Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Trump Lectures the Generals

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Sept. 30, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

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COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Trump Lectures the Generals

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	Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
	Today is Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.
	Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
	The lectures President Trump and Secretary Hegseth gave to the generals and admirals yesterday.
	Hang on to your seats.
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	Colonel, welcome here, my dear friend.
	Before I ask you about some of your favorite topics, that would be former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Secretary of Defense, or as he calls himself, Secretary of War Pete Heggseth, and President Trump.
	I need your take on this.
	Within hours of hand shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office and beaming over the Israeli acceptance of a deal negotiated by Steve Whitcoff with Arab leaders, but not with Hamas.
	Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, as soon as he landed in Tel Aviv, in Hebrew, undermined the deal by saying the IDF is not leaving Gaza, even though that's a core part of the deal, and there will never be a Palestinian state, even though the deal contemplates one in five years.
	Does this surprise you?
	Not at all.
	Had he not said that in Hebrew and in Loki, if you will, his coalition would have collapsed.
	Wow.
	Well, was he lying when he shook hands with Trump and on American television with every broadcast and cable network showing him saying that he...
	You asked me that question about Bibi Netanyahu.
	Okay, let me restate the question.
	Don't the Americans know that they're dealing with an inveterate liar and what he shakes hands about and says one day he'll repudiate the next?
	I think they do.
	I think most of the people who count within the Trump administration do.
	That doesn't necessarily include Donald Trump himself.
	I'm sad to say.
	And I'll say something else about it too.
	I think what we're looking at here is we're looking at a decision made on both sides of the ocean, if you will, in America and in Israel, that we're going to war with Iran.
	So everything else that's happening right now is just sort of uh wind addressing to lead up to what's going to happen.
	Uh, Colonel McGregor, who'll be on with us tomorrow, uh, reports in his emails that uh heavy American equipment fighter jets are beginning to uh land at that enormous base uh in Doha.
	Right.
	That would be an indicator that uh war is coming and the U.S. is going to back the Israelis.
	Exactly.
	And a fleet of tankers have also crossed the Atlantic and moved into that region, not unlike the fleet that went over for our attacks on the nuclear.
	What is a fleet of tankers mean, Colonel?
	It means that the aircraft can refuel endlessly, you know, coming out of Al-Udeed or wherever they might come from.
	They can even refuel from carriers.
	Right, right, right.
	So I guess they're getting ready.
	You know, Scott Ritter, uh, Max Blumenthal, um the woman that runs uh Code Pink, her name is escaping me right now.
	Benjamin and I uh were invited to lunch with the uh president of uh Iran uh last week.
	No question in my mind after listening to him and his colleagues that they are fully prepared uh and they uh are going to react in a far more decisive, effective, and long-lasting way against Israel than they did in June.
	And as I understand it, they're gonna act region wide, not just against Israel.
	What does that mean, Colonel?
	Well, I don't know that it means the Saudis or others in the region as much as it means U.S. facilities in those countries' territory.
	I think it means they know they're at war with the United States, and so thank you very much.
	Here you are.
	Take this.
	Well, Colonel, yesterday, in a rather uh preening self-indulgent uh talk before I don't want to take words, put words in your mouth, uh, before 800 generals uh and admirals um visibly disappointed because he didn't expect President Trump to show up, Secretary of uh defense, made some rather uh peculiar arguments, but rather than characterize it myself, I'll let you watch it.
	It's under a minute.
	Sounds to me like he wants the United States to abandon the Geneva Conventions, which have been a hallmark of civility since the end of World War II.
	Will you tell me what you think?
	Chris number 20.
	Every day we have to be prepared for war, not for defense.
	We're training warriors, not defenders.
	We fight wars to win, not to defend.
	Defense is something you do all the time.
	It's inherently reactionary and can lead to overuse, overreach, and mission creep.
	War is something you do sparingly on our own terms and with clear aims.
	We fight to win.
	We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.
	We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
	We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.
	No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.
	Just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.
	That's all I ever wanted as a platoon leader.
	I'm sure that last comment reminded them how uh how sparing his experience in the military is stupid rules of engagement.
	Would those be the rules that prohibit torture that prohibit attacking uh civilians that prohibit using more force than is necessary to subdue the enemy, the rules that we wrote when we wrote the four Geneva conventions, Colonel?
	Yes, and also very dramatically includes taking on boats on the high seas and blowing them up.
	Yes due process without congressional approval just because you can.
	I said yesterday on the Capitol Steps, I said we had a demonstration there, and I said to a reporter, imagine you're on New York Avenue, and you stump your policeman or you're a military person in DC, which there are plenty of right now, and you stumble on a guy sitting on a five-gallon can in front of the church there on the corner of uh H and New York Avenue, and there's a line down the street, a thousand people in that line, and he's selling cocaine.
	And you walk up to him and you pull out your service revolver or your M16 if you're militia, and you blow him away.
	That's the same thing we're talking about.
	You're talking about doing that.
	Now it might be heinous that he's on the street corner selling drugs and he's probably gonna run when he sees you coming anyway, but you're walking up to him and blowing him away without due process is not what you should be doing.
	Well, the the president uh has said uh that he can kill people before they commit crime if he has a reasonable belief that they're going to.
	I'm I'm putting words in his mouth and making it sound a little bit more elegant than he put it.
	Uh the president has said uh we'll play this clip for you uh in in a minute, that American cities should be used as training ground for the military.
	So can the pre-charge, pre-trial, pre-conviction, public execution of Americans whose crimes have been observed be very far behind Colonel Lawrence Wilperson.
	Not very far.
	And we said we had this discussion when George W. Bush introduced to the border patrol within a hundred nautical miles of their position.
	Think about that for a minute now, because some of these people were at international airports.
	So that means a circle with a hundred mile radius all around that airport.
	They can act if they think someone is a criminal.
	No reasonable suspicion, no probable cause.
	You can act.
	And we did that.
	We did that post uh 9-11.
	And boy, did we get a lot of people that were angry with us for confiscated confiscation of their laptops and such, and people who were essentially uh put aside and interrogated who were just businessmen coming across the southern border or wherever it might be.
	This is this is taking it way too far.
	I don't know if you saw the interview with Edward Snowden the other day, but I had many people emailing me and saying, Jesus, I've never listened to this guy at such depth and such wisdom.
	This guy's smart.
	Why the hell is he in the Soviet Union?
	Ah, because the uh Trump administration indicted him.
	That's why he's in the Soviet Union, indicted him for tell telling the truth.
	One of the greatest, most profound, most courageous, truthful revelations in the modern era.
	Yes.
	The Queen's whistleblower.
	Yeah.
	Here's President Trump on practice in American cities.
	And then I'm gonna ask you to grade the two speeches.
	San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.
	They're very unsafe places.
	And we're gonna straighten them out one by one.
	And this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room.
	That's a war, too.
	It's a war from within.
	Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security.
	We can't let these people in.
	We're under invasion from within.
	No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms.
	At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out.
	These people don't have uniforms.
	I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.
	What the hell is he talking about using American streets as a training ground for a military in the same breath in which he says we're under invasion from an enemy within?
	He's talking about a better coup than the one he tried to conduct before and failed at.
	That's what he's talking about.
	And he's talking about preparing the forces necessary to make sure that that coup doesn't fail.
	That's what he's talking about.
	And he's not talking about it necessarily for himself.
	I don't think he has enough brain power really now to deal with that sort of thing.
	I think he's talking about it in words having been given him and written for him and otherwise offered to him by people like Steve Miller.
	And I'm sorry to say, people who might be behind Steve Miller, even who are very anxious.
	I go to Peter Thiel immediately to bring the kind of authoritarianism that once echoed through the halls of South African government to America.
	What are you referring to when you said coup, Colonel?
	I'm talking about what I've said all along.
	The January the sixth attempt at overthrowing our government or installing Trump forever didn't fail because the system held.
	It failed because the coup plotters were utterly incompetent.
	They will not make that mistake again.
	Wow.
	Colonel, can you think of anybody now living worse than Tony Blair to become the governor general of a neocolonial Gaza Strip?
	Yes, Bibi Netanyahu.
	Okay.
	I got another one.
	I got another one for you.
	Dick Cheney, if he's still alive.
	Yeah.
	Well, Dick would do a better job than either Blair or Netanyahu, but he would be ruthless.
	Why Tony Blair and why would the Arabs ever accept somebody as singularly responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan as he was?
	I have no idea except that I know that he spent the last decade or decade and a half or so in inserting himself back into the end of the Milo so that he could make lots of money and so that he could regain some fame.
	He really lost a lot of his stature when he left the prime ministership, but I think he's managed to build it back up again with the people that count.
	If he becomes the governor general, would the former occupant of the opulent residents known as number 10 Downing Street take up residence in Gaza City?
	Some of them would, no question in my mind, and MI6 would be all over the place, just like their Air Force is flying over Gaza right now, still giving information and intelligence to the IDF.
	Um, this you cannot make it up about Britain's complicity in the Levant from the beginning of time, as it were, up until the present.
	They are a malignant force in that region of the world.
	They always have been.
	I suspect as long as the Demi Paradise exists, they will continue to be.
	I want to get back to President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, and I've not asked you for a grade yet, and I don't mean to put you on the spot because your non-grade explanations have been very illuminating.
	But Colonel, are generals and admirals generally fat?
	Not generally.
	There are too many of them in the reserve components who are, and we've talked about that at the Eisenhower Media Network.
	There are quite a few, both male and female, officers and NCOs in the reserve components that are not following the Army's guidelines or the Marine Corps'guidelines on weight.
	But this was really not what that was all about, I don't think.
	What was it all about?
	I think it was all about testing.
	They wanted to see, and they got a really dull answer, just how much they could make that crowd not completely like, but remotely at least like the crowd you recall they had at Fort Bragg.
	That they really, I didn't know this until I read up on it.
	They really vetted that crowd at Fort Bragg to the point of you can't sit in the front row if you have any color on.
	You can't sit in the front row if you are going to move your eyes in some kind of grimace when the president says something.
	This was detailed instruction to that crowd to make sure what they had out there was either MAGA sympathizers or people who were scared and weren't going to do anything on toured with regard to the commander-in-chief.
	They thought they were going to get something like that at Quantico, not quite as subdued and then as raucous as the Fort Bragg one was.
	But they thought they were going to get cheers and applause and various and sundry reactions.
	They got stoicism.
	They got people looking at them without any emotion whatsoever.
	Well, maybe, maybe this is one of the reasons.
	Chris, the uh clip of Secretary Hag Seth saying, if you feel uncomfortable, well, you can fill in the blank.
	Yeah.
	The new compass heading is clear.
	Out with the Sherelli's, the McKenzie's, and the Millies.
	And in with the Stockdales, the Schwarzkopf's and the patents.
	More leadership changes will be made of that, I'm certain.
	Not because we want to, but because we must.
	Once again, this is life and death.
	The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies.
	Personnel is policy.
	But if the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.
	We would thank you for your service.
	Admiral Stockdale would have stood up wherever he was in that auditorium and told that man he was a sack of shit and walked out.
	I wish there were more.
	And Patton would have stood up and maybe walked up there and smacked him upside the head and walked out.
	I mean, the idea that he would bring those people up as exam, and Schwarzkopf too.
	Bring them up as the example of warriors is one thing, but to bring them up as examples of what he's talking about, gross insubordination, gross war crimes, gross ignorance of the code of conduct, and everything else that makes a military, the American military, what it is, is just unconscionable.
	Petey does not know what he's talking about, or he is truly an insane individual.
	Here's uh one of the people he attacked by name, talking about fidelity to the Constitution, former uh chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four star General Milley.
	You see, we in uniform are unique.
	We are unique among the world's armies.
	We are unique among the world's militaries.
	We don't take an oath to a country.
	We don't take an oath to a tribe, we don't take an oath to a religion.
	We don't take an oath to a king or queen or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator.
	We don't take an oath to an individual.
	We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that it's America, and we're willing to die to protect it.
	Every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian, and coast guardsman, each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price, and we are not easily intimidated.
	Bill and I have both taken that oath.
	I thought that was a brilliant statement that he made.
	This is the guy that had Seth trashed.
	Yes.
	I think it was speech to the Warsaw Pact generals.
	And I think it was in Warsaw, if I recall.
	And he said something that got them so mystified that many came up to him afterwards and asked him to explain, and he did in some copious terms.
	He said, I'm a soldier who takes an oath to a constitution of a people who don't necessarily like me.
	And then he talked about James Madison and the standing force and how dangerous it was and such.
	And they didn't get it really.
	And so they began to crowd around him and ask questions.
	And by the time he finished answering their questions, each one in turn, they understood what he meant.
	All right, Colonel, I'm putting you on the spot.
	What grade would you give Pete Heggseth?
	Fow.
	I don't have one for President Trump.
	I simply don't have a grade for him.
	I can't go that low.
	Do you uh have a feeling from your colleagues who are still in uniform, if there was a prevailing consensus similar to yours amongst the one, two, three, and four stars that were there.
	Well, here's something that people don't probably realize unless they've had experience in the military.
	Before these guys came to this meeting in Quantico, I'll guarantee you they exercise what we call the O-boy network.
	They called Millie, they called other general officers, other flag officers, and all their services, and they said, What's your advice?
	And they listened to these people.
	So that's one reason you saw them come and be so stoical about the addresses of both the president and the Secretary of War.
	And then the other thing is they are people who are more imbued with the ethic that Millie expressed there, or that Powell expressed to the Warsaw Pact, than not.
	And so this was really a shock to their systems in some ways, though I suspect from the old boy conversations and everything, they didn't get taken completely by surprise.
	So you're looking at a refutation of both the Secord and the President's invitation to participate in the takeover of America.
	Well, and as he was leaving the White House to get in a helicopter to take him to Quantico, cut number 18, he said this.
	And if I don't like somebody, I'm going to fire him right on this spot.
	I would have loved to have seen him try that, especially with the quantity.
	Maybe one or two that he could have singled out that he'd done some research on before and make an example out of them.
	But with a quantity on the spot, I'd love to have seen him try that and seen the confrontation that would occur.
	I wonder if President Trump will be taking the PT classes that uh Secretary Hed Seth told the generals they're gonna have to start taking.
	He'll be taking a heart attack.
	The last president I know that tried to take a military PT test and did fairly well was H.W. Bush.
	HW, not W. HW.
	Wow.
	All right, Colonel.
	Such unpleasant uh stuff.
	I I almost can't admit.
	Oh, I know.
	What do you think it cost to bring 800 admirals and generals from all across the globe?
	And each or most had a senior commissioned officer with him.
	So a lot of human beings.
	And some had aides with them.
	Uh in fact, you know, a flag officer rarely travels without his captain or lieutenant or whatever aid.
	Um, I I would say in the hundreds of millions when you count the jet fuel, the time away, and all that goes into it.
	Wow.
	Uh, I'm gonna play Heg Seth on fatness.
	Of course, Trump was backstage at the time, so we don't know what he thought, Chris number 21.
	Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the war department.
	In other words, to our enemies.
	If the secretary of war can do regular hard PT, so can every member of our joint force.
	Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops.
	Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.
	It's a bad look.
	It is bad, and it's not who we are.
	Today, at my direction, every member of the joint force at every rank is required to take a PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year.
	Every year of service.
	Now, the way to do that, Judge, had he wanted to do that, and it's been done before, he's not the first person to do this, was to tell the secretaries, the service secretaries, who themselves are civilians, as you well know.
	They then tell the chief of service, the chief of staff of the army, the chief staff of the Air Force, the CNO, and so forth, to do it.
	You don't do that as the Secretary of Defense.
	That's beneath your dignity and your responsibilities.
	You do advice to the president of the United States, and you transmit his orders to the war fighters in the field and their opinions and views to the president.
	That's your job.
	That's your only job, Petey.
	He's uh vicious, angry, micromanaging.
	Oh, by the way, he's going to have everybody that works in the Pentagon sign an oath about non-disclosure, and he's announcing random uh polygraph tests.
	This is just going from bad to worse.
	I heard that this morning.
	You know, he was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 50.
	One of the 51 has since said, I wish I didn't vote for him.
	I don't want to say who it is, a Republican uh senator.
	If that senator had stuck to his original guns, we wouldn't be having this conversation because he would not have had the 51st vote that he needed.
	But that's history and can't be changed uh right now.
	That man may regret that vote deep before this is over with.
	Yes.
	Um this is a little uh out of the blue for you.
	Uh but the uh young man that uh murdered um Charlie Kirk uh was texting to his uh romantic uh lover.
	Uh his plans to uh murder Kirk.
	The NSA had those texts.
	That doesn't surprise me.
	Before before the murder.
	It doesn't surprise me at all.
	Does all of the destruction of the Fourth Amendment and all of the mass surveillance of every keystroke on every mobile device and desktop in the country do any good?
	We had the two Al-Qaeda agents who were operating in the United States and then went to the Far East.
	We had them.
	We knew who they were.
	They knew what we knew what they were plotting, and the fight between the FBI and the uh CIA was so intense at that time that neither wanted to share with the other, and so that information never got to the right places.
	But let me say this too.
	Larry Johnson and I have been looking really closely.
	You know, both of us are riflemen.
	We shoot all the time.
	30 odd sixes, two forty-three Winchesters, we shoot all the time.
	We don't think that man shot Charlie Kirk.
	Good lord.
	Who did?
	We don't know yet, but we are pretty sure that it was at least a 300, and it was one of those rounds like the one that the autopsy people in Texas said killed JFK, blew his brains out and put him on the back of that sedan.
	It was a bullet that fragments, it's a special bullet.
	It is not a steel-jacketed round.
	It's not around like you shoot deer with, it doesn't shoot out of a 30-6.
	It goes into your head and explodes.
	If you remember that movie about the jackal where he's out practicing with a pumpkin and he shoots that pumpkin and the pumpkin and explodes, well, that's what we're talking about.
	Wow.
	Well, more from Larry on that, he'll be with us on the Friday.
	Uh Colonel, thank you.
	We've been all over the place, and I deeply uh appreciate your uh willingness to do it.
	I deeply appreciate your intellectual honesty and personal courage in taking these people on who are ruining the military and assaulting American culture.
	Thank you, Colonel.
	Surely let me tell you about one other thing.
	We passed around the Iden Our Media Network.
	We're all on the alert.
	We uh what Trump said is he's coming after us.
	Coming after people like you and me.
	Yeah, exactly.
	God be with us.
	Thank you, Colonel.
	Surely.
	All the best.
	Be safe.
	And you, my dear friend.
	Terrifying stuff.

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