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Sept. 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
33:00
COL. Douglas Macgregor : How Long Can Israel Keep Killing Innocents?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Thursday, September 18th, 2025.
My dear friend Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now.
Colonel McGregor, a pleasure.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
We have a lot to uh talk about, uh the uh continued Israeli slaughter, which no one seems to be able to stop, uh, and a fascinating piece that you have written about global wealth and power pivoting to the east before we do,
and as an entree uh uh to that, I want to ask about the Israeli attack on Doha and its facilitation by the U.S. Why does the U.S. permit attacks on allies?
Well, I think the only answer that I can come up with at this stage is that the Israel lobby uh controls these decisions.
Uh I I can't imagine that if uh President Trump were a completely in independent actor that he would decide so quickly to cast aside uh sort of international norms when it comes to negotiation.
Uh so I I assume that the Israel lobby is ultimately in control of these kinds of decisions.
And if you get a call from uh Mr. Netanyahu and he wants X, Y, and Z and support for X, Y, and Z, he's going to get what he wants.
End of discussion.
You have a uh piece out at judgesnapp.com and elsewhere called Global Wealth and Power Are Pivoting to the East.
I'm just going to read the opening lines because they're so provocative.
History's wheel is turning.
China builds, India rises, BRICS surpasses the G7, while America punishes allies and empowers its enemies.
Take it from there.
That's a mouthful.
No, you're right.
The thing, the thing that people need to be aware of, and when I say people, I'm talking about Americans.
The average American citizen needs to understand this.
That uh we no longer live in the world of 1945 or 65, 75, 85, or 95.
This is a very different world today.
And countries that previously lagged far behind us have not only caught up with this, but in many respects surpassed us.
And that's not just a function of the economy, it's technology, it's ways of doing business and so forth.
And right now we need to understand that India, while it is not as advanced as China in its development, is nevertheless coming on very strong.
It has a huge manufacturing base, a large uh working population, skilled working population.
When you look at India and China together, uh, they uh have purchasing power parity that is roughly twice what we have.
Now, why purchase power uh purchasing power parity?
Because it it's really saying what can you buy with your dollar versus what uh the Chinese and the Indians can buy with their currency.
And the reason that's important is that it's a better measure than this gross domestic product, because gross domestic product, those statistics can be manipulated in lots of ways and be very confusing.
This is very stark when you ask that fundamental question.
Uh and it it leads you back to the uh answers to your questions about what are we really producing?
What are they producing?
How do these compete?
Where do they fall in?
Bottom line is that this is producing a dramatic shift in wealth and power.
And I'm not just talking military power, although that's part of the equation, but I would say national power across the boards in those two countries.
And if you put them together, and it's important that we do see it that way right now, because as you know, after we lowered uh the boom on India and punished India with 50% tariffs simply because they refused to buy refused to stop buying oil and gas and so forth from Russia.
Uh that the India said, Well, thank you very much.
Then uh we don't need to do business.
We'll go elsewhere.
And that's very important because elsewhere is usually China, the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America.
Let me just stop you for a minute, Colonel.
That decision to punish India was not made by the Congress of the United States.
It was made by one person, the president of the United States.
We'll put aside for now whether that's constitutional.
Three federal courts have looked at it and said it's not constitutional, it's before the Supreme Court.
How catastrophic was that single decision for what we are discussing?
The movement of the center of economic gravity from the West to the East.
Well, in the short run, or or most immediately, the Indians are going to retaliate by canceling a massive $35 billion deal that had been struck with uh the government of India to buy aircraft from Boeing.
Uh Boeing employs 150,000 people in Seattle, Washington, and or near there, and also in South Carolina.
So this could conceivably uh hurt Boeing, but put a lot of jobs at risk.
We we don't know yet.
Someone will have to run the numbers.
That's part of it.
But long term, it's back to something else that we've discussed in the past, this decision to take 300 billion dollars that belong to uh Russia and essentially say we're going to confiscate it.
We haven't done it yet, but we've said we're going to confiscate it, redistribute it to Ukraine and others.
You've got two problems.
One is we are turning out to be an unreliable and untrustworthy economic partner.
In other words, you know, we have these policies and attitudes, it's our way or the highway.
That's the first problem.
The second problem is that that's theft as far as the international system is concerned when you do that to the Russians.
And if you're India or Brazil or South Africa or Egypt or any other country, you ask yourself, well, what are they going to do to me next?
Uh, what would happen to our money, which is currently residing in the Western financial system, which is essentially ours.
We could lose our money as well.
So the bottom line is that BRICS is important because it's developing parallel institutions.
Uh, the equivalent of SWIFT, which the Chinese have developed and people are now using, which is actually, I'm told, much easier to use and more convenient than the old Swift system.
And you're beginning to see uh parallel institutions to compete with what we created in the form of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and so forth.
So the bottom line is that we've offended, uh, we've broken promises, uh, we violated international norms, and we're not talking on the military side.
Now, this is all commercial in essence, and people are walking away from us.
And we are, we don't seem to understand that we are not the only game in town.
President Trump seems to think that our market is everything.
They everyone needs us.
We don't necessarily need everyone else.
And he's wrong.
Uh the Chinese want to do business with this.
They they want us uh in the system.
They want our market, they want access to it.
That's all true.
But if you continue down this road, they'll direct everything somewhere else.
And this has a big impact on supply chains.
We're wealthy and successful in this country because we built up supply chains over the years all over the world.
Well, those supply chains are now reorienting.
They've been reorienting actually since COVID, and they're reorienting to China, to East Asia, now to Southwest Asia, into Latin America, into a place like Mexico.
People don't realize how much Mexico produces it's of importance to us, if for no other reason, because a lot of our manufacturing moved to Mexico.
How brilliant was the Chinese decision in the 90s to take a gamble on and unleash capitalism?
Well, I think the Chinese understood something that they were lagging behind the West of the rest of the world dramatically.
Uh, Obviously, communism did not work.
The demise of the Soviet Union helped to sober everyone up on that score.
And so I think they said we're going to take what capital we've got and whatever we can borrow.
We're going to sink it into our own infrastructure.
We're going to build up our own manufacturing base.
But we're not going to do this directly from Beijing.
We are actually going to let people in the provinces who have already demonstrated that their free enterprise, at least in a restricted sense, is successful.
We're going to let a thousand flowers boom in terms of capitalism.
And it's worked brilliantly.
So their infrastructure is very, very new.
Their manufacturing base is spent brand spanking new, and now they've gone one step further.
While we were sinking somewhere between $9 and $14 trillion into all of these failed interventions all over the world, they sank a trillion dollars into this one belt, one road project, which is infrastructure across Central Asia, all the way up through Russia, down into Iran, the Middle East, and all the way to Africa.
And this is beginning to pay dividends as well because everybody wants part of it.
And why wouldn't they?
Because this is a way to trade internationally, much more expensively and much more safely than we do now.
So they have super highways, high speed rails.
We have broken down highways, trains nobody wants to take, but a trillion dollar defense budget.
Yeah, well.
Well, how absurd, how dis uh disoriented is that priority.
Well, it's deranged.
But the problem is that when you cross the border between the rest of the world and the beltway, you go into Central Washington, everybody who talks to you talks in terms of unending numbers of threats all over the world that have to be countered on any given day for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which justifies uh essentially the pursuit of global military hegemony by the United States.
That's been a you know a bunk uh a budget buster on a scale that we can't even begin to imagine.
We're like the British Empire in its later stages.
We're defending everywhere against everything, and there's really no requirement for us to do it anymore.
It's it's a it's a losing proposition.
I hope that we're not going to wait until we have a debt-to-d GDP ratio of 240%, which is what the British had after the second world war.
The only solution to their problem was to abandon places like India and Pakistan that eventually the whole empire would be much better to sort of shed unnecessary burdens, reduce our defense commitments, and scale back our defense spending in favor of uh more heavily investing in what we think will be technology and capabilities and manufacturing that'll build up our prosperity.
Um Colonel, before we uh spend some time on Israel uh and the Middle East, I want to ask you a few questions about Ukraine.
Since the uh meeting in Alaska between President Putin and President Trump, has there been any measurable steps taken by the U.S. toward peace, or if we just ramped up uh our support and re-triggered the financing of that support for the failing Ukrainian military.
Well, it's interesting you bring that up because it was uh a meeting, some of which uh you can watch on YouTube in uh Ukraine, and I think some of the participants one of the participants was uh general retired David Petraeus, and it was a discussion of where things are.
The only good thing I can I can say is that uh nobody there was arguing vociferously as General Kellogg did, that Russia was losing the war.
On the other hand, the solution to Russia's battlefield successes and growing economy and growing stature, frankly, in the world, because more and more people see Russia's cause as just uh instead of that, uh they were talking about doubling down on what we've been doing for three years, expecting a different result.
In other words, more money into this Ukrainian uh corruption machine.
It was it's interesting to point out that our friend Zelensky has an estimated 1.1 billion dollars in cash in various bank accounts in the West.
He owns many, many properties, including uh, I'm told a $15 million estate somewhere south of Naples, Florida, along with uh Magnificent Villa and Vineyards in Italy.
Those are not the only properties, those are just the ones that I'm aware of.
Uh it would help a great deal if he uh would sacrifice uh his ill-gotten gains that he's effectively stolen from all of the money that's been poured into Ukraine and used it to uh comfort the widows and orphans of the 1.7 to 1.8 million dead Ukrainian soldiers.
I don't think that's gonna happen.
In other words, there's there's still a failure to understand that this thing is beyond redemption.
It's not just a question of the battlefield.
I mean, the Russians are advancing along the entire front.
They're closing in on Zabarisha, which is uh effectively the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.
They're they're making progress in Pokrovsk, other areas.
Uh this this war is effectively at an end.
They're just spending lives in Kiev uh to try and maintain the facade that there's something there.
There isn't any more.
And the great tragedy is that none of this is is any good for Ukraine.
It's not good for Russia.
The Russians also would like this war to end, but they're not prepared to bargain away at the negotiating table what they've won on the battlefield, particularly since these areas that they want to retain are part of what historically was called New Russia or Nova Russia.
So I I think uh the truth is that Ukraine is is winding down.
We're going to send less and less uh resources over there, if for no other reason, Judge, because we don't have them to send at this point.
You know, you you mentioned General Kellogg, and this is difficult to watch because it manifests serious, serious uh problems of understanding.
But the most dangerous part of this is that this is the stuff that is whispered into Donald Trump's ears every day.
Chris cut number nine.
If he was winning, he'd be in Kyiv.
If he's winning, he'd be west of the Dnieper River.
If he's winning, he'd be on Odessa.
If he's winning, it would have changed the government.
Russia is in fact losing this war.
Now, they may make movements and see, well, they're advancing uh in the Donbass region in the desk, but if you consider advancing, moving by meters, not miles, well then okay, that's successful.
But if the cost that are having, it's enormous.
And I don't think people truly appreciate it.
It's a number.
But the numbers they have lost, when you're talking dead and wounded, well over a million, they left Afghanistan after losing 18,000.
We left Vietnam after losing 65,000.
They've lost over a million dead or wounded.
These numbers are World War II level numbers when you have when you think about it.
They're they're stunning in the loss.
And this is in and their first line units that they came and tried to take Kiev with a little over four years ago.
Those first line units are gone.
So they've gone through a second or third or fourth iteration of wartime commanders.
They're pulling tanks out of mothballs out of museums put on the battle line.
They can't operate in large movements because the Ukrainians will kill them.
Is there any evidence to substantiate these wild numbers and incredible claims, pulling tanks out of mothballs and museums?
No.
I mean, remember at some point in the uh spring of 2022, I think it was April or May, someone in the Senate said that uh the Russians were stripping washing machines of parts and microchips in order to keep the force going.
This is in the same category.
It's pure unadulterated nonsense.
It's maintaining fiction because to admit the truth is too damaging.
Now, there are two things that people need to understand that have that have guided the conduct of this operation in Moscow.
Number one, President Putin was never interested in crossing the Dnieper River and conquering all of Ukraine.
That was never on the agenda.
Now he realized after this war got off the ground that he was really facing us behind this facade of Ukrainian manpower.
Uh, But he never was interested in crossing that river to do that.
Now, secondly, he recognizes that moving quickly.
Let us say he gave the order to the general staff, plan for two major offensives, one in the south to take Odessa, another in the north to capture uh Kiev.
That that would probably provoke people in NATO to the point where everyone would be on Washington's doorstep, begging Washington to effectively declare war on Russia.
Uh Putin doesn't want a war with Russia or a war with the United States under any circumstances.
And so he's chosen to exercise restraint.
As far as casualties are concerned, we estimate that perhaps 120,000 people in the Russian army have been killed.
Another 100, 150,000 wounded, but most of that wounded uh number has returned to duty.
Whereas the million wounded Ukrainians, most of them will never see action again.
They are too horribly disfigured and uh damaged to ever fight.
They don't have a medical evacuation system that is capable of saving very many lives.
And they're just throwing people away without regard to the consequences, because frankly, I think at some point the regime in Kiev will dissolve and fly away to the West and hide out.
At least I think that's what the plan is, because they know they're not going to win.
So they'll maintain this fiction, they'll try to preach what uh General Kellogg is preaching, but it's not based on fact.
And the truth is seeping out.
The Polish chief of staff has made very clear that millions of people have been wounded or killed in Ukraine.
And he's talking about the Ukrainian forces.
We estimate the 10,000 Polish soldiers wearing Ukrainian uniforms inside Ukraine have died.
As a result, the new president of uh Poland has said, we're not sending anybody to Ukraine.
You've lost your mind.
No boots on the ground from Poland.
And then you have the the British, they have nothing really to send.
How many soldiers could they put on the ground?
What?
15,000, 20,000 if they're lucky as a uh as an organized force.
The French are probably similar, the Germans maybe even less.
And these people have no chance whatsoever of influencing operations in Ukraine in the in favor of the Kiev regime.
So they're they're all turning to us.
And Kellogg is part of this commitment on the hill inside the beltway to essentially misrepresent what's happening on the ground, to keep the money flowing and hopefully to drag us in because it's the only way the regime in Kiev could possibly survive.
But remember, Putin met with Trump.
He laid it out.
President Trump thought that he could overwhelm Putin with his charm and and uh bluster and somehow another quote unquote get a ceasefire.
He figured out that can't be done.
So what is President Trump doing at this time?
Is he talking much about Ukraine?
He says, Well, we'll get it done, but we're slowing the pace of uh equipment and supplies and money to Ukraine to a crawl.
It's not going to make any difference.
It's irrelevant, and he knows that.
I think he's quietly walking away from it and will eventually uh depend upon the media to change the subject.
And in the meantime, in Europe, you have, as you know, chaos in London, chaos in Paris, chaos is coming to Berlin.
The people in those countries want an end to this, and they are nationalists.
They are tired of globalists who have been selling them out, destroying their countries from within, opening their borders and inviting millions of people into the countries that the people that live there don't want.
They've had it.
So President Putin, right now, has stayed this course of restraint and patience, and it's working.
You forgot uh Ursula Vanderleyen at the uh European Union, she's facing two votes of uh of no confidence, both of which have a good chance of uh prevailing.
Well, we're all trying to forget uh Ursula Vanderlein.
Well, she has no army, but she acts like she Commands one, and I'm sure would love nothing more than being able to do that.
God have mercy on us if that comes.
She was the German defense minister.
I did not know that.
So she once did command an army.
Well, yeah, and she did everything she could to destroy it.
She was the one that was telling people manufacturing uh uh armored fighting vehicles, they had to build the vehicles in such a way that it would accommodate a pregnant woman in combat uniform.
To me, that's sheer unadulterated nonsense.
That's insanity, but that was the sort of thing that she did.
Uh she she was a very destabilizing force, and anyone that turned out to be a nationalist, and I don't see how any of us anywhere, whether we're Russians or Americans, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, doesn't matter.
Anybody who serves in the armed forces of their respective country is by definition a nationalist.
And she spent all of her time trying to root it out on the grounds that any form of nationalism immediately was evidence for national socialism, which is just not true.
But all of these things have gutted the German military establishment.
You're a former tank commander.
Have you ever seen a pregnant woman uh operate a tank?
No, and we don't want to.
We don't want to see any women anywhere on the battlefield in combat uniform and combat formations.
We all know what real war is like, and that is no place for any woman.
We ought to be interested in protecting our women, not offering up for sacrifice on the battlefield.
Well, well said.
Um I'm still horribly disturbed by what's going on in Gaza.
The United Nations issued a very detailed report, which our friend and colleague Jeff Sachs has read the entire report.
It's about a hundred pages long.
Uh it details with excruciating and unassailable detail.
It recounts excruciating non-assailable detail, uh, the barbaric acts being committed by the IDF and the use of starvation uh as a uh means of repressing the uh populace.
Doesn't history teach that some force at some point in time will come in to put a stop to a Holocaust of this magnitude.
Well, I think what you're saying is that justice can be delayed, but justice eventually finds its way.
I think that's probably true.
The problem that we have right now is that we're giving a lot of evidence for the old observation that there is nothing more reliable than a person that can be got bought for cold hard cash.
And I'm afraid that's what the Israel lobby has discovered about us.
Uh, we have been purchased, our government has been purchased.
There's no moral justification for any of this.
There's no strategic justification for it.
You know, this recent attack uh on Qatar was something that we knew about.
We we uh helped to enable it, frankly.
The British provided air refueling assets.
All of this is part of the same uh lobby and same power in in the United States and in the West right now.
Will this continue?
It's it I guess it will.
At some point, the money may run out.
Uh we don't know under what circumstances our economies are fragile.
If you look at the bond market, which the British call guilt in London, it's only a matter of days, maybe weeks before the entire British economy implodes.
Financially, the rest of Europe is not in much better shape, and of course, we're not far behind.
So I guess when these things happen, there will be an epiphany, and we will simply walk away because we can't afford to stay and do what we're doing.
But at the moment, that's the best we can do.
It would be wonderful if President Trump simply picked up the phone and said, Look, I've gone as far as I can with you on this, and I can't in good conscience as the president of the United States continue.
I see no evidence that that will happen.
Does Trump control Netanyahu or does Netanyahu control Trump?
I think that's self-evident.
It's it's Mr. Netanyahu is the de facto president when it comes to matters in U.S. foreign and defense policy.
I don't think there's any question of that at all.
I mean, right now, you and I were talking off-camera before this began.
Uh Friends inside the Department of Defense who are very knowledgeable and involved right now in the inventories of missiles and rockets.
Right, right, right.
Please go to this.
I forgot about it, please.
Yeah.
Well, they contacted me and they said uh they used an acronym that you found interesting.
Uh it's essentially an informed estimate that says right now, if we continue on the current path, it we're seven to eight years behind the Russians and probably the Chinese in terms of our inventories.
Now we could improve that with both legacy and new technology to about three to four years.
And they said this is not absolutely hard facts.
They said this is our informed estimate, and they use the acronym swag, which we frequently do, which is a uh uh wild ass uh wild ass guess, but it's it's based on their experience and and the times for manufacturing this equipment.
And we have no surge capacity, as we've discussed before.
The point is that if we were to go to war with any major power, we would run through our existing arsenal very, very quickly.
So if we were really concerned about our own security, which I think we should be, we would be much less provocative than we are.
Now, obviously, Venezuela is very weak, and Venezuela would not tax us greatly if we decided to destroy it.
Uh that's not a vote in favor of doing so.
I think it's a dumb idea and unnecessary.
But uh, if we find ourselves in a on a collision course with the Russians, whether it happens in Eastern Europe or it happens in the Middle East, or God forbid the Chinese, their capacities to produce are far greater than ours.
Their inventories are far greater than ours.
And we can't make up for the last 10, 15 years in the space of uh six months or 12 months.
We'll simply run out and then we'll be naked in the face of overwhelming military power.
Colonel, thank you very much.
A gloomy picture indeed, but uh one that needs to be uh articulated and is deeply deeply uh appreciated.
Colonel, what are we doing uh on October 4th?
Well, we're we're not solving all these problems, but we're gonna talk about you know this uh this uh is going to be a very important dinner uh and VIP reception.
We've got a lot of very interesting people coming.
Of course, you and Natalie Brunell will be there, and Natalie will have a very important role to play because I think the financial situation is moving in the direction that it will need explanation by the time we get to four October.
And uh we'll try to deal with all of these.
We'll we'll look at finance, we'll look at the economy, we'll look at employment, we'll look at what we're doing overseas.
We'll look at the uh law enforcement in the United States.
What laws are we enforcing?
What laws are we ignoring?
I mean, uh, anybody who is looking right now at Pam Bondy's recent announcement about hate speech is beginning to understand that we're dealing with a government that uh is going to brand hate speech what it doesn't like.
And this will be an effort to suppress free speech, not protect it or enhance it.
So that's that should be a big issue, I would think, for discussion on the 4th of October, don't you?
Yes, absolutely.
Uh I've been teasing her all week that she flunked constitutional law.
She didn't flunk constitutional law, she's just giving what she thinks is a political statement that her boss wants to hear.
This is what happens when you have a Department of Justice that is subservient to the White House instead of independent uh of it.
Um she did backtrack on it, and then she said she was going to prosecute uh staples because some young men there didn't man there, didn't want to uh copy posters about Charlie Kirk's memorial, and she seemed to felt feel that that was a federal crime.
She's uh misspoken on that as well.
But it's dangerous when the government gets into the business of speech.
Yes.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating speech.
Yes.
There is no such thing as hate speech.
What speech is hateful, harmful, hurtful is protected.
The remedy is not prosecution, the remedy is not silence, the remedy is more speech.
The paragraph Chris put up as the concluding paragraph in my column this week at judg's nap.com and elsewhere called Show Me Your Papers.
Because the Supreme Court has now, without an opinion, just on the basis of a green light, allowed ICE to stop anyone, you or me, and we have to prove our citizenship or our residency permission on the spot, and the failure to do so can result in an arrest.
When Justice Kavanaugh was asked about this, he said, Don't worry about it, just show your papers.
We don't do that in America.
Show your papers.
This is not the old East Germany or the old Soviet Union.
Anyway, without extending our time together, Colonel, that's where we are today.
Yep.
And these are all the things that we'll discuss in the 4th of October.
And we want to build a consensus ultimately for a new way forward, something beyond the uniparty.
Because everybody can agree, I think, increasingly that the Republicans and the Democrats, though there are some differences, are far too alike and far too likely to support the same things.
And you just explained one of them.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best to you, my dear friend.
We'll talk to you next week.
Right.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
So long.
Um coming up at one o'clock this afternoon on all of this, the European view of it from Professor Glenn Deason.
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