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Nov. 26, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
34:28
COL. Douglas Macgregor :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, November 26, 2024.
Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. Colonel Douglas McGregor will be with us in just a moment on how close are we today to World War III.
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Colonel McGregor, welcome here, my dear friend.
I have a lot of questions for you about Ukraine, about Israel, about the incoming Trump administration, but I'm going to start where I thought I would end.
How close is the United States to a hot war, whether you want to call it a regional war, World War III, nuclear exchange?
Unfortunately, I think we are closer than we have been in many decades.
And where do you see that breaking out, and how do you see it coming about?
Well, we're getting disturbing reports, both from NATO and other sources, suggesting that NATO now, as a collective body, wants to authorize the use of more deep strike weapons, Tomahawk missiles, and so forth.
There is some rumbling in Washington about discussions behind the scenes about giving the Ukrainians, whatever that means right now, I prefer to say the Zelensky regime, access to tactical nuclear weapons, which seems incredible to me.
I can't imagine it.
But I think more important than any of those statements right now is what's happening on the ground in eastern Ukraine with the Russian armed forces.
Mr. Shogu, the former Minister of Defense, referred to as general, but he's really a civilian who was appointed to supervise, is back on the ground in eastern Ukraine, and he is watching carefully as the tremendous logistical buildup takes place.
Millions of tons of ammunition, food, water, fuel are being built up very far forward, right?
Behind the lines with the object of preparing for what looks to be a major offensive to end the war.
The Russians seem to have assembled roughly 180,000 troops for the purpose of striking decisively, ostensibly towards Kyiv and the river and putting an end once and for all to the Ukrainian resistance.
They also are providing lots of warm food and showers and other things to the troops, new uniforms.
This usually indicates you're getting ready to go to war in a big way because you want your soldiers to be rested and well-fed.
And I think there is a sense in Moscow that there is no longer any point in waiting for a new government to show up and take control.
I think they've decided that whoever shows up, whether it's Donald Trump, Or anybody else is probably going to do what's been done before.
And I think that's very unfortunate.
But we have to attribute that to a lot of stupid remarks made by a lot of people over the last couple of weeks about what should or should not happen in Ukraine.
And among those stupid remarks, Mike, you consider comments by Admiral Bauer, the chair of the NATO military.
And intimations from EU elites like Prime Minister Starmer of Great Britain and President Macron of France that they're not intimidated by the Ereshnik missile that startled the world when President Putin's people engaged it or fired it four or five days ago.
I think that's right.
It's hard to ignore dumb remarks along the lines of British and French troops deploying to fight in western Ukraine against the Russians.
I think if you add the two armies together, you barely come up with 200,000.
I suppose they plan to ship all the forces they have there, which will make it easier for the Russians to annihilate them quickly and get on with business.
Very stupid remarks.
There is also, as you point out, a failure to understand What the Russians have recently demonstrated.
And I think you've had other guests on, like Scott Ritter, who've given us excellent details on the missile, many of which I was unfamiliar with.
But the thing that we need to keep in mind is mass times acceleration equals annihilation.
And what I mean by that is that when you begin building these hypersonic missiles, regardless of the various types of warheads that you put on them, in this case,
Whatever you are using comes in at such an enormous speed that the combination of the speed of impact with the munition itself and the explosives is so great that it has the effect of a nuclear weapon.
Now this is a long-term development.
This is not something the Russians began developing recently.
Go all the way back to the late 1970s when Marshal Ogarkov was the chief of the Soviet general staff.
He talked at great lengths about new, modern, conventional missiles and warheads replacing nuclear warheads.
And by the time he got into the late 80s and early 90s, the leading lights of his general staff began writing extensively on it.
Actually, it's Colonel General Mahmoud Gureyev wrote extensively.
On why nuclear weapons were of no real value on a battlefield or in a war any longer because they're so poisonous and destructive and that these new missiles could take their place.
Well, we have arrived and we are not in a position to challenge that.
We can't protect ourselves from it.
The Russians know it and they thought that we should be aware of what they've got.
I suspect that we will now see another round of hypersonic missiles.
Striking a variety of targets, probably command and control, certainly aviation centers or airfields, logistics, specifically rail lines, which to this point, for various reasons, the Russians have not set out to destroy.
And I think also roads, where trucks carry enormous quantities of supplies forward for the Ukrainians.
So everything is on the table now.
We're going to see mass destruction.
Are we going to see an attack on NATO?
I don't think so.
But if we continue on the road that we're headed right now inside NATO with the United States in the lead, I suppose that's evidently possible.
Colonel, are Russian troops preparing to fight NATO?
Yeah, I think so.
I think what you've got is they're doing two things at once.
First of all, they're assembling the force to end the war with Ukraine.
And at the same time, they're hedging their bets.
And they're saying, well, we've got to hedge against the possibility.
That these fools decide to intervene on the ground in Western Ukraine.
That would be, in my judgment, catastrophic for the West and for NATO, but people are discussing it.
And I guess this sort of discussion doesn't mean that all the NATO allies have to agree.
The recent discussions, majority rules, if the majority votes to do something stupid, then NATO will do it.
I think that's where we are right now.
They're preparing for both contingencies, end the war and then take on NATO.
Colonel, you and our colleagues on the show have referred to this Ereshnik missile as a game-changer, and I wonder if the Pentagon and the State Department and the West Wing view it that way.
There has been apparently another use of attackums striking Russian land.
After the Oreshnik was fired, this TACAMS event apparently occurred yesterday or Sunday.
We know that these missiles cannot be triggered without the involvement of American personnel.
Doesn't anybody get it that Putin is serious?
Well, that's a good question.
I think there is a...
It's a bit strange because, as you know, Judge, we've never had any strategic interest whatsoever in eastern Ukraine, let alone Ukraine.
Certainly nothing vital.
And the notion that we're defending some sort of liberal democracy is, of course, absurd.
It's an organized crime state.
Things in Western Ukraine are worse than they've ever been with regard to criminality.
So it doesn't make any sense.
But yes, you're right.
The combination of ignorance and arrogance is quite profound.
and we've decided that it doesn't make any difference what they do.
And what worries me most of all is in response to these kinds of devastating assaults by These Russian missiles, we may be contemplating the use of a nuclear weapon.
And of course, that would lead to rapid escalation to the strategic level and the end of life as we know it on the planet.
But as you pointed out, we've heard people talk about we're prepared to fight a nuclear war.
No one, no one is prepared to fight a nuclear war.
That's insane.
Is that Admiral still around who out of the blue made that statement last week that got little publicity but upset so many of us?
I imagine so.
It doesn't appear that there's any civilian oversight that would change that condition.
And so the problem for the Russians is if they hear a senior officer make a statement like that, no action is taken, then they assume this reflects the government's will, the people in power.
Right.
And that's the conclusion I think they've reached.
This is a very dangerous moment in the history of the United States, and it's really striking how radically different the people in leadership positions are today from what they were in the early 60s when we went through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Are there some sort of nuclear weapons available for the Biden administration to give to the Zelensky government?
Oh, yes.
You could turn over aerial bombs.
You probably could fit some missiles with certainly cruise missiles and other things.
Why anybody would do such a thing is, again, beyond my imagination.
Why anybody would think that the Russians will not answer this dramatically with their own capabilities is, again, a mystery.
You've been told if you walk down this street, it's a dead end.
And if you reach the dead end, you're going to fall into a pit and be devoured and destroyed.
That's really what it amounts to.
And that doesn't seem to bother anybody.
He said, no, let's full steam ahead.
We'll go down this and you wait and see.
There won't be a problem and we'll be in charge.
I don't want to...
I have a couple of quotes for you.
The first is Michael Waltz, Congressman Waltz, who's about to become the National Security Advisor.
On one of the Sunday talk shows, basically saying, I agree with my predecessor, Jake Sullivan.
This is cut number five.
President Trump has been very clear about the need to end this conflict.
That's what we'll be working with this administration until January and then beyond.
And I also want to be clear on one thing, Julian.
Jake and I, Jake Sullivan and I have had discussions.
We've met.
For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other, they're wrong.
And we are hand in glove.
We are one team with the United States in this transition.
I mean, is that hyperbolic or is their mindset the same?
Because you and I could list a thousand statements that Mr. Sullivan made, which are inconsistent with what the president-elect said he believes and what we believe is in the best interest of the United States.
Well, setting aside for a minute what the president-elect actually thinks or believes, we do need to keep in mind that he's expressed views.
That are widely shared on the hill by the so-called Uniparty.
We've talked about that before.
Yes.
There's no one there that disagrees with what Waltz has said.
Everyone is delighted to continue the ride into hell without a pause on the assumption that somehow or another, magically, we can dominate and rule, which is absurd.
As far as his comments at the beginning about what we want to end the conflict, this goes back to another discussion.
We seem to think that we hold all the strategic cards, which has never been the case.
From the very beginning, it was very clear that whatever happened in Ukraine, it would ultimately work to Russia's advantage.
Russia could not lose a war to the Ukrainians any more than we could lose a war to Mexico.
So this is strategically preposterous to suggest that we're going to force the Russians to the table to agree to something.
Impossible.
All we're doing is we're creating more obstacles to any measure of understanding or any end to the hostilities that exist between Russia and the United States, all of which, as President Trump has said in the past, are artificially constructed.
They don't need to exist.
But one wonders who's really in charge.
We haven't heard anything from President Trump.
We keep hearing from the underlings that are connected to him in some fashion.
It's very dangerous.
And again, people overseas, people in Russia, China, India, Iran, all over the world are listening to this in suspending disbelief, but they're taking it very seriously.
And we should understand that because that puts us on a path to Armageddon.
Well, here's a statement that people are probably taking seriously from Sebastian Gorka, who I believe is the president's in-house national security.
advisor.
This is outlandish, but here it is, cut number 10. I'll give one tip away that the president has mentioned.
He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation, you will negotiate now, or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.
That's how he will force those gentlemen to come to an arrangement that stops the bloodshed.
Well, I think he's confusing his hyperbolic voice on radio with reality.
It's disturbing that he would even be seriously considered for much of anything at this point in the new administration.
But we have to take him seriously because he says, I will let you know what Trump is thinking.
President Trump needs to decide whether or not that kind of thinking is what he wants.
Everyone in the world to believe in, particularly the Russians.
Pouring buckets of filth and abuse all over Putin has become an institutionalized practice here in Washington.
It's all counterproductive.
It gets you nowhere.
It's a sort of hypocritical morality that we adopt when we want to feel superior to others.
As I point out, most of the Senate lives at least part of the time, if not all the time, on Epstein Island.
So taking them seriously when it comes to moral posturing is very difficult.
So I think, again, where is President Trump?
President Trump is the one who needs to speak.
And he should be sounding what he says or what he thinks is important.
How does he do that?
He stands up and says, first of all, this is not my war.
I did not start it.
I don't support it.
And I want to end it.
And I'll do everything in my power to bring this about.
We have no interest.
In war or conflict with Russia or the Russian people.
He needs to say that, because right now the assumption in Russia is that we definitely want to destroy them.
And in contrast to us, the Russians are prepared to fight.
We are not.
And we're kidding ourselves on every level in this sort of thing.
We are the ones that are bluffing, not the Russians.
General, excuse me, Colonel, switching gears.
You and I recently communicated off-air about the extraordinary number of children and babies killed and grievously permanently wounded in Gaza.
There appears to be no stopping this.
Will, in your view, President Trump continue to give Prime Minister Netanyahu whatever he wants, or will he put some moral restraint?
I see no evidence for any daylight between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
I think they are very much joined at the hip.
So I don't think any of this will really penetrate with him.
If we say 15,000 children, according to various reports, British, UN and others, average age of five, five and a half have been killed.
No one seems to take it in.
It's dismissed as propaganda.
The media are entirely on the side of the Israeli war of Jewish dominance and superiority and supremacy in the Middle East.
Anyone who questions that is immediately branded as an anti-Semite.
And any number of other epithets.
And I think that's where we are, and I see a lot of evidence for it.
I don't see any evidence that there is any daylight, and I don't have any expectation that President Trump will exert any influence or power that makes sense, quite frankly, to end the disaster in the region.
And this is very important, Judge.
I'm glad you mentioned this, because we need to understand that the war that is now going on in Ukraine And what is developing in the Middle East into a potentially regional, even global conflict, those are not disconnected.
They are connected.
And doing what we are doing today to the Russians in terms of pouring buckets of filth and abuse all over them, accusing them of things they've never done, taking a position that they are somehow evil and deserve to be destroyed.
That is not going to help us in the Middle East in any way, shape, or form bring about any sort of solution.
In fact, it's very similar in the strident tone to what Netanyahu and his friends have said about virtually everybody in the region.
Everybody in the region is Amalek.
Everybody in the region deserves the worst, and we're going to give it to them.
That's the perception in the Middle East.
Everybody knows that, feels that way.
The same thing is true today in Moscow.
I cannot conceive of a worse set of circumstances, and if there is ever a need for very dynamic and forceful leadership out of this morass that is leading us to destruction, it is now, and it's Donald Trump.
We'll have to see if any of that finally penetrates with him.
Here's the Palestinian ambassador to the UN yesterday at the National Security Council.
Cut number 11. Freedom will not be...
The Palestinian people will not surrender.
We will continue our struggle for freedom and to put an end to this illegal occupation as the International Court of Justice has articulated.
You're not listening to anyone.
You're listening to extremism, to fanaticism, to the extremists in your government, to the extremists in your society, and therefore you are perpetuating this war.
And we will, all of us, led by international law, succeed in either making you listen and understand or forcing you to listen, as all people like you in the past were forced to listen to the will of the people in all corners of the globe and international law.
No, I think the incoming administration is 200% With the current Israeli leadership, and we will join in whatever war breaks out in the Middle East ultimately, and it will.
And it will be a war involving Iran and eventually virtually everyone else in the region.
And we seem to be determined to do that.
And again, as I pointed out, the Russians are preparing to end this business in Ukraine or fight NATO.
Not just Iran, but ultimately all of the forces arrayed against Israel.
This is a terrible situation.
We and the Israelis are largely on our own.
Now, I suppose somebody will point to Great Britain as willing to supply something, but tragically, Britain is a shadow of its former self, can't contribute much to begin with.
And all of our economies in the West are very fragile right now, extremely fragile, thanks to all of these sanctions.
And bullying that we've been engaged in against the Russians and Chinese and others.
So there's no good news at this point.
I'm glad it's Thanksgiving.
People need to stop and think about all of this.
And I would urge everyone to get down on their knees and pray, because that's probably the most important thing we can do at this stage.
There's not much else we can do.
Colonel, is the Taliban still a threat?
No, no.
The Taliban was never a threat.
The Taliban was a radical Islamist organization founded by the Pakistanis to combat Indian influence in Afghanistan.
It's now grown into something more, but nothing over there threatens us.
I mean, Judge, if we simply said we've had enough, sort these things out for yourselves and packed up and left, we wouldn't notice.
The problems that we confront here in our country are so legion.
And so enormous that we haven't got time for any of this other business.
And that's the other message that I really wish the incoming administration would get.
You know, Donald Trump can end up like LBJ.
You know, he's got lots of plans for the domestic side of the House, and he could lose everything as a result of these pointless, uncontrollable wars that could easily destroy him and us.
It destroyed LBJ in Vietnam.
This is much worse and far more dangerous.
In fact, FDR's New Deal died on the battlefields of the Second World War.
Once the war began and we got into it, that was the end of all of his New Deal ideas.
So I think we really need to step back and tell these people, look, you can do one or the other.
You can come home and you can address the emergency here in the United States.
Or you can fight overseas while everything here continues to deteriorate and fall apart.
That's essentially the choice.
The reason I asked you about the Taliban is because of the Trump foreign policy spokesperson.
Here he is again.
Cut number 12. The resurgence of global jihadism.
People think that it went away, but it didn't with the surrender of Afghanistan, the disgraceful surrender of Afghanistan by Joe Biden, by Lloyd Austin, his Secretary of Defense.
We have a new hub of jihadism.
We left 80, well, just $83 billion worth of weapons for the Taliban.
Al-Qaeda is resurgent.
ISIS is still out there.
Whether it's the Houthis.
So whether it's the numerous proxies of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, the threat is as great as it's ever been.
Sounds like one of the extremists the Palestinian ambassador was talking about.
Well, I think the Israel lobby is quite delighted with someone like Gorka because he's resurrecting the otherwise comatose body of global jihad.
I remember reading these stupid comments that came out of the Pentagon.
In the early part of this century, the imminence of the global jihadists taking over and building the quote-unquote global caliphate.
You know, see the men in the pickup trucks behind the machine guns?
That's about as far as the Taliban's going to get.
They can't operate or maintain most of the equipment and machinery that we left behind.
We shouldn't have left it there.
There's no question about that.
And again, nobody's being held accountable for that.
But then the word in Washington is no accountability for anything.
The Senate's not interested in accountability, neither is the House and neither is anybody in the Department of Defense.
So I think his words are well received here by certain people in Washington and certainly in the Middle East by the Israeli government.
But they're empty words and they don't lead us anywhere and they don't help us to understand what's really important here in the United States.
Colonel, before we go, in this Thanksgiving week, President-elect Trump has indicated he will impanel a warrior board of retired generals to review the competence of current generals and admirals and determine whether or not he should.
Is this a good idea?
No, actually, I think it's a very bad idea.
I don't see much hope for it.
He's trying to empower a group of retired four stars, I suspect, who are responsible for many of the four stars you see on active duty because they're friends.
To pick and choose among them who is, quote-unquote, a real warrior, whatever the hell that means these days, and somebody who is ideologically repugnant to the incoming administration.
Now, much of this revolves around this DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion.
You can dispense with that with a stroke of the pen.
That's very easy.
This is not going to fundamentally change anything because we've got 44 four stars.
People say, well, you say I have too many generals.
I never said we had too many generals.
I said we had too many four stars and three stars.
And that's where you need to attack, but you don't attack them on a personal level for whatever they have said or done that you don't like.
We need a new national military strategy that steers a course away from war.
We haven't even talked about the millions that have suffered as a result of what we've done.
We just need to get out of that business, focus on defense for a change instead of offensive operations.
That can be done.
And then you begin to look at the structure and decide you don't need all of the commands that we have, all the regional unified commands, functional commands.
It's turned into a circus, a jobs for generals circus.
That needs to go away.
And I'm talking about four stars and three stars.
It's hopelessly bloated and overweight in every sense of the word.
So that's where the new administration should focus, but they're not.
And so walking into the Pentagon and said, well, if you support DEI, you're bad.
I'm removing you.
That's a dumb idea.
I don't remember that that was covered in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights anywhere.
I don't remember any regulation that says that.
If you issue an executive order that simply says diversity, equity, inclusion, affirmative action, which is already being judged to be not constitutional by the Supreme Court, Get rid of all of these things that turn anybody into a protected class.
We've got to get out of this business of categorizing people.
This is what the left loves.
It promotes the kind of divisiveness, hatred, and bitterness that they thrive on.
What we're doing, if we hold such a board and put a bunch of retired four-stars on it, we're not changing that at all.
We're probably exaggerating it and making it worse.
That's not the way forward.
But then again, I haven't heard anything thus far from this administration, other, frankly, than some of the good comments about digital currency and Bitcoin, which I agree with.
I haven't heard anything about making cuts in spending, which are desperately needed.
I haven't heard anything about a new national military strategy.
I haven't seen anything that tells me there's any evidence for a new national strategy for the United States that emphasizes what we can do in energy, agriculture.
High-tech manufacturing.
Those are the places we need to focus.
And yes, secure the border and come up with a plan to deal with all of the illegals.
What we're promoting right now is this sort of highly frightening and ugly deportation approach.
Certainly, we're going to deport people.
But you don't deport people on day one.
You just don't walk in and say, everybody get on the truck at gunpoint and you're going.
You have to sit down and come up with a process.
It makes sense for us, for them, for the economy.
I don't hear that right now, General.
And the process must also be fair to the individuals.
Yes.
After all, these people in any cases, as you know, Judge, were invited by this crazy administration.
Correct.
Correct.
Colonel, thank you very much.
Thank you for your time.
As always, it's a short week.
I appreciate you coming on.
A happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
I hope we'll see you again next week.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and everyone else.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Coming up today, still to come, we have a full day for you.
At 11 o 'clock this morning, Colonel Tony Schaefer at noon, Aaron Mate at 2 o 'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 3 o 'clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski at 5 o 'clock, Staff Sergeant Major Chief Dennis Fritz.
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