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Aug. 26, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:27
Kyle Anzalone : Why Progressives and Libertarians Agree.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, August 26, 2025.
Our dear friend, Kyle Anzalone, joins us now.
Kyle, always a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
I'd like to touch on a variety of topics with you, some of which you have been mentioning in other venues.
Let's start with Mexico.
Is the Trump administration using U.S. military assets?
against drug military assets against drug dealers in mexico yeah the the us is ramping up for that since taking office the state department led by marco rubio has placed about a dozen, what they call Latin American cartels on the terrorism list.
And then Trump gave a presidential order to the military to be ready to target these terrorist cartels.
And so there's been some great reporting by Ken Klippenstein and Will Arkin that's published at Substack.
And they obtained military documents showing that Trump ordered the Pentagon to dedicate about half of their resources at Northern Command Special Operations.
And they are supposed to launch raids, drone strikes, and even airstrikes.
strides against the cartels and be ready to do so by mid-September.
Well, this is probably a war crime.
It's certainly in violation of the Geneva Convention.
I mean, has the United States declared war on Mexico and I missed it?
Not at all.
Yeah, the constitution, I guess Trump has completely thrown that out.
He's going after the First Amendment with his flag burning executive order and, of course, trampling all over the war-making provisions of the constitution by launching undeclared wars against Yemen and Iran already.
And it seems that Mexico or Venezuela may be next on the list as not only is Trump ordering the military to prepare for actions against the Mexican cartels, but they labeled the entire Venezuelan government cartel and claimed the Venezuelan president Maduro is the leader of that cartel.
And there's scant evidence that this cartel even exists.
There's just some elements of the Venezuelan government that are involved in illegal activities, but they label this a cartel.
And now the U.S. has positioned, I believe, three guided missile destroyers and an attack submarine off of Venezuela's coast.
According to Ritter, there's a few thousand Marines either on those ships or have received deployment orders to Venezuela.
This is what happens when he does it and gets away with it, like in Yemen, he'll just keep following up.
Where's the Congress on all of this?
Well, my instinct is that even if the Congress were to take action, they probably support this.
They've long agitated particularly for regime change in Venezuela.
And Trump seems to have support for his action against the cartels, or at least not enough dissent that anyone is going to stand up and stop them.
I mean, this was reported by the New York Times at the beginning of the month.
So I guess Congress has been out of session the entire time that this has been public knowledge that Trump has given the order allowing the military to target the cartels designated as terrorist groups.
But I don't hear members of Congress outraged or speaking out about this.
Really, it's the few statements that I've read against this are from the Mexican government making it clear that they are not going to go along with the U.S. military conducting operations in Mexico, which means the U.S. military would not only be violating Mexico's sovereignty, but what happens if U.S. troops on a raid come across Mexican troops?
I mean, this could be a serious and dangerous escalation that Trump is talking about going forward here without any input at all from Congress.
So Mexico and Venezuela are both in the United Nations.
The Senate has ratified at least two treaties that I can think of, the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
Well, the Geneva Conventions is four different treaties, all of which limit America's war-making power to that which is defensive or imminently dangerous to American national security.
Now, how is the government of Venezuela imminently dangerous to American national security?
The federal government claims this is almost ridiculous to articulate that a grad student in Miami is the true president of Venezuela.
As ridiculous as that sounds, do I have that right?
I'm not sure where Amando Gonzalez is, who I believe is who they're recognizing as the president of Venezuela now.
I think they've moved on from Juan Gallido, who the Trump administration tried to install in, I believe that was 2019, and the Biden administration recognized him as the rightful president of Venezuela throughout much of the Biden administration, even though he had never won an election.
He was just essentially a representative and won the parliament.ary bodies in Venezuela and he just declared himself president.
He didn't even have supported the Venezuelan opposition when he did so.
He tried to launch a couple of coups from within Venezuela.
He was routinely mocked and harassed by Venezuelans who saw him as a US and Western puppet trying to overthrow the government that the Venezuelan people largely support.
Last summer, Venezuela held another election.
Maduro did win that election, but the US said that the opposition candidate that again is, I believe, Gonzalez.
And I think he's hiding out in Spain because, of course, he has not enough popular support to actually claim the presidency in Venezuela.
Right.
The person I was referring to as the grad student in Miami was Juan Guaido.
I didn't realize they had moved on from Mr. Guaido.
Trump sent Rick Grinnell, the director of national intelligence and the U.S. ambassador to Germany in his first term.
Now I think Rick is the president of the Kennedy Center.
I might not have that right, but he sent Rick Grinnell.
twice to Venezuela to negotiate for the release of prisoners and Grinnell was successful both times.
Does the U.S. claim that Maduro was not the legitimate president, even though we negotiate with him and send emissaries to him?
Yeah, well, this is one of the confusing pieces of Trump's foreign policy.
And I think it kind of represents some of the dysfunction that we see in the White House when they're negotiating with any country where you have Trump's personal envoys like Witcoff and Gurnell.
I think Gurnell's official title, at least it was at the beginning of the administration, was hostage envoy.
And so right at the beginning of his administration, it might have even been in January, very early February, Gurnell went to Venezuela, met with Maduro, and returned to the United States with six Americans who were imprisoned in Venezuela.
They were they were released and so it seemed that things were off to to a good start and that Trump was going to really rely on Gurnell to do business with a lot of these countries and try to negotiate diplomacy.
But he also appointed Marco Rubio who is a real hawk on a lot of issues, but he is an uber hawk when it comes to Latin America.
He typically is the senator that is most vocal in support of regime change against any government in Latin America.
We don't like whether that's Cuba, Venezuela, the government in Brazil.
And so Rubio then, right after Grenell got the CITS Americans back, announced that he was seizing one of Maduro's planes that was held in the Dominican Republic and then pushed more sanctions on Venezuela.
And eventually the State Department did come out and say they, like the Biden administration, recognized the Venezuelan opposition figure as the true president of Venezuela and not Maduro.
One of the people that Grenell got released had been convicted in a jury trial of murder.
Murder in Venezuela.
But he was an American.
He was on Trump's list.
And now this guy's free in the United States.
I don't know if the jury trial was fair but it's an odd person for the American government to be seeking to have to have released what is the latest i i thought i saw something that you either wrote or said the latest on the nordstream pipeline has has si hersch changed his mind on the uh identity of the destroyers of it, which is the American Navy and CIA?
Or did you change your mind?
uh that psy is now probably right or have i misread this no uh so i've always uh just have been really unsure as to what happened of course you're talking about psy hersch who were I heard she reported, I believe it was in 2022 that the US when the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed in 2022, that it was the US behind the attack and that US Navy divers had conducted the operation.
Now Germany has conducted an investigation and they ordered the arrest of a Ukrainian man who was living in Italy and he was arrested this week.
I still don't know if this is a cover and maybe they're trying to prevent or trying to obscure the facts enough by arresting some Ukrainians who maybe were involved in some illicit crimes but didn't actually bl know what happened, but a Ukrainian was arrested for the attack this week.
And I don't believe Hirsch has walked back his earlier reporting.
It would be startling if he did that.
So I'll blame my own ineffective speed reading on it.
In other words, I read it too fastly, too quickly and not thoroughly enough.
Why is Trump, in your view, totally indifferent?
to the Israeli murder of journalists in Gaza.
We know he's indifferent to the murder of civilians.
Now he's indifferent to the murder of journalists.
Well, because Trump just defers to Israel.
One of Trump's big taglines, one of the ways he likes to label himself as the most Israeli friendly president in American history.
And so I think Trump is really committed to that image that he is.
an Israel first president that he puts Israel's needs first.
He doesn't care about the lives of Palestinians.
He has this vision for turning Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East.
Earlier in his administration, he called for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
My guess is he would rather Israel not be making all these headlines by killing journalists, but at the same time, he, like the Biden administration before him is just going to defer to Israel and say, well, if Israel did it, I'm sure they have a good reason for it.
Have you been covering the murder of any one of these journalists?
Yeah.
So I wrote an article for judgeknapp.com yesterday.
So if anybody goes to the site, they can find that.
Yeah, Israel conducted a double tap strike, which is when you bomb a target, wait 10 or 15 minutes.
That way, first responders are on scene.
Journalists who are trying to cover the bombing are on scene.
And you drop a second bomb, making sure that not only the first target of the bomb is hit, but then any rescue workers are hit.
And it's a horrible war crime to do this, right?
You're intentionally targeting doctors, nurses, really the brave men and women who will rush to the scene of a bombing and try to save an innocent person who's trapped beneath the rubble, who's being crushed by all the rubble on top of them.
And so they conducted this double-tapped strike.
It was on the Al-Nasser hospital.
I believe that's the largest medical center now in southern Gaza.
They actually targeted the stairwell, which is important to note because that's where journalists, Palestinian journalists are known to congregate because they get Wi-Fi signals there.
And so this was a deliberate attack on journalists, on a group of journalists.
And I believe Israel has even said the target was a camera.
They claimed it belonged to Hamas, which it obviously didn't.
But that is the Israeli claim.
And so this is just an absolute, horrific and disgusting war crime committed by Israel.
And financed by the United States and not stopped by the United States, which we all know Trump could do with a phone call.
Yeah, absolutely.
I can't believe Trump hasn't picked up the phone yet and called Netanyahu and said, at least you have to make it not look so bad.
At least you can't let these war crimes go on and on and on.
I mean, we've heard since the start of the war, even from retired Israeli generals and prime ministers that Israel could not continue to do this without the support of the United States.
And like I said, Trump sees himself as an Israel president.
He wants to be the most pro-Israeli president in American history.
And I think to Trump, that means always deferring to Netanyahu.
When the history of these times is written, he'll be marked as a war criminal since financing genocide and financing starvation are war crimes and the United States is clearly doing that switching over to Ukraine.
What do you make of Trump taunting the Russians by saying nobody ever won a war by playing defense and Ukraine can't win by playing defense only and at the same time authorizing now they're not there yet according to Ritter they're not even built yet 3,000 EROMs offensive missiles with a range of 280 miles which can reach almost to Moscow.
What do you think Trump is trying to accomplish by this while at the same time he's buddy buddy with Putin?
Yeah, well, I think one of the ways that Trump likes to negotiate is when he has the upper hand.
And so my guess is he sees this as a way of playing hardball with Putin to try to force Putin to make some concessions.
I mean, this is what we hear from a lot of Trump advisors, that we have the ability to put economic pressure on Russia to make Russia make a good deal for Ukraine.
That's simply not going to happen.
The Biden administration has been trying to do it since the invasion.
It hasn't worked.
But yet they're really pushing forward with this and they're really trying to get, I guess, you know, force Russia to end the war, which they're not going to do.
So.
So, and it's really interesting too, Judge.
As I said before, Trump's foreign policy on almost all levels is really confused where the Biden administration near the end of his term approved and allowed Ukraine to use American intelligence, American weapons, the attack on rockets to hit targets inside of Russia.
And they expanded that territory.
At the time.
Trump called it a dangerous escalation.
He denounced the decision.
And then this was just reported by the Wall Street Journal.
In fact, in the same article that first reported the thousands of cruise missiles he's now sending to Ukraine, that the U.S. had removed support for Ukraine hitting targets inside of Russia and isn't allowing Ukraine to use American weapons to hit targets inside of Russia.
So it doesn't make sense why Trump is saying that Ukraine needs to go on the offensive when at the same time he's somewhat tying their hands in doing so, but at the same time sending them missiles capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia territory.
So has the Defense Department or the CIA or the State Department or whoever gives these authorizations authorized the use of American missiles to reach inside reach inside of Russia.
So what the Wall Street Journal report is that the Trump administration had rescinded that authorization given by Biden.
I'm not sure what limits at all are on it at this point.
The report wasn't expansive, didn't go into a ton of detail on it, but it seems that at least with the attackums, the long-range rockets, they have limited.
Ukrainian attacks inside of Russia.
That hasn't prevented Ukraine from carrying out attacks inside of Russia.
And of course, you have to imagine that American intelligence is being used for that.
They recently hit the nuclear power plant complex in Kursk.
So it caused a fire at one of the buildings.
Apparently it was quickly extinguished.
There were no reports of increased radiation, nobody injured or killed, but it did temporarily limit the amount of energy produced by the power plant.
Ukraine claims they have the ability to do this with domestically produced drones.
But of course, and it's been well reported that the CIA is really helping Ukraine procure and then design its long-range drones.
So obviously the U.S. is really still running this program, even if the weapons aren't being manufactured in the U.S. Let's veer into the philosophical.
Why do you think there is this odd combination between progressives and libertarians?
Why does so many hard.
lefties love judging Freedom.
I mean, I'm practically an anarchist.
I'm so libertarian.
And yet these big government people that want to redistribute wealth, they love judging freedom.
Yeah, I think there's maybe it's a part of the growing political divide in the US where at antiwar dot com every day we have articles from leftists like, you know, many of your guests, the great Maps Blumenthaler, Aaron Mate, on our front page.
Even though Max comes to mind, he's practically a card carrying communist.
And yet we are hand in glove on war and peace.
Right.
Well, I think Mats understands that the empire is evil.
And once you understand that, you have to be opposed to it.
And I think that means we're often in alliance on some other civil liberty issues.
It's not that we're completely opposed on all domestic issues.
Because Mats and Aaron and others like them understand the nature of the American government.
I think as libertarians, we would argue that this is the nature of all large governments, that they become tyrannical.
They try to become empires, try to wage endless wars overseas while oppressing the people at home.
But they certainly recognize it about Washington today, which is extremely important and meets us allies.
So you have Thomas Massey and AOC and Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul voting the same way.
I don't know if they're buddy buddy with each other's and I don't know if they collaborate on legislation, but on these issues, war and peace and civil liberties, their voting records are identical.
Tulsi Gabbard used to be in that group until she started working for Trump.
Yeah.
This is one of the first and most important lessons I learned from the great Ron Paul.
Paul, he would always talk about how, you know, he would try to sponsor his and the Fed bill in coordination with Bernie Sanders and how one of the people who voted with him most often in the House of Representatives wasn't another Republican, but Democrat Dennis Kucinich.
And Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich worked together long after they both left Congress.
And I think this made me always open to the writings of Mats and other people on the left because Ron Paul said, like, hey, on war and peace, these people over here are our allies.
And you have, you know, we're so marginal of a movement, libertarians and non-interventionists.
in the us i i don't think we have could turn away people like matt's and aaron and say we don't want you to be a part of our movement just because we disagree with them on welfare or health care or other issues when i had my show uh freedom watch on fox the two highest rated shows now the show only lasted for two years but the two highest rated shows were Ron Paul and Ralph Nader.
And then Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
You'll appreciate this.
Cut number 13.
Under the Constitution, there was never.
meant to be a federal police force.
Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century.
Yet today, fueled by the federal government's misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the states where they have no legal authority.
Force and intimidation are the tools of tyrants.
Intimidation with government guns and the threat of imprisonment and the fear of harassment by government agents put fear into the hearts of millions of Americans, justifiably cynical and untrusting toward the federal government, know the existence, the evidence exists that since the 1970s, both Republican and Democratic administrations have not hesitated to intimidate their political enemies.
This, of course, was four years before the Department of Homeland Security came into existence.
It's now ten times the size of the FBI, and its agents wear masks, don't display their badges when you ask for them, and they arrest people without arrest warrants.
I realize we're veering into domestic issues and civil liberties, but I couldn't resist after what you said about Ron Paul and Chris managed to find that terrific.
There are many of these that he did.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, when he did them, the chamber was empty.
Nobody listened to him, but he made these statements and they resonated with the public.
Right.
Well, millions of people did listen to him, myself included.
And that's why I think there's such a strong, not only libertarian, but anti-interventionist movement in the U.S. today.
There are, you know, our large protests about the war in Gaza, you know, demanding the US end their involvement in it, even though no Americans are dying and the US isn't going to war.
So I think we have made a lot of progress.
And one of the best things about Ron Paul is not only did he oppose that in 1997 when Bill Clinton was president, but he would make the same speech when George W. Bush was president, Barack Obama was president, and through the Trump, Biden and Trump administrations again on his great show, The Ron Paul Liberty Report.
And so he has this principle.
And of course, unfortunately, we just didn't listen to him in the regulatory state.
military state and the militarized police problem we have in the United States.
He's the only guy in war since he said that almost 30 years ago.
Yes, I was privileged to participate in making suggestions for one of his speeches, a notorious one that he gave, which is all rhetorical questions.
What if, what if, what if, what if?
Every single one of them, every single one of which is demonstrably answered yes.
but when taken together as a string is terribly frightening.
Kyle, thank you very much.
Thanks for letting me go all over the place with you.
It's been a pleasure.
All the best.
If people want to get more of you, where can they do it?
Yeah.
So I am the news editor at the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor at antiwar dot com dot I host the Kyle Landsloan show and my articles appear at the institute antiwar dot com and at judgeknapp dot com.
And you have an incredible producer for your podcast, don't you?
Somebody I think I know pretty well.
I don't want to mention his name.
Okay, good.
We won't give him too much credit, right?
But Chris does a pretty good job behind us.
Don't make his head get any bigger than it already is.
I love you, Kyle.
Thank you.
All the best.
Thank you, Judge.
At the risk of getting turned off by the producer.
Okay, tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8 o'clock in the morning from Brussels, Professor Gilbert Doctor, at 11 in the morning from, I don't know where yet, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
at noon from Brooklyn, New York, Aaron Mate, and at three o'clock from somewhere in Western Virginia, the great Phil Giraldi and Colonel Kwadkowski, if we can find her somewhere in there.
Thank you for watching.
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