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Jan. 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:39
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Can Russia and the US Sustain Peace?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, January 9th, 2025.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us today.
Colonel Wilkerson, thank you so much for all the time and thought you have given us during 2024.
Thank you for the development of our personal friendship as well as professional collaboration.
It's been an utter delight, and I hope it will continue and grow.
Well, thank you.
Let me say that I appreciate what you're doing, too.
Thank you, Colonel.
Let me start with two oddball events that have happened in the past five days, which connect to each other and an issue that you and I value deeply, which is the freedom of speech.
Mike Walls, who is a congressman from Virginia and soon to be the president's national security advisor, a position that does not require an FBI background check or Senate confirmation,
said about six days ago that the Trump administration will be very concerned about political opinions.
Critical of the Netanyahu government and supportive of the Palestinians.
At the same time, a group of Quakers attempted to pay for a full-page ad in the New York Times, which asked the American government to stop funding genocide, and the New York Times refused to take the ad because of the use of the word genocide.
Are we in for dark?
Days with respect to the freedom of speech.
Are you surprised at any of this?
I am somewhat, Judge.
I probably shouldn't be.
I was on the Hill yesterday in the Senate Hart Building with a group called Doctors Against Genocide.
It's about 15,000 doctors and other medical personnel who have put themselves together to protest this.
And we were accosted, I almost say attacked.
Just short of that, by 20 or 30 Capitol Police officers just for exercising our right as American citizens to be in, incidentally, one of the American citizens' buildings, the Hart Building in Washington, D.C., and had to take some umbrage at it.
And finally, when we went in Tammy Baldwin's office and spoke with her staff, they calmed down a little bit, and later I'll have to admit they were pretty nice to us.
But I had a conversation.
I won't mention his name.
With a congressman who is very sympathetic to DAG, Doctors Against Genocide, very sympathetic to them for obvious reasons.
And he even mentioned the possibility that Johnson, the Speaker, was going to try to orchestrate legislation that would be aimed at removing sitting members of the legislature.
Think about that for a minute.
Removing sitting members of Congress for what reason?
Got me.
They can't even have the Ethics Committee meet and remove one for clear ethical violations.
Right now they're going to try and remove them for speech.
The speech or debate clause of the Constitution was written to protect that.
Of course, the First Amendment was written to keep the government out of the business of speech.
Do you think the Trump administration is going to look for ways to suppress...
Speech critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian cause, all of which is protected.
You can stand in front of a street corner and say, I want Hamas to win, and that's protected speech.
It is.
I think there is a possibility that the Congress member is right.
He knows more about it than I do.
He's heard the rumors and rumbles in the Republican Party and in the Congress in general.
I don't put it past the people he surrounded him with.
Trump has surrounded himself with, coming up with something that will not just go after young people on college campuses and their college presidents and others, but also other Americans who are speaking out, particularly on this issue.
You know, the New York Times is a private entity, and they can accept or reject any advertising copy that they want, but they exist.
Because of the First Amendment, they are the premier journalistic entity in the United States of America today.
For them to reject an ad because it uses a word to which they object politically, to me, tells you a great deal about them.
They don't believe in the freedom of speech.
I think you're absolutely right.
We at the Israel-Palestine Confederation...
We paid a great deal of money for, and it's called an advertisement.
It was a full page in the New York Times.
It's called an advertisement.
So the Times can divorce itself from any editorial opinion or any opinion altogether.
We are going with another one, and what you've just told me is we're probably going to be refused.
And they're very expensive, extraordinarily expensive.
One of our writers writes in, the First Amendment also says, That the government shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, and yet they've chosen sides in a religious war.
That's exactly true.
Yes, it is.
Exactly true.
And that scares me about some of these people, too, because a lot of them are what we call, in the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Christian nationalists.
And these are dangerous people.
The speaker, the person about whom your congressional correspondent, your congressional friend spoke, is the...
He's a paradigmatic example of a Christian nationalist.
Yes, yes.
Some form of Protestant evangelical version of Christianity would be the country's religion if he had his way.
And did you see how he bastardized Jefferson's supposedly Christian prayer as he extol the virtues of opening the house and Carter's death and such?
Jefferson never said that.
Jefferson never rendered that prayer.
That's been disputed by Jeffersonian experts all across the country, and yet he's still clinging to it, as are most of these Christian nationalists.
Wow. Colonel, also troubling were two comments that President-elect Trump made in the past 10 days, one of which is, this is a little schoolyard-ish, but there's meaning to it.
I am Israel's best friend.
The other is, if Hamas does not return the Israeli hostages, there's about a hundred of them living that we know of, by Inauguration Day, there will be hell to pay.
What more hell could be visited upon the Gazan people than have been visited on them?
Also, Colonel, now I prevail upon your military experience.
He wouldn't rule out.
The use of the military.
Are they actually thinking about sending American troops to Gaza?
First of all, your comment was well-couched.
Dennis Fritz and I had lunch just about an hour ago, and we were remarking on this, and we said, how can you possibly bring, quote, hell, unquote, to bear on Gaza?
It's already there, courtesy of Bibi Netanyahu and the IDF.
So there's no way you could intensify that short of dropping six or seven nuclear weapons on them.
So it's preposterous what he said in that respect.
If you put U.S. troops in there, you will have mutiny.
You will have mutiny because U.S. soldiers will not do what the Israelis are doing.
When he says he's Israel's best friend, what more could he give Netanyahu than Biden has already given him?
They dropped 2,000-pound bombs on people living in tents.
And this latest tranche is 500-pound bombs, 155-millimeter artillery rounds, hellfire missiles, and air-to-air missiles, which really concerns me because there's only one country they need air-to-air missiles against, and that's Iran.
That's all included in this package.
$8 billion.
As Biden goes out the door, he wants to put a stake in the heart of any decency.
Americans might think about him.
Do you think he might want to start a war with Iran before he leaves in the last two weeks of his decrepit presidency?
Nothing would surprise me about this team of Sullivan, Blinken, and Biden.
Maybe. I don't think this will surprise you either.
This will probably aggravate the daylights out of you, but I'm going to play it anyway, and you tell me what you think of the body language in this.
Cut number six.
Do you, Secretary Blinken, No.
It's not, first of all.
Second, as to how the world sees it, I can't fully answer to that.
But everyone has to look at...
Look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts.
And my conclusions are clear.
Modern American history, has there ever been a Secretary of State like that?
Nope. Every statement he made to the Financial Times and to that interview there, not only made my blood boil, but made me want to come through the screen and smack him in the face.
He's worse than Zelensky.
Zelensky, a couple of days ago, said that they couldn't identify the Korean soldiers, North Korean soldiers, they just killed in Kursk.
And he couldn't identify them because their faces were so badly burned, they weren't identifiable.
Are you kidding me?
Who are you trying to get to swallow a lot like that?
Well, that's what Biden is doing.
Those were all...
The world has condemned me.
He sort of admitted that, but I don't think I'm wrong.
No, I don't think you're wrong either.
Colonel, I don't know if you know or have encountered General Keith Kellogg.
This is more nonsense.
General Kellogg, whom I didn't know or even know of until he came to prominence shortly after Election Day, has been designated by President-elect Trump as his emissary for Ukraine and Russia.
The general said...
Fairly recently, maybe seven to ten days ago, if President Putin doesn't come to the negotiating table and seriously talk ceasefire, we will increase the level of weaponry and ammunition that we ship to Ukraine.
But what kind of negotiating technique is that?
I had a conversation with another person at the lunch table today, Gary Vogler, whom you may know of.
Gary knows General Kellogg from his six, seven years in Iraq.
And he thinks he's a pretty smart guy and didn't do anything to disabuse Gary of that view.
But when we got to talking about it, Gary, Dennis, and I, we could only conclude that this is a diplomatic ploy, a crude one, but a diplomatic ploy to try to gain more space because, let's face it, we don't have a whole lot of space.
Frankly, right now, Judge, if the Russians wanted to, they could take Odessa.
They could take anything along that line.
They could go to the Dnieper.
They could cross the Dnieper.
They don't want to do that, but they could do that.
And these kind of statements, this kind of negotiating tactic, ploy, whatever you want to call it, might force them to do it.
And then you have not only accomplished your purpose to make the negotiations easier and more capable of your winning something from, you have foreclosed them.
You're not going to have any kind of negotiations because Russia's going to tell you to pound sand.
Greenland. How will the Kremlin react if the U.S. acquires it, whether by force or stealth or deception or by a commercial transaction, which would probably be Trump's way of doing it?
I mean, if you look at the Arctic Circle, Greenland is very, very close to Russia.
It's in it.
Yeah, the top part of it's in it.
The Wolf's Cave that the archaeologists and paleontologists just went into for the first time in human history, big spread in National Geographic about it.
They came out of there with, I forget the name of it, but it's a formation that only occurs in certain places, and this cave was full of them, and they can...
Parse that system that is contained in these frozen, almost stalactite-type things, and they can find 300,000 years of climate history.
Even in some of them, maybe a million years or more of climate history.
So it's an incredible find.
And it's an incredible place to try and find anything because it's so dangerous and difficult to orchestrate.
It's so cold, so windy within the Arctic Circle and so forth.
But there are all kinds of critical minerals in there, too.
If I were Trump and I wanted Greenland, I'd make Denmark an offer and I'd buy it.
I mean, do you think that this is a diversion from the coming catastrophic defeat of America's policy in Ukraine?
Or do you think an attack on Iran might be a way to cover over the humiliation of the defeat in Ukraine?
I think Bibi's going to get his first blow when Trump moves swiftly to negotiate a new, and it will be better.
It won't have the 25-year sunset clauses on it.
The Iranians are ready to do this, I think.
So Bibi's going to get his first blow in the solar plexus when Trump says to hell with your war with Iran and negotiates an agreement with them on their nuclear program.
I'm really worried, though.
I listen to Doug McGregor and others, and I've talked with a lot of people who know more about this than I do with regard to Germany, France, and other key nations within NATO at this very moment in time.
We're about to see the complete disintegration of NATO led by Germany leaving.
There's no question about it.
AFD, once they have power, full power, get their coalition built if they have to, they're going to take Germany out of NATO.
That will be the unraveling of NATO.
So we've got a lot bigger problems to worry about than whether Denmark will sell us Greenland or not.
Agreed, agreed.
France is changing prime ministers every six months.
The Austrian government collapsed.
The Romanian government had nullified an election before it happened.
The German government collapsed.
Colonel McGregor has expounded extensively on this.
Some have said they don't think the AFD can form a coalition, but if it does, and if they do leave NATO, and if Trump pulls us out of NATO, will it exist any longer?
Not really.
Judge, I don't think any alliance political-military the way NATO is can exist without a real threat.
We have not had a threat since the Cold War ended.
Well, if you listen to Tony Blinken, I'm going to drive you crazy by playing another one.
Putin is a threat.
Sonia, cut number two.
Do you feel like you've left Ukraine in the strongest position that you could have?
Or what are the things that you could have done differently?
Well, first, what we've left is Ukraine, which was not self-evident.
Because Putin's ambition was to erase it from the map.
We stopped that.
Putin has failed.
His strategic objective in regaining Ukraine has failed and will not succeed.
Ukraine is standing.
And I believe it also has extraordinary potential not only to survive, but actually to thrive going forward.
And that does depend on decisions that future administrations and many other countries will make.
Is there any evidence, Colonel, of which you're aware?
That Putin's goal was to erase Ukraine from the map?
Not at all.
And there are reams of evidence on both sides of the coin, if you will, that he had no such intent.
No such intent whatsoever.
He simply wanted to settle the question of Russians in the portions of Ukraine where they were more or less a majority and make sure they were okay.
And he also wanted to ensure that no U.S. missile systems which could reach Moscow were planted in that area.
And that did not require even going to Kiev.
It required those oblasts, which he's pretty much taken now, and probably going to keep forever.
I won't say probably, he's going to keep forever.
The $64,000 question, if you don't mind me characterizing it that way.
Given... The long and deep attitude, the neocon attitude in the State Department in the West about Russia, given the generations of school children and government schools who've grown up to believe that Russia is a monster.
Do you think peace between the United States and Russia is feasible and sustainable, Colonel Wilkerson?
I did in 1992, 93, 94, on up to about Bill Clinton's first term.
I did think it was possible, and I was overjoyed by it, as was Colin Powell, as was Bill Perry, the Secretary of Defense, first one or second one for Clinton after we got Les Aspin out of there.
There were a lot of people.
A lot of people, I would say probably three-quarters of the cognoscenti, if you will, the leadership of America in one form or another, was ecstatic over this new relationship.
Then we ruined it.
We ruined it.
We ruined it with lying and cheating and deceitfulness.
And I would not, if I were Putin, indeed if I were Xi Jinping or any other world leader, trust the United States any further than I could throw a warm spit in the future.
And Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden put the coda to that.
They have made this the most untrustworthy, despicable, conniving, deceitful nation on the face of the earth.
And we're powerful and got nuclear weapons.
That's a real frightening prospect.
Do you think that Marco Rubio, Pete Hegg Sotheby's confirmed?
Mike Waltz will look at this any differently.
These people are neocons and Zionists to the core.
Yes, and it worries me greatly.
I don't know that Trump, regardless of what he believes truly and wants to do truly, I don't believe he is going to be able to stand up to the tsunami that's coming at him from these people because they do not give up.
Their sole objective is not just the maintenance of the hegemony of the known world, but the extension of that hegemony financially, economically, militarily, sanctions rise, and all else that equates with power.
That's their purpose.
And I've got news for them.
The power is slipping away.
The power is moving after 3,000 years of being in the East and led by China primarily.
Lots of others, like the Persians, the Western Roman Empire, and so forth.
It moved then to the West, and its epitome, its ultimate empire, if you will, was Britain, and then they spawned us, and now we are part of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.
750 military bases, all of the planet, a four-star to govern each section of the globe that that planet encompasses.
We are...
Unbelievably powerful.
And we are fritting that power away because we're trying to preserve it.
And you cannot do that.
You cannot ultimately preserve world hegemony, particularly not when the power is slipping towards the east with China as the magnet of that power.
Russia is in a conundrum right now because it's in both worlds.
It's in the east and the west.
And it has to make up its mind.
You remember Catherine's Court when John Quincy Adams, as a 14-year-old, was at Catherine's Court and learned all about the Russians?
They all spoke French.
And then he went back as John Quincy Adams, as our diplomat there with Alexander I, and Russia was still leaning and leaning and leaning and trying to get into Europe.
And it never could.
Every time it was rebuffed by the French, the Germans, or someone.
Well, Russia's going to have to make up its mind.
Does it join this inexorable movement of power towards the east with the magnet being China?
Or does it fight it out in the middle and ultimately lose big time?
I wouldn't want Putin's decision, but he's got that decision to make.
Lawrence Wilkerson, you are right at this moment at your articulate best.
And I'm deeply grateful.
For the statements you've just made, the passion with which you've articulated them, the personal experience and intellectual fortitude that backs them up.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Thank you for having me on.
Oh, sure.
And we'll look forward to seeing you again next week.
May it be a happy New Year.
Same to you and to your family.
Love to your grandchildren.
All the best.
Take care.
Sure. Tomorrow, Friday, end of the day as usual, end of the week, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with the boys, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, 430 Eastern.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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