We're going twice as fast before, and that happens to be true.
So what happens if the Russians end up on the Dnieper River before the election and sort of advertise the definitive defeat of NATO, the U.S., and Ukraine?
What will Blinken and Sullivan be tempted to do?
As you know, I am afraid that they will look on their shelf and see only a nuclear, a sort of a mini-nuke, a low-yield nuclear weapon left.
And that's the only thing they can put into play to prevent a defeat in Ukraine, a defeat in the election, and perhaps a defeat at the hands of this new guy who comes in, who has the book on them, and can put them in jail.
Here's President Putin yesterday on Ukraine.
Sorry about that.
Ukraine's failure, cut number four.
Their calculation was to stop our offensive actions in key parts of the Donbass.
The result is known.
Yes, of course, our people are going through a tough time, especially in the Kursk region.
But the main task of the enemy was to stop our offensive in Donbass and they failed.
Stop our offensive in Donbass and they failed.
There's no disputing this, is there?
Well, on the ground, yes, they failed.
What their intention was in the beginning, if they thought that by taking their best troops, best armed troops, out of the Donbas and do this feckless invasion of Kursk, if they thought that that would mousetrap the Russians to matching their folly and drawing troops away from that line, they were crazy.
The Russians didn't need to do that.
The Russians have plenty of troops up there on Kursk, and they're going to take their time.
Grinding away at what's left of the Ukrainian forces there.
Some 8,000 have already been killed.
Now, I take no delight in that, but this was really a crazy Hail Mary pass, trying to get the U.S. and others to realize, look, we've got all kinds of capabilities here.
Give us more weapons.
Give us the kind of weapons where we can strike really deep into Russia.
What are your thoughts on the map?
Massive demonstrations in the one-day general strike in Israel over the weekend.
It does seem as though Netanyahu is impervious to these things, doesn't it?
He didn't waste but an hour or two to say, no, we're going to keep doing this.
We're going to stay in that Philadelphia corridor, and we're just going to keep grinding away.
Now, again, I think he's depending on people like Sullivan and Blinken.
To make decisions that will bail them out if they get involved in a wider war.
I don't know how you disabuse him of that.
Only if one of them, or Biden himself, said, look, Bibi, you're on your own if you widen the war.
Only if that happens can that be prevented.
Is the United States military support for Israel utterly and totally unrighteous?
Or is there some, I hate to use this phrase because it doesn't stick with Biden, red line that he can't cross?
Apparently there's no red line.
And you have Kamala as well saying all these same things, to include bald-faced lies about Hamas raping Israeli women.
That has been disproven.
And you've had Max Blumenthal on.
And the New York Times has actually recanted that.
And yet here you have Kamala Harris saying the worst, the rape charges that are not only unproven, but if there are rape charges, they're very much on the side of the
There's a video of that and there's the efforts of Smotrich and Gebir to get the Knesset to give immunity to those nine soldiers who, sorry to say this, videoed themselves raping Palestinian prisoners.
But I think you're right.
Netanyahu does seem to be impervious to the outrage.
Well, here he is, cut number one.
We're asked to make concessions?
What message does this send Hamas?
It says kill more hostages, murder more hostages, you'll get more concessions.
The pressure internationally must be directed at these killers, at Hamas, not at Israel.
We say yes, they say no all the time, but they also murdered these people.
And now we need maximum pressure on Hamas.
I don't believe that either President Biden or anyone serious about achieving peace and achieving the release would seriously ask Israel to make these concessions.
We've already made them.
Hamas has to make the concession.
Very little truth in what he said when you talk about killers.
How many Palestinians are dead now?
44,000?
Yeah, Judge, it's not Hamas, it's Palestine.
Palestine is being liquidated as we speak.
40,000 is what the What's going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine before November 5th, something you pointed out many times.
Yeah, Judge, you know, when I watch Kamala Harris with the crocodile tears, let's face it, crocodile tears, saying, oh, we need to stop the violence, oh, we need to blah, blah, blah.
Well, She and Joe Biden can simply say, look, Bibi Netanyahu, not one more rifle for you if you continue this genocide.
They have that in their power, and it seems to be just off the table.
Just can't do that because of the strong influence of the lobby, and especially before an election two months hence.
Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure.
We'll see you at the end of the week with that youngster, Larry Johnson.
You're most welcome, Judge.
Okay, all the best.
And the aforestated Larry Johnson coming up at 11 o 'clock Eastern.
At noon Eastern, Jeffrey Sachs.
At 2 o 'clock Eastern, Matt Ho.
At 2.30 Eastern, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
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