➡ Gerald Cilenti and Judge Andrew Napolitano discuss the loss of true freedom in America and debunk common misconceptions about the Civil War. They argue it was not fought over slavery but to preserve the Union, noting the government’s manipulation of historical facts and criticize the current education system for its inaccuracies and government overreach.
➡ The text presents a debate on state secession in American history and presents the theory that states voluntarily joined the union and could quit it. It also discusses current secession movements and international affairs, including political tensions with Iran, possible escalation into World War III; Russia’s self-sufficiency and economic independence following sanctions; concerns about the U.S.’s foreign policy and the manufacturing sector’s dwindling contribution to the GDP; and scenarios for the 2024 presidential election.
➡ The text is a friendly conversation expressing a desire to dine together in the future, appreciation for Judge Andrew Napolitano, and sharing New Year wishes before ending the conversation.

Hello, everybody. This is Gerald Cilenti, and it’s Wednesday, January 3, 2024. The new year is here. And in the new year, we have an old cat that really knows about what this country’s turned into. And when we talk about our loss of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Once upon a time, there was a declaration of independence. It’s lost. You only can believe what the government tells you to believe.

You’re not allowed to believe anything else or say anything that’s, quote, misinformation. And Judge Andrew Napolitano, there’s nobody, nobody. Bring him around, her around, that knows the Bill of rights and the constitution better than Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, thanks for being here today. Thank you, Gerald. Thank you for the generous introduction. It’s always a know, talking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And again, it’s the truth.

What I’m saying about you, week after week, all the shows that you have and everybody listening, you got to go see who the judging, freedom and the people that he has on and the things that go on and what they’re saying. You don’t hear this anywhere else from the guests that he puts on. What I’m saying is that we’ve lost our declaration of independence, and you have this article coming out tomorrow about somebody I can’t stand.

And it’s the same know. It’s not whether you like somebody or dislike somebody. We look at the facts, and the fact is that this clown running for president, Nikki Haley, was condemned for a statement that she made about the civil war and slavery. We’re not mentioning slavery. And you write an article here about Nikki Haley, american history and intellectual honesty. Well, she was asked, gina, what was the civil war fought about? And she said, government, rights and freedom.

A perfectly accurate, historically respectable answer. And then the media and the left and some conservatives just dumped all over her because she didn’t mention slavery. Now, this is a touchy subject. You and I condemn slavery as America’s Holocaust, the most monstrous use of governmental power in history. But the Civil War was not fought to eradicate slavery. It was fought to preserve the Union. Who said that? Abraham Lincoln.

How many times did he say it? About a dozen times during his years in the White House while fighting the Civil War. Did Lincoln free the slaves like we were all taught in grade school? He did not. The 13th amendment did. Eight months after he was dead, did the emancipation Proclamation free the slaves? It did not. It was a military order telling the army that they could seize slaves and draft them into the military.

One form of slavery into another. And it expressly said, lay off the slaves in the border states. The five border states. That’s one third of the Confederacy where it preserved slavery. Was Lincoln anti slavery? He was not. He supported the amendment. Ooh, I don’t remember studying the Corwin amendment. That was the original 13th amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress right before the war started and never was circulated to the states.

But had it been ratified by the states, would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution. And then when the Civil War was over, Congress condemned slavery. So the same Congress that promoted slavery in 1861 condemned it in 1865. Why? Because the war was over and they wanted to rewrite history. Now, does any of this have anything to do with whether or not she’s worthy to become president of the United States? Of course not.

She is utterly unworthy to become president of the United States. Don’t misread what I’m about to say. She’s Lindsay Graham in high heels. She never met somebody else’s blood she didn’t want to spill. She never met a war she didn’t want somebody else to fight. But her answer, her original answer before she changed her mind with the avalanche of criticism on the war between the states, was correct.

That’s why I wrote it. It got under my skin to see people pounding on her because, as you said, sometimes we defend the indefensible. I don’t defend her as a candidate, but I defend what she says when she happens to be correct. Well, in trend forecasting, you look at things for the way they are, not the way you want them to be correct. And again, I’m a political atheist.

I don’t believe in politics. I mean, are you kidding me? What am I, six years old? And you call it government schools? And that’s what they are. They hate that. By the way, I have said that in the local high school here, and, boy, did the teachers come up to me, if that’s a public school, it’s not a government school. And I said, madam, who pays your salary? Who signs your paycheck? The government.

The money that it cost me for school taxes all my life. You, too? I don’t have any kids. Same here. To me, it should be, the more kids you have, the more you should pay in school tax. Of course. What the hell am I paying for your kids for? You pay for your own. I don’t even think we should have a public school system. I don’t either. I think the private schools would pop up on every street corner.

You want to be automobile mechanic? You go to this school, you want to go to Yale, you go to that school. You want to be a baseball player, you go to that school, it will cost a heck of a lot less. You’d have the choice you want. And you wouldn’t be paying to turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse. Yep. Pig’s ear into the silk purse. You got it.

And again, it was that piece of crap may rotten hell who gave us World War I. Yes. Gave us the bankster bandits to take over the country. The Federal reserve. He gave us federal income tax. Yes. And he gave us public school system. Wilson. Correct. That’s when it started. And it’s gotten worse and worse and worse. Now, I don’t know what it’s like in New York, but in New Jersey, in the classes on health, the government school teachers are required to tell seven year olds that they can change their gender.

I mean, this is just. You can’t even say this with straight face. It’s so from, we’ve gone from worship of Lincoln to you don’t have to live with your body, we can change it for you, and the government will pay for it. And by the way, you don’t even have to tell your parents. Just tell us. That’s what we’ve gone to in the public. I slipped in the government, you know, going back to this.

By the way, what’s that guy in paisano who wrote that book, the real Lincoln? Oh, Tom de Lorenzo. Boy, that book is a phd. He’s an economist by trade, but he is the most prolific and reliable author on Lincoln that doesn’t worship Lincoln. Another one is Brian McClanahan, but Tom is at the head of the. And how Lincoln was so pro slavery, and it had nothing to do with this at all.

Like you said, it was just about unionization. Listen, how many people died? Like, what, about 700,000, 750,000 Americans died in the civil war, more than in all wars in which Americans fought combined. The civil war was the first war in the history of the world where a central government targeted civilians and where it targeted civilians of its own country. Shermans marched through Georgia and South Carolina, robbed banks, burnt farmhouses, raped women, destroyed courthouses, because Lincoln looked the other way.

Now the Russians did. Right? Right. What’s wrong with you? The Russians made it happen. They were behind it. America wouldn’t do anything like that. We don’t kill people in other countries. I want to go back to your article. Here you go. Starting with its very inaccurate name, the war fought on american soil between Americans from 1861 to 1865 was not a civil war. A civil war is a violent contest for control of a central government.

The war between the states was not fought for control of the federal government. It was fought, like all wars, over power and wealth, because the federal government had seized the ports from Baltimore to Houston and began collecting tariffs, ports that were owned by the state governments and in which they had been collecting tariffs. That’s what triggered the whole thing. It’s no mistake that this started in the port of Charleston because that was the hotbed where the locals kicked the feds out and wouldn’t let them collect the tariffs.

The southern states wanted wealth that the north had seized from them. The north wanted wealth that it had seized. It’s all it was about. It was also know power. It was about the ability of a state that voluntarily joined the union to voluntarily leave. An argument that Thomas Jefferson, the guy that wrote the declaration, and James Madison, the guy that wrote the constitution and the Bill of Rights, both argued in favor of.

I wish you would explain this. In war, power means control of someone else’s land, and wealth means seizing someone else’s assets. The initial verbal and military salvos in the war were over whether the states covetous of tariffs, revenues seized by the feds could voluntarily leave the union and resume conflicting tariffs. Hardly a novel concept at the time, but in government school, you probably never heard of this. You probably never heard of the fact that it was not novel to suggest that the states could leave the union.

When the union was formed, the 13 colonies became 13 states of the United States of America. Five of them said, if you don’t add a bill of rights, we’re out of here. And the other states agreed, we’re going to add a bill of rights because we don’t want them to leave. Wait a minute. I thought they couldn’t leave. Of course they could leave. Joining was just a piece of legislation, and a piece of legislation can be undone if it doesn’t work out, if it turns out that it’s harming the life, liberty and property of the people represented by those who enacted the legislation.

Lincoln argued that when the states joined the union, a miracle happened and they were wedded to the other states and to the union forever. That’s absurd. There is no miracle that happened. They joined voluntarily. They can leave voluntarily. Of course, that would be nearly impossible today, after all the blood that was shed in the war between the states, my dear friend may rest in peace. Thomas Naylor. He had a movement going on up in Vermont about secession.

Going on back in the, he passed away in 2012 and he was really pushing for a secessionist movement. That was happening when Trump was in the White House and hurling a verbal salvos at Governor Newsom of California. There was a movement for California to secede. And Trump said at a press conference, let them go until somebody reminded him how much taxes they collect from the people in California.

You know, judge, I went on the air and I just read an article came out that almost 200 people were killed in bomb explosion in Iran. And they were celebrating the ceremony of talking about Trump. His assassination of General Soleimani of Iran back in was about 2018 or so, right? 19 was an act of murder. Yeah. And they just slaughtered a couple of hundred Iranians. And about a week ago, they wiped out another iranian general over there in Syria.

Allegedly the Israelis did it. We just put out our top trends for 2024. And last year, of course, was Middle east meltdown and it melted down. Now it’s world war three. If this thing escalates into Iran, this is going to be nuclear annihilation. Well, this is Joe Biden’s foreign policy conducted, as Phil Geraldi said, through the mechanism of starting a war almost every year, starting and financing a war in Ukraine and now financing all the slaughter in Gaza and the spread is almost something that they can’t control.

Gee, I wonder who killed those Iranians that were commemorating the death of General Soleimani. Of course it was the Israelis. Who else would have or could have done it? The Israelis blew up a residential neighborhood in Beirut three days ago, killing dozens in order to kill one man who apparently was one of the senior people in Hamas. But the Netsanyahu unridled bloodlust will consume Sachs. Professor Sachs said on my podcast yesterday, Netanyahu needs to stop the slaughter in Gaza in order to save Israel.

And if he doesn’t, he’s going to destroy his own. Know, we wrote in the upcoming, the Treasure journal just went out yesterday. And you know my line, when all else sales, they take you to war, right? And you look at Netanyahu’s poll ratings, you know what they are? I bet they’re pretty low. 15%. Wow. 15% support. They want them to leave after the war is over and Biden’s down to 39%.

Wow. So again, these wars are going to ramp up. And the other war is what’s happening over there in Ukraine. As we kept saying, they’re going to get back in the news and Ukraine is going to do everything they can to keep getting more support to fight Russia. They’re losing. They’re not going to win. No way, no how. They’re going to do something, a false flag event or some kind of an attack.

And Scott Ritter, of know this cat knows about what’s going on really very well. And I understand that he’s over in Moscow right now. He is. And I was privileged to interview him yesterday with a regional russian official who’s also a financial guy and a developer of downtown areas and construction projects. We had a translator and I said, alexander, what do the russian people think of Joe Biden? And a student that was translated.

I saw a smile from ear to ear, and he said, judge, in Moscow, we say, thank you, Joe Biden, because the sanctions have, a, made us economically independent and b, made us economically more prosperous, and c, we now know we don’t need the west. I said, what do the russian people think of the west? He said, we think very little of your government, but we love your people.

We are warm and friendly to your people, and we want to engage in commercial activity with your people. Yesterday, we had 500,000 views. Wow. Bravo. Thanks to Scott Ritter and this fellow Alexander and the translator, and was in a beautiful studio with all kinds of camera angles. It was first rate production. Here I am using my laptop and my camera in my home, and he’s in Moscow and the top of the line.

It was like being back on Fox, top of the line equipment again. Wow. What he talked about being self sufficient. That was one of our top trends going back to about 2018. We said more and more countries are going to pull away from globalization and really understand the power of self sufficiency. And Russia has all of the human and natural resources they need to be self sufficient. Correct.

When you become less self sufficient through globalization, you lose the power within, as you see within the United States, our production manufacturing accounts for only about 11% of our gross domestic product. That’s it. I didn’t realize it was that low, Gerald. Consumer spending, almost 70%. So self sufficiency is a top trend, and America could become a self sufficient country, but they’re not going to do that because the bigs are in control and they want to use all the slave labor they could get in any country.

They could get to make their products cheaply so they can make more. Bottom line. Right? Right. And when the United States put sanctions on Russia, in your trends journal, we said Russia is now going to move towards self sufficiency. And that’s exactly what. So what, what is Biden accomplishing? I guess, what has he ever accomplished in his whole life? No, nothing. He’s just gone along with the political trends of the time.

But maybe he thinks he’s going to run for reelection as a wartime president. I really don’t know. I fear. McGregor fears, ritter fears. You fear a false flag, some sort of an attack on a NATO country, which will give him the justification for moving tens of thousands of american troops in. And then he becomes, in his own diminished mind, another FDR, a wartime president fighting a war in Europe and running for reelection.

Yes. That’s the way we see it. This is a madman. He’s been sucking off the public tit for, what, over 60 years? Yes. And not a war that he didn’t love. So, no, this is serious. As I said in the letter to the subscribers, this may be our last year of the top trends for the coming year because we may not be here in another year. This is very serious.

What’s going on? If it gets to nuclear. You’re mean. We both live and work close enough to New York City. That would be a prime place for them to attack. I mean, this is just lunacy. If they really want to start world War three with a nuclear power, lunacy? Well, look at a guy by the name of Netanyahu. You want to talk about lunacy? There’s a lunatic in front of your.

And if this was America, and let’s say we were celebrating the death of a general that was killed by the Russians, and all of a sudden, a couple of hundred people at that ceremony were killed, what would America do to Russia? This would be our cause of war, remember? Was it Lusitania? Right? They’ll make up anything, right? And the people just follow the headline news by the prostitutes, the media whores that get paid to put out by the corporate pimps and government whore masters and march off to war.

Hey, judge, I’m a Yankee doodle dandy. A Yankee doodle do or die. How stupid can you be, right? I’m 100% with you on all of this, my dear friend, I hope 2024 is a better year than you. And I fear it’s up to the people to make the change. And again, if you want to donate to occupied peace, please do so. We’re going to keep doing all we can to fight for peace and freedom.

And again, please go to the judges channel. We got 500,000 views to see Scott Ritter and what a cat he is. We got to get together for dinner again sometime. And you go to judging freedom. There’s no one that judges freedom like Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, thanks for being here, Felicia? I don’t know. All of all. Happy new year. Yes, happy new year to you as well, my dear friend.

God bless you. See you next Wednesday. Ciao. Ciao. Bye. .