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Jan. 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:51
Max Blumenthal :
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, January 20th, 2025.
Max Blumenthal will be here with us in just a moment on Blinken and Rubio.
Is it Tweedledee and Tweedledum?
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Max Blumenthal, a pleasure, my dear friend.
I want to ask you about the transition from Blinken de Rubio, but first some questions about Netanyahu and the ceasefire.
Actually, before we get to those, have you received any pushback from your challenges to Secretary Blinken last Thursday?
As I went back and watched that clip, and we played it over and over again, it was very popular with our audience.
He seemed afraid of you, Max.
Yeah, he may have known who I was.
I certainly know many people close to him.
And I also know the whistleblowers who quit the State Department, who were some of the only people with the courage of their convictions at Foggy Bottom.
And I watched again, just studying his face closely.
And, you know, it did seem to affect him.
It was very personal for me.
But what I told other people was, you know, this was for everyone who couldn't be in that room.
Especially the journalists, the reporters in Gaza who were silenced with weapons dispatched by Tony Blinken and Joe Biden.
So it really wasn't entirely about me.
I was just a channel or a vessel for them.
That's how I saw it.
And the only pushback I got was someone correcting me.
I referred to Blinken's stepfather as his father-in-law, his stepfather Samuel Pissar.
His father-in-law is actually Catholic.
His wife is named April Ryan.
But no, there was almost, you know, other than some hate mail from radical Zionists, almost no pushback.
I received congratulations from the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who is a historic figure in the peace process of that country and who actually suspended coal shipments, coal exports to Israel to try to impose some cost on this genocide.
I've heard from around the world.
From leaders, elected officials, journalists, some journalists who can't speak as directly as I could.
And I also heard from random people, just old friends coming out of the woodwork.
My brother-in-law's soccer buddies were sharing the video.
It was kind of like the shot heard around the world.
And it spoke for so many people because, as I said in our last discussion...
Blinken is singularly identified with the Gaza policy of the Biden administration.
And they carried out the Holocaust of our time.
So Blinken is just so widely hated and reviled despite his dour demeanor and puppy dog eyes and attempts to play muddy waters.
And I honestly have never received a more positive reaction to anything I've ever done in my life.
Which wasn't the reason I did it.
You have my, you know this, sincere congratulations, my praise, and my admiration for your intellect, for your intellectual honesty, and for your courage.
Do you think that...
One more thing, Judge.
Just one more thing quickly, which is, I mean, you're one of the few people who actually asked to interview me about it, and that speaks volumes about our mainstream media.
Wow. I would have thought they would have lined up to interview you.
I think ours was the first interview you did, and I was surprised and thrilled.
I thought they would have lined up to interview you.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I should be doing Al Jazeera today, but even in Al Jazeera English's coverage, I don't even think they named me.
You saw CNN.
Declaring that they don't know who I am.
But, you know, you had State Department reporters from AP and elsewhere who didn't interview me who were in the same room.
And I wonder why that is and why they didn't want to quote me.
I mean, I think the reason is obvious.
And, you know, something I learned was that the day before, after Matthew Miller's, you know, the smirking press secretary's last briefing, he actually went out to drinks with the whole press pool.
So, no one was going to confront them in the way that the public wanted and that the public deserved.
Right, right.
Do you think that the fears articulated in Haaretz this morning and in some of the Western press that Netanyahu will try to sabotage the ceasefire deal between...
Absolutely. I mean, Netanyahu himself has said that he insists on the right to go back in.
He sees this as a pause.
And one of the reasons why, although Hamas agreed to the terms in May, one sticking point for them was that, you know, you give up your collateral.
In the form of your human collateral, in the form of these captives, that gives Netanyahu all the latitude he needs to go back in.
Netanyahu is also insisting on maintaining an indefinite, probably permanent Israeli military presence, especially in the Philadelphia corridor between the Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip.
This is something in phase two that's supposed to be removed, but the Israeli military, the whole military intelligence apparatus of Israel.
Believes they have to be there to prevent Hamas from rearming and reconstituting itself as a military fighting force.
And Mike Waltz, Trump's NSC advisor, has stated that Netanyahu should have all the latitude he wants to go back in.
I don't think there's going to be a whole lot holding Netanyahu back from sabotaging a permanent ceasefire, except whatever restraint the factions inside Gaza exercise.
Is the ceasefire just an inauguration, temporary move, an inauguration pause?
We'll see.
I mean, it definitely has political utility for Trump, who touted it repeatedly in his inaugural address today.
Both sides are exhausted, and the Israeli Reservist Corps is exhausted and heavily depleted.
They have been having entire units just simply not show up, just completely dissolved.
And I think that's one thing that will be holding back the Israeli Infantry Corps.
If Israel does something to sabotage the ceasefire, I think it'll be done primarily with air power.
And if they use any military forces, it'll be special forces on the ground.
But they're trying to maintain these de facto bases, like the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts off the north from central and southern Gaza.
There's also a political instability inside Israel.
I mean, right now you have Gideon Saar from this, what is it called, like the Dream Party.
But he's really a Likudnik, who was a former deputy of Netanyahu, used to be seen as a potential rival of Netanyahu.
He's come into the coalition to prop it up.
But the coalition is still less stable.
And you also have, socially, the religious nationalist movement in Israel, which served on the front lines.
They were the ones that you would see on the front lines in the reservist corps of the Israeli military.
It's why you saw so many horrific videos.
of men like holding Torahs and Hanukkah menorahs in destroyed neighborhoods and destroyed homes and really injecting the whole genocide with religious messianic fervor.
They served heavily in this.
They died.
A lot of them died, suffered grievous injuries, while the ultra-Orthodox did not serve.
And they feel like they deserve some kind of payback.
And so what they wanted, what they thought they were going to get from this coalition, from Ben Gavir and Smotrik, who had Netanyahu under their sway, was annexation of northern Gaza, north of the Netzerim Corridor, and the ability to reestablish settlements.
And that's not happening as a result of this ceasefire.
So there's going to be pressure on Netanyahu's coalition from the right.
And from the center, which is currently kind of holding it together with Ben-Gavir leaving.
Does Netanyahu need to sabotage the ceasefire in order to keep Smotrich and Ben-Gavir from leaving, and thus in order to stay as prime minister?
Ben-Gavir is gone, and there's a lot of support for the ceasefire for now.
It's really the Israeli military intelligence apparatus.
It's not just Netanyahu.
It's the whole military intelligence apparatus that sees the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza as a recipe for another October 7th.
And as we can see from the images...
Why did they agree to it?
Why did they agree to it then?
Because the U.S. finally applied pressure and because they felt like they had achieved as much of their objectives as possible.
In Gaza.
And I mean, they're also rearming and preparing again for another front in Lebanon.
I mean, I don't think that that ceasefire, which was 60 days, is going to hold.
The Israeli military has already been bombing in southern Lebanon.
And Netanyahu's ultimate goal is still on the table, especially with the Trump administration, bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.
So Gaza kind of became a sideshow, as I mentioned.
The exhaustion of the Israeli public.
And there's another social factor, sociopolitical factor I didn't mention.
The captives or the hostages was such a major issue.
Like in Israeli society, Jewish Israeli society, which is very small and hermetic, everyone kind of knows each other.
They know each other from their military units.
So everybody would know at least a family member of a family member of one of the captives.
And it became like...
The favorite hometown football team where you know all the players, at least the starting lineup, everyone knew all the names of the captives.
And Netanyahu was letting them languish there.
He couldn't do that any longer.
Okay. Okay.
Are Israel and Iran each preparing for war with each other, Max?
I think that's very obvious.
That's very much in the cards.
I don't think Trump wants war with Iran.
Even stated that he will start no new wars.
I don't think he wants it.
However, seated right behind the ex-presidents with a better seat than most cabinet-level incoming Trump officials and members of Congress was Miriam Adelson, the Zionist warlord and Israeli intelligence asset whose husband,
late husband Sheldon Adelson, called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran and is in many ways a Been a sponsor of Netanyahu's career.
So there's going to be a lot of pressure on Trump to authorize that, but Israel has to create the pretext for it.
And I think one of the questions I've had is, what can Iran do to defend against it?
Because it is said that Israel blinded Iran, removed its S-300 systems during its last strike.
And what can Iran do to deter Israel?
I think one of the lessons from the ceasefire...
Is that the Biden administration didn't want it.
They never wanted it.
They were lying about their desire for it.
They could have stopped it at any second.
This was a Biden genocide.
And so it was up to the axis of resistance to apply enough deterrent force to force a ceasefire.
But the longer that Israel was able to do damage to the axis, the longer they were able to score at least tactical defeats like the pager attack.
I think that bought Israel.
We're good to go.
Here's snippets that Chris put together from the inaugural address from Trump on No New Wars.
My proudest legacy will be that of a Peacemaker and unifier.
That's what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.
I'm pleased to say that as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families.
Do you think he meant bilateral when he said hostages?
Do you think he was also talking about the Palestinian hostages that were released from the Israeli jails, including the ones that were born there?
Absolutely not.
And the U.S. media, for the U.S. media, they're just numbers, statistics.
They're certainly not hostages.
They're all terrorists.
This context isn't being provided to the American public by anyone, so certainly it hasn't reached Donald Trump.
His speech was schizophrenic.
He said that he wanted to be a uniter, but there was some very divisive rhetoric in his speech, basically referring to it as deliverance from the other powerful political faction in the U.S. I thought it was a very dark and gloomy speech during the course of which he never smiled once.
Yeah, it was.
It was free of the kind of poetic abstractions and historical illusions that we've come to expect from inaugural addresses.
It was also less coherent than Trump's 2016 address, which was crafted by Steve Bannon, who doesn't seem to be in Trump's camp and is aligned against the AI tech warlords who were seated prominently, especially Elon Musk.
But the most schizophrenic part was Trump's Pledged to be a peacemaker, when at the same time he invoked the legacy of William McKinley as his lodestar, the lodestar of his foreign policy.
William McKinley was one of the worst American presidents in history, next to some of the presidents who were seated beside Donald Trump.
He was a fanatically imperialist president.
I would have loved to have heard Trump invoke the legacy of William Jennings Bryan, his opponent.
Who was a silver-tongued populist and anti-imperialist, but Trump chose McKinley, who sought to colonize the Western Hemisphere along the lines of a kind of Monroeist vision, the same vision that John Bolton embraced during the first Trump administration.
And ironic, I don't know, another dark aspect is that William McKinley It was popped in the head by an anarchist assassin because he was such a tool of big business, such a union buster, and such an imperialist.
And Trump invoked McKinley to pledge to basically take over Greenland, threaten war with Panama to take the Panama Canal, and threaten Mexico.
And there's always been this kind of invasion of Mexico on the table.
Dan Crenshaw, aka Eyepatch McCain.
Who sort of posed as a right-wing populist, but is really a neocon, had been calling for a U.S. military intervention in Mexico to stop the cartels.
That's something I could actually see Trump doing, and it would be a disastrous policy.
I gather you don't see any fundamental change coming between Blinken, Sullivan, and Rubio Waltz.
No, I actually do.
And I don't think Marco Rubio will last very long.
I think the person that Trump wants is Secretary of State, but who doesn't have the necessary experience or credentials, who's working his way there is Rick Grinnell.
And Grinnell has a more, a less, I would say, Ideologically neoconservative foreign policy outlook than Marco Rubio,
although he is an anti-China hardliner who would seek to continue the Biden administration's policy of arming Taiwan to the teeth and provoking China.
He's also someone who I think would like to wind down the Ukraine proxy war and maybe make a deal with Russia.
J.D. Vance clapped enthusiastically for Trump, declaring he wants to be a peacemaker.
He's in the same vein.
There are even questions about, as I talked about last week, whether Trump might even make a deal with Venezuela to lower the price of oil.
We don't know what's going to happen with Iran, but I just doubt that Trump wants to get involved in a regional war right away.
I think there are differences, but the key difference also is rhetorical.
Something that the foreign policy establishment in Washington sees so dangerous about Trump is that he lifts the mask on U.S. empire and he says things that really reveal the true intentions of the U.S. national security mandarins.
For example, when he was asked about his opposition to the Iraq war and they said, well, Saddam Hussein's a killer.
And he said, well, we've had lots of killers as well.
I mean, we've killed lots of people.
It's that kind of tone of Donald Trump and the unpredictability that could lead to some change.
Whereas with Blinken and Biden, you know what you're getting.
It's Wilsonian imperialist foreign policy.
And I think, you know, the key divide now is between the two major competing foreign policy factions in Washington is which foreign policy legacy do you embrace?
Wilson or McKinley?
Both horrifically imperialist presidents, but McKinley being more the crude unilateralist, focused more on the Western Hemisphere, and Wilson being the internationalist imperialist.
Yeah, McKinley wanting land and Wilson wanting to tell other countries how to craft their governments.
Max, a pleasure to chat with you, my dear friend.
I know it's a holiday and you probably have other things to do.
But thank you very much for your time.
We look forward to seeing you again, my friend.
Thanks a lot, Judge.
And I want to talk to Anya about Venezuela.
I didn't know that Trump was thinking of doing anything that might soften up our relationships.
That would be great to chat with her about it.
Yeah, for all I know, there could even be a back channel.
Who knows?
Right. But we'll make that happen.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Max.
All the best.
Take care.
Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday at 8 o'clock in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman at 10 o'clock, Pepe Escobar at noon, Kivork-Almassian at 2, Matt Ho, and at 3 o'clock, Karen Kwiatkowski.
And my voice is getting a little better as the day is wearing on.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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