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Sept. 16, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:32
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : American Cowardice Over Israel.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Tuesday, September 16, 2025.
Colonel Karen Kwadkowski will be with us in just a moment.
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Karen, Colonel Kwkowski, welcome here, my dear friend.
Do you have any idea why before this fellow Tyler Robinson, the one charged with murdering uh Charlie Kirk was even caught?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the need to go on international television and to deny that the Israelis murdered Charlie.
You know, we have to else would do this.
Who else would go on and issue such a denial?
Well, there's there's a saying that um when the govern you wait till the government denies something and then you know it's true.
So that's a very common saying.
We talk about our own government that way.
And uh so for him to do that so quickly and so emphatically, um, before really people even had a chance to react or or even think about what had happened.
I mean it was so shocking.
Um that actually is is it it adds unwanted attention to uh Israel's potential or possible role in this.
Um, you know, it's it's very disturbing, actually.
Uh Scott Ritter uh argued just a few minutes ago that Israel has totally lost the international PR war.
Uh, and it's beginning to be manifested in their desperation.
One act of which was this Netanyahu denial that he had anything to do uh with the murder of uh of Kirk.
There are other things I want to ask you about Netanyahu and uh and Kirk, but you you probably agree, and I don't know what the effect of this is, losing the PR war, but they have lost it, have they not?
Oh, yeah, that's that's clear.
And um, you know, actually, I was watching Netanyahu earlier today.
Uh it was uh well, a video from recently anyway, talking about his economic isolation, and he ended up talking about um cherry tomatoes as being an Israeli of invention, and uh I actually had to look that up, and um it was interesting.
It's they didn't invent cherry tomatoes, but the fact that he was kind of uh talking and continued to talk about crazy things, it it is I think he's at the end of his uh psychological rope.
I mean, even psychopaths have their limits.
If you stand with the government government of Israel today, you stand with genocide.
There's no way around that.
Not at all.
No, not it seems much to the chagrin of uh the Trump people that even some of their own base are beginning to recognize that the late uh Charlie Kirk is an example.
Yeah.
You know, I I uh knew I didn't know Charlie Kirk.
I knew of Charlie Kirk, occasionally watched his uh you know, short videos, his uh question and answer things and debates, but I wasn't really a follower of his, but I knew of his um import because of the uh turning point USA because that's been around for a little while and has done a really uh wonderful job of of getting the uh Christian conservative message and reaching younger people with it.
And also Charlie was is a young conservative, which means in some ways, despite his evangelical Christianity, which was important to him, he was very tolerant of uh, you know, things that the older conservatives, people my age perhaps were not, you know, he's socially more socially uh liberal in some ways.
I mean, not really, and and a little bit libertarian also, which is which is what is very attractive and unifying amongst many young people.
So Charlie's, I knew about him because of his influence.
I did not follow him closely, and part of it was I believed him to be uh a Zionist, a you know, a Christian Zionist.
I mean, that's what I thought he was.
And um, so I didn't follow him too closely because I I don't, you know, I don't really abide by that.
Now I wrote something that's on Judge Knapp, and I uh linked to uh a clip of Charlie talking about the October 7th stand down in Israel of the security, and Charlie was asking about that.
Of course, it's all verified that that there wasn't a military stand down on October 7th, that that warnings were ignored, etc.
But Charlie suggests what many others have suggested that um you know this was uh a political move.
I mean, he needed uh an excuse for a war.
Netanyahu needed to stay in power, and a lot of this is very predictable.
So Charlie didn't say that's what it was, but he said we kind of need to ask those questions.
I was shocked because I said, well, Charlie must not be the Christian Zionist I thought he was.
And it turns out, of course, that um, you know, as a rational thinker, as a as someone who hears all sides of the debate and debates very effectively, that's what he was known for.
Because of that, he has come to a similar conclusion that many of us have done.
So that concerned me a great deal because um if you if you think about APAC and Israel losing their popularity, not just all over the world, but particularly amongst the younger generations of Americans, and we are Israel's only ally that matters.
Um, if they lose the next generations of people who will be the governors and the state representatives and the congressmen and the president in the future, if they lose them, Israel's got nothing.
So it is a serious issue for Israel to continue their propaganda war, which Charlie was not participating in.
Here's here's the uh link uh that you uh spoke about.
It's about a minute and a half long, it's very uh telling.
It's Kirk uh on October 23, 2023.
So it's uh three weeks, two weeks after October 7th.
Chris caught number one.
So I've been to Israel many times, the whole country's a fortress.
When I first heard this story, I still had the same gut instinct that I did initially.
I find this very hard to believe.
I've been to that Gaza border.
You you cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that's an IDF soldier, right?
The whole country is surveilled.
I think some questions need to be asked.
Was there a stand-down order?
Was there a stand-down order?
They're live streaming the killing of Jews.
Was that somebody in the government say stand down?
That is a legitimate non-conspiracy question.
The whole country is the IDF.
The whole country is.
Yeah.
The essence is this.
This is the closest thing to the Holocaust that any of us have lived through.
But the fact is now BB and the Israeli hard right government has a mandate.
I gotta be careful the way I say this, to they're gonna try to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I mean, that that's and I'm I don't use That term lightly.
Okay.
They're talking about basically removing 2.5 million people from there.
Okay.
There are some serious questions here, Patrick.
And let me tell you, my pattern recognition over the last five years has become pretty sharp.
COVID, Maui fires, you know, Epstein.
When I see a story and it doesn't click, we're our guts are usually right.
Yeah.
Well, his guts were right from your perspective and mine.
Max Blumenthal on this show yesterday, which had an enormous audience, uh presented inside stories from a friend of Kirk and from somebody in the White House about how APAC, at the direction of Benjamin Netanyahu offered Kirk a huge amount of money, which he declined.
And then they attempted, attempted to intimidate him, and he politely excused himself from their efforts at intimidation.
He told a friend he couldn't stand and didn't trust Netanyahu and was afraid of him.
Yeah.
You know, uh for me the I I was I was not on the computer.
I wasn't watching it, and I heard about it after it happened, that his his assassination.
But what I what had been on my mind, of course, was the one that had happened on the 9th, which was uh in Qatar, you know, the assassination or attempted assassination that Israel conducted of the uh Hamas negotiating team in Qatar, which is the US ally.
And that's somewhat significant and somewhat weird, but that happened.
And people were talking about that.
I was thinking about that, and the article I wrote actually was about that.
But what I felt, and this is not intellectual, this is the gut feel, was that the demonstration of high-powered long-range one-shot kill shot above his body armor, you know, right in the in the neck.
Um, and then the immediate disappearance of this guy.
Uh to me, it looked professional and it looked like a hit.
And there's only one reason we do professional hits, and that is to um, well, one to solve a problem, right?
To solve an isolated problem, but you can't solve the Charlie problem by killing Charlie, as his wife made very clear.
But what it is is to send a message.
And um, much like the message was sent in Qatar, which which Israel actually articulated.
They said, you know, any of your capitals, any capital around the world, any place in the world, we will strike our enemies.
Now, Israel has said that before, and his and spokesman for the government and members of the Knesset said that again after the cutter attack on the 9th of this month.
So that's what it was on my mind, a demonstration shot.
And if that's the case, and again, this is not intellectual, this is my feeling that the message was being sent not to Charlie's people, not to TP USA, but to Trump, that he is because also think about how similar that was.
And I mean, I don't think Trump this escapes Trump in the least.
I think this, I think I could be wrong, but I think this is how Trump viewed it.
I think when Trump saw this, um, it was a demonstration of uh he better stay in line because Charlie didn't.
And and you know, you can say, well, why would a country do that to another country?
Well, Israel's not just any country, and one of the great um Forte's and and I think uh uh Boomenthal, of course, made this clear, you know, they are professional assassinators, they have done it from the beginning, they do it in every country around the world, they don't care where or who they kill the innocent, they know how to assassinate.
It's kind of their it's kind of their uh trademark, really.
And um, so it's not unusual that people would suspect them, and maybe because it is Israel's trademark, maybe that's why Netanyahu felt like he had to say, Oh, we didn't do that one.
Well, is there any ability to distinguish between the United States government and the genocide of the Netanyahu regime?
No, no, we we own that.
The United States owns that.
Um, they could not uh without USAID and money and uh backing at the UN, they would not have been able to sustain the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the mass movement, the destruction of Gaza, they would not have been able to do that without continuous and stepped up American support, you know, aid, military weapons, uh, trade, uh, sanctions of enemies, you know, discouraging others.
You know, we've we've got Europe now coming to a very late conclusion that perhaps they could recognize Palestine, or perhaps like Spain is doing, they can stop shipping weapons to Israel two years into this thing.
And one of the reasons that hadn't happened sooner is because the US also pressured Europe and other countries that the U.S. has uh holds sway with to not uh shut the valve you know to not to turn off the the faucet to Israel.
So, yeah, we own it.
We own it.
And unfortunately for Americans who don't pay a lot of attention to it and don't really understand, the rest of the world knows that we own it.
OK, and that's part of their reality now.
It may not be a part of our reality just yet, but it is the assessment of the world that we own it.
Israel could not have done this without us.
And Trump, for all his talk of peace, has been totally bent over on this one.
He is totally submitted enthusiastically, I think, which is a real shame.
And I don't think that is who Trump is as a person, but as a president, he certainly has.
He owns this.
I want to play a clip for you from just three days ago of the Attorney General of the United States.
Actually, it's yesterday of the Attorney General of the United States manifesting an utter ignorance of the First Amendment.
Chris, cut number 13.
There's free speech and then there's hate speech.
And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.
Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?
We will absolutely target you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything.
And that's across the aisle.
Yeah.
So what she is calling hate speech is absolutely protected.
This is speech that demeans, aggravates, offends, insults.
Often the demeaning is because of an immutable characteristic of birth on the part of the target of the speech.
But in reality, there is, according to my Princeton classmate and former debate partner, Justice Samuel Alito, the most conservative member of the court, arguably, there's no such thing as hate speech because all speech is protected.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, I'm very surprised to see that.
But Pam Bondi, I mean, she's I I know that she's connected to Trump and that's how she got that job.
But yeah, she didn't get it on her constitutional knowledge nor on her strong standards of the Constitution or what makes this country great.
You know, they want to make America great again.
They need to understand what made it great.
And obviously, free speech, the First Amendment is a big part of that.
There is a possibility that well, it's not a possibility.
It's going to happen because Charlie was assassinated and they're going to looks like they're laying it on the left wing folks.
You know, the people that are so unhappy and domestic terrorists are going to call them all those things that they that they'll go after those people.
But that's not what it is, because they will go after everybody who expresses an opinion that's contrary to the the the Washington's desired opinion.
So I stand on a soapbox outside of the office building where I am now and condemn the IDF behavior in Gaza.
A time will come when the government will want to silence me from saying that.
Not already be arrested for that in London.
But this what you just described, condemning the idea for criticizing them for their conduct and their execution of this genocide.
This was part of the free speech that Charlie was protecting, that Charlie was upset about from what I've read and what I understand, that they were saying, you can't say this.
His Israeli sponsors Netanyahu, the folks that were saying, oh, no, we we need Charlie needs to step up.
up for Israel or go back to stepping up for Israel.
And his concern was we have to be able to speak freely.
And I think you saw it in that clip of Charlie with uh uh Patrick Ben David.
Uh you you know, he said, I I have to be careful about how I say this, but he was free speech is extremely important.
And Charlie, of all people, the way he dealt with um differing opinions, his debate style was really something that more people should emulate.
You know, he tried to understand the other side, and that requires that requires not just courage, but an acceptance that people are going to say things that you may not like.
And that's what the First Amendment uh protects, and uh looks like Bondy's going after that.
You know, uh, Colonel, it really particularly offends me as a lawyer and former judge and self-professed absolutist on speech, meaning you can say whatever you want, but we do not have an independent justice department.
We have them the one that works for the political wing of the White House.
So I have mocked her saying she flunked constitutional law.
I don't really think she did.
I think she's just saying what she thinks her boss wants to hear.
She must know.
She must know.
This cases are in the basic course on the constitution.
I mean, the type of speech she wants to prosecute is absolutely protected, but she's trying to make her boss feel better about it.
Here's what her boss said today to Jonathan Carl from ABC News.
I know Jonathan, he's as meek and mild as a lamb.
But watch what Trump said to him when Jonathan asked the president about Pam Bondi going after hate speech, cut number 15.
Pam Bondi's saying she's going to go after hate speech.
Uh, is that I mean, a lot of people, a lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech.
We'd probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly.
It's hey, you have a lot of hate in your heart.
Maybe I'll come after ABC.
Well, ABC paid me 16 million dollars recently for a form of hate speech, right?
Your company paid me 16 million dollars for a form of hate speech.
So maybe they'll have to go after you.
Other person in the government, unfortunately, the chief law enforcement officer of the lander doesn't understand the First Amendment.
No, no, but I mean, he doesn't even, he's admitted that he hasn't even read the Constitution.
So so Trump Trump is showing his ignorance there.
But it's very dangerous.
Um and the media is no help with this.
You know, you'd think that if we had an independent media, even mainstream media, they had a spine, they weren't bought and paid for, if they weren't 99% off to the left side of things, or they can't see straight, these would be the defenders of free speech, because that's their business.
But uh, much as we've seen with their inability to stand up with uh, you know, for the journalists in Palestine, you know, they have no spine and they have no uh ability to defend free speech.
So who's gonna do it?
It's probably gonna be you, Judge.
You're gonna defend it.
And and people on uh and people who care about the issue will defend it, but it's gonna be costly.
And it looks like it's gonna be costly, and we're going through a time where uh we're gonna have to relearn what the First Amendment says, and it's not gonna be uh it's not gonna be easy on a lot of uh a lot of people.
Colonel Quadkowski, thank you, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure, no matter what we're talking about.
Uh and thank you for the great piece that you just wrote that you posted at uh at Judge Snapp.
Uh if you haven't read Karen Kwadkowski's pieces, she's very cerebral.
She can also be funny.
You always learn something when you read them.
And I uh I commend all of her work to you and the privilege to host each of your uh weekly pieces.
Thank you again, Colonel.
Well, thank you so much, Judge.
Sure.
We'll see you again soon.
Busy day for you uh tomorrow, starting at eight in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 11 in the morning from China, Pepe Escobar at two in the afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at three in the afternoon, Phil Giraldi at four in the afternoon,
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