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Sept. 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:36
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Is US Democracy In Danger Of Collapse?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Thursday, September 18th, 2025.
Professor John Meersheimer is here on.
You ready for this?
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Professor Meersheimer, welcome here, uh, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure.
You're as reliable as the dawn.
You're always there when we need you.
Thank you very much.
Uh what is the has been the international reaction to the U.S. supported Israeli attack on an American ally.
Cutter.
Well, I think it's uh beginning to bite in in the Middle East.
I think the most important development is that the Saudis and the Pakistanis have just announced a security pact.
As we all know, the Saudis have always depended very heavily on the United States for their security.
And before October 7th, we were hoping to fashion an Abraham Accord with Saudi Arabia that would really tie Saudi Arabia's security to the United States and to Israel in a profound way.
But October 7th and what's happened since that uh has fundamentally changed that situation.
The Saudis do not trust us uh hardly at all.
And after the uh the attack on Qatar and the fact that we supported the Israelis and apparently gave them the green light, uh the Saudis are looking elsewhere for their security.
And as I said, what has happened is that they have reached a security agreement with the Pakistanis.
And in fact, that security agreement says that an attack on one is considered an attack on both.
And you want to remember that Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
So uh the game is really beginning to uh play out in ways that are not favorable to the United States for sure.
Um why would Netanyahu go on international uh television before uh Charlie Kirk's killer had even been caught and deny that the Israelis had anything to do with his death?
Is their reputation that bad?
Well, actually that he had to do that.
The answer is yes, but I would note to you that Max Blumenthal, who has done yeoman-like work breaking that story, uh actually put out a tweet today uh that showed that Netanyahu has just issued another statement where he talks about the fact that Israel uh and Charlie Kirk were The best of friends, and uh that Israel had absolutely nothing to do with Charlie Kirk's death.
Now, the question you ask is why is this the case?
And the answer is there are three big events in recent American history, uh, where people believe there was a conspiracy involved, and that conspiracy involved Israel.
One is the assassination of JFK, two is what happened at 9-11 or on 9-11, and three is the Charlie Kirk killing.
This is a huge problem for the Israelis.
I'm not saying that the Israelis were involved in any three of those events, but there are a lot of people who believe that the Israelis were involved in Kennedy's assassination, what happened on 9-11.
And by the way, I would note that Tucker Carlson is doing a five-part series.
It's due to come out reasonably soon on what happened on 9-11, and he will make the argument that the Israelis were involved.
And then, of course, there's the Charlie Kirk business, and all sorts of people think, uh, and this is in keeping with Max Blumenthal's superb reporting, that uh that the Israelis uh were involved in uh what happened to Charlie Kirk.
So what's happening here is Netanyahu is scrambling, and he's scrambling to go to great lengths to distance self, distance Israel from what happened uh on with regard to Charlie Kirk.
Uh and uh, and by the way, Bill uh Ackman, uh, who is a mainstream supporter of Israel and was putting pressure on Charlie Kirk as well, has gone to great lengths to put out a tweet that uh says he had uh nothing but the highest respect for Charlie Kirk and had a very positive meeting with him and so forth and so on.
So both the lobby or Israel's supporters in the United States and uh Netanyahu are scrambling to avoid blame for uh this event.
Um Max Blumenthal did a rather extraordinary piece here on this show, right after having spent a few hours on the phone with sources whom he described as a person who was at the uh meeting with uh Ackman and um uh and Charlie and a person in the White House.
And Max has come to the conclusion that Ackman offered, Ackman's people offered Charlie a tremendous amount of money, not by Max but by others, to be upwards of $150 million.
If he would begin to say things favorable about Netanyahu, and Charlie refused.
Uh, that's when Ackman and company invited him to Ackman's home uh on Long Island, and they began some sort of uh coercive pressure on him, and he he refused that, and he told friends in the weeks and days before he was murdered that he was afraid for his life, and he told friends and colleagues that he couldn't stand and didn't uh trust Netanyahu.
Um, but here is Netanyahu saying what you just said.
Now, there's a lot in here to unpack.
It's not that long, it's only about a minute long.
But he does say, you'll hear this.
He and he, meaning Kirk, encouraged me to make the case directly to the American people about how vital Israel is to the US national security.
Hold your fire.
Here's Netanyahu yesterday.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, said that the bigger the lie, the faster it will spread.
Well, somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk's horrific murder.
This is insane.
It is false.
It is outrageous.
Charlie Kirk was a giant, a once-in-a-century talent who defended freedom, defended America, defended our common Judeo-Christian civilization.
Charlie loved Israel.
He loved the Jewish people.
He told me so in a letter that he sent me just a few months ago.
One of my greatest joys as a Christian, he said, is advocating for Israel and forming alliances with Jews to protect Judeo-Christian civilization.
He encouraged me to make the case directly to the American people about how Vital Israel is to U.S. national security.
He told me the holy land is so important to my life, it pains me to see support for Israel slip away.
Now, if Charlie disagreed with a policy of mine or decision here and there, not only did I not mind, I welcomed it.
This is the essence of Charlie.
This is the essence of a free country.
It's exactly what Charlie stood for.
And I knew that his suggestions always came from the heart, from his love for Israel, and from his love for the Jewish people.
A few weeks before his death, I spoke to Charlie.
I invited him to visit Israel again.
And sadly, that won't happen.
Now some are peddling these disgusting rumors, perhaps out of obsession, perhaps with Qatari funding.
What I do know is this: Charlie Kirk was a great man, and a great man deserves honor, not lies.
Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.
*sad music* Well, he references a letter that Kirk sent to him.
Of course, he won't read the second part of the letter in which Kirk announced what was happening in Gaza, but this sentence, he encouraged me to make the case directly to the American people about how vital Israel is to U.S. national security.
Israel isn't vital to the U.S. national security, it's destructive of US national security.
Is that not so?
Well, it's more than destructive of American national security.
It's reaching the point where it's destructive of American liberal democracy as well.
But let's leave that aside for a second.
The fact is that what was happening with Charlie Kirk, and it's very well documented, is that he was changing his mind in a fundamental way on Israel and Israel's role inside of the United States.
A lot of people in recent years have begun to rethink how they view Israel and Israel's relationship with the United States.
And what happened with Kirk is that he was at one point, as Prime Minister Netanyahu describes, super supportive of Israel.
But he began to change his mind.
And uh Max Blumenthal lays the story out again very clearly in his interview with you.
And for anybody who hasn't seen that, they should watch it.
And by the way, Tucker Carlson has put out uh a video where he talks about his lengthy discussions with Charlie Kirk that basically tell the same story that Max tells.
So it's quite clear that what was going on here is that Kirk had flipped on Israel and on Israel's relationship with the United States.
So in a very important way, uh what's going on here is that Netanyahu is not telling the truth.
What else is though?
Yeah, that's right.
But the problem is, I mean, there are two problems here.
First of all, everybody, not everybody, but almost everybody believes uh that Netanyahu lies all the time.
Uh that's true in Israel as well as in the United States.
So when he says he's telling the truth and others are lying, it's not an argument that's gonna sell very well.
The other problem that he faces and the Israelis face more generally, is they run around the world assassinating people on a daily basis.
It's really quite stunning.
So when someone like Charlie Kirk gets assassinated or someone like JFK gets assassinated, it doesn't take much for people with creative minds to link Israel to those assassinations.
Now, I'm not saying for one second that that's true, but in a world like the one that we live in, where it's very hard to tell what the truth is, and most people think the government, and we're here we're talking about the American government, lies to us.
It's very easy for conspiracy theories to fester.
And again, as I said, uh when you think about assassinations, the first country that comes to mind uh is Israel.
And uh that's the problem that Netanyahu faces here.
Here's uh Charlie Kirk, 24 hours after the meeting with Bill Ackman with my friend and former colleague uh Megan Kelly, Chris cut number 12.
Megan, you're hitting on something very potent and important.
The people that are attacking me are in a hyper paranoid state because they're at war, and war tends to make things black and white, and you're a hammer looking for a nail.
I have less ability sometimes online to criticize the Israeli government about backlash than actual Israelis do.
Personality types like you, myself and Tucker, the more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question when the hostile reaction is that now Megan and Charlie are enemies.
Right.
Boy, I'll tell you, like you're you're you're you're you're gonna you're not gonna I won't say lose, but you will weaken and just basically deflate two of your strongest advocates if that continues.
He was obviously talking about the people he had spent the day before with at Mr. Ackman's home.
Uh in Long Island uh New York.
A couple of other uh questions, uh Professor uh Meersheimer.
How uh dangerous and dumb was it of Donald Trump to impose a 50% uh tariff on India, Colonel McGregor argues it further pushes the center of economic gravity from the west to the east.
I'm not gonna disagree with him at all.
Uh I think Colonel McGregor's right on the money.
I find it hard to believe that Trump did that.
Uh I would imagine most of his advisors thought it was remarkably foolish.
Uh we want to be allies with the Indians.
Over the past 25 years, relations between uh the United States and India have improved greatly.
And in fact, President Trump, in his first term in office, did a great deal of good work to improve those relations.
And early in this second administration, it looked like he was going to continue that.
But then all of a sudden, uh he decided that because India was importing all this Russian oil, uh, that he was going to sanction the uh Indians and put you know 50% tariffs on them.
Uh and what does he end up doing?
It doesn't work, first of all.
The Indians continue to import Russian oil.
In fact, there's evidence they're going to import more Russian oil.
And furthermore, he drives the Russians and the Indians closer together, and he drives the Indians into the arms of the Chinese as well.
This is uh, you know, remarkably foolish.
This is the problem with a president violating the Constitution and imposing a tax on his own.
If Congress had done this, there theoretically would have been a great debate, and all areas of pros and cons would have been explored.
But the president is taken from Congress, Congress is supine.
Maybe the courts will correct us.
I expect that they will.
He's taken away the power to tax a tariff is a tax.
If you read the Constitution, the very first power in Article 1 given to Congress is the power to tax.
And that power doesn't belong in the judicial branch, and it doesn't belong in the executive branch, but yet he's done it.
Of course, I agree with you, but let me put it in an even broader context.
What's going on here is that there are just hardly any guardrails, uh, any checks and balances on Trump.
And in almost every realm, he's free to do whatever he wants.
And the Constitution was set up in a way uh that was designed to protect against that, because the founding fathers understood, as you and I and most Americans understand, no one person is invincible.
People make mistakes, they do stupid things.
And the reason that you have checks and balances is so that the person at the top or the people at the top uh are limited in what they can do by themselves.
Now, there are obviously circumstances where the president has to take over.
He is the ultimate decider, as George W. Bush said after 9-11.
We understand that though those there are those kinds of circumstances, but President Trump's view is that he is the ultimate decider 24-7.
And this is a prescription For disaster.
And it has, you know, nothing to do with Trump per se.
It just has to do with the fact that all individuals have faults.
And it's very important that you have guardrails to protect against those individuals going off the rails.
But we don't have those guardrails.
So what happened with India is just one manifestation of this broader problem.
Has the uh Anchorage Alaska meeting between presidents uh Trump and Putin in any measurable palpable way moved the Ukraine war toward peace?
No, not at all.
Uh the Ukraine war is going to be settled on the battlefield, as I've said on this show many times.
The fact is that the Europeans and the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other side have a set of demands that are so far apart, there is no possible way you could reconcile the two positions.
I think that Trump genuinely would like to cut a deal.
But I think Trump now understands that he cannot cut a deal.
And what he's doing is he's skillfully positioning himself so that when Ukraine loses the war, he can't be blamed.
That's why he's not cutting off the flow of weapons to Ukraine, but he's making the Europeans pay for them.
Uh and he's saying all the right things.
Uh, you know, with regard to tariffs, for example, or sanctions.
Uh, he's told the Europeans that he's in favor of sanctions, but he's not going to do anything until they do something uh on the sanctions front.
And of course, they're not going to do anything on the sanctions front.
So later, when Ukraine falls and people say you should have put sanctions on, he's going to be able to say, I wanted to put sanctions on, but the Europeans wouldn't do it.
And it would be unfair to the United States for us alone to pay the price of putting sanctions on the Russians.
So he's very, I think, skillfully positioning himself so that he will avoid much of the blame uh when Ukraine falls.
But he clearly understands at this point that there's no way he can work at a deal because the Ukrainians and the Europeans on one side and the Russians on the other are on pop polar opposite sides of the dipole.
Here's um President Trump being asked if his attorney general is in a position to prosecute hate speech, and of course, he accuses the questioner of hating him.
Is that I mean, a lot of people, a lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech.
We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly as hey, you have a lot of hate in your heart.
Maybe that's 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.
Well, that's an absurd, patently absurd response.
The attorney general's statement would have flunked the basic course and constitutional law.
She eventually walked it back, then she regenerated it again, saying she was going to prosecute uh Home Depot or Staples because some kid uh refused to make copies of uh a Charlie Kirk memorial uh flyer as if somehow that was a crime.
Um again, this is an example of an executive branch out of control.
In this case, it's a it's a department of justice totally under the thumb of the president, not independent at all.
The DOJ has always been quasi-independent because it must do what the law requires, whether the president wants that or not.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, this violates freedom of speech.
Hate speech is protected.
Uh I think these hateful things that have been said about Charlie Kirk are absolutely horrible.
Uh, but they're protected.
Uh and uh it's just like you know, Nazis marching in Skokie when we were younger.
Uh hateful thing, but the constitution is set up to protect that.
I remember when I was younger, when I went to West Point and I would see people burning the American flag.
Uh, that did not warm the cockles of my heart, as you can appreciate.
But people are allowed to do that.
It's what makes America great.
A lot of people don't understand that anymore.
But the idea that the president of the United States and some of his principal assistants uh think that freedom of speech is not that important and that they're free to label speech that they don't like as hate speech and then throw people in jail or do whatever is reprehensible.
It's the hallmark of a totalitarian regime.
If you can character uh if you can legally characterize your adversary's speech as hateful, prosecute and convict and incarcerate uh on that basis.
Absolutely.
I mean I mean, this is a threat to liberal democracy.
The law is very, very clear.
This isn't even a close call.
The the strongest uh uh case law in support of the protection of free of hate speech uh is the Westboro Baptist Church, a bunch of fanatics that used to say horrible, horrible things uh to people about to uh have abortions.
And the one liner in there says the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the speech we hate, written by the most conservative member of the court, my classmate and former debate partner, Justice Samuel Alito.
The United States of America is either a democracy or a republic or a blend of the two, a democratic republic.
Do we still have a freely elected government, or is the republic and democracy just a mask for the government that the people can't control?
Well, I think that uh our elections don't add up to very much at all.
Uh we don't have much say in who the candidates are.
Uh the moneyed interests in this country basically control who the candidates are.
Uh and uh the idea that the people uh have a significant influence uh on our government at this point in time is not a serious argument.
And all you have to do is look at the the Israel issue, right?
Uh if you look at how most Americans think about Israel and think about the Palestinians, more Americans support the Palestinians than they do the Israelis.
Uh the number of Americans who think that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is reported to be close to 50 percent, and it's well above 50 percent in the case of the Democratic Party.
But if you look at how those two parties and how the government acts, you'd have no idea uh how the people actually think.
We just don't have that much influence, uh, certainly on foreign policy, but even on domestic policy.
And by the way, this is why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump promised that he was going to fix this situation.
There are a huge number of Americans out there who think the government doesn't represent them.
They think the government is run by privileged elites who have boogered the system so that uh it favors them and it screws people down below.
And Trump understood that very well.
He has a very good nose, and he went out and appealed to those people and said that he was going to change things.
Of course, he's not changed things, and uh and we're in real trouble.
But there are all sorts of other problems as well.
We were just talking about the freedom of speech issue.
I mean, is there a more important issue than freedom of speech?
Uh the the protection against being searched or being violated all the time.
Well, look, the Supreme Court ruled the uh this past week that the police can stop you in the streets and ask you for your papers.
Yeah.
Are you are you an American citizen or do you have the legal right to be here?
Now, before last week you could say goodbye and walk away.
Today you have to respond to that.
If that's not a direct blatant failure on the part of the court to be consistent in its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, I don't know what is.
I agree with you completely.
And uh in other words, we could go down a long list of the.
Oh, yes, we could.
We could, but but the point is America is American democracy is in danger of collapse in large measure because of the iron grip that the donor class has on the levers of power in the Congress and the White House.
I agree with that.
Uh I mean, all you have to do is look at what's happening with regard to universities, right?
Uh there's all this talk about anti-Semitism on campuses, and uh uh university presidents have foolishly played along with this and accepted the argument that there is anti Semitism.
Uh, there's not anti-Semitism.
What there was was protests, significant protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
And the donor class, as you call it, the lobby, as I call it, went to great lengths to portray those uh protests against genocide as anti-Semitism.
This is ludicrous.
But the end result of that is it's freed up President Trump and it's freed up Congress to put their crosshairs on universities.
And now they're in the process of wrecking universities.
Uh, this is absolutely horrible.
The United States depends on those universities.
And furthermore, you don't want to threaten freedom of speech, whether it's at universities or in the country at large.
But that's what's happening.
And it's in large part because the Israelis and their supporters in the United States have a deep seated interest in shutting down discourse about Israel and about the U.S. Israeli relationship and about what the lobby is doing.
Steve Walt and I, who, as you know, wrote this famous book on the Israel lobby.
In many ways, we were the first two people to sort of uh point out what the lobby or what the donor class does in a very sort of public fashion.
Uh, but we understood very quickly that the lobby goes to enormous lengths to shut down any criticism of Israel immediately.
And they will act in incredibly ruthless ways to do that.
And that's what you're seeing now.
You know, Tucker Carlson, when I was on his show, said he had never met any more vicious people than those in the Israel lobby.
And of course, he's exactly right.
And the reason they have to go to such great lengths to shut down discourse immediately, is that if you ever had an open discourse on Israel and what Israel is doing, and you allowed people to speak freely, the United States would have a fundamentally different view of Israel, and it would have a fundamentally different policy toward Israel.
The reason that we have this policy toward Israel that's so out of sync with public opinion, as it's now changed, is because of the power of the lobby.
You take the power of the lobby away, and it's a new ball game.
Now, the problem here, just one more point on this.
The problem is that as time goes by, it will be imperative for the lobby to continue to defend Israel because it is continuing to behave in a barbaric manner in Gaza and on the West Bank, and truth be told, all over the Middle East.
So the lobby really has its work cut out for it.
And the end result is it is doing all sorts of things to limit the discourse that threaten freedom of speech, that threaten liberal values.
So, in a very important way, Israel and its supporters here in the United States, most of whom are Jewish, right, are doing things that are not in the interests of Americans, and in particular not in the interests of Jewish people.
This is a completely crazy situation.
And as bad as it is today, I hate to say this.
I fear that it's only going to get worse.
Well, Professor Mirschheimer, thank you very much.
It's hard to be cheerful with these things that we're talking about and these things that are discussing, and thank God we still have the freedom uh to uh articulate them.
You are a model of uh intellectual fortitude and personal courage, and I thank you for it.
I thank you for your time, and thank you for your friendship, all the best, Professor.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
I'm looking forward to it already.
Thank you for your kind words, and I too am looking forward to it.
Thank you all the best.
Okay.
Coming up tomorrow, Friday at 4:30 in the afternoon, the intelligence community roundtable, Larry Johnson's back.
Ray McGovern will be with us, And we will have a full segment going through all the things that have happened this week.
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