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Jan. 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:46
Alastair Crook :
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom, scratchy voice and all.
Today is Monday, January 20th, 2024.
Alistair Crook will be here with us, but first this.
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Alistair, welcome here, my dear friend.
Excuse my voice.
I'll let you do most of the talking today.
You have a very interesting piece out this weekend about the United States government and reality.
Was there any reason to believe in February of 22 that Ukraine could stop the Russian onslaught?
Or was the American foreign policy establishment...
They were not living in reality as we would recognize it.
They were living in an imagined reality, one that was carefully crafted by producing memes, echoing these memes, magnifying them across the internet until everybody was in a frenzy of Memes and imaginary realities about the world,
about Ukraine.
And as we've seen, you know, the consequence of that is that there's been more emphasis on the sort of imaginary politics, this identitarian politics, this balance, gender balance.
All of these things have consumed us, have driven us really into a frenzy.
And I do think if there's a revolutionary element to President Trump's arrival on the scene, I think it is to break that frenzy, to introduce a little bit of sunlight that shows us the real landscape,
the real reality that we're facing, and tells us a few things about where we really are and what the reality really is.
Now, it's not going to be easy because there's still a large proportion of the American population and even bigger proportion of the European population that are still living that frenzy, that are going to stay in it until they're forcefully expelled from it,
probably. But nonetheless, I think the exercise of unmasking and saying, you know, this is the true reality.
This is the reality for the United States.
This is the reality for Europe.
I think that is going to have a profound effect.
The question is, it's down to one man to do this.
I'm sure his intentions about wars and things like that, I think that's absolutely the case.
I think he has a slightly an advantage this time over 22 because I think...
On this time, he can count on the fact that America is on the cusp of this revolution of unmasking, of beginning to leave behind these fantasies,
this hall of mirrors of ideas about Ukraine and Russia and about Iran.
All of these things can be, if you like, just exposed.
And I think that is the revolution, but it's one man trying to do it.
But what has happened already is changing in Europe.
The mere fact of Elon Musk questioning Starmer and the rape gangs and of inviting Alice Weidel onto a talk program has sent Europe into a sort of frenzy of concern.
That they're going to lose the grip on these imagined realities and we'll have to face the real reality.
I want to get back to Ukraine in a minute, but is Prime Minister Starmer in danger of losing his job over these very profound criticisms of his failure as a chief prosecutor to prosecute these rape gangs?
I think so.
It is really such an outrage, and people in Britain feel so strongly about it.
But it's that and many other things.
I mean the things that he won't talk about that is not public.
They're giving three and a half thousand billion, I think it is, to Ukraine.
He's just been to Kiev and signed a hundred-year agreement with Zelensky.
You know, like some schoolgirls, we're best friends forever.
Anyway, he signed all those.
At the same time that, you know, old age pensioners and elderly in Britain are being deprived of their allowance for heating for those that need it.
In this cold weather, they are sort of having to shiver.
Because, you know, all this money is still going off to Ukraine.
But that, and the fact that the economy is in such dire straits in Britain, I think his tenure on par, he may go the same way as Liz Truss before too long.
Did NATO ever have a serious strategy, a unified strategy for resisting the Russians?
No, not really, because they'd been geared up so long for fighting these sort of mini counter-terrorist wars, counter-terrorist wars, which were sort of fighting small insurgent groups,
but never fighting a peer army, never thinking about how to deal with a peer army.
Iraqi Republican Guard commanders had been bought off by the British and by the Americans with pots of gold and money so that they wouldn't fight.
We've seen a bit of the same happening in Syria.
So they're not really used to this war, major war with big armies fighting.
They're used to this sort of small special forces counterinsurgency work.
So I don't think they ever had a proper strategy for this at all.
These were just episodes of good PR, good optics.
This looks great, so we'll do this.
It looks as if we're strong and we're winning.
But never any serious consideration of what could be expected when you put up, if you like, a much smaller...
Less well-equipped army against a major army like Russia with its capabilities and its forces.
And there was never any sense of that.
I mean, it's a tragedy that they've allowed to happen in the interests of sort of these memes.
Again, you know, these imaginary narratives that we've all had that, you know, Russia is collapsing, Putin is about to vanish.
All of these stories.
To keep us diverted.
And what has diverted us from is the reality that Ukraine was never going to win against a massive military force such as that of Russia.
Has the West seen as massive a military force since 1945?
No, they haven't.
As I say, we've turned over.
To really much more to this type of small-scale special forces actions, engaging few people, whether it was in Afghanistan or in Syria or elsewhere,
and mostly training small militias and working with them.
Well, this is not suitable for facing off a Russian army, well-trained, well-equipped.
Of nearly a million men.
This is a different type of war.
It goes back to that period.
And during this latter time, it's all been about not only not arming ourselves or preparing for anything else, but it's all been orientated towards fighting what they would describe.
Well, it wasn't.
Look at what's happened subsequently.
And certainly in terms of Ukraine, it was sort of producing fantasies.
What kind of advice or guidance did CIA and MI6 give the West that they could have been so wrong?
You know, it's been a long time since, either in the West, in Europe, or in America, that you've had people who've really tried to make an effort to understand other countries,
other civilizations, other cultures.
We just take it for granted.
And, of course, the advent of AI and data crunching has actually skewed this even further.
People assume that if you have enough data points and some cloud computing, you can know everything about Iran.
Well, you can't.
It's a different civilizational sphere.
It's very hard to leave your own cultural sphere completely.
I don't think it's probably possible.
But if you can stand back and look into your own sphere and see what you look like, at least from the boundaries of it, if not from another vantage point, then you can get an idea of what it means, what Russia is,
what China is.
But we don't do that and haven't done this for some time because of this reliance.
Particularly over the last four years, of the sort of machinery, the whole machinery of echo chambers and memes and creating constructs.
And, you know, it takes people.
They become engaged in this frenzy.
They get convinced.
And you'll hear people, after a very short time, repeating stories and memes about what's happening.
Oh, Putin's about to fall.
He's sick.
He's ill.
Within days, they come.
And they're a carefully constructed system of many, many people on laptops and universities and elsewhere.
And as soon as the meme has exited from sort of Washington headquarters in parts of the suburbs, it gets taken up by these young people.
And you get it.
It's almost a weight of consensus saying, yes, this is right.
Putin's a thug.
Putin is failing.
Russia is failing.
And it swept along there.
And the fever grips people.
And I think this is, as I say, why, you know, I think there is a prospect that Trump can do something quite revolutionary, which is break the fever.
Break the fever of all these memes and these imaginary ideas and try and take it back.
It's not going to be easy, as I say, because I don't think there's been any preparation.
Well, there's been the opposite preparation in America for the sense that Russia is winning, for example.
There's no preparation of the public.
It's begun, a little bit of that.
But there's no real psychological preparation for a new position for the United States in the world.
Did the West really and truly believe?
The nonsense that it fed us, question one.
Question two, how much resistance should Trump expect from the American deep state, which is heavily invested in this nonsense?
First of all is that even if they didn't believe all of the memes, they believed the memes themselves could bring victory.
That if you said it clearly enough and if you repeated it that, you know, Russia was weak and it would fail, then it would come about.
This was the magical thinking in this process.
Instead of doing hard work and homework and strategy, it was rested on the sense that if you get a victory language right, then you will get victory.
It's in the meme, it's in the narrative of who has victory, is really what counts, much more than what happens.
And what we've seen in Russia is the reassertion of the facts on the ground, of the battlefield realities.
That's what matters ultimately at the end.
When Ukraine is defeated, it will be visible and be seen by all.
But until then, we live in a sort of fantasy world of ideas.
Did they really believe it?
I think many people came to believe it.
And as I say, it's very compelling this process that we went through with these echo chambers because it seemed like all the world agreed with this.
You know, everyone was concurred, you know, that Russia is weak and Ukraine is winning.
And it seemed that, you know, there was a whole, you know, whole of society consensus.
And in a sense, all that mattered because most of the Europeans and Americans didn't seem to care much about the Ukrainians or the fact that they were dying in such numbers.
What mattered was that we had the victory of narrative.
We were there and we could claim we had defeated and damaged or hurt Russia.
How long do you think the Israeli Hamas ceasefire will last?
I think that Netanyahu, he doesn't see it in his interest.
Many Israelis may disagree with him on this.
A lot of them do.
But he does not see it in his interest, personal interest, political interest.
I think for this ceasefire, To last.
So the general feeling is that it will probably last maybe 16 days, which is when the next exchange is due to take place.
The big exchange, and that would be the exchange which involves quite a lot of senior military officers, Israeli military officers.
There's even, I think, a general amongst their hostages.
So I think it may last.
The whole process really...
At the end of the 16 days, then you start the process of discussing part two.
And I think we should expect from this that something, I mean, the nature of Israel, the psychology of Israel as it is in the wake of 7th of October, there will be a reaction.
It's very hard to tell how the actual sight of these hostages being released.
Which has been very emotional for many Israelis, these three girls coming out in good condition, looking well, smiling.
It's going to be a shock.
That is going to be a real shock to Israeli society.
We don't know how much effect that will have.
But Netanyahu believes, I think very clearly, that he needs something stronger.
I don't think there's any agreement with Trump about any of the next steps.
I think Trump keeps his cards very close to his chest.
But I think Netanyahu will want something.
Will it be Iran?
I don't know.
Certainly Israel and Iran are preparing as if there will be a conflict there.
I don't think Netanyahu has any assurance that America...
We'll back it up beyond a certain limited point, air refueling and things like that, but not go all in.
So we have to wait and see.
But meanwhile, Israel is sort of falling apart, is becoming very divided in the reviews.
No one knows quite what it is.
And I just give you, if you give me two minutes...
An anecdote from my past when I was in South Africa and dealing with trying to get a ceasefire, which the South African government wanted, with Swapo in Namibia.
Because the South African government could see that whereas the South African Defence Force was going in and destroying Angola and Mozambique, you know, rather like the Israeli forces are destroying Beirut and Sana'a and Yemen.
Very similar.
And yet the South Africans at the time were saying, you know, okay, we're very destructive.
Maybe people are fearful of that, but what is the political dividend?
What are we going to get from this?
And actually the ceasefire that I was involved in failed.
Because the South African public were not able to cope with the idea of a ceasefire with a group that they considered both terrorists and Marxist.
Does the Israeli public want a long-term ceasefire?
I don't think they know quite what they want at the moment.
They would like to have, if you like, A victory.
A victory that would bring a lasting, if you like, quiet to the region.
But I'm not sure.
I think that this is the question that is coming in their mind, rather as it did in South Africa.
What are you going to tell your grandchildren?
You know, the future of your country.
What is just to kill more Arabs every year?
To do more damage to the...
Infrastructure of the region.
Is that the future that you're promising your grandchildren?
Is that the best we can do?
Is that the solution for Israel?
Permanent Jabotinsky, permanent iron wall, permanent threatening all of your neighborhood with death and ruin unless they submit to you.
I don't know.
In South Africa, it took some time.
But eventually it was the Afrikaners who turned around and they said, you know, this won't do for our grandchildren.
We have to find some sort of solution to this.
Before we go, Alistair, what is the story with Netanyahu and President Trump's inauguration?
Was he invited and then disinvited?
Was he invited and said yes and then changed his mind?
What happened?
I don't think he was invited.
I don't think he was invited.
I think we have to wait and see.
You know, Trump has got plenty of surprises.
He specializes this ahead.
But I think there's two things we should prepare ourselves for.
Firstly, Trump is not going to change his position of support for Israel at all.
I mean, I think that will continue, and he will support Israel.
Strongly in this field, albeit that he does not want, if you like, wars to continue in the region.
So I don't think that Netanyahu, and I think what changed it, why we have a ceasefire at all, is because of the trepidation towards Trump.
For the first time, and this is consensus in Israel, by the way, not elsewhere, but in Israel it's understood, you know, that it was Trump and the sense that he really is in awe of Trump, in which he wasn't in previous eras,
that caused him.
And also his envoy, Witkoff, who went there and just said, listen, sign this, come here.
I don't give a damn about Shabbat.
You come here, sign the deal.
You make it work.
And by the way, afterwards, I'm going to come and visit Gaza to see what's really happening in the ceasefire.
That type of tactic seems to have really shaken Netanyahu.
And he's not sure some of his Ben-Gavir is likely to leave the government, but he's still providing Smotrich and Ben-Gavir.
Smotrich has about seven seats and Ben-Gavir has six seats in the Knesset.
Ben-Gavir can leave and he still has a stable majority, but if both of them leave, the government in protest, because they want to see, if you like the Nakba, they want to see the Palestinians removed from Gaza completely.
Those two and the right wing still wants the Thank you so much.
Thanks. Coming up later today, Ray McGovern at 10, Larry Johnson at 11, Max Blumenthal at two.
Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.
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