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Feb. 9, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:31
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : What to Do With a Lawless President
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Time Text
Undeclared Wars Commonplace 00:02:51
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 Adjudging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, February 10th, 2026.
Colonel Karen Kwatkowski will be with us in just a moment.
What to do about a lawless president?
But first this.
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Colonel Kwatkowski, Karen, it's always a pleasure.
Why is it in modern day America, no matter who you vote for for president, you get John McCain.
No matter who wins, the wars are fought.
The debt increases, regulations multiply.
And now, adding to that, we have a police state.
Why do we always get that?
Why do we continue to get that?
Government's Shadow Expansion 00:15:45
Well, the reason, I don't know for sure, but clearly the voice of the populace is not reflected there because none of those things, but let's say a police state.
I don't believe that was on the ballot.
I don't think either candidate and none of the lesser candidates for president in this past election or any other election have ever said, we're going to tighten up that police state for you people.
None of them said that because we don't want that.
None of them said they were going to inflate away the purchasing power of the dollar.
None of them said we would ensconce paedophiles in high levels of government.
They all said the opposite of that and that's what the people wanted, but we didn't get it.
So that means we don't, we the people don't rule.
Our voice is not only not heard, but it is really irrelevant in the current system.
So and somebody else's voice is relevant.
Someone else, people that we don't know, that club that the big club that we're not in, those folks get what they want.
So we have a big problem.
Would that be the club some of whose members have been revealed in the Epstein files?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think it's, you know, for the American side, for the people in Washington and New York, they've been pretty well sheltered from it because Trump has wanted to shelter his friends from this kind of exposure.
But what we're seeing, you know, with some of the European countries and even I think there was a guy in Dubai, their names being exposed here have been enough for these folks to be dismissed or to willingly step down from their leadership and political positions because of shame and because of fear of real accountability coming.
And I think that's really what we should see here in this country.
But we haven't so far seen him.
I don't think we've seen anybody step down yet.
But Massey is going after the thug.
I call him the thug.
He looks like a thug, but the commerce secretary, Ludwig, I forget his name.
Lutnick.
Let Nick.
Let Nick.
Letnick is in a little bit of trouble.
And if he had any character, he would step down.
And so, of course, would Kash Patel.
I mean, what a shame.
What an embarrassment Kash Patel has turned out to be.
And he's lied to Congress.
So on this issue, probably on other issues, but we know that Kash Patel has lied to Congress on the issue of Epstein and some of the things that were going on and some of the things that the FBI knew and denied that they knew.
So, you know, but we haven't seen them step down yet.
I think we're going to.
I do think we're going to.
Well, we may see the Prime Minister of Great Britain step down, not because of his personal behavior, but because of his poor judgment in appointing a very close friend of Epstein to become U.S. ambassador or British ambassador to the United States.
I mean, this guy might very well have been giving, these are the allegations, giving Epstein British government secrets when he was the head of the trade board about the prices at which the British government was going to buy gold so that Epstein could cash in on that.
You know, if freedom consists in the basic rights and the Bill of Rights, to think as you wish, to say what you think, to travel as you wish, the right to be left alone.
Who or what is the oppressor?
Where did the oppressor come from?
Who interferes with these rights that we all know are being interfered with?
I mean, the government has an office to go after people if you say something.
This office is in the White House, by the way.
If you say something that the people that run this office, the guy that runs it is an Orthodox rabbi, that he thinks is anti-Semitic, not anti-Netanyahu's government, not anti-Zionist, but anti-Semitic.
And the government's going to come after you for this.
But how did that happen?
Yeah.
Well, we have Trump as president and all the people around him see things through the lens of Zionism.
And in that perspective, they may not even, I don't think Trump and even this rabbi in particular feels it is wrong for them to silence free speech in America because they're so close to the particular issue of pro-Zionism that they can't see it any other way.
And that is kind of understandable.
What's not understandable and what we need to fix as Americans is we tolerate this.
We put up with it.
So many people, and again, we can think back to the uh we had a great lesson with the COVID era with the COVID lockdowns and the free freedom of speech violations, the shutdowns of free speech and association that were mandated by the federal government.
And the people, not all of us, of course, but the majority of the people submitted.
They submitted in order to keep their government jobs.
They submitted in order to not be pointed out in a group.
And the larger people who were going along with it kind of had this good feeling that they were in a majority.
They were in the righteous sides.
He's not wearing a mask.
He's bad.
We all have masks.
We're good.
This is what Etienne Labonte had to talk, you know, this is why he talked about this, you know, in the 1500s.
He said, how can a small number of arrogant, ill-informed tyrants, which is what I would say live in Washington, and I would include Trump in this at this point, how can they exercise such power over the masses when clearly they don't have that power.
And even if they killed two or three, they could never kill everybody.
They simply do not have the power to mandate our behavior in anything else.
But we have bought into this idea that somehow we're invested in our government.
And this is why, you know, your opening now says, maybe Jefferson was right.
Should we, when a government becomes wrong and does not serve the people, should we alter or abolish it?
Absolutely, we should alter or abolish it.
But you don't get taught this in government schools.
We are taught to submit.
We are taught to venerate Washington.
But we're learning not to.
I mean, Epstein is helping us a great deal learn not to venerate Washington.
I mean, clearly, they are not just arrogant tyrants, but they are perverts, many of them.
And they're also liars.
They are self-seeking liars.
You know, you mentioned that the UK, the prime minister there may have to step down because he showed poor judgment.
He did not show poor judgment in hooking up his people with Epstein and Epstein being hooked up with everybody in Washington, Israel, and the Saudi Arabia and all the connections that he had.
That wasn't poor judgment.
The poor judgment was doing it and not realizing this was all going to come out.
Okay.
Yeah.
They didn't, they have no shame.
They didn't like being caught.
But we've caught them now.
I think that it's clear something has changed with what we're seeing now.
Here's what one of the chatters writes: The Wizard of Oz is 78 years old.
Today, if Dorothy were to encounter men with no brains, no hearts, and no courage, she wouldn't be in Oz.
She'd be in the Congress.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Nicely.
But I see that we are both fans of Thomas Paine and H.L. Mencken.
I got to read two of their quotes from your fabulous piece at judgsnap.com, Lou Rockwell, and elsewhere.
Are we ready for weeks where decades happen?
The argument is that sometimes the world can change so rapidly.
Here's Mencken.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.
But you and I agree with that.
I mean, that's basically what you just said.
But what men and women need is the courage to articulate that.
Here's Thomas Paine, also from your piece.
Absolute governments, though the disgrace of human nature, have this advantage with them.
They are simple.
If the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs.
They know likewise the remedy.
What is the remedy when the police state springs from the head of the government?
It could be bloody.
I'm sorry.
I'm not sure that it won't require some violence, but certainly what it requires is resistance.
In all of the ways that Americans and the people living in this country can resist.
And I don't want to give a lot of too much credibility to the anti-ICE movement.
You know, they see themselves as resisting, you know, the no kings movement and that kind of thing.
But most of them really don't want no kings.
They want their king.
And they don't really oppose a federal police force like ICE in their community.
They just don't like what ICE is doing right now.
But ICE could change its name.
The federal police can choose a new topic that many on the left, unfortunately, might find a good thing.
Like maybe the federal police can come and collect guns, or maybe the federal police can come around and confiscate gold.
I mean, like FDR did.
So I don't think they're consistent in their value system, but I do credit them for at least resisting.
But I think most of us, and this is particularly MAGA, because the MAGA folks and the conservatives and the independents and a lot of people who are, I think, are thoughtful about what this country was designed to be.
It was designed to be free.
It was designed to be a place of opportunity, a republic that was reflective of the values in the country.
So these folks who think a little bit are going to need to think just a little bit harder about how they can resist what's coming.
Not just what already is happening, but what is coming, because it is coming.
So how do we do this?
I mean, there's a thousand different ways.
There's a million ways to resist.
We can pay fewer taxes.
We can one thing that people advocate, you know, we can have a second home outside of the country and a second passport.
Nothing wrong with preparing.
But we can also speak out and we can demand that our local governments, I mean, I had a conversation just the other day with my plumber and what were we talking about?
Well, kind of the same thing here.
And I said, you know, the sheriff, our local county sheriff, any person's county sheriff is the very important person because he is a constitutional officer.
He's bound to obey the Constitution.
So, and that's against all comers.
So if the federal government comes down and says to the county, we have to do this thing and you, Mr. Sheriff, have to go arrest these people because, you know, we really need you to put the stamp of approval.
He needs to say no.
He or she, those sheriffs need to say no.
And we have elections.
Most of the places elect their sheriffs.
So there's a place that you can say, we can talk about how we are going to resist, how are we going to deal with these things.
We need our local representatives to do it.
Most of them won't.
They're just as bad.
I don't know how it is with your local government.
Our local government is almost a little mini me of Washington, D.C.
They vote.
They run on one thing.
And then when they get in office, they do precisely the opposite.
I'll give you an example of how cozy they are.
We have six supervisors in our county.
Five are Republicans.
One is a Democrat.
And they elected the Democrat to be the chairman.
So this is the, you know, he's a nice guy.
I don't mean to say he doesn't deserve to be the chairman, but the very fact that they did that reflects where they put importance.
And importance is how government people get along with other government people, right?
So that's the club.
And I think it's very important not just to recognize that we're not in it, but to actually don't try to be in it.
Let's try not to be in that club.
You know, I think so many things would be different if we would simply not worship government.
Wow.
But we have a president who kills people.
He kills people in the speedboats and fishing boats in the Caribbean without any evidence and he justifies his masked, unidentified ICE thugs shooting a lady in the head rather than getting out of the way of her car and shooting a guy, a nurse in the back nine times.
Neither of them presented a threat to anybody.
What do we do about this?
How does this end?
I'm going to quote you now.
How do we end this before it ends us?
Yeah, well, I think the first thing is to recognize that it will end us, and it is the end of the idea of America.
If America has a federal police that can wear masks and that can behave and act with impunity, if they can shoot you nine times after they've disarmed you, okay, and you're on the ground, which is what they did with the second guy they shot in Minneapolis, then if they can do that and we tolerate that, then we have lost America.
This isn't the country we grew up in.
So accept that.
I think we need to accept that we are losing what makes America great and what makes America unique.
So once you realize that, then you might make different decisions.
Is it a good thing to pay your taxes?
Not really.
How do you avoid paying taxes?
I don't know.
Okay.
Maybe you earn less, but whatever you do, we should not work for government.
And I'll tell you, just on the tax thing, because obviously tax season is coming up, we are the dairy cattle.
We are milked by the government.
We are farmed by the government.
They're borrowing.
DC's borrowing, Trump's borrowing, this massive, uncontrollable increase in the money supply by saying that, oh, well, we have the assets.
Oh, but we have the assets.
Actually, the federal government does not have those assets.
The American people have those assets, but they count them as government assets.
So if that's not the America that was designed, that's not the America that I think our grandparents lived in, but it certainly is the America that we live in today.
And that's not right.
Okay, so I think recognizing, and it's not fun, it's not enjoyable to recognize that many of your fantasies about what this country is and what it stands for are just that.
They are fantasies.
Government's Hidden Crimes 00:09:20
They aren't real today.
If they were real before, I can't say, but they are certainly no longer valid.
So it's basically you have to wake up.
And then once you wake up, every person, we all have different situations and different networks.
Every person can do something to either restore what they think is important to be restored in this country, or they can kind of check out if they want to and not be a part of it.
And there's nothing wrong with, and look, how many people don't vote in the presidential elections?
We say, oh, 80,000 people voted or 80 million people, 66 million voted, whatever it was, you know, showed up.
Oh, how wonderful.
We had the turnout.
What they don't celebrate is the fact that 50 million people that could vote don't vote.
Why don't they vote?
Because they've checked out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
The government becomes very nervous when you don't vote.
And if you look at, if you look at the tyrannies around the world, the mandate voting, right?
In Iraq, 100% of the people voted for Saddam Hussein.
They had a very good system and they voted for Saddam Hussein.
The Soviet Union held elections on a regular basis.
Countries that don't have the popular mandate, they are even more concerned about making it look like they do have a popular mandate.
So by not voting, by not participating, that is a thing that people can do.
But we have to wake up to where we are today.
And I think we're very close to, you know, I hate to use the word civil war.
It's not really going to be a civil war, but we are very close to the end of the American experiment.
Isn't ICE just the successor of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who infamously did this?
Oh my goodness.
Broke into that house to kidnap Elien Gonzalez with a machine gun in his hands.
That's the successor organization to ICE that happened under Janet Reno as the Attorney General and Bill Clinton was president.
And then George W. Bush just changed the name of the group to immigration and customs enforcement.
That, of course, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.
And unfortunately, that little boy, that little baby, is now a grown man, happily living in and supportive of the government that his parents attempted to escape him from in Cuba.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same, Karen.
You wrote this masterpiece about it.
And there is some very, very provocative language in here.
I have to read the last paragraph.
Wait till Pete Hegseth hears this.
I'll make sure I send it to him.
All right.
We have accepted the unacceptable for decades.
It ends with us or it will end us.
The stark, acute, and uncompromising reality is here.
If we are decent men and women, 2026 is the time to spit in our hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Whose throats should we begin slitting, or is this just a metaphor?
Yeah, well, you know, I'm quoting H.L. Mencken on purpose because I don't want them to come and arrest me because I thought of this great idea.
Mencken wrote this in the 20s and 30s.
So, you know, I'm quoting him.
That's my defense.
So Pete doesn't, Secretary of War me out of my existence here.
But, you know, the enemy, I think, is very clear in the sense of the elites.
And I say the elites, it's the people that are exercising power over us.
It's the people who support the state behaving in an uncanny manner, which certainly is that picture from 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when Clinton was president.
You know, and also the Waco shootout.
That was also under Clinton.
Very much a use of military help and military tactics in a domestic law enforcement scenario.
And, you know, 30 years ago, people talked about this as being bad.
Well, now the only difference is these guys do it everywhere to everybody and they wear masks.
So it's gotten worse.
It hasn't gotten better.
And that's what you have to wake up to because whatever we did before, whatever pushback that the American people gave 35 years ago, it's not working.
Okay.
That's not working.
So we really need to think about what is going to work.
And certainly, I think we have a great opportunity with the Epstein exposure of these files.
Certainly Thomas Massey is the patriot of this country.
He is rallying people to criminality at the top.
And it's criminality against children, which I think is obviously gets people involved, but it is also government criminality.
It's the nature of government to hide its crimes, to hold itself above the law.
We're tired of it.
We're sick of it.
And this may be our opportunity to do something about it.
And I hope, I mean, we have to.
I don't hope that we do.
We will.
Yeah.
Here's a congresswoman that I really never heard of before the other day, Melissa Stansbury from either Arizona or New Mexico, making a very, very strong case.
Watch this, cut number 10.
Let us be clear that Donald Trump is not only named thousands of times in the latest release from the Department of Justice, he is named over 38,000 times in the files that were released two weeks ago alone.
And we know that that only represents half of the files that the Department of Justice has in its possession, including files that were used for direct investigations of perpetrators, people who committed crimes, people who were co-conspirators in those crimes, and individuals who knew of those crimes.
We know that there are multiple administration officials, including Howard Lutnick, Elon Musk, who served as the appointee for the Doge efforts in the White House.
We know that the Secretary of Navy, we know that Steve Bannon, we know that there are more than three dozen associates, family members, and individuals directly associated with Donald Trump named in those files.
Now, there are now at least nine or ten other countries across the world that have opened investigations or forced their leaders to step down because of their mere association with Jeffrey Epstein.
And the United States government is engaged in an active cover-up of the largest sex trafficking scandal and influence peddling scandal in the history of the United States.
And Donald Trump is right at the center of it.
She has represented New Mexico in the House of Representatives since 2021.
It's a very sad and dangerous, it's a very dangerous situation, Karen.
Very, very dangerous situation if this stuff is not dialed back.
I don't know how this ends.
The Republicans are terrified of Trump.
I don't know what they whisper to each other in private, but publicly, they just don't want to lift a finger to stop him.
There's a movement in the House against beer handed by Thomas Massey to vote to disapprove of the president's imposition of tariffs without congressional authorization.
This is civics 101.
This is pretty basic.
Instead of trying to persuade people to vote against it, what is the Republican leadership trying to do?
Prevent the vote from coming to the floor, blocking the ability of members of the House to vote on this.
That's their obeisance to Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Yep.
And it's not acceptable.
It's not acceptable anymore.
It's intolerable to the American people.
And I don't care if it's Democrats or Republicans.
We are all agreed that this is intolerable.
We're not going to tolerate it.
And I think really just it's one thing to say we're not going to tolerate it.
And I would like to see that translated into the lives and actions of 250 million Americans, because if that happens, we won't tolerate it.
You know, one of the excuses Trump has is, well, or not Trump, but the FBI guy.
Well, if we release these files, the whole, if we actually punish these people, the whole of government will, the institution of the United States government will fall.
It's like it deserves to fall if this is what it does.
And it's going to fall anyway.
Let it fall for this reason.
Now is the time to act.
And I think a lot of people are just totally disgusted by what they're hearing and seeing.
Evil In Washington 00:00:28
And they recognize that the evil in Washington and the evil throughout that has permeated throughout many, many parts of our federal government has got to be dealt with.
We're done.
Colonel Kwakowski, thank you very much.
Pleasure.
No matter how sad these matters are, your intellectual honesty and personal courage always shines through, Karen.
Thank you very much.
All the best.
Thank you, Judge.
Sure.
We'll see you next week.
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