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Oct. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:32
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now.
Colonel, you have another fascinating, fascinating piece at Judgesnap.com and elsewhere, the essence of which is, if I may resist, do not comply.
But before we get to that, I'd like to explore your thoughts on the...
How has the landscape of the Middle East, in your view, changed, if at all, in the past 365 days?
Well, I mean, I think we're seeing the real face of the Israeli government.
You know, their agenda, and we talked about this 20 years ago, you know, this greater Israel concept.
But, you know, they had a great opportunity.
October 7th was a great opportunity for many in that government, including Netanyahu, to really launch the expansion campaign, and I mean territorial expansion, and to put them in a place where then they can sit back and say, okay, now we will engage with our neighbors.
But that's after they take the land that they want and feel that they need.
Very much an opportunistic time for the government of Israel.
You know, all these wars and, you know, we think of wars as a bad thing, but I'm not sure that the government of Israel actually sees them as a bad thing.
I think they are looking to seize territory and what better time, not only when their people are demanding retribution for October 7th, but the United States government, we have a Basically a lame duck president who is not even there.
I mean, he's not, I don't think you could say Biden is functioning.
Harris, I'm not sure Harris could find the Middle East on a map.
So we have a problem with Harris.
And plus, of course, she's preoccupied with her campaign.
So it's the perfect time to do whatever you want, especially if you are in any way beholden to the American government, because the American government is not in play right now.
They're doing nothing except politics.
So it's a perfect time for them to expand, and I think that's what we're seeing.
We're seeing a strategic game where they think at the end of this, Israel will be in a better place, and then they can say, oh, we'll sue for peace now, now that we have what we wanted and we've done all these things.
And I think they're enthusiastic about it, even though it is an evil, ugly, destructive thing that has been going on there.
Israel, and I'm paraphrasing your colleagues on this show, significantly weaker economically, militarily, geopolitically than it was a year ago because of the ruthless genocide perpetrated on its adversaries by Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Yeah, it is.
It is weaker, and that wasn't their intention.
I don't think their intention was to become weaker and economically weaker, to lose the population.
So many Israelis have left the country, and many may return, but many may not return.
So you have a lowered population.
You certainly do not have the working class of Palestinians and Arab Israelis that usually do the work in Israel.
So they are suffering from their actions, but I think that they honestly don't care because they feel that this is our last chance to really get the territory, lock it down.
Have the country we want.
Eliminate, eliminate, exterminate, remove the Palestinians from any land that we claim is our own, which obviously includes Gaza, but apparently southern Lebanon and certainly the West Bank.
What do you see as the future for Israel?
I mean, they can't defeat Iran.
The United States is not going to get in a land war against Iran.
Both colonels, Wilkerson and McGregor, believe that Israel is actually going to, gambling with its future, Colonel Wilkerson has gone so far as to say its very existence is bleak because soon its bellicosity will be opposed by everybody in the world except the U.S. and Great Britain.
Yeah.
And that's even going to change.
I mean, yeah, their bellicosity has ruined relationships and friendships.
But I'm not sure that the people running, they're in an echo chamber in the government of Israel, much as many governments are.
So it's a gamble, but it's one that they still believe that they can prevail at.
Not necessarily war with Iran, but Iran historically has been amenable to not.
Making war on Israel.
They're pushing the envelope here.
They hope that Iran won't do anything.
But I honestly think, yes, it's weakened.
Certainly Netanyahu, whoever's going to step up next, Netanyahu will end up in jail or dead at the end of his reign.
There's no doubt, I think, about that.
But the next guy that steps up will be very similar to Netanyahu, probably slightly more honorable, if you can use that term about the Israeli government.
But I think...
Because what they're trying to win, you know, when you kill a person, you have gotten rid of that person.
When you kill a mother and a baby, you've gotten rid of that family.
You have eliminated them.
This is part of their tactic.
And I think to some extent it actually...
And as far as people in the economy, those things will bounce back.
There's a diaspora of friends of Israel, certainly of Israelis and American Jews, large population there, and other neocons who enjoy and value Israel's role.
They're going to pour the investment back in there.
Similar to Ukraine, you know, they're counting on, it doesn't matter if you destroy Ukraine, because there'll be money from the West to flow in.
And I think Israel has even a better chance of getting that kind of investment.
So to an outsider, it looks like a terrible gamble.
They're going to ruin their country.
They're going to destroy it.
That is a possibility.
But I think the way they see the cards is they will come out of this thing with the land that they have coveted and not been able to really get.
For a number of reasons, one including a strong United States that's not supporting them.
We are a weak United States who is giving them whatever they want.
Now's the time to take advantage of that.
That could change after the election.
They say Trump is a friend of Israel.
Trump's not stupid.
He's a friend of every people.
He wants to make business and he wants wars to stop so he can make more business.
So they will find pressure if Trump wins.
You know, if they think, oh, he'll support this.
No, he won't.
And they know that.
So they've got a couple more months to really kill and destroy and populate as much as they can.
And I think to them, it's not as much of a gamble as it is to the outsiders who look at what they're honestly doing to their country and their economy, because they'll bounce back from that.
But the dead Palestinians, dead Arabs, they don't bounce back.
Last week, Professor Gilbert Doctorow caused a bit of a kerfuffle.
There was actually an interesting academic kerfuffle on the show by making the following argument about Israel.
Just as the United States uses Ukraine as a battering ram with which to attempt to weaken the Russian military and the support for President Putin with the goal of driving Ukraine,
Now, this, of course, is contrary to the view of John Mearsheimer and Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter and most of the folks on this show who believe that the donor class controls the United States government.
And in fact, it is Netanyahu telling Biden what to do.
I think I have fairly summarized those two arguments.
Where do you come down on this?
Are you on one side or the other, or do you see legitimate arguments in each?
Well, killing Arabs, clearly that is their agenda.
Are we encouraging them to do that?
Well, clearly we are, because in fueling and funding their war and not suspending our So why do we want to do that?
Well, to me...
It was no threat to us.
was to make George Bush look like he was a Texas hot dog.
You know, they talk about wars being resource wars.
And I think...
So Israel has that agenda for themselves, both resources.
Clearly it does.
But the United States also does.
I mean, not the United States people, not the Americans.
And it has nothing to do with religion.
But if you look at the neoconservative vision, that vision, and they've talked about it openly.
I think our favorite guy, Lindsey Graham, has talked about.
Resources in Ukraine under the ground that we want.
And we don't want Russia to have them.
We want to have them.
Well, maybe the Ukrainian people ought to have them, but that's not part of it.
We're letting them die.
So we'll get this.
So we'll have this resource.
So if you think of these wars as resource wars, the United States government views its role globally as one thing.
That fits in perfectly with the Israeli view.
So in some ways, maybe killing Arabs is only incidental to what we're trying to do.
They are a tool in the Middle East.
Let me see if I can get really granular with you.
Does Biden control Netanyahu or does Netanyahu control Biden?
You can replace Biden with the State Department or Jake Sullivan or somebody else.
I don't want to get into Biden's mental issues.
I just want to get into this Mearsheimer-Doctoro dispute over whether Israel controls the U.S. or the U.S. controls Israel.
I mean, ordinarily, if the United States destroys a land in order to expand its hegemony, it controls in that area.
But Israel is different.
If Israel thinks it doesn't need the United States, it'll tell it to go take a hike.
And there's not much the U.S. can do about it because the donor class will be with Israel.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that is what it is.
The donor class and the political class that is beholden to Israel, whether it's via blackmail, Those guys, there's no airspace, I don't think, between them and Israel.
So does Netanyahu tell him what to do?
Well, he got, what, 45 or 50 standing ovations from our Congress?
Right.
He didn't have to do that.
It's very simple to turn your back.
It's very simple to stay seated.
Okay, that's nothing.
And none of them did that.
So I think that they are in agreement.
And Netanyahu, in that sense, sent You can look it up publicly.
Go to the website of AIPAC and you'll see the faces of everybody that gave him standing ovations.
That's right.
So they're bought and paid for, but much of that money comes from Americans.
It comes from within the country.
So I think we agree.
I have to say Mir Sharma might have a point there because Okay, so Professor Doctorow says the U.S. is using Israel.
Professor Mearsheimer says Israel is using the U.S. There's no overlap between them.
Others on the show see arguments in both camps, but these two see no arguments on the other side.
There's arguments in both camps, but it's in...
It's our country.
It's supposedly our government.
We have a huge crisis of governance in this country.
We have big problems.
American people have no influence over our policies.
So what does?
Well, the oligarchy, the political elite, they're bought and paid for by American money on behalf of Israeli interests, which are the same.
Those interests are American interests.
I think that there's evidence for both sides, but actually, if we wanted to solve the American problem with Israel, we would have to start in Washington.
It's not about, Bibi is a bad guy, we should have a better guy in Tel Aviv.
No, that's not it.
We have to solve the problem here, which means a great deal of the problem is here.
Well, you'd have to change the Citizens United case, which says that money is speech.
And that would burst the bubble of AIPAC.
I mean, they might try and make unlawful contributions, but it's the government's job to make sure these contributions are not unlawful.
I'm not suggesting that this should happen.
I tend to be in the Mearsheimer camp because living in the Northeast, I see the influence of the donor class and witness that they spent $13 million.
In a primary in the Bronx.
Now, they haven't spent $13 million in a general election in the Bronx in the past 10 years combined, but they spent $13 million in a primary in the Bronx to get rid of one pro-Palestinian member of Congress.
There were only about 20 of them, and they spent all this money to get rid of one.
Well, actually...
Extraordinary amount of money and power.
They're paranoid that even the slightest dissent will bring down the house of cards.
So that's a sign actually not of strength.
This gets back to Professor...
I'm laughing because she took the same oath you did when you joined the Air Force.
I did when I became a judge.
She did this several times for the government positions she's had.
All of which use language similar to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which, Mrs. Clinton, includes the First Amendment.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like the first.
It's like the first one.
You know, even if you don't read the rest of it, you're going to definitely hit that one.
Well, she's a graduate of Yale Law School.
One can presume she's read the Constitution and understands the basic interpretations of it.
I don't want to spend too much time on her, but these attacks on free speech.
Are becoming more prevalent.
Donald Trump wants to amend the First Amendment to give Congress the power to criminalize burning flags.
Not the government's flag, not your neighbor's flag, but your own flag.
John Kerry said two weeks ago the First Amendment is inconvenient for our efforts to get rid of misinformation in the public marketplace.
Don't you see this?
These crackdowns coming, no matter who's in the White House.
I think they're going to be talked about, and they're probably coming, but I think Americans, I just have such faith in Americans that we really don't like to be told what to do.
Now, I know that during COVID, we proved that most of us do like to be told what to do, and we'll do it.
But I think that when it comes to free speech, I mean, think about the TikTok.
Well, that's not a proposal.
That's a statute.
Biden signed it.
It's been argued before a federal appeals court already.
Yeah.
Well, but what was the pushback?
People that use TikTok in this country, they weren't happy with that.
They were actually like, our government isn't helping us.
You know, I'm not opposed to Washington doing unpopular things.
Because the more unpopular and stupid they are, the more likely a significant minority of people will wake up to not just that bad thing that the government is doing, but basically the entire construct that the federal government has evolved into.
It's certainly not anything related to the founders' vision.
It's not related to the Constitution very much anymore.
I mean, it's so I kind of welcome these these instances of stupidity and invasion of people's privacy and destruction of their liberty, at least as they talk about it, because hopefully it'll get people to start to think.
And I did.
I was kind of with the tick tock thing.
So many average people who don't care anything about politics pushed back against that thinking.
And so, you know, I use tick tock.
I like tick tock.
Why would the government want to take that away from me?
You can't really stop it, but we can leverage it if it happens.
And I also don't think anybody is listening to Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, for that matter.
The people in this country, we do not look up to them.
And it's not a political thing.
It's not like, oh, she's a great Democrat.
No, we don't like Hillary.
She's not likable.
The very few friends that she has, you know, they may listen to her, but they're not going to be convinced of anything.
Colonel, can the United States government be trusted by foreign governments?
Oh, my goodness, no.
Not ever, really.
But, I mean, no government can be trusted.
I mean, governments are interest-driven.
They're going to do what they need to do to advance their own interests.
But the American government in particular is so corrupted, so unprincipled in many ways.
And luckily, its hidden agendas really aren't hidden.
So that helps the rest of the world understand what we're doing and what we're lying about today versus what we were lying about yesterday.
Yeah, I don't think the other countries have a problem.
It's Americans that we need to wake up a little bit to take, you know, to take the reins back and have self-government or else, you know, I'm a big fan of secession.
I think, you know, we if the federal government isn't serving our nation.
They absolutely should be able to do that.
I really think it's time.
Well, you're whistling my tune on secession.
I've often argued that it doesn't take much of an argument.
The framers accepted secession as a given.
I mean, the only reason we have a Bill of Rights is because five of the colonies become states.
Well, I mean, you know, in this country, all Americans should definitely embrace secession because we absolutely embrace divorce.
and that's all secession is it's like you know Our relationship isn't what it was.
I'm not getting what I need from this relationship.
So we're going to peaceably separate.
This is how we think about our lives.
You know, I live in an area of northwest New Jersey where there is not even an organized Democratic Party.
The Republicans are conservatives and libertarians.
The mayor of this town is a pig farmer.
He's been the mayor for 40 years, a decent guy, and he does best to keep But one day I said to him, you know, I think I'm going to secede from the town and join the next town over because their taxes are a lot less.
Maybe the two of you could compete for my tax dollars and whoever offers me the most services at the least taxes, I'll go with.
He looked at me and goes, Judge, I thought you were a libertarian.
Now I think you're a communist.
Communist?
Because I suggested that I could secede and they would compete for my services.
So I tell that story because he's a very fine man, this mayor.
But even a conservative slash libertarian constitution loving guy can get his nose at a joint when he sees a loss of power or a loss of tax.
That's right.
You know, I was watching Elon Musk a little bit on his talk with Tucker.
And, you know, this thought that maybe Elon will take a look at government agencies and departments and really kind of see what can be done to make them more rational and certainly a lot less.
And he's serious about doing that.
But in talking to Tucker, he talked about the contracting function and he talked about what his company does.
With the space part of it, you know, competing to some extent with federal government wholly owned subsidiaries.
And honestly, honestly, you know, it is so nuts.
It's time.
We are ready for serious change.
And if the government was a lot smaller, It won't be able to pay its bills.
Dollars will be worthless.
Nobody will want to work for it.
The Soviet Union collapsed in about six months.
Chris just found, this is to raise your blood pressure just a little, even though I'm crazy about you.
Chris just found John Kerry's comments about the First Amendment is a major block to achieving accountability.
Watch this.
You know, there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities.
In order to guarantee that you're going to have, you know, some accountability on facts, etc.
But look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of it.
He wants the government.
John Kerry wants everybody to go to one source that will tell you the facts, and he's describing the problem with that.
Of course, you need competition and everything.
That was my theory with the pig farmer mayor.
Competition improves the product.
He wouldn't hear of it.
In this state, we have 535 municipalities.
Nearly all of them has their own police department and their own Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, when they do run out of money, we've seen this in our own county, and I'm sure this happens elsewhere.
We have a lot of little small towns that some of them used to have police departments of two or three guys, guys and gals.
And they have ended that because they couldn't afford it and instead contracted with the sheriff to cover, you know, the small town.
So there is a sense of, there is competition.
Competition is there whether you want it to be there or not.
Government competes with each, you know, government agencies compete with each other.
In fact, we see that every September, you know, before the money runs out, you know, they're all justifying how important their missions are and how much money they should have.
So, yeah, you can't get away from competition.
We need to encourage it, embrace it.
I wonder if that's why the DEI movement is out there, to really discourage competition.
But it's almost like a natural condition.
Here's another area, and I don't want to go much longer, but the DEI nonsense all began in government schools.
They call it a public school.
They are.
But what is a public slash government school?
No competition, guaranteed income, Guaranteed clients equals recipe for failure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And they're complaining because year after year, year over year, in every state, homeschooling, private schooling, it's accelerating and accelerating.
So people understand competition.
Whether we want to talk about it or not, it exists.
It's there.
And, you know, again, we need more talk about it, more information.
And it's funny when they say shut down the information because it actually makes people And maybe they perk up and become awake.
And I know you don't have a lot of time left, with me anyway, but, you know, the issue of, oh my goodness.
I guess I'm finished.
My brain is cooked.
All right, it'll come to you.
I'm sorry if I knocked you off track.
Karen, it's a pleasure.
No matter what we talk about, I like being sort of big brain and philosophical with you, and I sense you do as well, watching your, or reading your columns.
One of the viewers writes, 1984 is here.
It seems outdated, but talking about the concept of government wanting mind control.
It absolutely is here.
Thank you, Karen.
Come back again next week, please.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Jim.
All the best.
Colonel McGregor was to have been on at 4 o 'clock Eastern today, but a technical problem has interceded.
I don't think it's going to happen.
If it does, we'll let you know.
But more likely than not, we will see him Wednesday or Thursday of this week.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 2 o 'clock, Ambassador Charles Freeman.
At 3 o 'clock, Phil Giraldi.
At 4 o 'clock, Aaron Maté.
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