Judging Freedom - Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: Christmas and the US Government

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: Christmas and the US GovernmentSee 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 Wednesday, December 20th, 2023. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now. Karen, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us and thanks for your thoughts. You published yesterday a great piece called A Necessarily Anti-State Christmas Message. no connection. It used to be, but there is no connection between the government and Christmas, except that the government is the opposite of Christmas. The government claims that it is God, and it can decide from whom to steal and from whom to kill, and the rest of us shall just take a listen. What's the essence of your thoughts about the government at Christmastime? Well, it's certainly the enemy of all the things we celebrate at Christmas. We celebrate family. Government certainly is the enemy of family.

We celebrate giving. We celebrate creating. We celebrate love. None of these things have anything to do with the state or any government at all. So it's great that we're able to celebrate these things and value them, but it's very different than the state. And I think to truly love and to truly live, you have to be anti-state. You have to oppose concentrated power, monopoly on force, all of these things that the state is. And of course, the state constantly messages us the very opposite of that.

Did you feel this way when you were in the United States Air Force? And if you did, were there others who felt that way as well? Well, when I was in, and many people felt, I did not feel, my attitude toward the government was, it was wasteful. It wasn't very collectively bright. It made poor decisions. It was slow. It was inefficient. It was prone to criminality. These are the things that I thought about government when I was in the military. And I think many of my peers shared that. In fact, I don't see, I didn't work with anybody in multiple tours that would defend government process, that would defend any of the results. Certainly we understood that the intentions of government were one thing, but the results and

the consequences of government action were always, always something else. And and so I felt I felt pretty at home. And I think people in the military today and probably people in the military 100 years ago, you know, when you're working in the government, particularly in the military, but really any arm of government, you do see the difference between what they say and what they do. I know that when Ron Paul was running for the Republican nomination for president, I believe this is in 2008, he received more donations from active duty military than all the other Republican nominees, including John McCain, who won the nomination that year, and is a former military person himself, than all the other Republican candidates for the nomination combined. I guess that tells you something about those in the military and those who used to work for the government, understanding it to be the way you described it. I mean,

the last thing the Congress did last week before it went home for Christmas was to enact the National Defense Authorization Act, which basically funds the Defense Department and it spends 886 billion to fund the 900 plus foreign installations as well as all the domestic ones of the Defense Department uh it uh continues uh the killings uh though there's no Express money for Ukraine and Israel, at least not yet. And it extends the ability of the government to surveil people in the United States. As you know, Section 702 of the FISA Act suspends the Fourth Amendment for a class of people. And that class of people are innocent Americans who communicate with a foreign person. Your next door neighbor is born in Germany and you call that person on the phone for a cup of sugar. I don't know. People call their neighbors for a cup of sugar. I don't eat sugar. So I'm being a little

silly, even though this is profound. And that phone call, as well as the subsequent ones that you and this person make, can be surveilled by the feds. You call a bookseller in London. I call my cousins in Florence, Italy. And there's no Fourth Amendment protection, meaning there doesn't have to be suspicion. There doesn't have to be probable cause. There doesn't have to be a warrant. All of this is profoundly unconstitutional, but the Congress does it. The NSA and the FBI and the CIA do it. And this expires on December 31st, and Congress just extended it by five months. So question, why do we elect people who at Christmas time increase our debt by $800 billion, increase the killings of foreign innocents, and increase the surveillance on Americans as to whom there isn't even any suspicion of wrongdoing. What a Christmas gift from the government.

That's right. But oh, remember to go vote. Go vote and support these Republicans. And, you know, even the Freedom Caucus is so disappointing on so many of these things. So, yeah, I don't, we don't get the government, we're not getting the government that I think most people in this country want. And it is really, regardless of the party, both parties are aligned on domestic surveillance. They're both aligned on maintaining those 900 military installations around the world. They're both aligned on maintaining those 900 military installations around the world. They're in line with fomenting wars overseas. And, you know, we haven't even seen pushback in the Congress at all with the UN veto, which was hugely embarrassing. The veto there for calling for a ceasefire for humanitarian purposes in Gaza,

we vetoed it before, most recently, I guess just a couple days ago. And we don't even see condemnation of that. And yet that one act probably cost the United States, I don't know, massively in terms of our soft power, our power to influence the rest of the world, just got thrown out the window. And yet Congress, which is supposed to be thinking about what's good for our country, they do none of that. They don't even talk about it. I mean, except for Thomas Massey, they don't talk about it. Right. Thomas Massey in the House and Rand Paul in the Senate. I was deeply flattered. I learned this morning on a Cincinnati radio show that I was on that Senator Paul actually took one of my columns blasting Section 702 and read it

into the congressional record. That was very flattering for me. But you're talking about two people out of 535. Okay, Mike Lee, Senator Lee, was also with Senator Paul. He got in quite a tussle with FBI Director Wray, who basically said it's a pain in the neck to get a search warrant. And Senator Lee said it's a pain in the neck to get a search warrant. Get another job. You just took a job as the head of the FBI and you promised to uphold the Constitution, which includes the Fourth Amendment. If the Fourth Amendment's a pain in the neck, Director Wray, get another job. go back to practicing law in Atlanta. And they really went at each other. And then Ray just smiled because he knew he had the votes because the intelligence community has enough dirt and enough members of Congress to assure that these violations of the Constitution will continue and the money with which these violations

come about, that is the funding of these various alphabet soup agencies, will continue. Suppose Donald Trump is elected president again, and suppose he does what he said he was going to do in the first term and then change his mind and leaves NATO. Can he do that? Or did Lindsey Graham and company do something last week to prevent Donald Trump and any future president from doing that? Yeah, well, they tried to. I mean, they put it in the NDAA that they passed, saying that no president will be allowed to withdraw from NATO or defund NATO. We could possibly withdraw, but we wouldn't be allowed to defund it without congressional, with a congressional vote and approval. And I don't know if it was 50% or more, but they're trying to make

it difficult, but they can't, they can't do that. I think that is unconstitutional, but we'll see, because that particular part of the law, just like so many parts of previous laws, like part of the Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act, all these laws have so many illegalities. And it takes a while, it seems, before the proper suits are brought and then they rule differently. But I think it reveals the great fear that these has-beens in Congress, which is a good many of them, who love war and spending and debt, and they're making sure they're taken care of, but they're screwing basically every American and many across the world, really. frightened. And I think the very fact that they would be thinking that a future president, particularly Donald Trump, possibly, which they don't think he can be elected, but they do fear

this. And so just based on that fear alone, they would write, they would legislate a rule to protect what? To protect the defense industry, to protect themselves, to protect their friends and allies who they are enriched by because we're in NATO, because we fund NATO. It's a sign of a deep-seated fear. And it's not just a fear of Trump, which we can figure out that they are a little bit scared of Trump, because Trump's angry. And Trump has been abused by the very systems that we've been complaining about for years. So so they should be scared of Trump. But they are also afraid that the people are going to demand some things that make sense for America. And one of those things is to stop funding NATO and stop being a part of NATO.

That's not necessary. It costs Americans in many ways. And, you know, when when they're when they say they don't like Trump, what they're saying, and they don't like RFK Jr., what they're saying is they don't like the people in this country, because the people in this country like RFK Jr., and they like Trump. This is why they're populist candidates. They reflect the will of a good many of the people. And those guys in Congress reflect the will of very few people. The Supreme Court has ruled many times that foreign relations are a decision to be made by the president. Look, this cuts both ways. We have a president now who probably couldn't pass a driver's ed test to get his driver's license. And yet he can decide what our relationship is

with Russia, China, Ukraine, and Israel. But if Donald Trump were in there and decided he doesn't want us in NATO, I think he can pull us out. George W. Bush ill-advisedly, in my opinion, but he did it, pulled us out of the ABM treaty. I mean, that resulted in a resumption of the arms race, but he did, it was a horrible thing, stupidity on his part of one of many examples, but he did pull us out of it because this is a decision to be made by the Congress. This nonsense about the U.S. can't leave NATO was led by your friend, and I say this sarcastically, Senator Lindsey Graham, who also said at the same time, Colonel Kwiatkowski, are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Senator Graham, the world is going to be, if we don't stop them, the world will be

taken over by the alliance of Russia and Hamas. Wow. Did you know that? Did you know that? That we should worry about Russia and Hamas taking over the world? Yeah. Somebody needs to call the intelligence community and tell them to get on that. You know, how a country with, what, the 15th largest economy,

perhaps maybe if you stretch it with Russia. Hamas, not even a nation, not even, I mean, what is Hamas? A terrorist group? If the best, it's a group of people. So no, this is insane that they would think that. And also I think that the Senate and particularly Lindsey Graham, I mean, he's out of it, but they think that people believe what they say, that what they are saying is believable. And they don't realize one of the impacts of Internet and social media and everything else and, you know, use of computers and the are extremely cynical and actually quite suspicious of just about everything they see on television. Remember when we had reality TV and when it first came on, everybody said, oh, reality TV, that's so neat. And I remember learning from my children some years ago, they said, oh, mom, reality TV, that's all, you know, that's all stage. That's all, you know,

concocted. It's entertainment. It's not reality at all. And I'm like, what? I thought it was just cameras going around and just recording what was really happening. And the kids are like, you're, you know, come on, get with it, mom. So, you know, these, we've got multiple generations of people who understand that we're being lied to pretty much all the time. So I think that the target audience for a guy like Graham and a target audience for the NDAA is a very narrow part of government. Some of our foreign allies who we are communicating with them saying, oh, don't worry, we're sticking with NATO, we're there for you, this kind of thing. Certainly, it's a narrow message that they're sending to the defense industrial establishment in this country. But the average American hears

this and they're just like, whatever. They don't believe it. They do not believe it. They do not internalize this message. And that's got to be frightening for the guys at the top. We're going to take a break for a commercial announcement. When we come back, Colonel Kwiatkowski and I will talk about what, if any, lessons have we learned from the wars in Gaza and in Ukraine. But first this. Justice Baltano here. I love being a spokesperson for causes that I believe in. And one of them is the soundness of money. We don't have that anymore. first this. in government debt, and that number goes up with every tick of the clock. The cost of living is unsustainable, and the cost of everything from eggs to bread is going through the roof no matter what the White House tells you. You can no longer trust the government or Wall Street or the bank.

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800-511-4620. And don't forget to ask about a gold IRA. Find out how diversifying your portfolio from stocks and bonds into gold and silver can give you peace of mind, the peace of mind you deserve. 800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. And when you speak to these good folks, tell them the judge sent you. In Ukraine, there have been about 500,000 Ukrainian casualties, about 400,000 deaths, and about 100,000 injuries so severe that the young men cannot come back to the battlefield. A million people, excuse me, 10 million people have fled the country. A whole generation of formerly healthy young men, you'd be expected to be doctors, lawyers, factory workers, taxi cab drivers, small business entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, has been wiped out. In Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force, a misnomer if ever there was one, has killed about 20,000 people, 17,000 of them

civilians, maybe 3,000 at the most, Hamas fighters. You don't hear any outrage whatsoever from anybody in the government about the slaughter in Gaza, and you don't hear any praise from anyone, even in the government, about the surgical use of the military by the Russians in Ukraine, where only a handful of civilians have been killed by accident. Gaza, the civilians are targeted. Ukraine, the handful that have been killed are an accident. Lessons to be learned, domestic politics, warmongering at its height, feeding the military-industrial complex. I'll let you take this ball and run with it, Karen. Well, it's all of those things, really. I think, you know, one of the things that impacts how Americans are able to hold our own people, our own government accountable is we're not getting good information.

You know, for so many months and months, only only recently are we really understanding as a majority consumer of American news that we're starting to understand that not only is Ukraine losing, but what it has lost already. So we're just now getting fed that. Prior to that, we were being fed 18, 20 months worth of constant lies about how Ukraine was prevailing. Nobody was dying in Ukraine. They were defending valiantly and taking back their property from the evil Russians who were just incompetent and, you know, terrible. So because foreign policy doesn't attract a lot of attention for the average American anyway, and we're being flooded with false information, it's hard to blame Americans for not holding their politicians accountable. And I think with the Gaza thing just recently, with the mass of, with the slaughter really of civilians, also we have, yes, we have Ukrainian Americans, but we also have quite a few Muslim Americans and particularly Palestinian Americans. So there are a body of people in this country who were paying attention to what was going on in Gaza, whereas I think most people in America were paying no attention to what was going

on in Ukraine from 2014 on or at any time. So those folks are paying attention and they're rallying in the streets to stop the slaughter of Gazans because that's what this is. This war on Gaza, what the IDF is doing, what the Israeli government is doing is a planned slaughter. They wish to depopulate the area of humans and presumably of dogs and cats and donkeys, but they want to depopulate the area and make it impossible for the people to return to their homes because they're destroying their homes and they're pushing themselves into Egypt, into the sea, or into graves. I don't think the government of Israel cares one bit

where they go. They just want them gone and they want them dead. So this is a murder, a mass state murder. Now, we aren't told that in our media. We're saying, oh, Israelis are defending themselves. It's 9-11 or whatever. But we have a population in this country that actually pays attention to Middle East news when it comes to slaughter of their relatives or slaughter of their fellow religious people. And that includes Orthodox Catholics and Palestinian Jews, all these folks. So we're hearing this and we're seeing this, Americans are waking up to it a little bit. Now, the lesson, what lesson does our government take from this? Oh, we have to control the narrative a little bit more diligently than we did. Hey,

this was a mistake. Let's make sure next time we kill a bunch of people, they don't have relatives in the United States or they don't have, you know, a religious group that can organize. So, yeah, the lesson learned, the first one is always narrative control is dominant. That's the most important factor. We need to do it better. They've learned it in prior engagements, in prior wars, and our government spends a huge amount of effort, you know, the Twitter files, the stuff that we found out about on how our government manipulates the information that we're allowed to receive and allowed to transmit. This is the lesson learned. This is what they're learning. And that's a very bad thing. Now, in terms of military lessons learned, you know, we can say, oh, we're not fighting those wars. We're just supplying the weapons. So what lessons did we learn? Oh, we learned that we can't produce enough weapons. We need to produce more. Oh, we need to increase

the defense budget. That's the other lesson that they learned, because we can't support our friends and neighbors. And now I think privately, the lesson they're learning in Israel and to some extent in Ukraine, actually with Zelensky a very great extent, is that the people that we want to work with in these wars that advantage the neoconservative vision, because I don't think they advantage anything else but that, guys like Zelensky, who we chose or we helped put in place, and guys like Netanyahu, which, you know, the Republicans and Democrats have loved him, loved on him for so long. We're finding out those people don't give one wit about what American politicians would like them to do. And that lesson, I do

think that the Congress and some of our policymakers are learning. And I think you can see the lesson that they're learning on the face of our Secretary of State, just at any time he goes public, you know, he's got this cringe on his face. What's the guy's name? Tony Blinken. Tony Blinken's got a cringe constantly because he wishes to influence his counterparts. And he has, he understands completely that he has absolutely no control over them. And not even money, not even aid provides the control that they're looking for. So I think our American people, a lot of people in Washington, certainly in a government, are recognizing that the rest of the world doesn't

think very much of us, or I should say of them personally. Doesn't listen to them, doesn't do it. I mean, the way Bibi has played the United States, how many people have we sent over there? I think the Secretary of Defense just went over. They go over constantly. President Biden went over there two or three times. What's Bibi do? Shakes his hand, smiles, nods his head, does exactly what he wants to do and does not bend one bit to the interest of of the U.S. politicians that try to talk to him. And then we say, oh, but we're giving you all these billions and we've given you a trillion dollars in the last 35 years. Doesn't that get us anything? And Bibi just laughs. He just smiles. Yeah. Thank you. Good

job. Good job. We'll do. We all know that Joe Biden could stop this war on a phone call. He could establish a new state in Palestine in a week, but he obviously doesn't want to do that because of his maniacal, self-articulated wedding at the hip with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I don't know where it's going to go. You make a great... Go ahead, Karen. Well, I mean, the Israelis in particular have such an excellent ability to spy on all their allies and have done so for decades. And we are the biggest ally and we get the biggest, we're on the biggest receiving end of that spying. So many of our politicians and presidents, and you take a

guy like Biden, who's pretty much a crook from the time he was a senator, probably before he ever got elected. So here's a guy who dabbles in the dark side of what's legal and illegal all his life. You think they don't have stuff on him or half the people in Washington? Of course they do. And that's part of Israel's strategy. It's a good strategy for Israel to do this. I mean, they should. They're a little country. They have high tech there. They have the ability to move freely in all the Western countries and probably many other countries. Why shouldn't they gather data that will help their country? They should do that. And they have done that. And now we live with it.

Karen, I have to go. I have another program coming up. But thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for your thoughts. Merry Christmas, my dear friend. We'll see you again soon. Merry Christmas to you too, Judge. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.