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Dec. 25, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
01:11:24
[SPECIAL] - Best of Judging Freedom 2024 - PART TWO
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Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
It's the end of the year and it's time for us to look back and we do that for you.
Here's the best of Judging Freedom in the past 12 months.
Merry Christmas to you.
But we know that contractors are going to get killed.
Those guys are wearing fatigues but not government-issued, and their boots on the ground, and they have weapons in their hands, or at the other end of the computer, they're fair game.
Oh, absolutely.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about potential attacks on our satellites in space, as well as attacks on aircraft, manned or unmanned, that are part of this intelligence surveillance reconnaissance complex.
That's really at heart of what keeps the Ukrainians even in the game.
There's not much left on the ground, as far as an army is concerned, in ruins.
Last week, they lost 13,000 men.
This is the sort of thing that happens at the end of a war.
An army is collapsing and retreating.
That's when most of the damage occurs.
You lose more people during a retreat than you do in a stand-up battle.
This is effectively over on the ground.
I'm sure the Russians will advance when they feel comfortable doing so.
The real question is, how much damage do they do to what I just described, to our intelligence surveillance reconnaissance complex?
I hope that people are more thoughtful than they've been thus far and will keep at least our manned aircraft out of range.
But as the Russians advance towards the west, towards that river, they'll be able to take more and more things under fire and destroy them.
That's the concern that I have.
Switching gears to Israel, here's Prime Minister Netanyahu's latest.
I won't even characterize it other than by saying he has a catalog of countries in there that he believes will soon be at war, and he blames everybody but Israel.
This is just about an hour old, this clip, Colonel.
So we'll play it for you.
It's a little bit longer than a minute.
I'd love your thoughts on it.
A combined ground offensive from various fronts, coupled with a combined missile bombardment.
We've been given the opportunity to scuttle it, and we will.
The first requirement is to cut that hand, Hamas.
People who do this thing to us are not going to be there.
We'll have a long battle.
I don't think it's that long.
We'll get rid of them.
We also have to deter the other elements of the Iran terror axis.
But we have to deal with the axis.
The axis doesn't threaten only us.
It threatens you.
It's on the march to conquer the Middle East.
Conquer the Middle East.
Conquer. That means actually conquer.
Conquer Saudi Arabia.
Conquer the Arabian Peninsula.
It's just a question of time.
And what's standing in their way is the small Satan, that's us, on the road to the middle-sized Satan, that's the Europeans.
They're always offended when I tell them that.
You're the great Satan, not them.
And we have to stop them.
I don't know what to make of that, Colonel.
What do you think?
He's beginning to sound like Ahab in Moby Dick.
He's on a doomed whale hunt.
He's beginning to see enemies everywhere.
He doesn't seem to understand that he's precipitated the emergence of this coalition against him.
It's his actions as the Israeli offensive that's being launched against Hamas.
Now the very high probability that they will attack Hezbollah that is convincing everyone in the region to turn against him.
The Saudis...
I think King Abdullah is hanging on by his fingernails.
He's got millions of Palestinians in his country that are appalled at what's being done to their fellow Palestinians on the other side of the Jordan River.
You've got General Sisi, who is apoplectic.
We have been bribing him, willing to forgive his $180 billion debt, national sovereign debt, in return for taking in the Palestinian Arabs that are being driven out of Gaza.
He's incapable of doing it.
He understands that if he does that, he's going to be seen as a traitor to his own people.
And that's a pretty good description of the way many Egyptians feel about him at this point.
Everything is coming apart in the region.
And as you point out, he's blaming it on everything and everybody but himself and the actions of his own country.
And it's very interesting when he attributes this desire by the Iranians to conquer the region.
The Iranians are not equipped to conquer anything.
They can't project their own military power very far at all.
They build up the arsenal of rockets and missiles, much like Hezbollah, for the same reason, to deter the Israelis.
But they can't march into anything and conquer anything.
So the only people in the region who are capable of conquering very much right now, at least their neighbors, is Israel.
And they are viewed as waging this war for Jewish supremacy in the region.
It's entertaining to listen to his description as, once again, the permanent victim.
And that's something that he keeps insisting is the case, that he and Israel...
We are standing behind Israel, continuing to provide unconditional support for whatever Mr. Netanyahu wants to do.
And unfortunately, at this point, it seems to be...
A willingness to destroy the entire region.
In the meantime, Phil Giraldi reports from a source that the Israelis have used phosphorus to destroy an entire village of people in Lebanon.
I wonder if we paid for it.
I wonder if we supplied it.
Well, we do have white phosphorus in our inventory.
Normally, we use it to mark a target.
As opposed to burn down a village.
But it can be used for that purpose.
White phosphorus is terrible.
I mean, I've seen people with holes in their arms where a very small droplet of white phosphorus fell on a soldier's arm.
And you could literally see right through the arm.
The arm was melted in most respects.
I mean, it's a horrible weapon.
So I can understand why people would be horrified by that.
But at this point, if you're an Israeli, you take the position, you are the permanent victim, the world is against you, and anything you do to anyone who is your enemy is justified.
I mean, this was surprising to me to listen to the former chief of defense in Israel, Benny Gantz, make the comment that, well, we haven't been able to destroy Hamas, but we think we can destroy Hezbollah's capabilities in the space of a few days.
Isn't that absurd?
The only way that could happen.
One other story to relate to you.
This airman that immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy, Aaron Bushnell, our friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, who's a latter-day Seymour Hersh when it comes to digging things up,
found his orders.
There it is.
That he was ordered to be ready on a moment's notice to deploy to Israel.
And it was...
Listen, I don't defend suicide.
I don't defend what he did.
But the American people need to understand it and the media needs to address it.
Not with an Israeli flag waving in the background like NBC did.
And not without stating what it was about.
Like all the...
Look at those headlines.
Like all the major...
Newspapers in the U.S. did.
Only rats gave a headline that said what it was truly about in protest of American support of Gaza war.
But the American public needs to know what we didn't know until Max reported this a few hours ago.
That American airmen have been told to get ready on a moment's notice to deploy and it's mandatory.
As soon as we tell you, you'll go.
And this, put it up again, Chris, I think it was November.
There's a date on there somewhere.
21 November 2023.
There you go.
Your thoughts.
You know, it's interesting when you go through this man's social media.
He has a posting that says, a lot of people wonder.
There it is.
Many of us like to ask ourselves, what would I do if I were alive during slavery or the Jim Crow South or apartheid?
What would I do if my country was committing genocide?
And the answer is, you're doing it.
Right now, which is nothing.
This is the harshest indictment of American citizens that has been put out there by anybody in modern times.
And it's done by an airman of the United States Air Force.
He has exposed the American people for the moral hypocrites that we collectively are.
We claim to be somebody who is a nation who stands for right, doing the right thing.
And we all sit there and speak of this.
But how many Americans have actually got off their butts and gone out and done something?
You know, at least, you know, I'm not perfect, but at least when I say I want to improve relations between the United States and Russia, I get off my ass, and I travel to Russia, and I put it all on the line in trying to improve relations.
I'm doing my best effort.
There's other people out there who do the same thing for Gaza, doing the same thing.
But the vast majority of the Americans are sitting at home doing nothing.
And I think this man, this kid, who has apparently a moral conscience that just consumed him.
He's somebody who's...
Who just said, I've got to do something.
And he looked at the examples of history.
I mean, if you study war, you know, one of the more telling moments during the Vietnam War is when the Buddhist monk emulated himself in protest of the conflict.
It's an act that many people would say is an act of desperation.
But how desperate was this kid?
He had orders to go to Israel in a war that he couldn't support.
And he's on active duty.
He has to obey these orders.
And so does he bottle this up inside and say, well, I'm against all this, but I'm going to do my job.
I'm going to do my duty.
Well, apparently he couldn't.
But then he said, what do I do about this?
How do I let everybody know about this moral crisis that faces not just me, but all of America?
And he burned himself to death.
I wouldn't do it.
I don't have the courage to do that.
There's no way I would do that.
And a lot of people say, well, he's mentally unbalanced.
Maybe. What I say is, this man's a freaking hero.
Excuse my language.
But this is a guy who believed in something, and he paid the ultimate price to send a message to get people to talk and reach in deep inside and say, what am I going to do about this genocide that's being committed in our name,
our collective name?
And it's not just being committed in our name.
Our government's actively complicit.
And that makes us, we the people of the United States of America, you know, this Democratic Republic that we have, we elected these people to act in our name, and they're doing things in our name that is criminal, that is genocidal.
What are we going to do about it?
And as he said, many people talk about it.
They say, what would we do?
Ask yourselves.
Everybody watching this show, look in the mirror.
What would you do?
And the answer is, you're doing it.
Nothing. Judge Andrew Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
What a, after all my years at that network where I used to work, what a pleasure it is to be among like-minded people.
I was walking into a theater in New York City and I saw some lady across the street waving and waving and she ran across the street and I knew I was in her crosshairs and she said, Judge Napolitano,
Judge Napolitano, I heard you were dead.
I looked at her.
I said, Madam, I'm sorry to disappoint you.
I don't think any of you will be disappointed at the end of today.
Isn't Scott Ritter a genuine American hero?
And my friend Joe Lauria is the most courageous journalist you'll ever shake hands with.
And my new friend, Roger Waters, who watches my show every day.
God bless you, Roger.
I've been a fan of yours since I was a lot younger than I am now.
So when we are discussing the freedom of speech in law school, we often ask this question.
The First Amendment reads in part, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
And I would say to the students, well, what would happen if the states ratified an amendment repealing the First Amendment?
Would we still have the freedom of speech?
Now, if you're a big government type who believes that freedom comes from the government, then the answer to that question is no.
But if you recognize that freedom comes...
From our humanity, a gift from God who created us, then it doesn't matter if we have the First Amendment.
We will always have the freedom of speech.
This is at least the theory of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, that your right to live...
Your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to read what you want, to gather whatever information you want, to defend yourself against the government if it's taken over by tyrants, and your right to be left alone,
these are rights that come from our humanity, whether the government is willing to recognize them or not.
Now, after we fought the revolution and won the revolution and wrote a constitution, five states threatened to secede.
Isn't that interesting?
The framers believed in the right of the states to secede, and they threatened to leave unless a Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution.
And the Congress picked the same guy to write...
To the Bill of Rights who had written the Constitution, Little Jimmy Madison.
Now they call him Little because he was four foot eight.
So I hope when I go to heaven I get to stand next to Little Jimmy because I'll look like Shaquille O'Neal by comparison.
When Little Jimmy wrote the First Amendment, he insisted that the word the be in there.
Hear me out.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, recognizing its preexistence before the government.
If it existed before the government, where did it come from?
It comes from our humanity.
This was recognized by the framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights.
It would last for seven years.
The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.
In 1798, the Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Act, a law that was motivated by something that is inconceivable today, fear of the French.
All right.
They feared the French because the French had just cut the king's head off and they were worried the same thing would happen here.
So they enacted this awful set of laws, which basically said, if you want to come to the U.S. and become a citizen, Come here.
We'll give you 20 acres of land.
You can till it and do whatever you want.
And you'll be a citizen after 14 months.
Unless you're French, then you have to wait 14 years.
Oh, and by the way, anyone who is critical of the government or the president and is convicted of this criticism shall be sentenced to two years.
In a federal prison.
So the same generation and in some cases the same human beings who had just written Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech enacted legislation that abridged the freedom of speech and punished its exercise in order to preserve the government from too much criticism.
The statute prohibited criticism of the president, the Congress, and the government.
Note what's missing.
The vice president.
The vice president was Thomas Jefferson.
He and John Adams, the president, didn't speak.
Well, remember how you became president and vice president in those days.
Everybody ran for president.
Whoever finished first became the president.
The vice president.
Could you imagine that today?
Could you imagine Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump's vice president?
Hillary, get me a Diet Coke.
Jefferson didn't care what people said about him.
Nor did Congressman Matthew Lyons, the Ron Paul of his era.
Who decided to test the limits of the Alien and Sedition Act by criticizing the president in public.
John Adams, who was as wide as he was tall during his years in the White House, often wore a purple robe on his way to the Capitol building, and his wife sewed gold epaulets on the shoulders.
And he looked like a regal mountain walking through the streets.
So Congressman Lyons went up to him and said in front of the press, good morning, your majesty.
Well, that did not result in a prosecution.
And then he said a few days later, good morning, your pomposity.
And that didn't result in a prosecution for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts.
And then he said with the press there, good morning, your rotundity.
And that resulted in a prosecution for violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
And a member of Congress was tried in federal court in Boston and convicted of mocking the president's waistline.
And for that...
He was sentenced to two years in a federal prison.
And then he did something in jail, which if you are from New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, or Hudson County, New Jersey, you are familiar with.
He ran for re-election from his jail cell, and he won.
And when he got to Washington, D.C., expecting to mock His rotundity, he found instead a tall, thin, raven-haired occupant in the White House by the name of Thomas Jefferson.
And Jefferson proceeded to pardon Congressman Lyons and return the 430-acre farm that the feds had stolen from him during his years in incarceration.
You can see what the government thinks of the First Amendment.
This would continue on and on and on in the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln, forgive me for using bad language, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
That's your right to be brought before a judge after you've been incarcerated.
And then he arrested 3,000 journalists in the North for being critical of his war effort.
He claimed that he received emergency powers from the Constitution.
After he had died, the Supreme Court...
Five of whose members he appointed ruled unanimously, there are no emergency powers in the Constitution.
You can say whatever you want in wartime or in peacetime.
Woodrow Wilson, during World War I, he is the former constitutional law professor at my alma mater, Princeton University.
He is the former president of Princeton.
He is the former governor of New Jersey, arrested Princeton students.
Who stood in front of a draft office in Washington, D.C. and read subversive materials aloud, and he arrested them because he felt it was interfering with the draft.
What were the subversive materials that the Princeton students read?
The Declaration of Independence.
What was the name of the federal agent sent from Washington, D.C. to arrest these Princeton students?
John Edgar Hoover.
The rest, of course, is history.
When Wilson was challenged on this at a press conference, Mr. President, have you read the First Amendment?
Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech.
You're arresting your former students for reading the Declaration of Independence and you took an oath to uphold the First Amendment.
He said to the reporters, well, read the First Amendment.
It only restrains the Congress.
It doesn't restrain me.
Such an answer, of course, in law school today or on the bar exam would cause you to flunk law school and never be licensed for the bar exam.
Because Congress shall make no law means no government shall make any law abridging the freedom of speech.
That, of course, would not stop George W. Bush and the Republicans.
The Patriot Act authorizes one FBI agent to permit another FBI agent to conduct a search.
Even though the Fourth Amendment says there shall be no searches except by warrants issued by judges based on probable cause of crime and specifically defining the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.
The Patriot Act also makes it a crime to tell anyone that you received An agent written search warrant.
Of course, they have a fancy name for these agent written search warrants.
They're called national security letters.
So if the feds show up and hand a national security letter to your lawyer, your doctor, your banker, your librarian, the lawyer, doctor, banker, librarian cannot tell you that they received this national security letter.
So two librarians are in a library in Bridgewater.
I know that sounds like a joke.
Two drunks are standing at a bar, but this is a true story.
Two librarians are standing at a library in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and an FBI agent walks in and hands a national security letter to one of them, and she's hard of hearing.
She says, who are you?
Well, I have a national security letter.
What? She doesn't understand what he says.
She's 86 years old.
She hands it to her 75-year-old.
Volunteer. She's arrested.
She's arrested for revealing the fact that she had received a national security letter.
Now, fast forward a year, and the 86-year-old is 87, and she's a defendant in a federal courtroom.
And the federal judge says to the prosecutors, you really want to prosecute this 87-year-old lady for telling her 76-year-old assistant that she received a national security letter?
Yes, we do.
It's a violation of national security for anybody to tell anybody else that they received a national security letter.
And the judge says, well, wait a minute.
This is a public library with government books on government shelves.
How can it be a crime to take a book off a government shelf and read it?
Why was the FBI even in the library?
No answer.
Who's the Attorney General, John Ashcroft?
Get him on the phone, because I'm about to declare the Patriot Act unconstitutional.
Well, whereupon Ashcroft says, well, dismiss the case, dismiss the case, pull the case before she can declare it unconstitutional.
So the government then changes its mind and says, well, all right, Your Honor, we're going to move.
To dismiss the indictment.
And the judge says, I'll rule on your motion tomorrow.
And that night, she published an opinion declaring the Patriot Act unconstitutional, and then the next day dismissed the indictment.
This has happened five times throughout the country.
And whenever it happens, the government will not appeal it for fear that a higher court will sustain How can it possibly be a crime to tell your lawyer,
your spouse in your bedroom, a priest in confessional, a judge in a public courtroom, that you received a piece of paper from the government?
That's how disrespectful And hateful the government is of the freedom of speech.
Why does the government fear the freedom of speech?
So that people like Scott Ritter cannot tell you how dangerous the government's policies are.
And how close the government brings us to annihilation.
The government doesn't want to hear that.
The government is so afraid of Scott Ritter, they sent 40 FBI agents to his house, including a SWAT team and a bomb squad, to get his cell phone and his desktop.
And then they questioned him.
And Scott Ritter stood eyeball to eyeball with the government and never blinked.
The government does this when it wants to chill the freedom of speech.
When it wants to cause people who criticize the government to look over their shoulders before they speak.
Because not everybody who criticizes the government, well, not everybody who criticizes the government is as big as Scott Ritter, but not everybody who criticizes the government is as courageous as Scott Ritter.
So the freedom of speech, if you want peace, speak about it.
If you want peace, challenge the government.
If you want peace, Shake your fist in the tyrant's face!
In the long history of the world, JFK famously said in his inauguration speech, only a few generations will be granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger.
This Is that our?
This is the generation.
Now is the time to defend it.
Gatherings like this will rile up the people to tell the government when it is wrong.
Our freedoms come from our humanity.
Whether you believe, listen, I'm an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II, Francis skeptic, Latin mass attending Roman Catholic, but you don't have to be that.
You don't even have to recognize the existence of God.
You know that we are the highest and best rational beings on the planet.
And you know that we naturally yearn to be free.
And you know that those natural yearnings come from within our hearts.
And they are as essential to our existence and our pursuit of happiness as anything the government can give.
Government, on the other hand, is the negation of liberty.
Government only exists by stealing liberty.
You're at home at night.
There's a knock on the door.
You open the door.
There's a guy with a gun.
The guy says, give me your money.
I want to give it away in your name.
Say, what the hell is this?
I'm going to call the police.
Don't bother.
We are the police.
It's an old Mary Rothbard one-liner.
There are three ways to acquire wealth.
The sweat of your brow.
The inheritance model.
The mafia model.
Give us your money or else.
Which model does the government use?
Why do we tolerate this?
Why do we continue to vote for and fund a government that thrives on seizing our property and stealing our liberty?
Why do we have a one-party system?
In the Congress, in the government, a uniparty that loves war and killing and debt and surveillance and taxes and deficit spending and steals our liberty and steals our property.
Because there are not enough Scott Ritters in the world.
That's why we have that problem.
Because there's not enough understanding.
There's not enough understanding of our liberty and courage with which to articulate it so that the government stops.
Jefferson, for all of his flaws, said, when the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Does the government work for us or do we work for the government?
The government should fear us.
We shouldn't fear it.
Why don't more people understand that?
Why? Because the government has seduced two-thirds of the population into receiving wealth transfers from it and believing that they can't exist without it.
It is time for us to recognize That the individual has primacy over the government.
I've been around for a long time.
I've been doing this for 50 years, arguing for the primacy of the individual over the state, arguing for peace over war, arguing for a government that does nothing more than defend our individual liberties.
When I die, I hope to die faithful to these first principles in my bed, in my home, surrounded by the people who love me.
But not all of you will have that luxury.
Some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government prison because of your exercise.
Of the freedom of speech.
And some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government town square to the sound of the government's trumpets blaring.
When the time comes to make these awful decisions, you will know what to do.
Because freedom lies in the human heart.
But it must do more than just lie there.
But we know that contractors are going to get killed.
If those guys are wearing fatigues but not government-issued, and their boots on the ground, and they have weapons in their hands or at the other end of their computers, they're fair game.
Oh, absolutely.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about potential attacks on our satellites.
As well as attacks on aircraft, manned or unmanned, that are part of this intelligence surveillance reconnaissance complex.
Because that's really at heart of what keeps the Ukrainians even in the game.
There's not much left on the ground as far as an army is concerned.
That's in ruins.
Last week, they lost 13,000 men.
This is the sort of thing that happens at the end of a war when an army is collapsing and retreating.
That's when most of the damage occurs.
You lose more people during a retreat than you do in a stand-up battle.
So this is effectively over on the ground.
I'm sure the Russians will advance when they feel comfortable doing so.
The real question is, how much damage do they do to what I just described, to our intelligence surveillance reconnaissance complex?
I hope that people are more thoughtful than they've been thus far and will keep at least our manned aircraft out of range.
But as the Russians advance towards the west, towards that river, they'll be able to take more and more things under fire and destroy them.
That's the concern that I have.
Switching gears to Israel, here's Prime Minister Netanyahu's latest.
I won't even characterize it other than by saying he has a catalog of countries in there that he believes will soon be at war and he blames.
Everybody but Israel.
This is just about an hour old, this clip, Colonel.
So we'll play it for you.
It's a little bit longer than a minute.
I'd love your thoughts on it.
And Iran is fighting us on a seven-front war.
Obviously, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, the militias in Iraq and Syria, Judea, Samaria, West Bank.
Iran itself.
They'd like to topple Jordan.
And their goal is to have a combined ground offensive from various fronts, coupled with a combined missile bombardment.
We have to, we've been given the opportunity to scuttle it.
And we will.
The first requirement is to cut that hand, Hamas.
People who do this thing to us are not going to be there.
We'll have a long battle.
I don't think it's that long, but we'll get rid of them.
We also have to deter the other elements of the Iran terror axis.
But we have to deal with the axis.
The axis doesn't threaten only us.
It threatens you.
It's on the march to conquer the Middle East.
Conquer the Middle East.
Conquer. That means, actually, conquer.
Conquer Saudi Arabia, conquer the Arabian Peninsula.
It's just a question of time.
And what's standing in their way is the small Satan, that's us, on the road to the middle-sized Satans, that's the Europeans.
They're always offended when I tell them that.
You're the great Satan, not them.
And we have to stop them.
I don't know what to make of that, Colonel.
What do you think?
He's beginning to sound like Ahab in Moby Dick.
He's on a doomed whale hunt.
He's beginning to see enemies everywhere.
He doesn't seem to understand that he's precipitated the emergence of this coalition against him.
It's his actions as the Israeli offensive that's being launched against Hamas.
Now the very high probability that they will attack Hezbollah that is convincing everyone in the region to turn against him.
The Saudis, like the other ruling elites in the Arab world right now, are very concerned about being removed by their own people because the populations are enraged.
This is certainly true in Jordan.
I think King Abdullah is hanging on by his fingernails.
He's got millions of Palestinians in his country that are appalled at what's being done to their fellow Palestinians on the other side of the Jordan River.
You've got General Sisi, who is apoplectic.
We have been bribing him, willing to forgive his $180 billion debt, national sovereign debt, in return for taking in the Palestinian Arabs that are being driven out of Gaza.
He's incapable of doing it.
He understands that if he does that, he's going to be seen as a traitor to his own people.
And that's a pretty good description of the way many Egyptians feel about him at this point.
Everything is coming apart in the region.
And as you point out, he's blaming it on everything and everybody but himself and the actions of his own country.
And it's very interesting when he attributes this desire by the Iranians to conquer.
Iranians are not equipped to conquer anything.
They can't project their own military power very far at all.
They build up the arsenal of rockets and missiles, much like Hezbollah.
For the same reason, to deter the Israelis.
But they can't make anything and conquer anything.
So the only people in the region who are capable of conquering very much right now, at least their neighbors, is Israel.
They are viewed as waging this war for Jewish supremacy in the region.
It's entertaining to listen to his script as, once again, the permanent victim.
And that's something that he keeps insisting is the case.
That he and Israel together are permanent victims.
But right now, the rest of the region and the rest of the world sees them as the offending force.
They see their own people being murdered and turned into victims.
They don't agree with the Israeli assessment.
And we are standing behind Israel, continuing to provide unconditional support.
For whatever Mr. Netanyahu wants to do.
And unfortunately, at this point, it seems to be a weakness to destroy the entire region.
In the meantime, Phil Giraldi reports from a source that the Israelis have used phosphorus to destroy an entire village of people in Lebanon.
I wonder if we paid for it.
I wonder if we supplied it.
Well, we do have white phosphorus.
In our inventory, normally we use it to mark the target as opposed to burn down a village, but it can be used for that purpose.
White phosphorus is terrible.
I mean, I've seen people with holes in their arms where a very small droplet of white phosphorus fell on a soldier's arm, and you could literally see right through the arm.
The arm was melted in most respects.
I mean, it's a horrible weapon.
So I can understand why people would be horrified by that.
But at this point, if you're an Israeli, you take the position, you are the permanent victim, the world is against you, and anything you do to anyone who is your enemy is justified.
I mean, this was surprising to me to listen to the former chief of defense in Israel, Benny Gantz, make the comment that, well, we haven't been able to destroy Hamas.
But we think we can destroy Hezbollah's capabilities in the space of a few days.
Isn't that absurd?
The only way that could happen is with the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Putin has lost.
Putin has lost.
Putin has lost.
And then he says, if Putin takes Ukraine, this is worse than propaganda.
This is madness.
And the consequence is tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russians as well.
Yes. What?
For the goal of weakening Russia.
That's what...
Lloyd Austin admitted.
Other Biden administration officials confirmed that that was the goal.
Using this poor country to bleed a geopolitical foe and lying in the process.
And they have to lie because they have to tell their public who are footing the bill, over $100 billion allocated so far.
Now Biden wants another $60 billion.
They have to tell the public that this is going well, that we're winning, Putin's lost, to justify shipping out so much money and energy into this futile proxy war.
When in reality, As Zelensky recently admitted, so did his top aides.
Unless we get another $60 billion, we will lose.
So while Biden and his aides go before the public and lie just so they can prolong this war, they lead to Zelensky being in this horrible position where he has to beg for more money just to avoid an all-out defeat.
That's how pathetic this is.
And speaking of pathetic, your montage exposes...
The lies simply by listening to the words.
Because what do we hear up until the end?
We're going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.
What did Biden say recently, just in December 2023?
We're going to support Ukraine for as long as we can.
So this idea that we were behind Ukraine all along was always a lie.
We were going to support Ukraine so long as it could pursue our sole goal, which was to weaken Russia, not to defend Ukraine.
What will happen, what will become of the $61 billion if, God forbid, the Congress decides to spend it?
I mean, again, according to our military people, there aren't enough human beings alive and well in the military to use any equipment.
And the United States is actually running low, meaning a lot of that money will be cash.
Some of it will be stolen.
But what can they do with it?
Well, it's a racket.
So the money actually goes mostly into replenishing the U.S. stockpile, which means that the U.S. gets to purchase fancy new weapons for itself.
So it recycles money through the military industrial complex at home.
And then Ukraine, as guests on your show have talked about, Scott Ritter talks about this a lot.
They get our leftovers.
They get our hand-me-downs.
All this obsolete equipment that barely works, that's what Ukraine gets.
And that's why Ukraine's been having such a hard time on the battlefield, because they're not even getting top U.S. equipment.
The money is spent.
To replenish the arsenal at home and Ukraine gets...
Henry Kissinger once said it's dangerous to be America's enemy.
It's fatal to be America's friend.
Look, the First Amendment is the linchpin of our liberties.
Without the freedom of speech, we have no democracy.
We have no transparency.
We don't know who the government is killing, and we don't know when the government is lying.
The Pentagon Papers case should have no exemption to it.
Julian Assange is a national hero.
I am elated that he is free, but I'm crushed that the feds got their pound of flesh with this meaningless sham guilty plea for a crime we all know he didn't commit.
George Napolitano, I mean, I can see both arguments here, but as a journalist, my every instinct is...
You should absolutely be free to publish, particularly when you're protected by the First Amendment.
Should there be any line, though?
I mean, you know, I'm mindful of the fact that President Trump is facing criminal charges for storing classified documents.
Joe Biden was investigated for the same thing.
If it's perceived to be a crime for a president to take classified documents just to his home where he's protected by Secret Service, why isn't it a crime for people to publish...
Well, because of the First Amendment, Piers, which not only guarantees the freedom of speech, but according to the Pentagon Papers case, nicely described by my friend Michael, establishes the right of the public to know what the government is doing.
But Mike Pence, for example, has slammed it.
Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The Biden administration's plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonours the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces and their families.
And Biden himself has actually been extremely critical of Assange in the past.
Effectively, I think he called him a terrorist at one stage.
He called him a high-tech terrorist when he was vice president.
And he could have dropped the case in 2021, instead tried to extradite him to stand trial in the United States.
So, you know, people are flip-flopping around a bit on this.
And even on one side or another, there are people disagreeing with each other.
What should we make of it all?
Well, as I said earlier, we can't lose sight of the significance of the First Amendment.
And the absolute freedom the journalist must have, like Daniel Ellsberg, just to drop the 7,000 pages that he stole from the federal government on the New York Times and on the Washington Post.
He was eventually indicted for espionage.
The case was thrown out.
We all know the story.
The FBI broke into a psychiatrist's office during the trial.
The judge was outraged.
He threw the case out.
Chelsea Manning was prosecuted, pleaded guilty to half, was found guilty to the other half, sentenced to 35 years in jail.
President Obama commuted it to time served.
Manning was released from jail hours before Trump was inaugurated.
Trump told me shortly after January 6th and before January 20th in one of our final of many conversations, he planned to pardon Edward Snowden.
And Julian Assange.
Someone, probably Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, talked him out of it.
Fascinating. The only thing Bill Barr's ever done.
I think it's, I should say, Elsa Pierce, I would just say, I think it's wonderful to see Republicans coming around to a properly pro-free speech position after having been stuck in this awful neoconservative agenda.
I mean, you just have to see what's going on in Gaza.
They're killing children, destroying all of the civilian facilities, the hospitals, the schools.
1.7 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been made homeless, completely displaced.
And the idea of saying, so what's there for them to come back to?
How are they going to live?
What are they going to do?
No water, no bread, no schools, no hospitals, no facilities.
This is the plan, ultimately.
The Israelis bombed the most crowded refugee camp in Gaza twice.
They leveled an entire neighborhood called Block 6. People were digging their children out of the rubble with their bare hands after this bombing.
I've seen the footage.
And it is horrific.
But there is lots and lots of footage of children and babies being pulled out of rubble in Gaza.
And it's gruesome.
It's terrible.
These are the deaths of children in conflict zones.
And it's children killed per day.
The Iraq war, it was 0.6.
Ukraine is 0.7.
Yemen, 1.5.
Afghanistan, two.
Syria, three.
Gaza, 136 children killed per day.
The scale of the atrocities committed here outpace any that we've seen in modern history in the level of evil and butchery.
With our backing, with our bombs, with our support by our client state, not a soul could deny that now.
History will judge with horror those with power who enable these crimes against humanity.
Historians will write that this was when the US discarded its last tattered thread of credibility.
Nations are seeing us take part in this deliberate, systematic, organized murder of civilians in a kill box.
I mean, these people in Gaza are unable to escape and they are just being bombed every day with bombs supplied by the United States.
Israel has used 22,000 bombs.
To kill Gazans that were provided to it by the U.S. The plan has always been, it's why the settlement operations are so important to their strategy.
To break up and disrupt the ability of the Palestinians to continue to coalesce a national identity.
But, you know, I mean, when you are engaged in a conflict for going on a century now, and people suffer together, Israel has been keeping,
in the Gaza Strip, it's now like 2.4 million people, most of which are children, in a big ghetto, unable to leave.
It's hard to imagine how severe the conditions in Gaza are if you've never been there.
It's like nothing I've ever, ever, ever seen.
Criminals happening.
I don't even have words for it.
There's only so much you can say.
And I find it so crazy that despite the nearly 24-7 coverage that we see in the mainstream media about Israel and Gaza, there's never any criticism about the fact that our Western states are funding this genocide.
There's never any criticism about that.
But what I would like to at least see is some kind of understanding part of the public that Like anybody with a heart,
I spend my life teetering on the verge of tears because you can't possibly put yourself.
In that position, in their position, those mothers and fathers, those children, being bombarded by F-16s day and night, week after week after week, one cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like.
And that it's being cheered on by the most powerful empire in the world.
What is wrong with these people?
How can they possibly be doing that?
How can they still be trying to cast the Israelis as victims?
It affects you differently when you're a parent.
When you see people, men, not able to shelter their children, you don't know what it's like until you have a kid to feel that responsibility.
Something I know all parents in Gaza go through under bombing is where should the children sleep?
And they often tell them to sleep in different corners of different rooms so that some might survive if the bomb only detonates one part of the home.
It's American bombs that are slaughtering innocent Palestinian people.
40% of those killed are children.
30% are women.
It's American bombs wiping out the place under the BS line, we're doing this to get Hamas.
No, you're doing it to steal more land.
70 to 80% of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees from the Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 and, of course, their children and grandchildren.
They are there because they're born with the wrong religion and so they don't have the right to live in property that they rightfully own and that their grandparents, many of whom are still alive, still have deeds and still have keys.
These are a bunch of civilians who are locked in prison not for committing crimes, but simply for being born with the wrong religion.
When I think of Western values that actually mean something to me, I think life, liberty, property.
I look at the Israeli government and I unfortunately don't really see that.
I don't know if you get to call yourself a democracy while simultaneously trying to artificially control the demographics of your country in order to favor one specific racial and religious group over another.
I can't look at what Israel is doing with no end in sight to millions of people and say, yes, this is a moral just government.
And what they are is an apartheid state.
Where you have five plus million people who live with no rights since 1967.
The IDF soldiers will run up, point a gun in your face, tell your grandmother to get on the ground.
They arrest people.
They have no due process whatsoever.
I'm talking about even in the peace times, not when they're on bombing campaigns.
I'm just saying just everyday life is that you have absolutely no rights.
You have no freedom to travel.
You have no freedom to move within your own territory.
You have no due process guaranteed to you.
You can be locked up and they can just say, your kid threw a rock at me.
Did he?
Did he not?
Who knows?
But they can just say that and lock up a child.
That's just unacceptable.
Palestinians were driven from their homes, and not just homes in the sense of homeland, from their houses, from their land.
And a lot of times people have pointed out the refugees or their children still carry keys to those homes.
This was my father's home or my grandfather's home.
You know, what Israel is doing right now is slaughtering people in Gaza.
Israel has displaced more than two million people.
The idea is very clear.
If you watch day to day and listen carefully to the Israeli politicians, they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
They want the Palestinians out.
They're not just killing Hamas.
They're killing everybody.
They're killing children.
Thousands of them.
They're killing old women.
They're slaughtering Palestinians under the guise of fighting Hamas.
They're committing a genocide.
What's the endgame for Israel?
To wipe out the Palestinians and take over that land.
That's the endgame.
That's why they funded Hamas, so they could use Hamas as a pretext to do exactly what they're doing.
A member of his cabinet and his defense minister has said it is the plan of the Israelis, you know this phrase, from the river to the sea.
Even if they peacefully tried to go to the walls of the Gaza Strip, they were shot by Israeli soldiers.
And so this was, you know, a serious occupation that they were suffering.
And that's really important context.
Even if you want to ignore that, if you look at what happened since October 7th, there's clearly war crimes and genocide going on here.
And the Israelis, yes, have a right to defend themselves, but to defend yourself doesn't mean you get to go kill thousands of kids.
And again, the people on planet Earth who should be the most receptive to that, or at least see the logic of it, are American evangelicals who are rabidly pro-life.
But yet, they're some of the most vociferous.
Israel can do whatever it wants, wipe them out as far as I'm concerned.
Israel's got to take the gloves off, and it's just, whoa.
And if you look at what the Israelis have been doing, they are basically bent on Destroying a substantial portion of the Palestinian population.
They've killed huge numbers of Palestinians, huge numbers of women and children.
You know, roughly 80 to 90 percent of the Palestinian population is displaced at this point in time.
And when you marry that with what they say they intend to do, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they are bent on genocide.
So the bottom line is the situation in the region is explosive.
And what has happened in Gaza is not going to go away.
This has left a permanent mark on the people of the region.
After all, they were told that they too are animals that deserve the worst.
That they too deserve to be exterminated.
And these numbers are considered a low estimate.
About 85% of Gaza's population has been displaced, and about one quarter are facing famine-like conditions.
So as the Israeli operations continue through into 2024, many more Palestinians are expected to die from starvation and disease caused by the siege.
Public health experts are warning and estimating that if things don't change, nearly half a million Palestinians will die within a year.
The plan seems to be carpet-bomb them, make them so miserable, teach them a lesson.
That seems to be what the whole point of these bombings and these killings.
The problem with that strategy is that people in Palestine are already living in a prison.
They're on death row.
There's no hope for them.
They can't get out.
They are trapped.
They're already living in the worst possible human conditions.
Israel coined this satanic phrase.
We're going to mow the grass in Gaza.
And that lawn has 2.3 million blades of grass.
One half are children.
And everybody smiles.
I wonder if you would smile knowing that Among those blades of grass are the heads and skulls of your children.
I have seen multiple videos of children being injured, children dying, and there's no way you can tell me you can't watch those videos and feel some type of way because these kids didn't sign up for this.
This seems to be way out of proportion to war going on, innocents die and children get in the crossfire.
But this number is so high, a strategy that is sickening.
It's actually high level generals in the Israeli military have articulated their strategy of mowing the lawn, an actual policy of the military to every once in a while, just go clean out a couple thousand Palestinian bodies from.
And then, of course, their actions are very indicative of the fact that they have no regard for civilian life.
They tell people to migrate to the South while they bomb the South.
They're bombing hospitals, ambulances, schools, mosques, churches, etc.
And anybody that can sit by watching this happen without feeling Extreme nausea and shame in the fact that the United States is funding this unbelievable conquest of a civilian population is just beyond me.
You know, I was in Sarajevo during the war.
Well, that was four to five dead a day.
I still have nightmares about it almost three decades later.
That's nothing compared to Gaza.
We're losing hundreds.
I mean, they estimate up to 100 children alone a day.
So I think for those of us who have actually been in a siege, We're more cognizant of the carpet bombing, the indiscriminate leveling, which is, of course, the plan.
In terms of proportion, unlike anything we have seen, it's just a killing machine of children.
And so many of them are dying the worst possible deaths because they're asleep and their building gets hit by a bomb by Israel.
And they are all crushed to death.
I'm listening to Gutierrez at the United Nations.
And he is telling statistic after statistic about what's going on in Gaza.
The most poignant story he told was about his own staff.
His own staff in Gaza now are taking their children and their family with them to work in Gaza because they all want to die together.
Israel came with a policy that's based on the principle of deterrence.
It's called the Dahiwa policy.
It's mowing the grass.
And what it means is that Israel will respond with disproportional violence, not just against the fighters, but the civilians.
They will inflict overwhelming casualties.
It's a war crime.
It's a literal war crime.
Israel has published this.
They bragged about it.
What happened in Gaza and what's been happening is part of this policy of Dahiwa, mowing the grass.
And mowing the grass literally implies killing the children.
Decimating them.
Look, Israel published it.
Google it.
The papers are there.
I'm not making it up.
And when you read it, you're going to go, how could this be?
We have been blind to the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians for over seven decades.
And the United States, with its unconditional support, unwavering support of Israel, and it does so in a way that completely undermines any of its claims to being a beacon of freedom in the world.
One more subject matter I want to mention to you.
My friend and former Fox colleague, Tucker Carlson, is about to interview President Putin.
I happen to think this is a terrific, terrific opportunity for the world to see Putin in the presence of a well-known, controversial...
What does that tell you about Tucker Carlson and right-wing media and also Vladimir Putin?
What we've all known, he's what's called a useful idiot.
I mean, if you actually read translations of what's being said on Russian media, they make fun of him.
I mean, he's like a puppy dog.
You know, he somehow has, after he's been fired from so many outlets in the United States, I would not be surprised if he merges with a contract with a Russian outlet because he's a useful idiot.
He says things that are not true.
Any thoughts on this, Professor Mearsheimer?
Well, it's typical of the way the foreign policy establishment, and this, of course, includes Hillary Clinton, deals with people who disagree with them.
Instead of dealing with the substance...
Remember what Hillary said about Donald Trump's supporters.
She said that they're deplorables.
This is a remarkably foolish thing to say.
And you basically see the same line of attack at play here.
You don't have to agree with Putin and you don't have to agree with Tucker Carlson.
Vladimir Putin is a world historical figure.
He matters greatly to the United States.
He has a particular view of the world.
He has a particular view of the Ukraine conflict.
He has a particular view of the Biden administration in the United States.
Wouldn't it be a good thing to hear what he is thinking about?
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