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Aug. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
35:40
Judging Freedom LIVE with Andrew Napolitano

Judge Napolitano welcomes guests Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Jeffrey Sachs, and Doug Macgregor to a special, on-stage edition of his popular talk show Judging Freedom.

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Time Text
Pretty Close, Go Anya 00:01:07
So, welcome everyone to this special live broadcast of Judging Freedom.
Great things you're teaching.
As you can see, at the dais with us is Professor Sachs.
And you can see Colonel Douglas McGregor.
I've been privileged to have started this little podcast called Judging Freedom, with which many of you may be familiar.
By the way, we're waiting for the Blumenthal's, which happens on live television as well.
The largest reason for the success of Judging Freedom is the two gentlemen sitting at the podium right now.
They each personify intellectual honesty and personal courage, the likes of which is sorely lacking today.
Neutral Stance Risks 00:10:23
Okay.
I was going to go on and on and on until Anya Parrampal and Max Blumenthal arrive.
I understand they're pretty close, but we will start.
So we were going to talk about the depravity of American foreign policy, about which you heard a great deal in the very excellent and articulate lecture from Professor Sachs.
But we would be remiss if we did not discuss the events of yesterday as far as we understand them.
So, Colonel McGregor, even though I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this, I will start with you.
What the hell happened yesterday in Anchorage, Alaska?
Doesn't he look like Douglas MacArthur?
Except that I haven't urged nuclear war lately, so I think that's where the similarity ends.
I didn't hear the beginning of your presentation, so I don't know, Jeff, what you had to say.
I think on the positive side, we had the leaders of two important powers in the world.
I say that instead of saying a superpower and something else, because that's all nonsense now.
And they met and they talked, and it was amicable.
That was obvious.
And I think President Trump and his team were finally convinced after the meeting was over that the Russians are very consistent in their aims, consistent in what they want, and they are not going to deviate from those positions.
And I think Donald Trump was surprised that his personal charm, charisma, and so forth was not extraordinarily important to the Russian team.
Having said that, I thought the best part was the end, where Mr. Putin said, Well, you should come to Moscow.
And of course, President Trump said, Sure.
Oh, oh, I'm going to get heat for that.
And I'd say that's the biggest problem right now with President Trump, and I like him personally, but there seems to be an acute absence of courage and backbone to step away from all the nonsense and lead.
Anyway, what do you think?
Professor Sachs, has President Trump succumbed to the neocon control around him?
Professor Sachs.
Yeah, I also picked up on those last words that Trump clearly has in mind the Washington bubble rather than the issues of the conflict.
My guess is knowing most of the negotiators on both sides and the rehashing of issues for many years, that they get it and that Trump just can't figure out how to get out of this exactly.
On the U.S. side, it's not so hard because he has the American people on his side.
So this isn't trying to convey a message that is somehow contrary to American opinion.
Americans would love to hear nothing more from our president than we're not still involved in this war and we're improving our relations with Russia.
He seems, for reasons I do not fully understand, and Doug would know more than I or can help us on this, he seems to care about what Lindsey Graham thinks, for example.
Oh, good Lord.
Exactly.
Why would anyone care?
Or Blumenthal, another rather disgraceful member of the Senate, pure warmongers, no ideas, no strategy, no nothing other than to continue the war.
So I thought that those last few words, oh, I'm going to take heat for that if I go to Moscow, really showed a lot, actually.
It really showed something much bigger than the quip.
Colonel, isn't this as much Donald Trump's war as Joe Biden's?
Didn't Donald Trump arm Ukraine to the teeth during his first presidency?
I think that's indisputable.
And of course, you've heard him also say on more than one occasion, I'm responsible for providing the javelin missile systems that were so important at the outset of this war.
He's a schizophrenic.
He doesn't know which way to go.
But the biggest problem right now, and I've got to be frank about this, is the American people.
And now that I see Nassim Taleb, Mr. No Skin in the Gamed, who's just walked in here, I think it's important that everybody understand that too few Americans have any skin in the game.
So what's it all about?
The war and soldiering.
Well, I hear it all the time.
Well, no Americans have died.
Therefore, what difference does it make?
And of course, millions of people have had their lives destroyed by all of this.
Millions have been killed and wounded.
Ukraine is effectively prepared to go out of existence at this stage.
That's what people in the United States don't understand.
The lopsided exchange ratio is overwhelming.
You can't even begin to imagine it.
So what's wrong with Americans?
Well, Americans, if it doesn't affect them personally, then they don't pay much attention.
And this same problem extends to finance.
By the way, Mr. Nassim Taleb is also gold is now the reserve currency, which I happen to agree with 100%.
And I wish everybody else would come to terms with that reality as well.
I was saying these things up front, so you don't have anything to say when you get up here.
No.
In all seriousness, it's a big problem.
How do you get Americans mobilized to do something?
And I go back to World War I when the British asked the French, how many troops do you need at the outbreak of a war with Germany?
And they said, just send one and we'll make sure he's killed instantly.
Because that was the hook as far as they were concerned.
Sadly, I think that's where we are.
And Americans are about to wake up over the next few months and be shocked at what occurs financially, economically, socially, because they haven't paid much attention.
They just haven't.
Professor Sachs, I heard the President use a phrase yesterday that terrified me, Ukraine's security.
Good God, on the neocons back to that, where the United States would provide some sort of assurance, military assurance for the security of Ukraine.
Are we all the way back to where we were in 2014 under Donald Trump because he doesn't understand what's going on?
He doesn't know how we got there.
I suggest, I wasn't in the room, that he heard a lecture on the history of Ukraine from Vladimir Putin, which blew him away.
Jeff?
Ukraine's security, I think, would be assured by Ukraine's neutrality.
And that's what was protecting Ukraine before 2014.
It was the huge disaster and blunder of the United States strategy going back to, as I said, 1991 or 1945, take your pick, but we weren't stopping with neutral.
People will, any history buffs would enjoy rereading in Thucydides the Milian dialogue.
The Melian dialogue is part of the Peloponnesian War, where the Athenian tells the people of Milos, you cannot be neutral.
If you are neutral, we will kill you.
And the Milians said, but we just want to be friends with both sides.
We don't need anything bad.
And the Athenians say, no, we will kill you if you proclaim.
So, Professor Sachs, I have to say.
Just to say, because you will show all our other allies that they can be neutral also, and we don't want that to happen.
The United States hates the idea of neutrality, not because it weakens those countries, it protects them, but it hates that idea, like the Athenians did in 416 B.C.
And just to say, to my mind, if I may one more historical analogue, in 1955, Austria declared neutrality in an agreement with the Soviet Union, where the Soviet Union left eastern Austria, which it had occupied since 1945, on the basis of neutrality.
Austria became rich, prosperous, happy, never bothered again, either by the Soviet Union or by Russia, by their neutrality.
And this is what we have blown in Ukraine.
They don't need our guarantees.
just need to be neutral.
So we are joined now, now because of traffic issues, but happily joined by two of the most articulate and courageous investigative reporters in the United States of America.
Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil also reasons for the popularity of judging freedom Max, I'll go to you.
Venezuela, Argentina, and Malaya: Sovereign Claims? 00:10:31
We were going to talk in general terms about the depravity of American foreign policy, and you were going to opine on Israel.
Professor Sachs has covered that in his talk earlier today.
Your view, your take on what the hell happened yesterday in Alaska.
Well, first of all, we had babysitter issues because you wanted both of us.
Usually we get to kind of trade off.
I demanded both of you.
Just like the president and the vice president can't be in the same place at the same time, but I don't know what the hell happened yesterday.
It looked like a photo op to me, a very good photo op for Putin that legitimized him, that legitimized Russia's military campaign, that signaled that the U.S. understands that they're winning.
But I don't know what actually took place or what will take place or where they will meet next and the forces, the preponderance of force on Trump from the neoconservative camp.
I mean, I felt for so long throughout, ever since January, we're witnessing the third coming of Bush's first term.
I refer to Trump as Orange McCain these days.
So I don't actually know where this is going to go.
And I would like to weigh in quickly on what's happening with Israel because Israel has damaged the credibility of the U.S. everywhere on the world stage to the point where it's no longer taken very seriously and reduces Trump's ability to make a deal anywhere.
The rules-based order has completely collapsed.
The U.S. is supposed to be this nation that represents global liberalism in the post-World War II order, and we are supporting an ethno-supremacist colony as it enters the final stage of what it began in 1948, which is a campaign of ethnic cleansing for basically racial purity.
And every faction in Congress supports it.
The entire power structure supports it.
You see on your way here to this ballroom, military contractor after military contractor.
Our economy feasts off of it.
This is like the corridor of death out here.
Microsoft.
Microsoft's offices are right down the road in Reston.
They have two giant skyscrapers dedicated to them.
And we just learned through Israeli reporters that Microsoft's Azura Cloud is hosting Israel's database of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because they had run out of their own cloud space.
And that is the database they use to determine targeting for their AI gospel system.
In other words, their automated AI genocide system.
And Microsoft is hosting it.
So we're witnessing a complete collapse of the rules-based order.
And it starts here.
It moves through Tel Aviv.
And what we witnessed was merely a photo op.
Anya, to your field of specialty, which is Latin America.
Why did the State Department put a $50 million bounty on the popularly elected president of Venezuela two weeks ago?
Well, this is a fun question.
And to look at the follies of the Trump policy in Latin America, I think it's most illustrative to compare the way the United States under Trump has treated Venezuela, which is probably considered the great enemy in the region, versus its great ally or the one leader who has come from Latin America to celebrate with MAGA repeatedly, and that's Javier Millay in Argentina.
So there are probably a lot of people in this room that might be a fan of Javier Millay, even though my friend Daniel McAdams calls him out very early and said, watch this guy, because he's branded as a libertarian, but it might not be that simple.
And what I just want to emphasize with these two cases is that, yes, libertarianism, it might be a brand that he can use in Argentina, but really what he's implemented is just your standard IMF prescribed neoliberal package of privatization, slashing of public spending.
And did you know, by the way, that in his effort to privatize Argentina's water supply, that an Israeli company stands to benefit and may actually gain control of Argentina's water system.
So I think it's important for libertarians especially to consider national sovereignty sometimes when thinking about these policies because yes, it might look like he's cutting the budget and doing something very libertarian.
But another example of how Malay has given up Argentina's sovereignty, and I'll come back to Venezuela to contrast in just a moment, but is that last year it was actually reported in the Argentine press that a significant amount of Argentina's sovereign gold supply was shipped abroad, and nobody knows where it went.
Malay has acknowledged that he did this, but will not say where the gold was sent.
Now contrast that with Venezuela, the khuki man of the region, which yes, the judge just mentioned that the United States slapped a $50 million reward, which I think I can claim because he's in the presidential offices, Maduro.
He's working in Milfuero's Palace.
So I think I know where he is or should be able to claim that reward.
In reality, this reward came down the same week that the Trump administration actually approved Chevron operating in Venezuela.
It's been, U.S. companies have been restricted from developing and shipping U.S. Venezuelan oil to the United States since 2019 when Trump began this tour of recognizing a shadow.
Does the Trump administration still think that that grad student in Miami is the true president of Venezuela?
I've recognized a few other people since then, but in reality, they did send Richard Grinnell down there to negotiate with the president.
And now this reward is something that I think was done to appease figures like Rubio in the cabinet need to look like they're being very aggressive towards Venezuela while they move to normalize.
And just the last point I wanted to make on that point was I talked about Malay shipping his gold reserves abroad.
Well, five months before the United States recognized Juan Guaido, this now Miami grad student as the president of Venezuela, the Venezuelan government under Maduro actually lodged an official repatriation request with the Bank of England asking to bring back their sovereign gold supply.
So how convenient that five months later, the U.S. and London recognized a government that allowed them to say, well, actually, we don't know who is the rightful owner of this gold.
We have to keep it here in our Bank of England indefinitely while we figure this out, even though there's no question of who runs a central bank in Caracas.
So I just wanted to compare those two in the brief time.
I think the gold is a way of illustrating what it means.
If you're an enemy of the United States, you might have some sovereign claim to your resources, and that's the issue.
Whereas if you're friends with the United States, you can just sell your country off to international finance and be very pro-Israel along the way.
And that's kind of what Malay has done to win favor in Washington.
Thank you, Anya.
Colonel McGregor, what are the dangers of 750 military installations around the world in 80 different countries owned, operated, manned, and funded by the Pentagon?
Well, I hate to correct you, but I think it's a little over 850.
Happy to be corrected.
Well, I can't add too much more to what Jeff Sachs has said, and his point is accurate.
In most cases, these things are a legacy of the Cold War.
And if you go back and look at the original executive order signed by the president at the time, it talked explicitly about maintaining the necessary logistical lines of communication and support bases so that we could, in fact, respond to the Soviet threat or the threat of, at that point, what people thought was global communism, wherever it manifested itself.
So if you go back and look at those original bases, some of those can still be justified, at least in terms of if you want to logistically try and support yourself.
But you go to a place like the Pacific, there are only two or three places where you can stockpile a great deal of fuel and ammunition, water, and so forth.
All three, with one exception, there are two that are islands.
The other is a very large body of landmass.
I don't want to tell you where they are because in theory I would be violating some important security information.
But if you look at those three locations, they could be annihilated in the first opening minutes of any war that you might fight with anybody, in which case the entire fleet can't operate.
People don't understand that in 1941 after Pearl Harbor, the whole U.S. fleet, which according to the war plans was supposed to move decisively east in the direction of the Philippines, withdrew everywhere.
Well, we only had 11 refuelers in the fleet, 11 tankers, effectively, that could refuel the fleet.
And the chief of naval operations says, we don't have enough.
We can't do it.
What I'm trying to tell you is that we can't do most of what we have planned to do today because the world has changed.
Precision, guided missiles, overhead surveillance, all of these things militate against the style of warfare that we like, which is, or we think we like, which is World War II.
But most people don't even know what happened during the Second World War, where they would rethink their assumptions.
So most of those bases can be eliminated very quickly without any loss of security.
Some you will want to retain.
There's no question about it.
And the countries in which they sit, in many cases, may be happy to have them.
But the point is, it's time to sit down and look at the 850.
And I'd be very surprised if you couldn't cut that down to about 120, personally.
Max, what's the best I can do?
Total Arms Embargo Needed 00:02:26
Max, what would it take to stop Netanyahu's slaughter?
It would take a total arms embargo, and it would happen tomorrow.
And what we're hearing is from the Europeans, statehood for the Palestinians.
Where is the state going to be when Gaza is fully ethnically cleansed?
And the West Bank, the Israelis are just authorizing settlement activity in E1, which will fully close off any part of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
So it's empty bluster.
We'll give the Palestinian Authority more power in the UN, perhaps.
And then we see Bernie Sanders actually finally offering, putting forward an arms embargo.
Ro Khanna is doing it in the House.
They're getting very little support.
I think 23 Democrats supported it.
The rest of the Senate opposed it.
And long term, it will take registering APAC as a foreign agent, which Thomas Massey is pushing.
and what we need to do because this isn't about Netanyahu It's about the Zionist movement.
And it's about a foreign bribery network in the capital.
As Grant Smith has documented, APAC grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was itself funded by the Jewish Agency, which is an Israeli institution, foreign money, and they circumvented the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
The Fulbright Committee was basically shut down with JFK's assassination.
We just released an interesting piece about James Angleton and not only his involvement in handling Oswald, but also his involvement in basically setting up the Mossad and helping Israel steal nuclear secrets.
So what we need is a bipartisan coalition to shut down APAC.
It's understood on both sides that this is really the heart of the issue.
But the Democrats are afraid to touch this massey.
Look at who he's going up against.
Who's putting up the money for the super PAC?
It's Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer, two of the top Zionist billionaire donors in the country.
So it's clear what the stakes are.
This is about money and shutting down the financial feeding tube of Israel and the U.S. will end this program overnight, but it starts also with an arms embargo.
Anya, what is it like being married to somebody who risks his life every day to get the truth out?
China's Peace Party Solution 00:10:19
It's fun.
Ask Max's new friend, Congressman Fine, the poor sign Congressman Fine, who openly said starvation is a legitimate weapon of war, as if that isn't a war criminal in the making.
As if he's ever missed a meal.
Professor Sachs, does Mossad spy on the President of the United States?
Does Mossad buy the President?
I said spy, but buy, buy might be another question that you can answer.
Buy, buy, spy, suborn, and blackmail, probably all of them.
I don't think that there's a single instrument necessarily that's decisive.
Others here would probably know better, but they're all over this, no question.
And it is a murder ink institution at first.
I'm going to give you each two minutes to say whatever you'd like.
The freedom, the judgment freedom audience is enormous.
This audience is very appreciative.
We are running a little bit over, and I'm getting sort of these, if he were Italian, it would be called Malocchio, but it's coming from McAdams.
You got to stop, Judge.
You got to stop.
But two minutes to each of you on the depravity of American foreign policy, starting with Anya.
Well, right now it's definitely not great, but I try to remain hopeful because one area that I focused on in my reporting, in fact, two years ago when I was here, I think I discussed my trip to the BRICS Summit in South Africa.
And while I was there, I was speaking with the officials who represented South Africa, India, China, Russia.
Of course, I'm probably forgetting one of the BRICS nations at that.
But they were actually open to the United States when I would ask them, and they were talking about their goals of multipolarity and cooperation, whether or not they could ever imagine the United States joining a group like BRICS.
And I think if we got over some of our ties to our imperial mentality and decided to cooperate with the world like an adult, that we would find that these organizations and these groups aren't actually formed in opposition to us, but just to create a different kind of world that we could participate in, viewing other countries like China, Russia, India, South Africa as equals or partners.
And so I just like to try and emphasize as much as we'll all emphasize where we're going wrong.
I want to also say that there's hope.
The rest of the world doesn't want to just cast the United States aside.
We're always going to be a powerful, influential nation.
But I think it's time that we did something positive with that and actually move toward cooperation and peace.
But I'll let the other three just trash the policy.
This is going to sound worse than it is.
Max, two minutes on depravity.
i've never really been a two-minute man but i'll try uh what the next uh I'm just looking at a Politico headline just to follow up on your question to Jeff.
Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House.
This is Politico 2019.
Remember that?
I mean, some of you probably don't remember it because it wasn't a scandal.
The scandal was Trump, Putin, Putin, Russia, Trump.
It was just that non-stop.
Israel spies on this country more than any other country.
It's industrial-grade spying.
And another reason that many politicians, elected officials are afraid of taking this on is the fear of assassination.
Let's face it, especially an executive.
Beyond that, look at what the U.S. has done in Syria.
You want to talk about depravity?
Look at the slaughter of the Druze, the slaughter of the Alawites, over 10,000 massacred in just a week by al-Qaeda bandits, many of them from Uzbekistan and Chechnya and other countries.
And the U.S. then sends in lobbyists to try to arrange the normalization of Syria's al-Qaeda government with Israel and legitimizes Jolani in the midst of this massacre.
And you know who's next?
It's the Christians.
And we are signing off on that entire campaign, all because Syria has been neutralized as a potential threat to Israel.
And they're starting to arrest Palestinian resistance leaders.
And Israel's still bombing Syria.
We are pushing Lebanon towards civil war right now, demanding Hezbollah disarm.
They will not do so.
The United States government wants Lebanon in a civil war.
And I was just interviewing an analyst who's a friend of ours from Iran in Tehran yesterday.
And everyone there is bracing for another round in which Israel will inevitably drag the United States into another military conflict with Iran.
They consider it absolutely inevitable.
It could happen by the end of this month or September.
How does this serve us?
How does this advance American interests in any way?
Why aren't we even having that debate?
We're not.
And this is just talking about one region.
Going back to your initial question, just to wrap up about this summit in Alaska.
Well, had there been a peace deal, a durable peace deal, it would have been done with the consent of the military leadership and the intelligence apparatus so that the U.S. could move on to Iran and then China.
And that's the depravity there, is that we are in a state of permanent war until we face a real political revolution in this country.
The kind of revolution that, while I'm not a libertarian, I still carry in my communist card.
the kind of revolution that Ron Paul was putting forward in his presidential campaigns on foreign policy.
I don't really have a card.
Colonel, is Donald Trump free to do something against the will of the deep state?
Short answer is no.
And I would say I agree with everything that's being said.
But I would point out that I do not expect anything to change dramatically in any particularly positive direction until the financial system collapses and we go into a serious crisis.
That's simple truth.
That's it.
It all runs on money.
When the fake money runs out, then things will change because we'll pull everything overseas back to the United States and we will focus internally.
I don't know what the answer is.
Are we going to become embroiled in a larger scale war that will involve Russia and China, as well as Iran, and potentially other states before the collapse?
Because if that happens, that's unfortunate.
I would prefer to see the collapse first, because the collapse would then prevent us from committing suicide.
But I see no evidence right now for anything changing without that particular event.
Professor Sachs, when you were.
Sorry.
When you were talking about the absurdity of suggesting war with China, I thought of my former Fox colleague who runs the Department of Defense standing in Japan three weeks ago, shaking his fist at China, almost welcoming war.
Why do they do that?
I'll ask you.
I'm not going to answer that.
I have no clue.
Maybe, ladies and gentlemen, we need-I know it's naive, but we do need a peace party.
The politics we have will not solve this, neither party.
We need a peace party because that would have a very strong majority of the American people.
They would understand it.
They would understand that this would make us safer.
They would understand that, as Doug is saying, we are 100 percent of GDP in debt with a trajectory which is mind-boggling, and we've just raised the budget deficit to another percentage point, so it will be 7% of GDP in this coming fiscal year.
We can't afford what we're doing.
It's not safe.
It's not prudent.
It's not moral.
It's not practical.
It gains us no benefits whatsoever.
And what you've heard from everybody is that it's not even hard to stop these conflicts.
In fact, we've all used the expression in a day, and it's literally true, because these are artificially prolonged conflicts.
These are not conflicts that have some existential, unbendable will.
These are choices that are terrible choices made for particular interests and for particular reasons that don't serve the American people.
I don't love financial crises.
I've used to make my career working in places with hyperinflation.
You are right about the dangers, but I wouldn't relish it.
I don't hope we could get to this before we hit that stage.
So I'm still hoping that we could figure out a way, you guys figure it out, how could we have a true political movement of peace?
Because if you go through that optic, all the rest can fall into place.
Thank you.
Colonel McGregor's Insight 00:00:52
You will hear later today from Anya Parampol, Max Blumenthal, and, of course, Colonel McGregor.
But let me thank my superb and excellent panel.
They are all professional colleagues and personal friends, and they are top of the line when it comes to intellectual honesty and personal courage.
The judging freedom live audience at this moment is truly enormous.
And I thank those of you who are watching live.
We will continue to live stream the balance of the program because I'll be on a plane, but I'm dying to hear what the great Colonel McGregor, doesn't he look like Douglas MacArthur, that the great Colonel McGregor will have to say this afternoon?
God love you.
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