So we have with us Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, thank you for being here. Thank you, Gerald. Thank you for your generous introduction. It’s always a pleasure, no matter what we’re talking about, which seems to be getting worse every week. It’s always a pleasure to work with you. Yeah, it is getting worse every week, and it’s right in front of everybody’s eyes for all to see. And you have an article that’s coming out tomorrow, and it’s called American hubris, for they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.

Hosea 87. The debacle of the nearly 20 year American occupation at Afghanistan continues in Joe Biden’s America today. The disaster began when President George W. Bush, stung deeply by the intelligence that he failed to heed, thus enabling the attacks of 911 to take place unimpeded, convinced the American people in Congress and most of our allies that the bad guys who ran Afghanistan in the early part of the century needed to be taught a lesson, whether they personally enabled or facilitated the 911 attacks or not.

And you go on to say more about George Bush, and again, 88% of the people believe this little clown. Boy, we’re going to get that guy, Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. That’s a quote. Yeah, well, the reason I wrote the article is because the $2 trillion spent on Afghanistan, the 20 year occupation, the 850,000 deaths, resulted in the same mindset, occupying and taking over Afghanistan after American troops left.

As we tried to kick out, it was as if American hubris was blind to the efforts by British troops in the 19th century. About 20,100 thousand Soviet troop deaths in the 20th century, both in efforts to bend the Afghan culture to their will, the British to the west, the Russians to their will. So under the guise of spreading democracy, an impossible task, Bush invaded. The invasion was not grounded on a declaration of war.

We had no ability to declare war on the country of Afghanistan because that country’s government did not invade us. Instead, the Congress and the Bush Cheney regime came up with a novel idea, a monstrosity utterly unknown to the Constitution called an AUMF, an authorization for use of military force. It doesn’t name a target. It doesn’t name an entity. It has no end. It can be used anytime you want.

So Bush’s successors have used it to kill people who were infants at the time it was enacted. It purports to authorize the American president to kill anybody he wants that arguably had anything to do with 911, even if they were babies at the time of 911. That monstrosity manifests the mindset of American hubris, that we are the essential country. JOe Biden’s phrase that we can spread our Americanism wherever we want to go.

Before we started this show this morning, you read something to me I hadn’t heard, which is a quote from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which mimics this very theme and condemns people like you and I and the hundreds of thousands listening to us now who want, if you, I think you do know, know I got blacklisted from, I used to be on Oprah, the Today Show, Good Morning America, everybody, ABC, CBS, NPR.

I was on everybody all the time. And then USA Today, when it was a big newspaper, used to run my top trends every year. And we come out with the top trends in December for what’s going on in January. So this was the headline in USA Today in December 2000. 2001 won’t be our year. Trendseer says, I warned that a wave of anti Americanism was sweeping the globe and Americans wouldn’t be safe at home or abroad.

In the Bronx, we used to say, had to say, payback’s a bitch. People forget about what America did in Bosnia, what they did, yugOslavia, what Bill Clinton killed over 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. And his secretary of state boasted about it. Yeah. She was asked by Leslie Stall on 60 MiNutes, is the price of 500,000 Iraqi children dead worth what Bill Clinton did with the sanctions and the war against Iraq? And she said, yes, it is.

So we saw this coming. So I got blacklisted because just what you said. I said, listen, if the Russians couldn’t pull it off, if the British couldn’t pull it off at the height of the British Empire into the valley of Death row, the 600. Correct. And there was another one, a cat by the name of Alexander the Great. He couldn’t defeat them either. I said, if they can’t defeat them, what do you think America is going to, how are we going to win when we haven’t won a war since World War Two? Why, you anti American? Why, how dare you say that? That was basically the attitude I got blacklisted from everybody.

I didn’t get back on until I came out with. I took the domain name out for the panic of eight in 2007, in November, and said the thing was going to crash. That’s when I got back onto the media because it was about money. And that’s what they wanted to hear about. Right? So what you’re saying about what’s going on and people also, again, we wrote about this, judge, in detail in the Trends Journal.

Afghans said, listen, let’s talk about this. We had nothing to do with it. Bush’s words were, there are no time to talk. And they were saying that the reason we were invading Afghanistan was because Osama bin Laden was hiding there and they were protecting him. That’s about as realistic as Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and therefore we must invade Iraq. This is the reason that Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes, for killing human beings under false pretenses and dragging the United States into wars under false write.

You write here in your article that the gambit born of Bush’s hubris and nurtured by Obama’s incompetence. You mean the Nobel piece of crap Prize winner, the troop surge in Afghanistan? Or that guy who lied into office as being a peace candidate? That Obama has to go, Assad has to go. That Obama was one of the worst foreign policy errors in modern American history. With all due respect, judge, you forgot about Vietnam.

How many American soldiers were killed? Nearly 60,000, 52,000, 500,000 rotated through and more than an 11% came home in body bags. Yes. You keep going on and you say all this killing, unless in self defense. Killing for empire is not self defense, defies the natural law, which teaches that all aggression is illicit and every individual person, American or not, enjoys the invoiable right to live. Where are all the religions out there? Where are the Baptists? The 7th day Adventists waiting for the 8th day? The Mormons, the Quakers? Yeah, the religions have lockjaw.

Where are the preachers for peace? Look what’s going on in the world. Where is everybody? We are among the few. The Scott Ritters, the Colonel McGregor’s, the Phil Geraldis, and a number of us, the Norman Ficklesteins that are calling for peace. Where are the rest of the people? I don’t know. I’m not a fan of the pope, as you know, but he did condemn the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

And of course, the Israelis sent their ambassador to protest, and the Pope, to his credit, did not back down. I mean, that’s about all he can do. He doesn’t have an army. But basically what you say is correct. The outwardly overtly religious leadership is silent about Ukraine and about Gaza. And about this quote you’re going to read from Lloyd Austin, the secretary of Defense, the shareholder and former board member of Raytheon, who’s arguing for the type of bellicosity that has produced the blowback that produced 911.

Yeah, and I’ll get to that. And again, going back to the Pope, how come the pope isn’t saying, I want all you Catholic people to stand up and protest in what’s going on in Gaza as they’re slaughtering people in front of everybody’s eyes. Right. Nearly 17,000 people killed. Well, more civilians killed in Gaza in eight weeks than killed in Ukraine in 18 months because the Israeli government, the Netanyahu regime, is engaged in an act of genocide and Putin is engaged in a serious military endeavor to stop the Nazis from bombing the Russian cultural people in eastern Ukraine.

And of course, the United States somehow still supports Ukraine. The Congress will debate this week or next, 68 billion that old Joe wants to give to Ukraine. Even Lindsay Graham, who never met somebody else’s blood that he didn’t want to shed, is having misgivings about it. Let’s not forget another 13 billion to the Israelis. We’ve given them so far, 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells, and basically said, oh, here they are, but don’t use them, which is absurd.

Absurd. Tony Blinken has no credibility whatsoever. Joe Biden has no credibility whatsoever. Again, it’s American bombs that are slaughtering innocent Palestinian people. Over 40% of those kill their children. 30% are women. It’s American bombs destroying, wiping out the place under the BS line. We’re doing this to get Hamas. No, you’re doing it to steal more land. Again, that’s what al Sisi, the president of Egypt, is saying, that they want to do this to get the Palestinians out so they could keep taking more and more land.

And other people are saying that. That’s kind of obvious why the United States doesn’t recognize that is because of the domestic American politics and the influence that the Israeli government has on domestic American politics. Now, when you say things like that, you risk being called anti Semitic, which is, of course, absurd. It doesn’t make sense linguistically. And this has nothing to do with anybody’s religion. This has to do with the overreaction of the Netanyahu government.

Do you know what Netanyahu’s approval rating is amongst the Israeli voters? 4%. 4% it makes Joe Biden look like Ronald Reagan by comparison. I want to read to you what this guy, Lloyd Austin, a murderer of the first degree. This is the guy that brags what he did and how many people when I was in know, running the show slaughtering innocent people that did nothing against America. That Lloyd Austin, same letter, Lloyd Austin, yes.

He goes on to say, and again, this is the former Raytheon board member and Raytheon is the second largest defense contractor in America. He goes on to know every generation, some Americans prefer isolation to engagement. Engagement. What are you talking, what are you talking to? Engagement. You mean war? He goes on. He means killing. Yeah. And they try to pull up the draw bridge. They try to kick loose.

You ready? The cornerstone of American leadership. Cornerstone of American leadership. Going into other countries and slaughtering innocent people. He goes on, he goes on to say, and you hear some people try to brand an American retreat from responsibility as bold new leadership. So when you hear that, make no mistake, it’s not bold, it’s not new, and it’s not leadership. Leadership. You mean a little deadhead like Biden? That kind of leadership and out of his mind, Mitch McConnell, a little slime ball like you mentioned before, you didn’t use that word.

My words. Lindsey Graham, leadership. Look who’s leading us. Nancy Pelosi, Chuckie Schumer. Look at leadership. He goes, know, our competitors, competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions and so doing so erodes our security and our ability to compete. Our competitors, who are you talking to? And they don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions. You mean they’re dictatorships. They do whatever they want. And how dare anyone condemn wars that we have no business being in.

Look, the House of Representatives is about to vote to give Lloyd Austin 880,000,000,000 with a B dollars to spend in the next year. That’s more than the next twelve nations, including Russia and China combined. And he’s complaining about the scrutiny over what he has to spend and what he has to waste. Well, Gerald, let’s not forget he’s got 903 foreign military installations on which US military personnel are present.

He has to fund them, he’s got to feed them, he’s got to clothe them, he’s got to house them, he’s got to give them weapons with which to kill people. Yes, and he goes on to say, here’s exactly what you said. He said that the US military has launched, quote, the most ambitious modernization effort in nearly 40 years for our defense industrial base. It’ll see some $50 billion allocated to the sector, supporting, quote, tens of thousands of good American jobs in more than 30 states.

Good American jobs. The war machine. Yeah, look, the war machine has very shrewdly spread itself out throughout the United States so that it can claim that it has jobs in enough congressional districts to induce the members of Congress from either political party always to vote to spend more money on the war machine. Otherwise, they’ll be accused of putting their own constituents out of work. This is how war, General Smedley Butler’s phrase, has become a racket.

When Butler said, that was almost 100 years ago, and very little has changed except the order of magnitude. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of the laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war. It is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. Dwight D. Eisenhower, five star general, supreme commander of the Allied forces, two term president, who? Lloyd Austin just said, hey, Ike, f you. Who the hell are you? Eisenhower. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Lloyd Austin. I’m a war criminal. That’s what we have today.

And quite frankly, if a Republican is elected president, the same mindset will. Unless it’s Doug McGregor, it’s not likely to happen. The same mindset will replace Austin. Yep. This is terrible, what’s going on. And if the people don’t do something to stand up and stop it, we’re finished. And again, where is the out again? Congress just voted. If you’re anti Zionist, then you’re anti Semitic. They just had a resolution.

One dissent, Thomas Massey. Yeah. And one abstention, Tlaib. The congresswoman. That Congress censured, the House censured because she sang a song from the river to the sea. You’re not allowed to say that anymore. She sang that song, and everybody in that room who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment, still voted. Not everybody voted. There were dissenters. But the people who voted took that oath to censure her for what she said.

That’s a welcome to Joe Biden’s America. Yeah, it’s been going on. It’s been going on. Has been going on. Censorship. If you don’t believe in what we’re telling you about, COVID you believe in misinformation now put on that mask when you go into the airplane, but you could take it off when you’re reading and drinking because COVID knows when you’re reading and drinking. And stand 6ft apart because the wind blows exactly in straight lines and 6ft doesn’t go up or down.

And when you go in a restaurant, make sure you walk in with that mask on. But when you sit down, you could take it off because COVID doesn’t go at table length. Knows when you’re reading and drinking. I remember dining with you at a French restaurant on the Upper east side of Manhattan, freezing our butts off because we sat outside because we didn’t want to be involved with the mask nonsense on the inside.

This wasn’t the restaurant’s fault. This was the city enforcing this on the restaurant and it had no choice but to comply. And the only way around it was to sit outside. You know what? It was a fabulous meal, but we always have a fabulous time and we have a fabulous time trying to do the best we can in the spirit of America. Thank you so much judge, for being on and thank you for all that you do.

And everybody, look, go see what the judge does. The people he has on are phenomenal. And the podcast he has, they’re one of a kind. So go to judging freedom on YouTube and see what the judge is doing. And thank you judge, and we’ll see you next week. Thank you, Gerald. All the best. .