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Sept. 18, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:57
Max Blumenthal : Israel/Ukraine and Max Locked Out of X.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, September 19, 2024.
Max Blumenthal joins us now.
Max, always a pleasure, my friend.
No matter what we talk about, it's a pleasure to chat with you.
Of course, I want to talk to you about Israel's latest war crimes in southern Lebanon.
I want to talk to you about the latest decisions in the White House affecting Ukraine.
But before we get there, I want to ask a few questions about you.
Do you know why you were blocked out of X for a day?
Because it was exposing how the would-be Trump shooter Ryan Routh was radicalized in Kiev and how deeply connected he was to so many other actors, including, for example, MSNBC national security hack Malcolm Nance, that my Twitter account came under attack.
And there was an attempted mass login attempt to force Twitter to boot me.
And suspend my account when I logged out and tried to log back in because it thought it was suspicious.
So that's my theory.
whatever took place, just as the gray zone was suspended when we started reporting from the Democratic National Convention for a week for the whole convention, I was suspended for pretty much the whole initial news cycle.
But I managed to get...
Might your being blocked have anything to do with this, talking about MSNBC, cut number 15?
I think it's important to indict the Russians, just as Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in drugstore.
But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda.
And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence because the Russians are unlikely.
except in a very few cases to ever stand trial in the United States.
The establishment is obviously very worried about alternative media.
This is, of course, the most extreme statement I've ever heard from somebody who's a graduate of an accredited law school.
Yeah, I mean, this isn't someone who certainly cares about international law.
But even U.S. law, the First Amendment, doesn't seem to matter to Hillary Clinton.
Or to Tim Walls and Kamala Harris, who've said pretty much the same thing.
She's not saying that Americans who are acting covertly as foreign agents against U.S. law should be prosecuted or criminally charged.
She's saying that Americans who spread misinformation, which is subjective and can be determined by anyone, According to their own political views, should not only be criminally charged, but civilly penalized.
In other words, they could face massive lawsuits to prevent them from participating in journalistic activities, which embarrass or infuriate Hillary Clinton.
And it really speaks to the dictatorial authoritarian mentality that she and so many around her uphold.
The Machiavellian attitude, the lack of principle, the lack of actual belief.
In the Constitution, the idea that U.S. law and this concept of democracy is somehow fungible and flexible to fit their political objectives.
And that really was why so many people despise her and see her as dangerous.
But it's also consistent with, as I said, not only with what Kamala Harris and Tim Walls say they're gonna do, Tim Walls just today said But what Tony Blinken and the State Department Global Engagement Center are doing, where they're going to Meta, Instagram, and other malleable social media platforms and telling them not only to remove RT, Russia Today,
because it's Russian, but they're telling them to remove outlets like African Stream.
Which is a pan-Africanist outlet accusing it of being a front for RT.
And they've been removed from YouTube and every other platform on the word of the State Department without any due process.
They haven't even been able to respond to those allegations.
So it really shows how the U.S. plays this role as a global information dictator.
And it's something that Jamie Rubin, the head of the State Department Global Engagement Center, has said he wants to do, which is to, no, sorry, Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, said this, that they want to establish a global information network that, is free of misinformation which means total psychological dictatorship over what everyone within the U.S.'s realm Chris, do we have FBI Director Wray?
Saying that they plan to investigate and prosecute propaganda.
It was at the press conference with the Attorney General.
All right, if you can find it, just give me the hi sign.
When Merrick Garland announced the prosecutions of Dimitri Symes, for example, somebody you and I both know.
I don't actually know him, but I know who he is.
Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, was seated next to Attorney General Garland, who said we, meaning the FBI, are going to continue to investigate propaganda.
You articulated this as well as anybody.
This is as subjective as can be, which is why, you know, one person's propaganda is another person's truth, which is why the whole purpose of the First Amendment was to keep the government out of the business of evaluating the content of speech.
The content was pitched as legitimate independent news when, in fact, Much of it was created in Russia by RT employees who worked for the Russian government.
Which I would say, Chris, so what?
This is none of the government's business from where I get my information and how I articulate my thoughts.
Well, I don't know if they can just ban it on that basis.
But again, there's no due process.
All they have to do is threaten the owner, Mark Zuckerberg, of a major social media platform with all sorts of legislation they can pass against him.
They could ram antitrust legislation through because that has created a monopoly.
Mark Zuckerberg's reputation could be ruined.
He just doesn't want to go up against these characters.
And they're a much bigger mafia than his.
So he has to obey.
So we're not talking about the Constitution here.
We're talking about whatever governs Meta's terms of use because it's a private company with the government holding a gun to its back.
Which is why we see them out.
They have the knives out for Elon because he's less malleable.
Mark Zuckerberg is.
We are talking about the Constitution with what Hillary said.
Yes.
She wants to use law enforcement to prosecute people.
Let's be candid, like you and me and your colleagues and my colleagues and some of our mutual friends, because we articulate thoughts that she and Genocide Joe and everybody between them don't want to hear.
Well, she's saying that Americans should be prosecuted for what she considers misinformation.
And that's where this is all going.
Russia and RT is kind of like a subway stop on the way to the destination.
And you hear so much from particularly Democrats within the foreign policy establishment about what they call democratic backsliding.
They always talk about Turkey.
Or, you know, Asian countries that have putatively democratic systems that are becoming more centered around one.
Hungary would be another one with Viktor Orban.
They accuse that they're obsessed with democratic backsliding because they believe they're establishing these strongman authoritarian.
What do you mean by backsliding, Max?
That they've taken democracies.
And turn them into, use democracy as a mechanism for establishing one party, one man rule.
But that's what the Democratic Party and I would say the establishment Republicans who exist outside of Trump world aim to do and what they think Donald Trump is going to do.
But that's what they're actually doing.
But they're not doing it through one man or one charismatic strongman.
They're doing it through the architecture of the national security bureaucracy and through these grim, dour figures.
Like Christopher Wray.
And they're using RT as a mechanism to get to that destination.
But in order to get there, they have to create this sense that misinformation is inextricably linked to Russian propaganda.
And so they're going after the easy targets right now.
I don't know if they can criminally charge Americans, but you can see what they're doing with Scott Ritter, for example.
Is clearly political.
Because in order to establish that Scott's a foreign agent, he has to be taking orders from a foreign state in exchange for payment.
But it's very clear Scott is a well-established intellectual and thinker in his own right.
And all he's doing is volunteering his pre-established opinions for RT and Sputnik in exchange for apparently journalistic remuneration, which is...
They're not really able to really pin this down, and I don't know if they will be able to, but this is not the ultimate objective.
The ultimate objective is what Hillary's spelling out.
It makes me wonder if she's getting senile and is becoming more candid than she's supposed to be, like Joe Biden has been for the last four or five years, where he blurts out that the real objective This man must go, referring to Putin.
I think that their real objective is what constitutional scholars call chilling, making people afraid to speak their mind.
Who's looking over my back?
Who is knocking at my door?
Is going to knock on my door?
Gee, I don't want to upset the government, so I'll dial back what I'm going to say.
The Supreme Court, every time it's looked at, chilling has condemned it.
As a direct assault on the First Amendment.
Let's move on to Ukraine.
I want your thoughts on the embarrassing scene in the White House when President Biden walked out and thought he was going to announce with Prime Minister Starmer that The Brits and he had authorized the Ukrainians to use long-term or long-range missiles that would reach deep into
Russia.
Prime Minister Starmer actually had a map with him.
But before Joe Biden walked out, somebody spoke to him, probably somebody from the Defense Department, and said, we can't do this.
Here's Joe at one of his worst moments.
All right, until I speak, okay?
That's what I say.
Good idea?
What do you say to Vladimir Putin's threat of war, sir?
All right, you've got to be quiet.
I'm going to make a statement, okay?
All right, anyway, Mr. Prime Minister, welcome back to the White House office.
Well, of course they can work together.
Britain is America's poodle.
Okay.
Do you think Biden came to his senses, or do you think the Defense Department said, listen to what Putin just said.
The man is serious, Mr. President.
Well, it was clear from the onset that U.S. service members were going to pay the price for this demented...
telling them, I understand that you are the source of this.
In my view, while the UK is the US's poodle, the UK has been trying, with all of its might, across administrations, from Johnson to Sunak to, I should say, from Cameron to Johnson to Sunak to Starmer, who's from Labour, to deepen the West's involvement in Ukraine and escalate the war.
And they've been doing so through sabotage, through encouraging Ukraine to conduct terror attacks around the cursed bridge, attacking Crimea.
We've exposed some of these plans at the gray zone, which is partly why we have had our reporter who exposed that interrogated by British counter-terror police.
And so Biden is being pushed by the neocon faction or the cruise missile liberal faction.
Within his own administration, that person to his right, that smirking, smiling, sort of dead-eyed figure to his right, Tony Blinken, has been a major advocate of this, clearly.
I assume Jake Sullivan as well.
And then the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon sit Biden down and tell him, we are exposed, we can be hit at various bases, including in Iraq, where Putin could conceivably assist the popular mobilization units, including in and around Yemen, around the Red Sea, where Putin could provide hypersonic missiles to the Yemeni Houthis,
including in Syria, where the United States occupies one third of the country around the Canoco oil fields to steal Syria's oil, and where U.S. soldiers and their Kurdish proxies have been confronted by local Arab tribes that are seeking to winkle them out and have received training from Damascus.
So there are so many areas where Putin could actually extract a price for what the U.S. would aim to do.
And what would actually take place if there were storm shadow strikes?
Now, there aren't that many storm shadow missiles in production.
It wouldn't be some constant assault.
There aren't enough missiles to really wage a constant assault with HIMARS systems.
But Jake Auschenschloss, who is a young former Marine and liberal member of Congress from a deep blue district that was previously held by Joseph P. Kennedy III.
Auschenschloss claims to be the cousin of a Kennedy.
He called on national TV.
For the US to strike oil refinery facilities inside Moscow in order to reduce oil production in Russia by 30%.
And he claimed that it would immediately cripple Russia's economy if they did that.
So he had obviously gotten some kind of intelligence briefing.
This is the kind of stuff being pushed around by Blinken's people and by the UK.
That's what they want to do.
Just imagine if they actually did that, what Russia would do.
So I think the Pentagon looked at this and said, We don't want to take these casualties, and Biden had to at least momentarily pull back.
Oshon Sloss must be hanging out with Senator Graham or in a contest with him for the most extreme, irrational, counterproductive, and deadly suggestions.
Let's transition, Max.
What is your take on Netanyahu's latest act of genocide and war crimes on the people of Lebanon?
Well, we're talking about the mass battery attacks in Lebanon that have left thousands wounded, blinded, maimed, children killed, nurses and emergency workers have been harmed and wounded as well.
And it was targeted at Hezbollah.
This is a Mossad operation.
Netanyahu may have known about their capacity to carry out this operation along with his defense secretary.
I'm sorry, defense minister.
But it wasn't authorized by Netanyahu.
It was authorized by the Mossad with his consent when it appears that the batteries that had been laced with extremely powerful explosives implanted in these pagers while they were in the production or supply chain phase, because they were sort of intercepted by the Mossad, had been discovered by lower level Hezbollah operatives.
And they hadn't had time to notify their superiors.
And so the order came in to explode them I kind of believe the United States on this one, that they didn't know about the nature of the attack.
This is the kind of attack, first of all, that you would want to authorize hours before you are going to stage a major full frontal assault and invasion.
Of Lebanon.
And that's what I think Israel initially planned to do, but then they just had to execute it because they were going to lose their advantage and lose their ability to carry it out in the first place.
So there's no, it doesn't, it doesn't, I mean, Israel's escalating in the South right now.
There are lots of airstrikes, but it doesn't appear that they want an invasion.
It doesn't appear that Hezbollah wants to respond with a full-scale war either.
It's being looked at as a security incident and a major security failure on Hezbollah's part.
A major tactical blow to Hezbollah.
You have an extraordinary grasp on how the Israeli government works far better than I. But until I heard you a few minutes ago, to me it would be inconceivable that something of this nature could have occurred without the express authorization of Netanyahu.
He must have known.
What they were up to.
And as well, we all know Mossad spies on CIA, CIA spies on Mossad.
CIA and MI6 did not know that this was going to happen?
I mean, who knows who in the CIA knew?
But Lloyd Austin gets a call at the last minute and is told a major operation is going to take place.
What's he going to do?
I mean, this is the price of the carte blanche that the Biden administration has given to Israel to pretty much do whatever it wants.
And what is that price?
The price is that Israel has demonstrated that it can and will turn any consumer product into an instrument of death and carry out a terror attack that can all across America.
an entire society.
I mean, every supply chain is contaminated.
So yeah, Hezbollah probably made an order of these pagers because they wanted to Hassan Nasrallah, General Secretary of Hezbollah, had actually said after Fouad Shukr, one of his close deputies, was assassinated by Israel, that your phone is a weapon.
He was telling Hezbollah operatives and soldiers.
If you're looking for an Israeli agent, look in your cell phone.
And that was sort of the command to discard cell phones, get pagers, and the pagers themselves had been transformed into a weapon.
So now everybody around the world should worry and will worry that their devices could be turned into a weapon.
And Israel is the one country.
That has the ability and the wherewithal to do that, as we can now see, because of the power and prowess of the Mossad, but also the ruthlessness and lack of regard for human life to conduct something like that, and the ability to so flagrantly violate international law and the Geneva Conventions and all standards of war because it's bribed the United States government.
Through its cutouts in Washington at AIPAC and other entities.
So Israel poses a unique threat to humanity.
And let this be a message from the Israeli point of view.
This is a message.
Not only this, but all the assassinations it's conducted.
Killing Ismail Hania in his hotel room in Tehran.
It's a message to politicians in the United States.
That if you somehow rise above AIPAC's ability to take you out.
And you somehow reach a position of national leadership?
Well, they'll do it to you too, and it could be any of your devices.
Your morning grapefruit could blow up in your face.
They will do it, and they'll get away with it, and your own government will do nothing because they're bribed.
All right, so what happens now?
This is an act of terror.
It's not an act of military strategy, although you said they were planning to invade shortly thereafter.
Or they were planning on doing this when they were ready to invade as a prelude to the invasion.
Let me correct myself.
But what do you think happens now?
will there be a massive resistance-wide retaliation against Israel?
Okay, if Israel had been planning a full-scale invasion and assault on Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah once and for all,
It would have actually been a massive strategic victory because they would have taken out the communication systems, the low-tech communication systems.
Of their enemy and caused mass confusion and disrupted their ability to operate, probably causing them to lose at least the first stage of the war.
But there was no strategy here.
There's no clear objective here beyond Israel's desire to return its population to the north.
They want to get at least 60,000 Israeli citizens back to northern Israel.
Because they can't go back.
And so what they're trying, the only strategy I can perceive here or deduce here is to frighten Hezbollah into pulling back because they are terrified by Israel's capacity.
But they're not going to.
And Nasrallah is going to use this to demonstrate the steadfastness of not just Hezbollah, but of Lebanese society against Israel, which he has called I don't know what Hezbollah can do technologically to retaliate, but we can expect some kind of escalation short of full-scale war.
Again, Israel's very good at scoring these kinds of tactical achievements, but they can't ever achieve a strategic victory, and they certainly can't get themselves even out of the Gaza Strip.
So it's hard to say where this is going.
Before we go, Chris, do you have the full screen of the retired IDF Major General?
Do you know or know of this fellow Major General Gadi Shamni, now retired?
Hamas is winning the war.
Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we're losing the war and in a big way.
He's the former commander of the Gaza Division of the IDF.
Well, I mean, that echoes what I've been saying about how Israel can be tactically superior because it is one of the most well-equipped militaries in human history.
Its 98th Division are pretty good in the field.
They've just been moved to the north.
But strategically, they can achieve their goal.
And the government is hopelessly divided over what the strategy should be, with Netanyahu insisting that the strategy should be total victory, which now somehow centers around the Philadelphia corridor between Gaza and Egypt, and other parts of the government and power players outside the government, like Benny Gantz, who holds sway within the military, wanting to cut some sort of a deal.
To get the hostages out.
Large sectors of Israeli society want the hostages out.
So Israel can't decide on what the strategy is in the South.
And in the North, there's no clear strategy either, because Israel simply cannot defeat Hezbollah in a direct confrontation.
And as Hassan Nasrallah concluded in 2000, when Israel was forced to withdraw finally, from southern Lebanon and end its decades-long occupation.
Israel cannot withstand the same level of casualties and pain that Lebanon is forced to absorb as we see this week.
So I couldn't sit here and even tell you what Israel's strategy is.
I think what they're forced to pursue is a strategy of intensifying pain On Lebanese and Gazan society, mostly attacking civilians in hopes that they will turn against their leadership or against the armed factions of Hezbollah and Hamas,
which is sort of consistent with the Dahiya Doctrine that Israel laid out back in 2006 when it first tried and failed to destroy Hezbollah by destroying large parts of Beirut.
And Israel isn't done with its destruction in Lebanon.
It's just getting started.
Just getting started.
Max Blumenthal, a pleasure, my dear friend.
No matter how dark and gloomy are the subjects that we discuss, thank you for letting me pick your brain.
We look forward to seeing you twice next week on air here and up in some godforsaken little place in the middle of upstate New York with Salenti and his crew.
Sounds like you're excited.
It's not New York City, but no, looking forward to it, Max.
Thanks very much for your time.
Good seeing you, Judge.
Likewise.
Coming up this afternoon, in a few minutes actually now, at 3 o 'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
At 4 o 'clock, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
And at 5 o 'clock, from midnight in Moscow, Pepe Escobar.
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