Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: Liberals and Free Speech

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Aaron Maté: Liberals and Free SpeechSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 31st, 2024. Aaron Maté joins us now. Aaron, my dear friend, thank you very much for joining us. You have been writing lately on liberals and free speech, and I want to explore your thoughts on that and some of the absurdities we hear in the media marketplace in a few questions about Ukraine and a few about Israel. Do you surmise that whether President Zelensky and the West have a plan B for Ukraine, a way to end this? Zelensky has basically acknowledged that there is no plan B. His only plan was the so-called victory plan, which was dead on arrival. It relies on him begging for continued Western escalation, which is now off the table. He asked for immediate NATO membership, which the U.S. has refused to provide, despite dangling it in front of Ukraine's face since 2008. And he also asked for U.S. permission to conduct long-range strikes with U.S. weapons

into Russia, which the U.S. also denied after Vladimir Putin warned NATO about what that would really mean. It would put NATO directly at war with Russia. And now we learn this was leaked to The New York Times this week by The New York Times. Lezlensky also asked the U.S. for Tomahawk missiles, which have a far longer range and lethality than the Atakums missiles, which the U.S. has already provided and which is a very sophisticated weapon system. And the U.S. said no because the U.S. understands what that would mean. The U.S. has been fined to fuel this war so long as the people dying and paying the price are Russians and Ukrainians. But as soon as Zelensky asked for something that will actually put the U.S. at risk, the U.S. is walking away.

And Zelensky is understandably feeling betrayed because he was told by the U.S. all along that we have your back. Don't make that peace deal with Russia that Ukraine negotiated more than two years ago. Don't respect the Minsk Accords, which could have avoided a Russian invasion to begin with. We have your back.

And now that Ukraine is running out of people to sacrifice, the U.S. is telling Zelensky to go packing. Two issues that I want to raise with you. One is, are North Korean troops physically present with Russians and engaged in battle or preparing to do so? and two, in connection with one. If that is the case, does that bring South Korean troops into the fray on the side of Ukraine? There has been confirmation from Russia that North Korean troops are training with Russian troops inside of Russia. And there have been rumors that there are Russian troops inside of Russia. And there have been rumors

that there are Russian troops fighting alongside North Korean troops inside Kursk. But no evidence at all that North Korean troops are operating inside of Ukraine, which was Ukraine's allegation. Ukraine alleged that North Korean troops

were fighting in the Donbass alongside Russian forces. And there's no evidence of that whatsoever. What I think this was on the part of Zelensky, look, he knows his only means of survival is if he gets direct Western military intervention on his side. So that's what he's begging for in the victory plan. And that's what he's trying to promote by claiming without evidence that North Korean troops are fighting inside Ukraine alongside Russia. I don't think there's any real prospect of other countries, including South Korea, joining the fray because Russia has the sovereign right to train alongside North

Korean troops inside its own territory. And that appears to be what it's doing. Alistair Crook says that North Korean troops have been training in Russia for decades, but way, way east, nowhere near Ukraine, where their common border is. And that Ukraine has probably used this historical fact to gin up the type of conversation that we're having now. Larry Johnson, our friend and colleague, reports that Ukrainian troops have shelled their own civilians trying to escape to Russia. Do you know if that is so? I don't. I don't follow the battlefield developments that closely, to be honest with you. What I know is that on the diplomatic level, as we've talked about so much, all of this could have been avoided. All this carnage on both sides could have been avoided. Right.

Had Ukraine simply been willing to respect the cultural rights of ethnic Russians in the East, and had the US been willing to take Russian security concerns somewhat seriously. With US encouragement, Ukraine walked away from the Minsk Accords, which could have avoided all this long before Russia invaded, then walked away from a peace deal that was immediately brokered in the aftermath of Russia's invasion. Meanwhile, the U.S. has built up missile sites in Poland and Romania, expanded NATO, torn up really important arms control treaties, including the INF. And all these things, along with the coup back in 2014 backed by the U.S., have contributed to the mess that we're in today. Switching to Israel, do we know if the Israelis caused any significant measurable damage in

their limited attack on Ukraine last weekend? Again, Alistair Crook says they had planned three waves of attacks. They stopped halfway through the first wave because they confronted some sort of radar or defensive mechanism that they weren't anticipating and didn't know how to deal with. Can you enlighten us at all on any of this? I would just direct people to the other guests you've interviewed about this. I know that we're talking now about the Israeli strike on Iran. And I know that there was a claim put out in the Washington Post that actually Israel had penetrated Iranian airspace. And I know that people on your program, Scott Ritter and others have challenged that,

saying that likely that actually Israel only got as far as Iraq, but it's unlikely that they got into Iranian airspace. Not my forte, not my area of expertise. It does appear that whatever happened, Israel did not go forward with its biggest threat of striking Iranian oil and nuclear sites. And they can claim that that's because they wanted to avoid escalation. I think it's because, more plausibly, Iran showed in its counterstrikes that it actually can penetrate Israeli missile defenses and can do damage. And that's why I think we saw a relatively minor and damaged attack on Iran by Israel

last week. Right. I said Ukraine earlier. I obviously meant to say Iran. What can you tell us about the public spat between Defense Minister Gallant and Prime Minister Netanyahu? Is there any significance there? Well, in terms of the impact on policy, no, because Gallant is a fervent supporter of the Israeli mass murder campaign in Gaza and its extension into Lebanon. Gallant probably sees that Netanyahu is vulnerable in the sense that he relies on a far-right coalition. And also, there are people in Washington who aren't pleased that he's the face of the Israeli war machine and would rather have somebody else who's at least willing to pay lip service to the goal of the Palestinian state espoused by the U.S., even though the U.S. undermines that goal at every single turn. So to the extent they have a feud, it's Gallant sometimes seizing a political opportunity when

he senses that Netanyahu is weak, especially as Netanyahu continues to make clear he has no interest in returning the remaining captives inside Gaza. But in terms of whether there's a spat over the fundamental premise of Israel's right to, you know, self-declared right to commit aggression, no, there's none at all. We're going to play a clip, which I know you've seen, which is two minutes long, it's Bill Clinton at his most absurd attempting to, I don't know why Vice President Harris's campaign sent him to Michigan, but he's attempting to win over people in the audience. It doesn't appear as though he's succeeding, but let's play it and then I'll be happy to hear your comments on it. Chris, number 14. I have to be careful what I say because there's only one president at a time and none of us can get. I have to be careful what I say because there's only one president at a time and none of us can get.

All right. Well, there seems to be a problem with that. I just watched it and we just watched it together right before chris and i before the uh uh before the show came on uh victorian i can paraphrase what he said judge basically right go right ahead it's absurd what he said but you paraphrase it as you recall it he's basically trying to pretend he has empathy with people who are concerned about the carnage in gaza and lebanon and he says but you know and Lebanon. And he says, but, you know, think about what Hamas did. He claims that, you know, Hamas attacked Kibbutzim inside Israel near Gaza that are pro-peace. And he said, accordingly, given that Hamas did that, if you were Israeli,

what would you do? I mean, you're basically, what he's saying is Israel was forced to go commit mass murder because Hamas attacked some Israeli kibbutzim where some residents are. It's true, pro-peace. It's just an absolutely absurd argument because a militant group resisting military occupation killed civilians. That gives you the right to go and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the death camp that you're occupying. But that's Bill Clinton's argument. And he's amazingly, he's making it to people in Michigan where the number of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans is enough to decide the election, not only in Michigan, but of the entire country. He's telling them to suck it up and just basically accept that Israel had to go and kill all those people. And then he goes and turns into a religious fundamentalist and he claims that Jews were in the land of Palestine before Muslims were.

Even though you have done such a job of summarizing it, and I didn't know his voice is that bad. Boy, his voice is worse than Bobby Kennedy's, but here it is, cut number 14. To be careful what I say, because there's only one president at a time and none of us can get ahead of where we're going. But I think we're going to have to essentially start again on the peace process. I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died. I get that. Kibbutz and in Israel right next to Gaza where the people there were the most pro friendship with Palestine most pro two-state solution of any of the Israeli communities were the ones right next to Gaza and Hamas butchered them and so then the people who criticize it are

essentially saying yeah but look how many people you've killed in retaliation so how many is enough for you to kill to punish them for the terrible things they did? That all sounds nice until you realize what would you do if it was your family and you hadn't done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians and one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village. You would say, well, you'll have to forgive me. I'm not keeping score that way. It isn't how many we've had to kill. Because Hamas makes sure that they're shielded by civilians. They'll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend

yourself. This is really A, off the wall historically and morally and B, why the hell did her campaign send him to michigan to make statements like that whose vote is he going to win for her you know my friend katie helper who i host a podcast with she says her theory is that the clintons are still so bitter that hillary was

denied the chance to become the first female president, that sending Bill to Michigan to say this is their effort to actually sabotage Kamala Harris to prevent Kamala from becoming the first female president. I have heard that before seeing this clip. Hillary has said some off-the-wall stuff. All right, we've already analyzed it before we heard it. I want to play this clip. Let me say one thing, Judge.

Let me say one thing judge let me say one thing sorry on the issue of the human shields which i didn't address in my preemptive answer please um these are two million plus people who are trapped in a death camp so by definition they're going to be around hamas because no one no one has anywhere to go and it's even worse than before october 7th because israel has forced millions of people now or hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. So you have more than a million people, well over a million people displaced in Gaza from their homes. So by definition, people are going to be in the vicinity of where Hamas is because they have nowhere else to go. They can't leave.

This is not like a free country where people can pack up and leave. They're trapped in a very small strip of land that's being destroyed. So you can't be a human shield in that situation. You're a human target because Israel has pinned you there in a cage that they can't get out of. Well, he's bought the Netanyahu argument, hook, line, and sinker. There's no question about it. Before we jump to Victoria Nuland, one of the viewers writes in, was that somebody in a Halloween costume pretending to be Bill Clinton? That's how bad it was. Victoria Nuland is out complaining about too much free speech.

We'll run this clip. The he to whom she refers in the earliest parts of the clip, no surprise, is President Putin. Chris, cut number 13. He's at it again. This time he's not even trying to hide his hand and he has far more sophisticated tools. You know, his AI is better so he can make these fake videos. He has done things like spend $10 million trying to buy American influencers and get them parroting his lines and not even know it's happening. But he's also got a brand new,

very, very powerful tool, which is Elon Musk and X. You know, in 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the U.S. government to try to do content moderation, to try to catch this stuff as it was happening. But this time, we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something like this, it gets 5 million views on X before anybody can catch it. So it's it's quite dangerous, although I do think the American electorate has gotten more sophisticated and more savvy about this stuff. You caught that euphemism content moderation, otherwise known as government censorship. Yes. She's complaining that Twitter is no longer working with the government to censor factual information.

And the example she cites as being favorable was 2020 when reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop was kept from Americans. It was censored based on the fake claim that it was all a Russian disinformation operation, when in fact the FBI knew the laptop and its contents were real. That was the actual election interference in 2020, when factual reporting on the son of a candidate was censored,

based on the bogus claim that there was some sort of Russian hand in it. And this is now the third consecutive election, when national security state officials and bureaucrats like Victoria Nuland some sort of Russian hand in it. And this is now the third consecutive election when, you know, national security state officials and bureaucrats like Victoria Nuland, along with Democratic Party elites, are fear mongering about a Russian interference effort. The only interference effort we've seen in these elections is the Russiagate interference election that has tried to invoke a mythical Russian boogeyman to brainwash Americans into voting for their preferred candidate and blaming Russia when they don't vote for the one they want.

And the case now, it's Kamala Harris. Before that, it was Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. And it's incredible that despite all the polls that have been punctured in Russiagate, all the embarrassing retractions, all the ways in which the story has collapsed, the whole conspiracy theory, which dominated the first half of Trump's term, that he was conspiring with Vladimir Putin, which triggered a sprawling FBI investigation, where Robert Mueller was the

hero who was going to, you know, lead Trump away from the White House in handcuffs. Despite the failure of that and just how wrong it's been shown to be, these people still go on TV and speak as if it's real to the point where now they can lament that the government is no longer, that social media companies are no longer engaged in censorship based on their own scam scandal, which is Russiagate. Are you surprised that liberals are suddenly anti-free speech? Well, it makes sense with the shift that they've underwent in the last decade or so. If you recall, when Obama was debating Mitt Romney on the debate stage in the November 2012 election, Romney was mocked by Obama, who said the 1980s called they want

their foreign policy back when Romney was saying the Russians are our top adversary. Well, fast forward to the Maidan coup of 2014. And ever since then, basically, if you want to be a good liberal in the US, you have to embrace neoconservative dogma to the point where they've all embraced Mitt Romney's worldview. And when you embrace a neocon worldview, you're going to embrace the attendant belief that dissenting viewpoints should be censored. This is a tradition of neocon opinion. Just look back to Dr. Martin Luther King. He was smeared as a Russian agent way back then because he was challenging the system. So now fast forward to the last decade or so, and anybody who dissents from the neocon orthodoxy, who challenges it, who is perceived to be a threat to it, liberals are now, because they're in lockstep with neocons and cold warriors, they're going to embrace the doctrine

of censorship too. And to the point where they were fine censoring journalism that happened to be unfavorable to their preferred candidate. I asked you earlier if Zelensky has a plan B. We have a clip that you found of Zelensky yesterday. Let's take a listen. Chris, cut number 12. Before the full-scale war, there are prevention things of so many leaders in the world, so many strong economies, so many strong countries, a lot of prevention steps. When I asked them in the victory plan to give me the package of long-distance weapon,

and we will use it only if Russia will not stop the war and will not stop continuing escalation. I said this is a prevention method. They said to me this is escalation. When a lot of countries began to support victory plan, you see what's going on now in media. They said that Ukraine wants or wanted a lot of missiles like Tamagavsk and etc. But it was confidential information between Ukraine and White House how to understand these messages. So it means between partners, there's no any confidential things.

Where is he going with this? He's complaining that his request for U.S. Tomahawk missiles was leaked to The New York Times. And on the one hand, he does have the right to be angry because not only was this secret request leaked, so his confidentiality was broken, but also he's been promised all along that the U.S. has his back. Joe Biden told Ukraine, as much as it takes for as long as it takes. Notice how Joe Biden doesn't say that anymore. He dropped that a while ago. So he was told to walk away from peace deals that could have avoided all this. First, the Minsk Accords prior to Russia's invasion,

and then the Istanbul agreement that was brokered in early 2022, right after Russia invaded. He was told, we have your back. Keep fighting Russia. And he went along with it. Now he's paying the price. And he's learning, as he says there, the Ukraine doesn't have partners. It has sponsors that have used it and bled it dry. And now that that utility is running out, they're walking away. And they're even humiliating him by leaking his desperate request for Tomahawk missiles to The New York Times. And what makes us even more cynical brings us to a point that Ray McGovern has made. And he was the only person in the U.S. to notice this, I believe.

And, you know, it should have been a major story, but it wasn't. Back in late 2021, early 2022, when the U.S. and Russia are still talking in the hopes that a Russian invasion can be avoided, Russia said that the U.S. had expressed an openness to an agreement that would rule out the U.S. placing missiles inside of Ukraine. That's what Russia said. And the U.S. didn't contradict them publicly. But then fast forward to now we're talking, I think, January or February, just right before Russia invaded. And the Kremlin came out and said that the U.S. had actually reneged on that willingness to discuss the placement of offensive missiles inside Ukraine. And for Russia, that was a serious provocation because this is the U.S. saying to Russia, yeah, we reserve the right to place

missiles inside Ukraine if we want to. So Biden back then could have tried to negotiate an agreement that addressed Russian security concerns and ruled out putting missiles like Tomahawks inside Ukraine. And he didn't. He used that to bait Russia into invading. And now, fast forward more than two years later, Zelensky asked him for TAMAC missiles, and Biden says no, because it's very clear what Biden was doing. Whatever their intentions were back then, they wanted to use the prospect of placing missiles inside Ukraine to bait Russia into invading because they wanted this war. They wanted to use Ukraine to bleed Russia. Now that they've done that, now they're leaving Ukraine, hanging out to dry. Some of the worst diplomacy ever by the Biden crew, whether it's Biden himself, Jake Sullivan, or Tony Blinken. I think Blinken is probably worse than Biden because Blinken doesn't have the deteriorated mentality that Biden has an excuse.

Blinken doesn't. Yes. And according to Sergei Lavrov, Blinken's Russian counterpart, Blinken told him during that pivotal time of early 2022, right before the invasion, that the U.S. would only be willing to discuss limits on the number of missiles placed inside Ukraine, not rule out the placement of those missiles to begin with. And imagine again, if Canada or Mexico were hosting offensive missiles from China or Russia, it would be a non-starter. Those places would be wiped out by the US. Correct. And the US would not even discuss it with Russia back then, insisted on the right to place offensive missiles. That helped provoke Russia into the invasion to impose its security demands by force. And the price has been paid foremost by Ukrainians. Aaron, thank you very much, my dear friend. I know we were all over the place. And

thank you for those clips of Victoria Nuland and Bill Clinton and Vladimir Zelensky. I hope you can join us again next week. Absolutely. Thank you, Judge. Happy Halloween. And to you as well. Are you going to the parade as crazy as it is in the city? I'm going to skip that. I'm going to skip the parade.

I saw it once, but that's enough. Thank you, Aaron. It is the weirdest parade you have ever seen, should you be on 6th Avenue in Manhattan in the next few hours at the end of the day. But if you're not, coming up at five o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson and at 5.30, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. That is the symbol of my column today called Tweedledee and Tweedledum. My family is angry at me because I won't tell them for whom I'm going to vote for President of the United States. You can guess what I think by calling them Tweedledee and Tweedledum,

and I explain it in my column of that name, which is out today and up on judgenap.com. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.