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Aug. 14, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
01:33:05
ON STAGE: Judging Freedom LIVE from the Ron Paul - Blueprint for Peace Conference
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Time Text
We have to start on time.
That's pretty good.
Thank you.
I'm sort of OCD.
And it shows that there should be two minutes before I start.
And I'm very conflicted right now because everybody's ready to start hearing things, but it doesn't seem right unless it's exact.
But I'll let it go.
Welcome to our ninth DC conference.
This is our ninth time that we've brought the show on the road to DC.
And I have, as always, I have just two questions.
Thank you.
First of all, how many of you, is this your first time at a Ron Paul Institute conference?
Wow, that's great.
That's always encouraging.
And is there anyone here who's been to all nine DC conferences?
Not yet.
We had two last year.
This is also our 19th conference overall that we've sponsored or worked together, usually with the Mises Institute, a couple of them.
But in 12 years of our existence, 19 conferences, that's a lot.
And that really represents what our chief mission is.
It's just to bring people together.
And I like to think in an analog way.
That's why we don't live stream with some exceptions for very dear friends because, and we don't have people on the screen when they're talking, because the whole point of what we do, I think, is for people to get together.
And that's why I'm so delighted when I see people talking.
We have to get to know each other and speak to each other.
We're atomized.
We're in our own little world.
The social media is partly responsible for that.
So that's why I just really strongly feel the need to get together.
A couple of thank yous, and I'll make some short remarks.
I never get to speak at my own conference because there's too much to do.
But I wanted to express my deep appreciation for all of our speakers today.
These individuals are giving their own time freely to us, and they're sharing their lifetime of work and expertise with us to help enlighten us.
And we deeply, deeply appreciate them.
I would like to thank our sponsors.
The event sponsor this year is Texit Coin, and it's a great organization.
Dr. Paul and I met with the founder of the organization just about a week or so ago.
And I would encourage you to look into them.
They're really neat guys and gals.
And I want to thank all of our gold sponsors who are here today as well.
These are the individuals that help us put on these conferences.
As you may know, it's very expensive to put on a conference.
And so there are some very, very generous people who step up to the plate and they put up some the money to help us make these things happen.
And I appreciate that.
And I would also like to draw your attention to the Ron Paul Scholars.
And they have their own table over here.
This is the 2025 class of Ron Paul Scholars.
This is...
We even have alumni.
TJ, where are you?
You're over here somewhere.
TJ was in our first class, and now he's a Kentucky state representative.
So that shows the quality of people that we have.
The Ron Paul Scholars Program is the program that I'm most excited about because we are helping to bring together the next generation of the Ron Paul revolution.
And I think that is extremely important.
Investing in young people, I think, is the best investment that we can make.
And we're doing our best.
We would love to grow the program.
To do that, we need support.
So I'd love to talk to you anyone who wants to help us grow the program as well.
And I will go to a couple of remarks before I turn it over.
It looks like we got the good Trump yesterday.
I didn't get to See everything, did we or not?
From what I could see, until he meets with Lindsay and Lindsay gives him his marching orders, then it'll be a different tune, and he'll be mad at Trump again.
But why do we do DC?
I say it every year.
We flew into DCA into Reagan, and as we were flying over McLean, getting ready to land, well, two things happened.
For the first time that I remember, I looked down and saw the Pentagon as we were flying.
It was very close, and I was really hoping the pilot wasn't a psycho.
I was really worried.
And the other thing I saw before the Pentagon were the mansions of McLean.
Have you ever seen those?
Unbelievably elaborate, gorgeous homes with huge properties.
And I thought to myself, that's why we come here.
These people did not make their money producing really neat things that we like and need.
They made their money working with the government to rob us.
We're on the 28 corridor, which is where the military industrial complex is headquartered.
These are the people who are robbing us.
They're stealing our children's future.
And they're also creating mayhem overseas.
It is the center of the war machine.
And unfortunately, the war machine seems to be the only thriving part of our economy.
So we come here to remind them that we see you, we know what you're doing, and we don't like it, and we oppose it.
And as long as we can do it, we will.
Thank you.
Now, we spend a trillion and a half dollars a year, and that's a very conservative estimate on our war machine.
It's not a defense budget, it's a military budget.
It's the global empire.
We spend that much money, and what do we get for it?
We don't even get weapons.
We don't even get weapons that work.
When Israel decided it might be a good idea to start bombing Iran as we were in negotiations with Iran, and they realized about eight hours into it, oh crap, we're in trouble.
Well, what did they do?
They put Uncle Sam on speed dial and said, hey, we need some missiles, Pronto.
And of course, being the U.S., we said, yes, sir, how many can we bring you?
And we shot off about, I think the Wall Street Journal said about 20% of our TAD missiles in just that 12-day war.
And I guess it was 11 days because we didn't shoot them the first day, to the tune of untold billions of dollars, 20% of our entire supply in one week.
Now, what does that tell you about people who say we need to prepare for simultaneous wars with Russia and China?
What does that tell you?
They're smoking something.
They're in la-la land.
So we don't even get weapons.
We lost to the Houthis, right?
We lost to the Houthis, who probably a lot of them are in sandals.
All of this money does not buy us the strongest military on earth.
And I'm in no way denigrating the men and women who are in the armed forces, but what they do is they feather the nests of the people who live up there that we flew over.
And that's what we're getting.
It is a massive, massive ripoff, and it's destroying our country.
And it has to stop.
Our military industrial complex doesn't make weapons like we've seen, like the Oreznik and the weapons that Russia is using now.
They make small, extremely expensive boutique weapons that don't work very well.
We've seen that over and over again.
The Iron Dome didn't work very well.
So while they do, well, they actually do work well against children if you're in Gaza, starving to death.
They seem to do fairly well over there.
But against an actual peer enemy, they don't do very well.
So my talk for the couple of minutes that's left is what I learned from Ron Paul.
Now, there's sort of a canard, I would say, for lack of a better word, that Ron Paul was not a successful congressman.
How many bills did you pass, Ron Paul?
You weren't very influential.
And I wrote a piece about this that we published, and Lou Rockwell picked it up about how Ron Paul changed the world.
He didn't pass bills.
You know, he just, as an example, I mentioned the speech, What If?
And the judge always riffs off that and does a terrific job riffing off that speech.
I remember when he came in and said, he mulls around in his mind.
I got this good idea.
Let's work on it.
He drafted the whole thing.
Let's work on it.
Let's tighten it up a little bit.
Let's do the timing because before the one-hour special order speeches, you can do five minutes.
And they stick to that time.
So after Congress is out of session, there is a group of five-minute speeches.
And so we had to get the timing right.
We had to get the five-minute right.
And that speech, I think, was an extremely, extraordinarily powerful speech.
And it was an interesting concept that he came up with.
I think that speech was very influential.
The other thing that Dr. Paul did was simply vote no.
What do you mean passing?
We don't need any more bills.
We have enough bills.
We have enough laws.
We need to pass no.
And though he hated doing it, when there was a particularly pernicious bill on the floor dealing with foreign policy, usually, well, both the R's and the Ds were all for it, going to war with Iraq, everything.
But there's a feature in the U.S. House of Representatives where their time is allotted between those in support of the bill and those in opposition to the bill.
So the R's and Ds are both for it.
Dr. Paul would reluctantly go down and say, is the gentleman for the bill?
Yes.
Is the other gentleman lady for the bill?
Yes.
Okay, then I would like to claim time in opposition.
And that's how Dr. Paul would get a slot of about 20 minutes or 30 minutes or however long the rules committee passed the rule for.
And that meant he controlled the entire time in opposition to this bill and could proceed to completely rip it apart.
And not only by himself, but he had his friends come down.
And his friends were from all other parties, were from Dennis Kucinich on the left, Mr. Duncan on the right, the old right, would go down and they would claim the time and they would proceed to destroy the party.
It was supposed to be unanimous.
It was a Soviet Polar Bureau.
Everything had to be 100%.
And he went down and ruined the party.
And he was on C-SPAN doing it too.
That's powerful.
That's saying, no, we don't all agree with this.
We don't all agree with the war machine.
There's a big group of us who hate it.
And we're on the left and we're on the right and we're everywhere in between.
That changes the world.
It took a while.
It took a while for people to wake up and think and realize that the Iraq war was an absolute disaster.
And the people who were most rude to Dr. Paul, calling him Saddans, whatever, they're the ones who, of course, when the wind changed, said, well, I was never really for that war.
And for me, I get mad when that happens.
And I got mad.
They didn't deserve that.
They didn't deserve for all the grief they gave him to say, I was always against the war.
But this is the point.
What did I learn from Ron Paul?
He never got angry when that happened.
I was the one who got angry.
He was always patient with people.
They'll come around.
Just be patient.
They'll come around.
Learn, study, and then teach.
And that's what he always did.
That's what he always did.
When I first went to work for him, when I was interviewing for my position, he said, so what do you think about libertarianism?
I said, yeah, I agree with pretty much all of it.
He said, is there anything you disagree with?
And I said, to be honest, I have a problem with the position on drugs because I think they're terrible and horrible.
This was a while ago, guys.
And he didn't say, okay, well, you don't get the job.
You clearly don't get it.
You're clearly not qualified.
He said, that's okay.
Just read, read some more about it, study some more about it.
I think you'll come around.
And he was absolutely correct.
Patient, teach, don't get angry.
And that's what he's done.
And to say that I have learned these things from Ron Paul is not to say that in my daily life, I continue to practice what he's taught me because I still am hot-headed and I still get mad at people.
And I'm still pissed off that they don't support peace like we do.
But I try.
I try to emulate Dr. Paul.
And I apologize.
And he, I'm sure, is he was devastated when he wasn't able to make the trip to come down here.
He's had some challenges this year.
He's going to turn 90 next week, guys.
But he wanted to be here.
And it's one of the very few times that I see emotion in Dr. Paul's face when he told me, Daniel, I can't make it this year.
And it was very touching and sad.
But he will be here with us live stream.
And you can bet your bottom dollar that he's with us right here in spirit.
So with that being said, I want to introduce our first speaker.
It's going to be a different one this year, and that's thanks to the judge because he's a very creative thinker.
He said, Daniel, how about if I come do my show during a conference?
And I said, Judge, that sounds like a pretty neat idea.
I love doing the judge.
It's the only one I can do.
But what I did, and I rarely decide on speakers early because I want to get the sense of what's happening now.
But one speaker I did decide on early, and that's Professor Jeffrey Sachs, and I bugged him, and I bugged him, and I sent him emails over and over, and he said, I'd love to do it, but I've got a really challenging travel schedule this summer.
And I was just about to give up, and I even said a little bit, this is the last time I'll bother you.
and I finally heard back from him.
And so my persistence has paid off, and we will all benefit from the insights of the incredibly brave Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Dan, thank you.
Thank you so much for being persistent.
I'll tell you the trick, why it worked.
He was persistent and extraordinarily polite, and it really worked because I said, that's a meeting I want to do everything I can to make.
So it is a little bit rushed today, but an honor to be here, and really a special delight to be at a conference whose title is Blueprint Peace.
We don't hear much about peace in this world, strangely enough, other than on the judges'show, and from the Ron Paul Institute.
Today, I was looking at all of the banner headlines about the failure yesterday in Alaska.
The failure because we didn't launch World War III, because the two presidents had a good meeting together, because they announced progress.
This is taken as failure in our media, which, of course, is hawkish by the moment and manipulated by, controlled by, paid by, or simply aligned with the military-industrial complex in the country.
So it's extraordinarily hard to hear a word about peace in this country.
It's not so complicated, actually, to end these conflicts.
It's a little surprising how long it takes and how hard it is to accomplish this, but it's not so hard in substance, because the underlying reasons for the conflicts that the United States is in perpetually are not sound reasons from the point of view of America's
interests, from the point of view of our security, from the point of view of our well-being or our economy.
All of the conflicts that we are in and those that we could get in are misguided, misdirected, provoked by us to a very large extent, and solvable.
That's the basic point.
It really is not so complicated.
I think the, wisest words which we repeat and uh dan just started us with that we've heard in the 80 years since the end of world war ii were those in president eisenhower's farewell address on january 17th 1961.
And I'll just repeat them because they summarize all that has come to pass.
He said: in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
This is a man who knew what he was talking about as the supreme allied commander and as president of the United States, and I might add as president of Columbia University, his most important job.
He knew what he was talking about, and he was reporting to us a reality that existed already in January 1961.
That reality almost led to the end of the world, actually, just a year and a half later in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President Kennedy experienced the full, nearly catastrophic weight of the military-industrial complex at that time.
Because if President Kennedy had followed the overwhelming advice of absolutely almost every advisor in that XCOM that was famously preserved for history through its recordings of the days of that crisis, we would not be here today.
And I think people know, or you should know, that even after Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis through a kind of genius of decency and humanity against the advice of all of their military advisors, we nearly had the world end anyway because of a disabled Soviet submarine that was out of communication.
And when it began, and it was in crisis, and when it began to surface, some jackass in the U.S. military was dropping live hand grenades as a joke rather than death charges.
They thought they were under attack.
And it happened to be the one submarine in the squadron that had nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and they were entered into the bay.
And a man named Mr. Arkipov, who was senior to the captain, countermanded the order and saved the world, only to go back home, by the way, and be reprimanded and live in obscurity.
But literally, the man who saved the world saved the world within one second, because U.S. doctrine at the time was that any attack by a nuclear atomic weapon would be met by the full force of the U.S. nuclear armaments.
And the estimation at the time was 700 million dead across the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, but good reason to believe that all of humanity might have perished.
And we came within a second of that.
Next year, Kennedy made peace with the Soviet Union in one of the most brilliant and illustrative episodes of modern history.
I commend everybody to listen to Kennedy's peace speech of June 10, 1963.
My poor family has had to listen to it maybe 100 times.
I wrote a book about it because I loved the speech so much.
I was a friend also of Ted Sorensen, whom I admired enormously.
But Kennedy made peace by praising the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, talking about their valor, their culture, their scientific accomplishments, and the fact that both sides would perish in a conflict, so both sides could be depended on to seek peace.
And Khrushchev heard the speech, immediately summoned Kennedy's envoy, Avril Harriman, and said, that's the finest speech by a modern American president.
I want to make peace with your boss.
And five weeks later, the partial nuclear test ban treaty was signed.
And about four months after that, in my opinion, the CIA killed Kennedy for that and for other crimes of trying to make peace.
Maybe that explains the military-industrial complex as much as anything.
Maybe our leaders are just afraid.
They're afraid to make peace.
They're afraid to step out of line.
Maybe it is true, as some have said, that since John F. Kennedy, there hasn't been a president really that has been an independent actor in the American scene.
I think it's an arguably correct point.
Nixon is another partial example, and he may have paid the price as well by an inside job to help bring him down.
I think it's arguable that they're just afraid.
If they're not afraid of that, maybe they're afraid of Mossad, or maybe they're bought, or maybe they don't understand, or maybe they read the New York Times.
It's a little hard to understand why it is that we are in this mess of war after war that cost trillions of dollars and that do nothing but worsen our security.
I happen to be a fan of the doomsday clock, which is the graphic of the bulletin of atomic scientists unveiled in 1947, which tries to alert us with a considered opinion of how close or far we are from nuclear war and nuclear Armageddon.
And as people who follow the doomsday clock will know that when it was unveiled in 1947, it was seven minutes from midnight.
It went closer to midnight during the height of the Cold War.
Then, as some measure of détente and Kennedy's initiatives came to fruition, it was moved away from midnight.
Then it came closer to midnight.
Then the Cold War ended in December 1991, or so we thought.
And the clock was reset at 17 minutes away from midnight, the farthest away.
Every president since 1991 has been in a period in which the clock has moved closer to midnight.
I would argue that every president since 1991, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump I, Biden, have moved us closer to disaster, that this isn't just an accident of their term.
We had all of the ability to make peace in 1991.
We chose not to.
We chose not to consciously the military-industrial complex and the lobbies, the Israel lobby, and others chose not to.
They chose not to because they said after 1991, we are all powerful and now we can do what we want.
And some of our so-called leaders and strategists put it exactly in those terms, Wolfowitz and others, who had the doctrine that now we can do whatever we want.
We can go to war anywhere we want.
We can overthrow any government anywhere we want.
I had a bit of a front row seat in those days because I fruitlessly was trying to get the United States to actually help the Soviet Union actively in 1990 and then to help Russia in 1991 and 1992 with financial assistance because of an urgent financial crisis
that engulfed not – randomly but a failed economic system.
But when a system fails and a society is in distress, I believe you help so that you don't get into worse trouble.
So I had a front row seat.
I was part of an effort as an advisor to President Gorbachev to try to enlist U.S. support for financial stabilization in a very deep crisis.
Then I was asked by President Yeltsin, and I mentioned this, I actually was in the Kremlin on December, I think it's December 13.
I haven't been able to absolutely confirm the specific date, but it was around December 13, 1991, when President Yeltsin walked across the room and sat in front of me because I was a young kid, but happened to be head of the delegation.
And he said, gentlemen, because it was all men, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.
That's pretty interesting to hear that in the Kremlin.
I kind of pinched myself, and then it was my turn to speak.
And I said, Mr. President, this is one of the greatest days in modern history.
And I am sure, I am sure that my country will come to your assistance to give you help, to help you stabilize, because I know how extreme the financial crisis is.
I'm a financial economist.
I've helped stabilize a number of hyperinflations.
You need some urgent help, even just a standstill on debt service payments because you don't have foreign exchange reserves.
This is a revolution.
You need help to stabilize.
But Mr. President, I'm sure that this will happen.
Incidentally, without digressing, I had said the same thing as Poland's advisor two years earlier.
And when I made those recommendations as a technical economist, Brent Scowcroft, General Scowcroft, delivered within eight hours the recommendations that I made and Senator Dole.
So I thought I'm a pretty good economist, very convincing, and they'll do the same.
Nothing of the sort.
Then I got blamed for the lack of stabilization in Russia by many people, though it was exactly the opposite of what I had been saying, because we refused to provide any help whatsoever.
And honestly, I could not quite figure it out.
I knew that the people weren't very clever, but I still couldn't figure out why.
To summarize, the reason why is that the Cold War did not end in December 1991.
It was only midway.
Because the idea, which actually goes back to the British, I would date it to 1840, was to destroy Russia, then to destroy the Soviet Union, and then back again, now we'll destroy Russia.
And Brzezinski spelled it out, of course, in his book in 1997, The Grand Chessboard, opining that a NATO expansion eastward would be inevitable, that Russia would exceed.
What could it do?
He actually has a whole chapter reasoning that Russia would never side with China.
Impossible, Zbig told us.
And I liked Zbig because he was a nice man who helped me when I was helping Poland.
But he had his designs.
We're going to break Russia.
And that's what the military-industrial complex went after after 1991.
Another not-so-gentle gentleman joined the scene in 1996, another disaster of our time, and that's Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most vile, misguided criminals on our planet, far as i'm concerned
Maybe you'll give me 58 standing ovations like Congress gave Netanyahu 58 standing ovations.
But Netanyahu's idea was at a smaller scale, while the military-industrial complex of Wolfowitz and Fife and all these extraordinarily naive and ignorant people thought the U.S. would run the world.
Israel decided, of course, it would control the Middle East.
And it would do so on our tab and with our military and with our support.
And so Netanyahu said, we're not going to make any compromises.
It's even a funny term if you know the history of Zionism, that it's a compromise.
We come in, you should leave, is the basic summary, but not even we'll divide the house.
It was your house, we'll divide the house.
We'll take 78%, you can have 22%.
No.
We'll take 100%, and there's a lot of places you can move to.
What are you complaining about?
You ingrate?
That's the basis of the idea.
And then the point is that a lot of people won't like that.
There will be a militant reaction.
And then Netanyahu's idea is: you don't fight the militants, you fight the governments that back them.
So we know, of course, from Wesley Clark the famous story that he visited the Pentagon a week after 9-11 and he was shown the list of the seven wars in five years, which was a neocon-Israel concoction combined.
We're going to take out all those governments, and that is Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
You know what?
We've been at war with all seven of them.
It didn't quite go to plan of seven wars in five years because we got bogged down in each one.
It didn't go to plan because it made a wasteland of several thousand kilometers from Libya to Iran.
But that's been a plan.
And that's part of this same disaster.
It solves nothing.
We have solved nothing.
And to this day, these maniacs who are murderous genocidaires and killing in mass murder, to this day, they have the backing of the United States government.
Not even a murmur of opposition.
60,000 dead, 20,000 of them, 18,000 by the official count, children, names listed in the Washington Post recently.
People showing up starving at food depots to be shot at, all caught on TikTok.
Ben Gevere saying we're going to take everything again yesterday.
Not a murmur from our government.
Who runs it?
What is going on?
The American people at least two to one against Israel in this in the opinion surveys because the American public is revolted by what's happening.
So this is why we're here.
And yesterday was at least a glimmer of hope.
It's just a glimmer.
There's a battle going on, obviously, in Washington and in London.
London is even worse than Washington, by the way, because they had centuries of insanity.
If anyone's here from Britain, my apologies.
But it's unbelievable.
It shows you can lose your empire 80 years ago and still think you have it And still think you run the world and still think that America's your junior partner doing your mischief.
MI6 is an absolute reckless out-of-control disaster.
And you look at a starmer.
Oh my God, don't get me started.
Do not get me started because I will not get off the podium.
We had a doctrine issued 202 years ago, which is not remembered properly, the Monroe Doctrine.
And I do want to remember it because it's sometimes taken as a bogeyman or sometimes taken as a statement of American foreign policy, but it's not taken correctly.
And the idea of the Monroe Doctrine was that in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Declaration of Independence of the other states in the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the 1820s, the United States said to the European powers, do not interfere in our hemisphere.
Okay, a little bold, by the way, of the U.S. at the time.
We were not exactly the strapping empire of the world compared to the European empires, but there was actually a very important part of it that I want to recall, and I want to read it.
And I quote, it's from the message to Congress of President Monroe, December 2nd, 1823, with this part written by the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.
He said, our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars that have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.
It was a reciprocal commitment.
Stay out of our lane, we'll stay out of your lane.
This is really smart advice, even smarter in a nuclear-armed world.
Don't go to provoke.
Don't think you run the world.
Don't expand NATO eastward to Russia's border, for God's sake, after you have said repeatedly, explicitly, not ambiguously, to President Gorbachev and to other Soviet and Russian leaders that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And if you think it's a myth, go to the National Security Archive of George Washington University and pull out the dozens of documents or the clips of Hans-Dietrich Denscher saying explicitly, this doesn't refer to a promise within Germany.
This is in general, we're not going to move eastward.
That's what the Monroe Doctrine really says.
What are we doing trying to push NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia?
Well, I'll tell you what we're doing.
We're doing what Lord Palmerston tried to do in 1853 in the Crimean War, which was to surround Russia and banish Russia from the Black Sea.
That's the idea.
And immediately after the Maidan coup, which my colleague Victoria Newland was a very competent sponsor of, she now teaches diplomacy at Columbia University.
You cannot make this up.
Even George Orwell did not imagine such a thing.
Anyway, she teaches diplomacy together with Hillary Clinton.
It's so weird.
Anyway, the coup came and immediately the post-coup government said, we don't think the Russians should be in Crimea.
That is their naval base for the last 100 from 1783.
I won't calculate the number of years.
That was the idea.
It was Palmerston's idea.
It was Brzezinski's idea.
That's not the Monroe Doctrine.
That is, we will be in your face, right up to your face.
We will annoy you.
We will, as the RAND Corporation wrote in 2019 in one of the most absurd, dangerous, ridiculous exemplars of American foreign policy, we will extend you.
Extending Russia a document of a think tank, how to annoy Russia in 27 different ways.
Is this really what we pay them for?
How to provoke the other nuclear superpower with 6,000 nuclear weapons and then wonder why the hand of the doomsday clock is 89 seconds to midnight?
These people are crazy.
Honestly, it's very, very dangerous.
So I know I don't, nobody told me how long to speak, and I tend to speak about six hours.
So I'm going to stop very shortly.
Let me just say that all the major conflicts can be ended straightforwardly.
The Ukraine war, the causes, belli of the Ukraine war is NATO enlargement, U.S. coup, CIA operations all over Ukraine.
Even the New York Times reported that one a couple of months ago.
We've got to stop being in Russia's face.
They know it.
They know all of it.
They were so kind as to post Victoria Newland's call with Jeffrey Piat choosing the next government.
Thank you.
They know all of it.
They know who paid for the Maidan demonstrators.
They've got everything.
We've got to stop the provocations.
And yes, by the way, there was no Russian demand for territory of any kind.
Crimea, they wanted a 25-year lease, which they negotiated, President Putin and President Yanukovych.
Not territory, not a claim.
Even after the coup, Russia took back Crimea.
No, NATO, you're not getting that base.
But even when it came to the Donbass, they just said autonomy in this post-coup anti-Russia regime.
The United States said no to that one, too.
And incidentally, I'll share with you just one moment.
In 2021, the war could have been avoided easily by President Biden saying to President Putin, NATO will not expand to Ukraine and I will say so.
And I called Jake Sullivan.
He teaches at Harvard.
It's all consistent.
After you fail in Washington.
And I said, Jake, avoid a war.
Stop NATO enlargement.
It's ridiculous.
It's useless.
Would you like it on the Rio Grande in Mexico, a Russian military base?
Said, Jeff, we have an open-door policy for NATO.
Said, Jake, give me a break.
Open door policy.
I repeated the Monroe Doctrine to no effect.
And I said, Jake, stop the NATO enlargement.
He said to me, Jeff, NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine.
I said, Jake, we're going to have a war over something that's not going to happen.
Why don't you say so?
He said to me, don't worry, there's not going to be a war.
Honestly, these people are not clever.
They're not clever.
What they're doing makes no sense.
They don't know what they're doing.
We don't know when Biden checked out, maybe already then.
But in any event, they're not smart.
They're getting us into trouble.
So we could make peace In Ukraine.
Tomorrow was, yesterday was a hint of it, but you could see the president is so everything about our media, about the Congress, about the military-industrial complex, whether he has the skill or not, I don't know.
But if he were a communicator and had the guts and what he should stand up and explain to the American people, this was about NATO enlargement, we're not going to do it.
That would be the end.
But he can't quite, he says it privately, I'm sure, but not publicly.
Why?
Because we're still trapped.
We're trapped as Eisenhower told us we're trapped.
And all these think tanks up and down the East Coast are bought the same way.
It's all phony.
Everything you hear about the data, there was a report recently about Russia's casualties being X times that of Ukraine by one of the Washington think tanks.
So I looked at the, it was absurd.
So I looked at the footnote.
Where'd that come from?
The footnote came from the Ministry of Defense of Britain.
I was already suspicious.
So then I went to the Ministry of Defense of Britain and after a little maneuvering, tracked down its source.
It was Ukraine.
Oh my God, they get paid for this.
Of course, it's paid propaganda.
Okay, Ukraine can be stopped when the President of the United States says publicly, NATO will not enlarge.
He could add parentheses, it was a bad idea.
If he wants, he could say, it wasn't my idea, it was their terrible ideas.
He could say, Obama did the coup, whatever he wants to say.
But if he told the truth, the war will end.
When it comes to the Middle East, oh God, practically speaking, we should vote today, tomorrow, Monday, in the UN Security Council for a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
you'd have 109.
Thank you.
You would have 192 votes, and Israel would not have a veto.
And it would be implemented.
And I speak with top leaders across the world in my job, including throughout the Middle East, all of the governments, with Iran, with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with presidents of Islamic majority countries all over the world, Indonesia, Malaysia, throughout Africa.
Everybody's ready for peace, except the zealots in Israel and the Israel lobby here in the United States.
That's it.
And peace could come the moment we tell the truth and tell them to stop the genocide and we stop being complicit in the genocide too.
It's not even complicated.
And finally, we are preparing for war with China now.
If you want the worst idea on the whole planet in all of history, that's it.
Unbelievable that the thought could even be uttered.
Let me tell you something about China's overseas military adventures.
It's easy.
I'm going to give you 2,000 years of China's overseas military adventures.
I'm done.
There have never been Chinese overseas military adventures.
China never invaded Japan once in 2,000 years.
With the following footnote, if anyone challenges me when you repeat that and they say Sachs is an idiot, doesn't he know that China invaded Japan in 1274 AD and 1281 AD.
And you remind them, no, no, that was the Mongols, not the Chinese.
Okay?
China never invaded Korea once in 2,000 years, except in 1950 when Douglas MacArthur threatened nuclear war on China.
Other than that, never.
And yes, I did get an email from a very nice Vietnamese correspondent corresponder, not a correspondent, who said, Mr. Sachs, you underestimate we've been at war with China for 2,000 years, Vietnam.
I had to remind him that the actual war ended 1,050 years ago, and that there were two wars in the last thousand years.
It's true.
China did invade a northern province of Vietnam in 1410 AD, and the war lasted for 17 years to 1427, at which point the Chinese were defeated by the Vietnamese and by malaria, which is one of the reasons why they never did it.
There is a disease zone and a tropical forest zone and a mountain zone, and they invaded Vietnam one month in 1979 after Vietnam had toppled their ally next door in Cambodia was one month.
Other than that, a thousand years, China's not going to invade the United States.
It can't.
It won't.
It's not going to invade any place.
And if there would be an invasion even of Taiwan, which is a province of China, it would be because the United States is unilaterally arming Taiwan against our diplomacy, against our treaties, against our 1982 communique, which said we would phase out arming Taiwan.
The biggest risk we face is turning Taiwan into Ukraine.
And we're way on the way to doing that because the same thought processes in Washington are at work in East Asia.
It's just that the consequences would be even more devastating, first for Taiwan, second for the United States, and third for the entire world.
So let me end by saying not only could all these conflicts easily be resolved, easily be resolved, but we should also look just a bit at the process.
And I just want to mention a few quick points.
First, it was already recognized by President Truman in 1963 publicly, soon after Kennedy's assassination, and already known before that that the biggest mistake we made in 1947 was to give the CIA two jobs.
One, intelligence, which we need, and two, covert operations, which is absolutely deadly for our security and for world peace.
We should end all CIA covert operations, period.
Thank you.
Second, obviously, from the news that we've seen recently and from what we know, we need to depoliticize the CIA and the intelligence agencies.
We need intelligence.
We don't need politics in those agencies.
Third, we need to close our overseas military bases.
They serve.
There are hundreds of billions of dollars in 80 countries, 750 to 800 overseas military bases that only suborn politics all over the world, support Covert operations and create terrible expense and terrible crises.
We need diplomacy to return.
J.D. Vance explained what he called the Trump doctrine.
I just want to say he got part of it right and one major part wrong.
Or, I mean, the doctrine is part right and a major part wrong.
Vance said that the Trump doctrine is: first, articulate a clear American interest.
Good.
Second, aggressively seek a diplomatic solution.
Good.
Then the third, if diplomacy fails, use overwhelming military force to solve the issues and then withdraw before it becomes a right word, an extended conflict.
Huh?
That is the Iran absurdity at play.
By the way, if that was aggressive diplomacy, you announce your next meeting is on Sunday and you bomb on Friday, and that that's really going to solve your problems or enhance diplomacy.
So the Trump doctrine, if that's really what it is, urgently needs to be rethought.
And finally, most importantly, we need public understanding.
We need public awareness.
We need the public to understand what America's real interests are.
We need brave congressmen like Congressman Duncan, who told his constituency that these wars make no sense, that they are not for American security.
We need the Ron Paul Institute.
We need our favorite judge, Napolitano.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't know how you do it.
So, welcome, everyone, to this special live broadcast of Judging Freedom.
As you can see at the dais with us is Professor Sachs and you can see Colonel Douglas McGregor.
I've been privileged to have started this little podcast called Judging Freedom, with which many of you may be familiar.
By the way, we're waiting for the Blumenthals, which happens on live television as well.
The largest reason for the success of judging freedom is the two gentlemen sitting at the podium right now.
Thank you.
We were going to talk about the depravity of American foreign policy, about which you heard a great deal in the very excellent and articulate lecture from Professor Sachs.
But we would be remiss if we did not discuss the events of yesterday as far as we understand them.
So, Colonel McGregor, even though I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this, I will start with you.
What the hell happened yesterday in Anchorage, Alaska?
Doesn't he look like Douglas MacArthur?
Except that I haven't urged nuclear war lately, so I think that's where the similarity ends.
I didn't hear the beginning of your presentation, so I don't know, Jeff, what you had to say.
I think on the positive side, we had the leaders of two important powers in the world.
I say that instead of saying a superpower and something else, because that's all nonsense now.
And they met and they talked, and it was amicable.
That was obvious.
And I think President Trump and his team were finally convinced after the meeting was over that the Russians are very consistent in their aims, consistent in what they want, and they are not going to deviate from those positions.
And I think Donald Trump was surprised that his personal charm, charisma, and so forth was not extraordinarily important to the Russian team.
Having said that, I thought the best part was the end, where Mr. Putin said, well, you should come to Moscow.
And of course, President Trump said, sure.
Oh, I'm going to get heat for that.
And I'd say that's the biggest problem right now with President Trump, and I like him personally, but there seems to be an acute absence of courage and backbone to step away from all the nonsense and lead.
Anyway, what do you think?
Professor Sachs, has President Trump succumbed to the neocon control around him?
Professor Sachs.
Yeah, I also picked up on those last words that Trump clearly has in mind the Washington bubble rather than the issues of the conflict.
My guess is knowing most of the negotiators on both sides and the rehashing of issues for many years, that they get it and that Trump just can't figure out how to get out of this exactly.
On the U.S. side, it's not so hard because he has the American people on his side.
So this isn't trying to convey a message that is somehow contrary to American opinion.
Americans would love to hear nothing more from our president than we're not still involved in this war and we're improving our relations with Russia.
He seems, for reasons I do not fully understand, and Doug would know more than I or can help us on this, he seems to care about what Lindsey Graham thinks, for example.
Oh, good Lord.
Exactly.
Why would anyone care?
Or Blumenthal, another rather disgraceful member of the Senate, pure warmongers, no ideas, no strategy, no nothing other than to continue the war.
So I thought that those last few words, oh, I'm going to take heat for that if I go to Moscow, really showed a lot, actually.
It really showed something much bigger than the quip.
Colonel, isn't this as much Donald Trump's war as Joe Biden's?
Didn't Donald Trump arm Ukraine to the teeth during his first presidency?
I think that's indisputable.
And of course, you've heard him also say on more than one occasion, I'm responsible for providing the javelin missile systems that were so important at the outset of this war.
He's a schizophrenic.
He doesn't know which way to go.
But the biggest problem right now, and I got to be frank about this, is the American people.
And now that I see Nassim Talib, Mr. No Skin in the Game, who's just walked in here, I think it's important that everybody understand that too few Americans have any skin in the game.
So what's it all about?
The war and soldiering.
Well, I hear it all the time.
Well, no Americans have died.
Therefore, what difference does it make?
And of course, millions of people have had their lives destroyed by all of this.
Millions have been killed and wounded.
Ukraine is effectively prepared to go out of existence at this stage.
That's what people in the United States don't understand.
The lopsided exchange ratio is overwhelming.
You can't even begin to imagine it.
So what's wrong with Americans?
Well, Americans, if it doesn't affect them personally, then they don't pay much attention.
And this same problem extends to finance.
By the way, Mr. Nassim Taliban is also, gold is now the reserve currency, which I happen to agree with 100%.
And I wish everybody else would come to terms with that reality as well.
I'm saying these things up front, so you don't have anything to say when you get up here.
No, in all seriousness, it's a big problem.
How do you get Americans mobilized to do something?
And I go back to World War I when the British asked the French, how many troops do you need at the outbreak of a war with Germany?
And they said, just send one and we'll make sure he's killed instantly.
Because that was the hook as far as they were concerned.
Sadly, I think that's where we are.
And Americans are about to wake up over the next few months and be shocked at what occurs financially, economically, socially, because they haven't paid much attention.
They just haven't.
Professor Sachs, I heard the president use a phrase yesterday that terrified me.
Ukraine's security.
Good God, on the neocons back to that, where the United States would provide some sort of assurance, military assurance for the security of Ukraine?
Are we all the way back to where we were in 2014 under Donald Trump because he doesn't understand what's going on and he doesn't know how we got there?
I suggest, I wasn't in the room, that he heard a lecture on the history of Ukraine from Vladimir Putin, which blew him away.
Jeff?
Ukraine's security, I think, would be assured by Ukraine's neutrality.
And that's what was protecting Ukraine before 2014.
It was the huge disaster and blunder of the United States strategy going back to, as I said, 1991 or 1945, take your pick, but we weren't stopping with neutral.
People will, any history buffs would enjoy rereading in Thucydides the Milian dialogue.
The Melian dialogue is part of the Peloponnesian War where the Athenian tells the people of Milos, you cannot be neutral.
If you are neutral, we will kill you.
And the Milian said, but we just want to be friends with both sides.
We don't need anything bad.
And the Athenians say, no, we will kill you if you proclaim neutrality.
Professor Sachs, I have to say.
But just to say, because you will show all our other allies that they can be neutral also.
And we don't want that to happen.
The United States hates the idea of neutrality, not because it weakens those countries, it protects them, but it hates that idea like the Athenians did in 416 BC.
And just to say, to my mind, if I may one more historical analog, in 1955, Austria declared neutrality in an agreement with the Soviet Union where the Soviet Union left Eastern Austria, which it had occupied since 1945.
on the basis of neutrality.
Austria became rich, prosperous, happy, never bothered again, either by the Soviet Union or by Russia by their neutrality.
And this is what we have blown in Ukraine.
They don't need our guarantees.
just need to be neutral.
Thank you.
So we are joined now, now because of traffic issues, but happily joined by two of the most articulate and courageous investigative reporters in the United States of America, Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil.
Thank you.
Also reasons for the popularity of judging freedom.
Max, I'll go to you.
We were going to talk in general terms about the depravity of American foreign policy, and you were going to opine on Israel.
Professor Sachs has covered that in his talk earlier today.
Your view, your take on what the hell happened yesterday in Alaska.
Well, first of all, we had babysitter issues because you wanted both of us.
Usually we get to kind of trade off.
I demanded both of you.
It's like the president and the vice president can't be in the same place at the same time.
But I don't know what the hell happened yesterday.
It looked like a photo op to me, a very good photo op for Putin that legitimized him, that legitimized Russia's military campaign that signaled that the U.S. understands that they're winning.
But I don't know what actually took place or what will take place or where they will meet next and the forces, the preponderance of force on Trump from the neoconservative camp.
I mean, I felt for so long throughout ever since January, we're witnessing the third coming of Bush's first term.
I refer to Trump as Orange McCain these days.
So I don't actually know where this is going to go.
And I would like to weigh in quickly on what's happening with Israel, because Israel has damaged the credibility of the U.S. everywhere on the world stage to the point where it's no longer taken very seriously and reduces Trump's ability to make a deal anywhere.
The rules-based order has completely collapsed.
The U.S. is supposed to be this nation that represents global liberalism in the post-World War II order.
And we are supporting an ethno-supremacist colony as it enters the final stage of what it began in 1948, which is a campaign of ethnic cleansing for basically racial purity.
And every faction in Congress supports it.
The entire power structure supports it.
You see on your way here to this ballroom, military contractor after military contractor.
Our economy feasts off of it.
This is like the corridor of death out here.
Microsoft, Microsoft's offices are right down the road in Reston.
They have two giant skyscrapers dedicated to them.
And we just learned through Israeli reporters that Microsoft's Azura Cloud is hosting Israel's database of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because they had run out of their own cloud space.
And that is the database they use to determine targeting for their AI gospel system.
In other words, their automated AI genocide system.
And Microsoft is hosting it.
So we're witnessing a complete collapse of the rules-based order.
And it starts here.
It moves through Tel Aviv.
And what we witnessed was merely a photo op.
Anya, to your field of specialty, which is Latin America.
Why did the State Department put a $50 million bounty on the popularly elected president of Venezuela two weeks ago?
Well, this is a fun question.
And to look at the follies of the Trump policy in Latin America, I think it's most illustrative to compare the way the United States under Trump has treated Venezuela, which is probably considered the great enemy in the region versus its great ally or the one leader who has come from Latin America to celebrate with MAGA repeatedly, and that's Javier Malay in Argentina.
So there are probably a lot of people in this room that might be a fan of Javier Malay, even though my friend Daniel McAdams called him out very early and said, watch this guy, because he's branded as a libertarian, but it might not be that simple.
And what I just want to emphasize with these two cases is that, yes, libertarianism, it might be a brand that he can use in Argentina, but really what he's implemented is just your standard IMF prescribed neoliberal package of privatization, slashing of public spending.
And did you know, by the way, that in his effort to privatize Argentina's water supply, that an Israeli company stands to benefit and may actually gain control of Argentina's water system.
So I think it's important for libertarians, especially to consider national sovereignty sometimes in thinking about these policies, because yes, it might look like he's cutting the budget and doing something very libertarian.
But another example of how Malay has given up Argentina's sovereignty, and I'll come back to Venezuela to contrast in just a moment, but is that last year it was actually reported in the Argentine press that a significant amount of Argentina's sovereign gold supply was shipped abroad and nobody knows where it went.
Malay has acknowledged that he did this, but will not say where the gold was sent.
Now contrast that with Venezuela, the boogeyman of the region, which yes, the judge just mentioned, the United States slapped a $50 million reward, which I think I can claim because he's in the presidential offices, Maduro.
He's working in Mirafloy's Palace.
So I think I know where he is or should be able to claim that open reward.
In reality, this reward came down the same week that the Trump administration actually approved Chevron operating in Venezuela.
It's been, U.S. companies have been restricted from developing and shipping U.S. Venezuelan oil to the United States since 2019, when Trump began this coup of recognizing a shadow.
Does the Trump administration still think that that grad student in Miami is the true president of Venezuela?
I've recognized a few other people since then, but in reality, they did send Richard Grinnell down there to negotiate with the president.
And now this reward is something that I think was done to appease figures like Rubio in the cabinet and need to look like they're being very aggressive towards Venezuela while they move to normalize.
And just the last point I wanted to make on that point was I talked about Malay shipping his gold reserves abroad.
Well, five months before the United States recognized Juan Guaido, this now Miami grad student, as the president of Venezuela, the Venezuelan government under Maduro actually lodged an official repatriation request with the Bank of England asking to bring back their sovereign gold supply.
So how convenient that five months later, the U.S. and London recognized a government that allowed them to say, well, actually, we don't know who is the rightful owner of this gold.
We have to keep it here in our Bank of England indefinitely while we figure this out, even though there's no question of who runs the central bank in Caracas.
So I just wanted to compare those two in the brief time.
I think the gold is a way of illustrating what it means.
If you're an enemy of the United States, you might have some sovereign claim to your resources, and that's the issue.
Whereas if you're friends with the United States, you can just sell your country off to international finance and be very pro-Israel along the way.
And that's kind of what Malay has done to win favor in Washington.
Thank you, Anya.
Colonel McGregor, what are the dangers of 750 military installations around the world in 80 different countries owned, operated, manned, and funded by the Pentagon?
Well, I hate to correct you, but I think it's a little over 850 at this point.
Happy to be corrected.
Well, I can't add too much more to what Jeff Sachs has said, and his point is accurate.
In most cases, these things are a legacy of the Cold War.
And if you go back and look at the original executive order signed by the president at the time, it talked explicitly about maintaining the necessary logistical lines of communication and support bases so that we could, in fact, respond to the Soviet threat or the threat of, at that point, what people thought was global communism, wherever it manifested itself.
So if you go back and look at those original bases, some of those can still be justified, at least in terms of if you want to logistically try and support yourself.
But you go to a place like the Pacific, there are only two or three places where you can stockpile a great deal of fuel and ammunition, water, and so forth.
All three, with one exception, there are two that are islands.
The other is a very large body of landmass.
I don't want to tell you where they are because in theory, I would be violating some important security information.
But if you look at those three locations, they could be annihilated in the first opening minutes of any war that you might fight with anybody, in which case the entire fleet can't operate.
People don't understand that in 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the whole U.S. fleet, which according to war plans, was supposed to move decisively east in the direction of the Philippines, withdrew everywhere.
Well, we only had 11 refuelers in the fleet, 11 tankers, effectively, that could refuel the fleet.
And the chief of naval operations says, we don't have enough.
We can't do it.
What I'm trying to tell you is that we can't do most of what we have planned to do today because the world has changed.
Precision, guided missiles, overhead surveillance, all of these things militate against the style of warfare that we like, which is, or we think we like, which is World War II.
But most people don't even know what happened during the Second World War, or they would rethink their assumptions.
So most of those bases can be eliminated very quickly without any loss of security.
Some you will want to retain.
There's no question about it.
And the countries in which they sit, in many cases, may be happy to have them.
But the point is, it's time to sit down and look at the 850.
And I'd be very surprised if you couldn't cut that down to about 120, personally.
Max, what's the best I can do?
Max, what would it take to stop Netanyahu's slaughter?
It would take a total arms embargo, and it would happen tomorrow.
And what we're hearing is from the Europeans, statehood for the Palestinians.
Where is the state going to be when Gaza is fully ethnically cleansed?
And the West Bank, the Israelis are just authorizing settlement activity in E1, which will fully close off any part of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
So it's empty bluster.
We'll give the Palestinian Authority more power in the UN, perhaps.
And then we see Bernie Sanders actually finally offering, putting forward an arms embargo.
Ro Khanna is doing it in the House.
They're getting very little support.
I think 23 Democrats supported it.
The rest of the Senate opposed it.
And long term, it will take registering APAC as a foreign agent, which Thomas Massey is pushing.
And what we need to do.
Because this isn't about Netanyahu.
It's about the Zionist movement.
And it's about a foreign bribery network in the capital.
As Grant Smith has documented, APAC grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was itself funded by the Jewish Agency, which is an Israeli institution, foreign money, and they circumvented the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
The Fulbright Committee was basically shut down with JFK's assassination.
We just released an interesting piece about James Angleton and not only his involvement in handling Oswald, but also his involvement in basically setting up the Mossad and helping Israel steal nuclear secrets.
So what we need is a bipartisan coalition to shut down APAC.
It's understood on both sides that this is really the heart of the issue, but the Democrats are afraid to touch this massey.
Look at who he's going up against.
Who's putting up the money for the super PAC?
It's Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer, two of the top Zionist billionaire donors in the country.
So, it's clear what the stakes are.
This is about money and shutting down the financial feeding tube of Israel and the U.S. will end this program overnight.
But it starts also with an arms embargo.
Anya, what is it like being married to somebody who risks his life every day to get the truth out?
It's funny.
Ask Max's new friend, Congressman Fine, the poor sign Congressman Fine, who openly said starvation is a legitimate weapon of war.
As if that isn't a war criminal in the making.
As if he's ever missed a meal.
Professor Sachs, does Mossad spy on the president of the United States?
Does Mossad buy the president?
I said spy, but buy, buy might be another question that you can answer.
Buy, buy, spy, suborn, and blackmail, probably all of them.
I don't think that there's a single instrument necessarily that's decisive.
Others here would probably know better, but they're all over this, no question.
And it is a murder ink institution, first and foremost.
I'm going to give you each two minutes to say whatever you'd like.
The freedom, the judging freedom audience is enormous.
This audience is very appreciative.
We are running a little bit over, and I'm getting sort of these.
If he were Italian, it would be called Malocchio, but it's coming from Mick Adams.
You got to stop, Judge.
You got to stop.
But two minutes to each of you on the depravity of American foreign policy, starting with Anya.
Well, right now, it's definitely not great, but I try to remain hopeful because one area that I focused on in my reporting, in fact, two years ago when I was here, I think I discussed my trip to the BRICS Summit in South Africa.
And while I was there, I was speaking with the officials who represented South Africa, India, China, Russia.
Of course, I'm probably forgetting one of the BRICS nations at that, but they were actually open to the United States when I would ask them, and they were talking about their goals of multipolarity and cooperation, whether or not they could ever imagine the United States joining a group like BRICS.
And I think if we got over some of our ties to our imperial mentality and decided to cooperate with the world like an adult, that we would find that these organizations and these groups aren't actually formed in opposition to us, but just to create a different kind of world that we could participate in, viewing other countries like China, Russia, India, South Africa as equals or partners.
And so I just like to try and emphasize as much as we'll all emphasize where we're going wrong.
I want to also say that there's hope.
The rest of the world doesn't want to just cast the United States aside.
We're always going to be a powerful, influential nation.
But I think it's time that we did something positive with that and actually move toward cooperation and peace.
But I'll let the other three just trash the policy.
This is going to sound worse than it is.
Max, two minutes on depravity.
I've never really been a two-minute man, but I'll try.
I'll try.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
What?
I'm just looking at a Politico headline just to follow up on your question to Jeff.
Israel accused of Planting mysterious spy devices near the White House.
This is Politico 2019.
Remember that?
I mean, some of you probably don't remember it because it wasn't a scandal.
The scandal was Trump, Putin, Putin, Russia, Trump.
It was just that nonstop.
Israel spies on this country more than any other country.
It's industrial-grade spying.
And another reason that many politicians, elected officials are afraid of taking this on is the fear of assassination.
Let's face it, especially an executive.
Beyond that, look at what the U.S. has done in Syria.
You want to talk about depravity?
Look at the slaughter of the Druze, the slaughter of the Alawites, over 10,000 massacred in just a week by al-Qaeda bandits, many of them from Uzbekistan and Chechnya and other countries.
And the U.S. then sends in lobbyists to try to arrange the normalization of Syria's al-Qaeda government with Israel and legitimizes Jolani in the midst of this massacre.
And you know who's next?
It's the Christians.
And we are signing off on that entire campaign, all because Syria has been neutralized as a potential threat to Israel and they're starting to arrest Palestinian resistance leaders.
And Israel's still bombing Syria.
We are pushing Lebanon towards civil war right now, demanding Hezbollah disarm.
They will not do so.
The United States government wants Lebanon in a civil war.
And I was just interviewing an analyst who's a friend of ours from Iran in Tehran yesterday.
And everyone there is bracing for another round in which Israel will inevitably drag the United States into another military conflict with Iran.
They consider it absolutely inevitable, it could happen by the end of this month or September.
How does this serve us?
How does this advance American interests in any way?
Why aren't we even having that debate?
We're not.
And this is just talking about one region.
Going back to your initial question, just to wrap up about this summit in Alaska.
Well, had there been a peace deal, a durable peace deal, it would have been done with the consent of the military leadership and the intelligence apparatus so that the U.S. could move on to Iran and then China.
And that's the depravity there: we are in a state of permanent war until we face a real political revolution in this country.
The kind of revolution that, while I'm not a libertarian, I still carry in my communist card.
the kind of revolution that Ron Paul was putting forward in his presidential campaigns on foreign policy.
Thank you.
I don't really have a card.
Colonel, is Donald Trump free to do something against the will of the deep state?
The short answer is no.
And I would say I agree with everything that's being said.
But I would point out that I do not expect anything to change dramatically in any particularly positive direction until the financial system collapses and we go into a serious crisis.
That's simple truth.
That's it.
It all runs on money.
When the fake money runs out, then things will change because we'll pull everything overseas back to the United States and we will focus internally.
I don't know what the answer is.
Are we going to become embroiled in a larger scale war that will involve Russia and China, as well as Iran and potentially other states before the collapse?
Because if that happens, that's unfortunate.
I would prefer to see the collapse first, because the collapse would then prevent us from committing suicide.
But I see no evidence right now for anything changing without that particular event.
Professor Sachs, when you were.
Sorry.
When you were talking about the absurdity of suggesting war with China, I thought of my former Fox colleague who runs the Department of Defense standing in Japan three weeks ago, shaking his fist at China, almost welcoming war.
Why do they do that?
I'll ask you.
I'm not going to answer that.
I have no clue.
Maybe, ladies and gentlemen, we need, I know it's naive, but we do need a peace party.
The politics we have will not solve this, neither party.
We need a peace party because that would have a very strong majority of the American people.
They would understand it.
They would understand that this would make us safer.
They would understand that, as Doug is saying, We are 100% of GDP in debt with a trajectory which is mind-boggling, and we've just raised the budget deficit to another percentage point, so it'll be 7% of GDP in this coming fiscal year.
We can't afford what we're doing.
It's not safe.
It's not prudent.
It's not moral.
It's not practical.
It gains us no benefits whatsoever.
And what you've heard from everybody is that it's not even hard to stop these conflicts.
In fact, we've all used the expression in a day, and it's literally true because these are artificially prolonged conflicts.
These are not conflicts that have some existential, unbendable will.
These are choices that are terrible choices made for particular interests and for particular reasons that don't serve the American people.
I don't love financial crises.
I've used to make my career working in places with hyperinflation.
You are right about the dangers, but I wouldn't relish it.
I'd hope we could get to this before we hit that stage.
So I'm still hoping that we could figure out a way, you guys figure it out.
How could we have a true political movement of peace?
Because if you go through that optic, all the rest can fall into place.
Thank you.
You will...
You will hear later today from Anya Parrampol, Max Blumenthal, and of course, Colonel McGregor.
But let me thank my superb and excellent panel.
They're all professional colleagues and personal friends, and they are top of the line when it comes to intellectual honesty and personal courage.
The judging freedom live audience at this moment is truly enormous.
And I thank those of you who are watching live.
We will continue to live stream the balance of the program because I'll be on a plane, but I'm dying to hear what the great Colonel McGregor doesn't he look like Douglas MacArthur that the great Colonel McGregor will have to say this afternoon.
God love you.
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