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The Illegitimate Use of Force
00:13:30
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| Undeclared wars are commonplace. | |
| Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. | |
| Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. | |
| To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. | |
| What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? | |
| What if Jefferson was right? | |
| What if that government is best which governs least? | |
| What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? | |
| What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? | |
| What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? | |
| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026. | |
| Matthew Ho joins us now. | |
| Matt, a pleasure, my dear friend, what we're talking about. | |
| It's a pleasure to interact with you. | |
| Thank you for joining us. | |
| Before we get to the streets of Minneapolis, breaking news, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that an American F-35 jet shot down an Iranian drone, which was, according to the White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt, acting aggressively and coming toward the USS Abraham Lincoln. | |
| At a similar time, also in the Strait of Horm or near the straits of Hormuz, several Iranian gunboats failed to stop a U.S. tanker. | |
| Well, first, is this believable? | |
| And second, how do you read this? | |
| I know I'm just springing this on you. | |
| This just broke literally in the past 10 minutes. | |
| Well, thanks for having me back on, Judge. | |
| I don't think any of us should be surprised that something like this happened. | |
| I imagine this Iranian drone that was shot down was carrying out reconnaissance and it had, as far as I understand, every legal right to be in the sky doing what it was doing, unless it was actually on a flight pattern directly towards the Eisenhower and was about, or the Lincoln, I forget which one it is. | |
| I guess it's a Lincoln. | |
| You know, there is no reason to shoot this thing down under international law. | |
| But this may be the Kazas Belli that many in Washington and Tel Aviv want. | |
| This is the excuse to scuttle negotiations with the Iranians. | |
| Steve Witkoff is supposed to go to Istanbul on Friday to meet with the Iranian delegation. | |
| And this could give the Americans and by extension the Israelis, of course, all the excuses they want, all the reason they need to upend those negotiations and to push forward with military strikes with the goal of regime change. | |
| I mean, could this be a false flag or could it be manufactured by Mossad or CIA? | |
| It could be. | |
| It certainly could be something that, you know, you can imagine the script that goes along the lines of CIA or Mossad put up a drone and they send it towards the Lincoln and the Lincoln's Comet Air Patrol or whatever that F-35 was doing up in the sky shoots its down. | |
| It could be totally fabricated, made up, you know, and the pilots on the Lincoln are told just shut up and go along with it. | |
| You know, those things tend to leak out, though. | |
| And more than likely, it was an Iranian drone. | |
| I would bet 99 cents on the dollar that this is as it's being related to us is as it happened because the Iranians are observing the American warships in the area because those American warships are threatening the Iranians. | |
| So, of course, the Iranians should be doing their due diligence, if you will, in terms of watching the Americans. | |
| But again, this incident is often the type of spark that is used. | |
| We could go back, of course, to the Gulf of Tonkin, 1964, when the supposed attacks on the U.S. destroyers, Maddox and Turner Joy, never happened. | |
| But that was the Kazas Valley. | |
| That was the reason for war that the Congress authorized Johnson to fully invade Vietnam and begin that war for us in a way that Kennedy and Eisenhower hadn't. | |
| So certainly, Judge, there's plenty of historical precedent here to say this is a false flag. | |
| But sitting here, I'm inclined to believe, at least as we've heard a story so far, it is, as it says, the Americans shot down an Iranian drone. | |
| Right, right. | |
| I mean, what is the American interest in harming Iran other than pleasing Nets and Yahoo and his regime? | |
| Well, you know, this is a question of American hegemony, right? | |
| This is an idea of a nation that has stood up against the American empire for over four decades. | |
| You couple that with the affront, with the emotional baggage that comes from the overthrow of the Shah and especially the taking of the American hostages at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, that visceral, hurtful humiliation that is still carried by Americans who weren't even born, weren't even alive at that time, | |
| but they're still carrying this humiliation with them as some type of badge, as some type of duty to avenge. | |
| And, you know, so you package that together and, of course, bring in the understanding of the large oil and gas reserves of Iran, the place of Iran, just in the Gulf, in the crossroads of the world, essentially. | |
| And you understand why an empire like the United States, for mercantile or commercial reasons, for reasons of national pride, or just because this is what empires do. | |
| They have to put down any threat to their primacy, even if it is just one nation standing up against them. | |
| That's one too many. | |
| And, you know, then you tack on to that, the point that you made, Judge, about the relationship between the United States and Israel and how that relationship, we can argue about that, you know, which is superior, which comes first, is sort of like a chicken and an egg type of argument. | |
| The reality is that it's a bonded relationship. | |
| It's a relationship that sees each other as being essential in assuring primacy or domination of the region. | |
| And so you put all that together. | |
| And that's why here we are throughout my life. | |
| You know, one of the earliest memories I have as a six-year-old in 1979 was of the hostage crisis. | |
| I remember the hostages coming back and being delivered back to West Point in 1980, right before my seventh birthday. | |
| And I remember all the yellow ribbons around the trees and everything. | |
| I mean, so this story, this narrative, this episode is integral to understanding the thoughts and the actions and behavior of American foreign policy establishment figures because it's been ingrained. | |
| It's part of their story. | |
| This strikes me as childish. | |
| This was nearly 60 years ago. | |
| Most of the people involved are dead. | |
| We have to avenge something that happened 60 years ago when the government itself in Iran didn't even do it. | |
| It's key for our own understanding of who we are, Judge. | |
| It was a clear to the Americans, a clear episode of good versus evil, of chaos versus order, right? | |
| Of this idea that if this is why the United States needs a world's policeman, because if we're not there, then things like this, like these crazy moolahs, are going to take power, right? | |
| This is what happens when the United States is not present and when the world rejects the United States' rules-based order, you get things like the Ayatollah. | |
| You know, let's not bring up the fact that the CIA worked with the Ayatollah for years and years before he came to power. | |
| But, you know, I mean, the importance of Iran as America's enemy has been constant. | |
| I mean, throughout, again, see, throughout my life, where I've been aware of things, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, at different times, if you asked Americans who are America's enemies, and you gave them three, Iraq would be in there, Libya would be in there, Russia would be in there, China would be in there, Venezuela, North Korea, they come in and out. | |
| But Iran, I guarantee you, Iran would be in the top three American enemies as listed by the American public and certainly by members of Congress consistently for the last 45 years or so. | |
| I agree with you. | |
| And when I have conversations with intelligent friends and the conversation veers in this direction, they always mention Iran. | |
| And then I ask what I will ask you now, how is the average middle-class American harmed today by the public policy of Iran? | |
| Right. | |
| Right, Judge. | |
| They can't answer that. | |
| They can't, let alone if you then make the extension of saying, well, about the hypocrisy, we have these policies towards Iran, this idea that we are going to not just dominate them, but punish them and change their government. | |
| These draconian sanctions, decades of military action, decades of covert sabotage, of assassinations, of cyber attacks by the Americans and by the Israelis against the Iranians. | |
| Across the Gulf, who do you have? | |
| One of America's greatest allies, the Saudis, who are more repressive, you can make the argument are more repressive, more oppressive of their people than the Iranians are. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| So the hypocrisy of this, I think, is what makes this so churlish, right? | |
| Which makes this so disgusting is the fact that here we are attempting to destroy a nation, wanting to see a nation fall into disorder, instability, chaos, essentially to repeat what has occurred in Libya, in Syria, in Iran. | |
| So bring incredible miseration and harm to the Iranian people. | |
| And at the same time, a country that has more or less similar policies is a theocracy. | |
| It's not even democracy. | |
| The Saudis are our monarchy. | |
| We're selling them F-15s and missiles and anything else they want. | |
| Chris reminds me, you know, this song, Tony Orlando's Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree, spent 11 weeks at number one on Billboard's hot 100 chart in 1973. | |
| I would think it would be a little later, but whatever. | |
| The song became a cultural phenomenon. | |
| Radio shows and DJs were sick and tired of playing it. | |
| How is the average American going to be harmed if the straits of Hormuz are closed because Donald Trump has attacked Tehran? | |
| Well, our gasoline prices, Judge, will go up five or six dollars. | |
| You know, that'll be the immediate consequences. | |
| But there'll be the continuing devaluation of the American dollar, the continuum flight from American treasuries, a continuing pursuit. of alternatives to the American monetary and financial and economic world order that will have great effects on the American people in the coming decades in terms of just a very, | |
| very decreased quality of life, which is really tough to say as more than 60 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck now. | |
| What's it going to be like we don't have the world's reserve currency, right? | |
| What's it going to be like where nations aren't lining up around the block to buy our treasuries to fund our debt? | |
| You know, I mean, so what's going to happen then when this country that doesn't really manufacture much, except for weapons, essentially, is now, you know, and is a massive importer. | |
| What's going to happen to American families when inflation is a constant seven, eight, nine percent because the dollar has crashed. | |
| We can't manufacture what people need and it costs a fortune to import them. | |
| So there's these long-range things of these, not just this immediate pending war with Iran, but the overall trajectory of American foreign policy. | |
| But there's also something else I want to bring up, Judge. | |
|
Vulnerabilities Within Borders
00:02:32
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| And my friend Rich, who's a retired Marine Corps colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, he makes a very compelling argument about this, about just how vulnerable the United States within our borders are to attack. | |
| Whether it's things that have kind of been brushed aside, not spoken of during the war on terror, they occur and then they disappear. | |
| I'm talking specifically about things like the attempted Times Square bombing, the Pulse nightclub massacre just a year ago when the guy with the Islamic State flag on his truck ran over and killed, what, a dozen, 14 people in New Orleans on New Year's Eve? | |
| You know, none of those attacks, and there's others, are carried out by men who are saying convert or die. | |
| What they're saying is that you're now getting part of this war. | |
| What they're saying is stop attacking my countries. | |
| Stop attacking my faith. | |
| Stop attacking my people. | |
| And the inability of the American people to understand that. | |
| I think most Americans still probably don't realize that the 9-11 attackers had three motivations for their attack. | |
| American support for Israel, the American sanctions and bombing of Iraq, and the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia. | |
| All pretty much solid motivations. | |
| You don't have to agree with them, but they're reasonable. | |
| And none of them are saying convert or die. | |
| And so my friend Rich's point is that we live in a country that has a lot of soft targets and is, particularly in this day and age, where you don't need the sleeper cells that have been the part of the neocon fever dreams of the last 40 years that there's Iranian or Hezbollah sleeper cells off the United States. | |
| You just need a handful of like-minded folks, people who are inspired by what they see on television, people who are inspired by Iranians being massacred by American and Israelis bombs to pick up a rifle and start doing some damage. | |
| And Rich's point is specifically about our electrical infrastructure. | |
| You know, a couple of years ago, we had a couple of guys shoot up a power station in North Carolina. | |
| They never caught these guys. | |
| And it caused great trouble for that part of North Carolina for a pretty long time. | |
| And so imagine what if just a handful of people around the country decided to, you know, grab rifles and go out and start shooting up our electrical substations. | |
| How could that cripple the United States for days, for weeks, cause long-term problems, and cause real problems for Americans here at home? | |
| You know, I mean, just one example of how we're vulnerable. | |
|
Graham's War Cry
00:06:29
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| You know, and I'm reminded, Judge, that, you know, George Orwell, writing about the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, for folks who aren't too familiar with it, that was the first real concentrated use of aircraft to attack civilians, to attack targets behind the front lines. | |
| And Orwell wrote, after being on the front line himself, Orwell wrote that, you know, I'm comforted by the evolution, by the introduction of aircraft, aircraft, of airplanes into warfare, because it brings the war behind the front lines. | |
| And I think his comment was, it'd be great to see some jingoists with bullet holes in them. | |
| You know, this idea those who support the wars the most, they're usually the furthest from the front lines, and they're usually facing no threat whatsoever. | |
| I think that's something to keep in mind as we go forward with here, that whether it's a Blumenthal or a Graham or a McConnell or a Federman, you know, these are men and women in Washington, D.C. who, by and large, are immune from the harm that they're causing with their policies overseas. | |
| Here's America's supreme jinguist. | |
| You just mentioned him. | |
| Now, Aaron Monte makes a very good observation. | |
| The fact that Senator Graham is going on Fox News and begging the president to bomb Iran probably means that he, Senator Graham, has failed to talk the president into doing this privately already. | |
| But this is tough to take, but here it is. | |
| Number five, Chris. | |
| If this regime falls, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houdis, they all go. | |
| It'd be the biggest change since the fall of the Berlin Wall. | |
| But here's one thing I know. | |
| Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan plus in my mind. | |
| Venezuela soon, Cuba. | |
| The one thing you can't do as president, talk like Reagan and act like Obama. | |
| There's no deal to be done here. | |
| These people are not trustworthy. | |
| The protesters in the street are not protesting for a better nuclear deal. | |
| They're protesting for a better life. | |
| And if they win the day, we have a chance to have friends with the people of Iran. | |
| The Ayatollah will never be our friend. | |
| He's a religious Nazi. | |
| President Trump, you said help is on the way. | |
| That has to be real. | |
| It has to be real soon. | |
| Do it, Mr. President. | |
| The people of Iran are begging you to be on their side. | |
| You have done it so good. | |
| You're a Reagan plus. | |
| This is the defining moment in your presidency. | |
| Stand by the people. | |
| The Ayatollah falls. | |
| The region changes bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall. | |
| No more international terrorists. | |
| This regime has American blood on its hands since 1979. | |
| You got the Houdis. | |
| You got Hezbollah killing Americans. | |
| Bring this regime down because the people want it down. | |
| You don't have to invade the country. | |
| But help on the way means military strikes against the infrastructure that is killing the Iranian people. | |
| I'm just pulling my hair out. | |
| This is the third time I've heard this today. | |
| This is tough to take. | |
| But this is what he is. | |
| This is what he does. | |
| And this is what the people of South Carolina must want. | |
| I don't know what he does for them, but he keeps carrying on like this. | |
| I don't know. | |
| What do you think? | |
| He's cracked in the head, Judge. | |
| He always has been. | |
| He doesn't, he has no compunction about distorting things, lying about things. | |
| I mean, he says, you know, Donald Trump, you talk like Reagan, but you act like Obama. | |
| Obama bombed a heck of a lot more countries than Reagan did. | |
| Obama bombed seven countries. | |
| Reagan did what? | |
| Grenada? | |
| Reagan smartly pulled our troops out of Lebanon rather than being stuck in a type of war that Lindsey Graham fantasizes about. | |
| You know, I mean, there was interaction, you know, I mean, so this reality that Graham and those around him live in is, as you said earlier, Judge, it's childish. | |
| It's a fabulous reality. | |
| It is something where they see themselves like children with sticks as swords attacking a tree, pretending it's a dragon. | |
| I mean, that's a type of fantasy world these people live in, where again, they by and large are immune to the consequences. | |
| And many of them, like Graham, have benefited from him. | |
| I don't have offhand what Graham's haul from the military industrial complex over the last decades has been, but I imagine it's incredibly substantial. | |
| He does have a primary challenger this year, I believe, someone running on an America first agenda. | |
| And hopefully, the good people in South Carolina will realize enough is enough with this guy. | |
| He is just simply repeating the same calls for war that he has repeated for dozens of years. | |
| And where has that gotten us? | |
| It's buried thousands of Americans in graves. | |
| It's made the world less stable. | |
| Ready made a pitch about how this is affecting us economically and how that will worsen the future because our geopolitical policies are ruinous and countries are trying to get away from us as fast as possible. | |
| And so, sticking with a guy like Graham for the people in South Carolina, you're just riding that train into an embankment. | |
| What possibility can this guy bring? | |
| What can he offer anything other than just the maniacal, megaliomaniac calls for war that he's offered for decades? | |
| And shame on the networks, the mainstream corporate media networks that keep platforming these people. | |
| But the reason why they do, Judge, of course, you know, this is because he gets people to watch. | |
| He says things that are outrageous. | |
| And so people watch him. | |
| You know, but the fact is, is that he's a senior figure in Congress. | |
| And like you said, he's taking to the airwaves to get the war that he has long wanted because all the other wars haven't been enough for him. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| How close is Charleston, South Carolina to Tel Aviv? | |
| It's in his mind, very, very obsequiously close. | |
| Matt, thank you very much. | |
| The news is often terrible, but thank you for your analysis, Seven. | |
| Thanks for sharing your time with us today. | |
| Look forward to seeing you next week. | |
| Of course. | |
| Thank you, Judge. | |
| Thank you. | |