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Sept. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:30
Scott Ritter : How Close Is Doomsday?
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All right, we're back.
Thank you, uh Scott and uh audience and chatters, thank you for uh telling us about these issues.
Uh it apparently was a YouTube problem, and hopefully we don't have it anymore.
You were telling us how dangerous it is for the president of the United States to listen to neocons who happen to be ardent Zionists who whisper into his ear, and you were about to address the uh preposterous nature uh of what the president apparently said about an hour ago.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, they're all leading with this.
Donald Trump says Ukraine can regain back its territory going to pre-war.
Ukraine won't gain back its territory going to pre-war.
Um, what Donald Trump has done is opted out of uh the peace process.
The peace process is now dead.
Uh and with it dies the Ukrainian nation.
Uh, because there is no peace process process, there is no prospect for peace.
Uh, Ukraine now, emboldened by Donald Trump's irresponsible rhetoric, will continue to uh resist until the last Ukrainian, which has been Lindsay Graham's wet dream.
Um, and you know, when this war is done, and it will be done, you know, this may last another year, uh, but more than three million Ukrainians will die.
The uh death toll will double because we're entering the final phases of the war where things are going to go very bad for the Ukrainians very quickly.
Um, and we will see more death and destruction.
We will see the dismemberment of Ukraine.
Um, and if we're not careful, we may see direct conflict between Russia and NATO, which will be devastating for NATO.
Then the United States has a choice.
Uh, do we trade Boston for Bosna?
Because Poland is going to do something stupid, and Russia will take out a Polish city, and then the United States has to make a decision.
Uh, do we commit suicide for an irresponsible Europe?
This president um is is grossly irresponsible.
Um, supporting this position only extends a war that can't be won by Ukraine.
It only emboldens a NATO that uh won't be able to back up its rhetoric with anything meaningful and only creates the potential of a conflict that you know will possibly draw the United States into a world-ending nuclear conflagration.
Uh Chris, for the benefit of uh those who have just joined us and were not part of the show that we had to abandon because of the uh YouTube problems.
Can you put the full screen up again?
which Scott analyzed in which the President of the United States used that language.
Okay, can you there you go?
After getting to know and fully understand the Russia-Ukraine military and economic situation, fully understand.
All right, I'm not gonna editorialize a lot, Scott.
I'll let you do it.
And after seeing the Europe, the economic trouble that is crossing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and win, WINN CAPS, all of Ukraine back in its original form with time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and in particular NATO.
The original borders from where this war started is very much an option.
Why not?
Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years of war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win.
This is not distinguishing Russia.
In fact, it is very much making them look like a paper tiger when the people living in Moscow and all of the great cities, towns, and districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this war.
Pardon me.
The fact that it's almost impossible for them to get their gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things, if you can raise that, Chris, thank you, are taking place in their war economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has great spirit and only getting better.
Ukraine would be able to take back their country in its original form, and who knows, maybe even go further than that.
Putin and Russia are in big economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act.
In any event, I wish both countries well.
We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them.
Good luck to Walt Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.
You were saying that by this statement and a similar statement he made uh at the United Nations earlier today, the peace process, whatever was commenced in Anchorage, Alaska is dead.
It's dead.
It's finished.
There's no hope of reviving it.
Donald Trump has washed his hands of the process.
He's walked away from it.
And in doing so, he's, as I said, condemned Ukraine to die.
But moreover, uh, he's condemned the European economy to collapse and NATO to become even more of speaking of paper tigers, it takes one to no one, I guess, uh NATO will become uh uh a paper tiger unable to live up to any expectations and any obligations they may incur incur.
Uh but moreover, it just pushes the United States into a role of what?
I mean, how can he possibly now talk about uh engaging in the normalization of relations between Russia and the United States when he makes a statement of that?
Does he not know that should a NATO backed Ukraine uh make a meaningful incursion into Russian territories that Russia will respond with nuclear weapons?
This is a trigger for nuclear action.
Now it won't get to that, but you know, again, the the what he's done is he's condemned, and by the time this is done, the Ukrainian death toll will double.
Uh 3.4 to 4 million Ukrainians will die because of Donald Trump.
That blood is on his hands.
And anybody contemplating giving this man the Nobel Peace Prize deserves to be locked up in an insane asylum.
Do you think that before he makes statements like this, before he composes um uh a tweet, an X, whatever you want to call it?
It's on his own uh website, uh, which he calls uh Truth Social, that he takes guidance and advice from knowledgeable people, or is he just shooting from the hip or off the top of his head, just as he did at Charlie Kirk's funeral and just as he did in the United Nations a few hours ago.
Donald Trump is a morally and intellectually weak man, and he's a prisoner of the last person to talk to him.
I don't believe Donald Trump's uh two thumbs type this message out.
I believe it's the job of somebody like uh Sebastian Gorka, who hovers around Donald Trump listening to the advice, and then Donald Trump will say something and Gorkha will turn it to a social media post that Donald Trump will then um approve for for release.
Um, where is Marco Rubio when things like this are being said?
Um, you know, where where is Peak Headset?
Because Donald Trump just committed the United States uh to major foreign policy and defense policy um, you know, initiatives here.
Um is the State Department ready to back this up?
Is the Defense Department ready to back this up?
Is anybody ready to back this up?
What does Steve Whitkoff think of this?
Because he's been effectively sidelined.
How did Keith Kellogg go from being you know fired literally a week and a half ago to now being the dominant guy running around getting medals from Zelensky?
I just want to remind everybody about two weeks ago he was in award ceremony where Zelensky draped a medal around his neck, and he's now running around bragging, telling, I mean, bragging about how uh Zelensky can you know recapture Ukraine and do things.
This is this is very dangerous.
Uh again, anybody who thinks that Russia is losing this war, uh, you need to go reexamine your facts and your data.
Is Trump's thinking deranged enough that he would consider putting American troops into Ukraine?
I'm not asking you to be a psychiatrist.
I'm just asking you to uh read between the lines of what he has said in the past 48 hours.
No, just the opposite.
Notice at the end of that tweet, he was very careful, or whoever wrote that tweet for him, that we will continue to supply weapons to NATO from NATO to do whatever they want with them.
Um that's it.
That's the extent.
This is purely a transactional deal for him right now.
There will be no American blood.
America will not put boots on the ground.
We aren't going to get our boys in.
Because at the end of the day, the Pentagon will tell him what everybody should be telling him that um we can't stand toe to toe with the Russian army as things stand.
Neither can the Polish army, neither can the French army, neither can any European army.
The only army that's capable of doing this is Ukraine, because Ukraine has uh developed drone warfare um parallel with the Russians.
Both sides have seen their respective capabilities to wage drone warfare uh you know, develop and mature simultaneously.
They're both very dangerous armies.
Um, but Europe doesn't have this ability.
And if a, for instance, a Polish army was to go up against their Russian counterparts, uh, the the Pol or an American army.
If the American military was to go up against the Russians, the American military would be bogged down and destroyed within days.
They wouldn't stand a chance because they don't know how to fight drone warfare.
What would likely happen if a NATO country did shoot down uh a Russian jet uh fighter that inadvertently or even intentionally uh veered uh across a border over a NATO country?
Take Poland as an example.
If it was over Polish airspace, nothing.
I mean, Russia would clearly be in the wrong.
Um, but you know, Russia doesn't have any aircraft operating near the Polish border.
Um that's you know, the Russians are very careful to avoid such a scenario.
The three MiG-31s that Estonia claims violated airspace did nothing of the sort.
They are in internationally recognized air transit lanes that have been used repeatedly by the Russians in the past.
Uh it's a clear provocation by Estonia.
Now, if they were to shoot down a Russian aircraft operating in international airspace, um, you know, the Russians would, you know, respond as Russia would respond.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, we saw what they did with Turkey.
Everybody thought Russia would come in uh, you know, guns ablaze, and all they did is put pressure on the Turkish president so the Aragon had to issue an apology and uh and grovel before Putin because they were going to shut down the Turkish economy.
I would imagine that Russia would not let uh the murder of a Russian pilot and the downing of a Russian aircraft go unanswered, but Russia's not in the business of deliberately escalating this conflict.
Russia is winning the conflict in Ukraine.
The best way to lose that conflict is to play Ukraine's game and get involved in a shooting match with NATO, because even though Russia would win, it would divert significant resources from the primary effort, which is uh bringing the war in Ukraine to an end.
Switching uh over to Gaza, Scott, uh will the near now near universal recognition of a Palestinian state in any meaningful way stop Netanyahu's slaughter in Gaza.
No.
First of all, the the recognition is meaningless.
I mean, uh to say you recognize a Palestinian state to the 1967 borders and not put forward a plan on how you're going to compel Israel to abandon the settlements that they've put in the West Bank had stolen the land uh that would comprise part of Palestine means that this is just an empty gesture.
Moreover, not a single nation that recognized uh or said they recognize a Palestinian state, recognize the legitimacy of Hamas as the governing authority of the Palestinian people.
If there was an election today in Palestine, Hamas would win the election.
Um and yet the United States, Europe, and everybody else is saying Hamas can't be part of the Palestinian future, which means you're basically drawing lines on the map, but you're not willing to populate it with reality.
And that just shows how disconnected these uh these these gestures are from reality.
The bottom line is um the thing that will get Israel to change its point of view are dead Israeli soldiers.
And the bad news for Israel is that Palestinians, Hamas continue to slaughter the Israelis on a daily basis.
And none of that is being reported uh into the West because the Israelis, the Israeli military doesn't allow uh uh journalists there to report it.
No, uh and you know, and it's also being suppressed what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinian people.
I mean, every day, more women, more children, scores uh their shattered, torn bodies are being scraped off of the rubble of uh destroyed buildings.
The genocide is real, it's active, it's ongoing.
Um, and the world's ignoring this as well.
Wow.
Does Trump want uh I uh that's a silly question, but I'll ask it.
Does Trump want peace in either Ukraine or Gaza?
Uh uh, not peace is in the way in the way that you and I would recognize it.
Trump wants um to be seen as bringing an end to fighting.
But you know, the uh if you think peace happens because you got both sides to stop shooting each other for a specific period of time, then you don't understand the nature of conflict.
Uh Russia has indicated clearly that there cannot be peace in Ukraine until the root causes of the conflict are addressed in full.
No half measures, et cetera.
Otherwise, you're just simply buying time for the war to continue.
And now that Trump has told the Ukrainians that uh they should continue until they restore the 1991 borders and maybe go beyond uh you know Russia will never end this war until they destroy Ukraine.
So that's that.
On the on, you know, wanting a ceasefire, a ceasefire that only um embraces or adheres to Israeli demands.
Um you can't have a ceasefire and seek peace when one of the port warring parties, Hamas, will be excluded from this peace.
I mean, i it's just it's ridiculous.
Uh so Trump, he doesn't understand what real peace is, and he's not working to achieve real peace.
He's a charlatan.
Uh he's a con artist.
He's trying to, you know, buy his way into a Nobel Peace Prize by manufacturing um, you know, events he can label as peace, but don't do anything to uh to bring the actual fighting to an end, and indeed, if they were implemented only encourage future fighting.
He's not a peacemaker, he's a warmonger.
How close are we to doomsday?
Well, Vladimir Putin just gave an interesting um presentation to his Security Council yesterday, in which he basically said that the new STAR treaty is dead.
Um will not be revived.
Um the new START Treaty is the last remaining arms control vehicle between the Russia and the United States.
It currently caps uh the respective nuclear arsenals of each side to 1,550.
And once it expires on February 5th, 2026, both sides will be able to engage in an arms race to show you the immediacy of the danger.
Um, you know, the Russians have long accused the United States of negotiating in bad faith for new start.
The proof is in the pudding.
Repeatedly, generals and admirals of the strategic command responsible for our nation's nuclear forces have testified before Congress that as soon as the United States withdraws from the New START Treaty, um, as soon as that treaty is no longer in force, the United States can almost immediately quadruple the size of its nuclear arsenal.
We do so by, for instance, we have 450 Minuteman III missiles uh under new start.
They've been down, you know, downloaded to one warhead per missile.
We would immediately put three warheads on those missiles, you know, tripling the number of warheads available.
We would reactivate um silos decommissioned on trident uh on Ohio class submarines for Trident missiles.
These were supposed to be permanently decommissioned as part of the new start, but we only temporarily decommissioned because we lie through our teeth.
The same thing, we would have B-52 bombers that were decommissioned as nuclear-capable bombers, converted into conventional bombers, instantly transformed because all we did is clip a wire and you just have to splice that wire back together, and there goes the B-52.
Um overnight we'll have six to eight thousand deployed nuclear weapons on board.
Um, you know, this just begins an arms race that will escalate poorly uh and on behalf of the United States.
Now, what Vladimir Putin did do is open the door for potential you know resolution to this.
He said that Russia will voluntarily adhere to the caps of the new start treaty, meaning that he will keep Russia's arsenal capped at 1,550, so long as the United States does the same and does not engage in any activities that are destabilizing in nature.
Well, good lord, the United States just said they're going to empower Ukraine to continue the war and maybe take the war on to Russia.
So we may have killed Putin's offer from the very beginning.
But the other thing is Donald Trump's talking about the golden shield, this uh this theory of a uh of a ballistic missile defense system that can't work and we can't afford it.
Uh but if we go forward with that, the Russians more more than likely say if you're going to build a missile defense shield, then we will have to build missiles capable of defeating your ballistic missile defense shield, and Then we begin an arms race.
So we are in a very, very precarious situation.
And unfortunately, we don't have a president with the mental capacity or the moral integrity to uh to see us through this.
If we're not careful, we could find ourselves stumbling into a nuclear war with Russia.
Will there be serious negotiations for nuclear restraint of any sort?
Or does Trump uh probably view this as some some sign of weakness?
Knowing Trump, who knows what he'll view it as, but he won't view it in the proper light.
The other the other problem is that he doesn't have the uh the ability to negotiate.
And I don't mean him personally, I mean the United States government.
On July 25th, Donald Trump addressing a reporter said, we can't allow new start to expire.
Well, guess what, Donnie Davy?
It's going to expire because you didn't do a damn thing.
One of the reasons why you didn't do a damn thing is a week prior to you making that statement.
You authorized Marco Rubio to gut the United States State Department for all you MAGA types out there saying, they gotta go.
The State Department's got to be cut.
1,300 jobs are cut, many of them in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
That's the guys who do the research on arms control.
And a lot of them came from the Bureau of Arms Control from the Russia desk, the people that deal with Russia.
And then after you cut them, he consolidated jobs.
So for instance, there was an arms control bureau that does arms control.
Now it's the arms code bureau that also does counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism.
And uh, you know, we're sitting here manufacturing a war against uh Venezuela by blowing up tuna uh tuna ships that we call you know drug smugglers.
Uh you think this guy's number one task right now is going to be coming up with an arms control treaty, he's gonna be overburdened.
We also, his boss was supposed to be, you know, on negotiations and things of that.
They combine that job, but that boss doesn't even have a job because he hasn't been ratified by the United States Senate.
So we don't have anybody sitting in the desk of the job that's supposed to oversee arms control.
And then lastly, the whole team that does multilateral arms control negotiations, nuclear arms control negotiations has been eliminated.
So Donald Trump doesn't have anybody, anybody to do these negotiations.
Even if he wanted to, we couldn't.
This is an extremely dangerous situation.
And he's surrounded by yes men.
Gorka, Vance, Heg Seth, Rubio.
They're worse than yes men.
Yes men might even have a brain attached to their ability to say yes.
These people are fundamentally stupid about all things pertaining to the national security of the United States.
Marco Rubio is a Russaphoe.
Pete Heggseth is a battalion operations officer operating well out of his death.
And Sebastian Gorka, you know, is a he's a traitor to the United States.
I'll just leave it at that.
Traitor to the United States.
Yeah, he's he loyal to the government of another country.
He's loyal to the government of Great Britain, he's loyal to the government of Israel.
He used to be an MI6 asset.
He used to work for the intelligence services of Great Britain.
Wow.
That's why he has frog marched out of the White House in President Trump's first term because he was incapable of holding security clearance.
But now Donald Trump has removed all checks and balances, and nobody's asking any questions.
But this known traitor, this known traitor to America, is now advising the president, probably brighting his social media posts.
Scotty, uh you're uh a champion, and you know just so broad and so deep, and I thank you for it.
Uh we had the original segment that went for two and a half minutes until we have problems with the uh service provider.
Thank you for coming back and doing this one.
You and I will be together on Saturday.
What are we going to be doing?
Well, we're going to be with uh our good friend Gerald Salante in uh downtown Kingston at the uh four corners of freedom, he calls it, John and Crown Street in Kingston, New York, where there's a peace and freedom rally.
Uh we'll be joined by great speakers uh like Joe Laurie, the editor of uh Consortium News, Dennis Kisinich, former congressman, former presidential candidate, an all-round good guy, Ray McGovern, former CIA presidential briefer, and Roger Waters is a well-known peace activist who's going to be joining us on live video feed.
Um we'll be talking about a variety of issues.
Uh freedom of speech, we'll be talking about Gaza, Palestine, Russia, arms control, and what the hell we can do to save the world we live in.
Should be uh a very dynamic afternoon.
And if any of you want to meet Scott, meet Congressman Kucinich, meet the great Ray McGovern or meet yours truly.
We will be there.
This usually draws about four or five hundred people.
It's in a beautiful garden in a beautiful downtown area in a town that was founded in the sixteen hundreds, about a two-hour drive north of New York City.
If you live anywhere in this area, it'll be a most enjoyable afternoon for you.
Scott, I'm sure will be his eloquent best.
I will do my best.
The others are all experts in their fields.
Scott, thank you very much for this.
Much appreciated.
You did double duty today, but uh deeply appreciated.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for having me.
I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.
See you Saturday, my friend.
Okay.
Thank you.
Coming up, uh, thank you for those of you uh who jumped from the original link to the one that we just uh used with uh Scott.
Uh I I and my team very much appreciate the loyalty that you show us.
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