Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Regime Change Is How Empires Die

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Regime Change Is How Empires DieSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New Year energy is all about resetting routines, feeling healthier, and starting fresh. Why not give your dog the same reset? From daily walks to better habits at home, our dogs are always right there with us. Ollie helps you start the new year with intention, beginning with your dog's bowl. With fresh, protein-packed meals crafted from real human-grade ingredients, your dog can start the year feeling their best, too. Choose from five recipes and get a personalized plan for your dog's needs. Meals arrive perfectly portioned with a scoop and storage container, so serving is fast and mess-free.

And with Ollie's in-app on-demand health screenings, tap real experts whenever you need peace of mind. Visit ollie.com slash crossover and use code crossover for 60% off your first box. Undeclared wars are commonplace. Fragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government?

government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, January 8, 2006, my dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson will be with us in just a moment on regime change. That's how empires die. But first this. History tells us every market eventually falls.

Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 38 trillion in national debt. Stocks have record highs defying gravity. So what happens next? groceries, gas, housing, everything's going up. And this dollar, it buys less every day. When the system breaks, your stocks won't save you and your dollars won't either.

But one thing will. Gold. I've set it on my show for years. Gold survives collapse. Central bankers know this and billionaires know it. That's why they're buying more. Is it too late to buy or is it just the right time? Call my friends at Lear Capital to find out.

Ask questions. Get the free information. There's no pressure. And that's why I buy my gold and silver from Lear. And right now you can get up to $20,000 in bonus medals with a qualified purchase. Call 800, 511, 4620 or go to Learjudgeonap.com today. Colonel Larry, always a pleasure, my dear friend, such as it is, a happy, New Year to you. You too. And let me just say it's your advertisement there reminded me of the old

Czech grandmother who in 1936 when Hitler was on the rise said to her grandson, always keep some gold on hand to bribe the border guards. That may work today as well. Colonel, are the neocons now in total control of American foreign policy? Well, Doug McGregor prefer. to call many of them globalists, I'd say you put the two together and you have it right. And then you throw in the Rothschilds of today and you have it totally right. That would be the Paul Singers of the world who are about to cash in on Venezuela and oil. Yes, the Charles Cokes, the Paul Singers, the Peter Thiels, the Elon Musk. They're all part of the same crowd.

I want to say even Fred Friedrich Meritz. How was Mertz involved because of the assets he owns through a black rocket? And because of the intelligence he came with. Intelligence is the coin of the day. I mean, are we in an era? I didn't expect to go here. We just put the spark of an idea in my head. Are we in an era in which heads of state regulate domestic and foreign policy in order to enrich themselves and their buddies?

Yes. And their buddies, of course, massive. and themselves quite adequately, thank you. Wow. Are Whitcroft and Kushner, those two real estate agents that supposedly represent the United States government negotiating for themselves when they bounce around the world?

Intermediaries diplomats, dare I say, for wealth acquisition, mostly theirs. Wow. But back to my first question, I think the colonel's terminology is probably more accurate, mine's more political. This is not the Donald Trump who ran for office. This is not Tulsi Gabbard.

This is not Rand Paul. This is Marco Rubio triumphant. Is it not? In some respects, yes. And then the question to me, the salient question becomes, is this because he is so massively bought off? because he is experiencing a degree of dementia, or because his character is ultimately fallible and has been fouled?

I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is. Could be all three together. Trump looked exhausted. In fact, we're going to play a clip. Chris put together quite a fascinating and somewhat humorous montage. Take a look at the way he looks today compared to the way he looked during his first term.

I mean, here was his moment of triumph on Saturday afternoon. He could barely read through, now maybe he had been up all night, perhaps, but he could barely read through the words that were in front of him. Chris, cut number four. We're going to run the country until such time

as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. Our current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven absolute failure. We will break the cycle of regime change. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt, and in Syria. regime change takes chaos. You've seen how that works over the last 20 years. that hasn't been too good. Not a reckless interventionist globalism.

We're getting out of the nation-building business. We're going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place. They told a reporter that he thought that would be many years. He didn't say many years after he left the White House, but he said many years. It's a contradiction of great importance, I think. showing what he said and what he was elected to do, one assumes, and what he is actually doing. It is almost, no, I'll say it. It's night and day. And then the question becomes, your question, who caused this change or what factors caused this change? And I would submit that the major one was money.

Money to Rubio's benefactor, money to the Trump family. The whole ballgame, everything from Mirian Aedelson to Paul Singer to all the rest of the people who are shoveling money down an open trough to get policies changed. The people, for example, who got one of the biggest drug dealers in the world, Hernandez in Honduras, pardoned by Trump. How do you do that when your own country convicted him and put him in jail? How do you come along and pardon him? There's no answer to that question that makes sense other than Bialf. The prosecutor in that case, 10 years later, was Trump's personal defense lawyer, now a federal judge on the Third Circuit in Newark, New Jersey. You can't make this stuff up.

What damage has been done to the U.S. geopolitically, Colonel Wilkerson, by the invasion and kidnapping in Venezuela? Tremendous damage, really, and it's coming at us from down the road, and it will continue to come at us. What we've done, Judge, is we've taken essentially the fabric that we designed with lots of others helped, particularly in Europe, post-World War II, and utterly rented. We've destroyed it. And what happens then, and you know this, as I think it was Madison said, if men were angels, you would need. no government and no law. Well, men aren't angels now any more than they were when Madison said that. And we have no law. And the United States is the destructor thereof. And we were talking about this before him, but right now, Russia very meticulously, this is Putin, he's a lawyer, you know.

He's very meticulously weaving some of this back together and hurling it back at us. We call it in the military, strategic mirroring. He's doing the same thing in the Caribbean or the Caribbean, and he's going to do it even more. But what he's doing there is he's got 12 U.S. ships in custody or U.S. ships in terms of the cargo and part portions of the crew, got their crews entirely and got the ships in custody. He started this a couple of years ago when we started enforcing the sanctions we had on him by actually shouldering his ships in the Baltic and the Black Sea and elsewhere with military vessels, and then on one occasion actually shouldering it and boarding it. And he said enough. And so he now has 12 U.S. ships. They were applying the Black Sea. They were applying their approaches to the Baltic,

and they were applying what Russia is now doing business in almost 24-7, the Arctic. And he took them. And he's going to continue to do that. I guarantee you. He's trying to. You might be breaking news, even though you and I talked about this before we came on air, I haven't heard this anywhere. Twelve ships, the cargo is American, the crews are fully or partially American in the custody of the Russian government. Yes. Just Google it on YouTube. You found it.

There are several episodes on there right now explaining it. And it's been very quiet, and it's been very subtle what Putin is doing. And it doesn't have, I did this in Beijing in 2009. in what we call a petroleum disruption exercise. We had everybody there. We had Merritt there. We had AIG there. We had Lloyd of London.

Everybody in the world that had something to do with international shipping was there and we did this game. And the contrast then when every time something happened untoward in the world to disturb the world commerce, the United States Navy was called upon ultimately to be the arbiter or to be the enforcer of the peace during the crisis. Not today. Fast forward to Somalia and the pirates there.

We formed a combined joint task force, and we went after those pirates, China even participated. We had cooperation, and we pretty much put the pirates to rest. Today, you couldn't do that. Today, no one would want the U.S. there. No one would call the U.S. there. The U.S. would be forbidden from participation. It would have to participate by force,

because we have made a pariah of ourselves on the one environment that was sacrosanct to the globe, the high seas. And we were seen, even by China, as the principal protector thereof. We no longer are. By what authority can the United States control, appropriate, steel, Venezuela, and oil? And how long will it take, McGregor says many years, but how long will it take before that acquisition is profitable? None, as far as I know, I'm not a legal expert.

I do know that Bill Barr was very deeply embedded in crafting the rationales for what we're doing back when he was working for Papa Bush, then when he was working for George Bush, then when he was working later in the First Trump administration on the sidelines, he helped craft some of the law, quote unquote, that we're operating under now. But the bottom line of this operation, no matter how miraculous it seems to everyone, is it didn't accomplish a thing except the extraction of a man who might even not be convicted, like Hernandez was, of what he's charged with. I suspect he will because we've preacher-packed the whole trial,

but if he's not, what a blow that will be. Oh, well, some of the charges are non-crimes, like the possession of a machine gun in Caracas. How the hell is that a federal crime in New York City? The dispatching of cocaine from Caracas to Paris. How is that a federal crime in the United States? It's a real threat. This thing was written by somebody who had no knowledge of the facts and no knowledge of the law.

That's how absurd much of it is. I think you're absolutely correct. And it's going to have repercussions. And the biggest one's going to be, nothing has changed in Venezuela. Not a thing. The people who could contest are doing what we want to do with the oil and contest it majorly and mightily are still in power and just as ruthless as they ever were, and just as dependent and desirous of continuing that stream of revenue as they ever were. We haven't accomplished a single thing. Colonel, how do you think the Kremlin is reacting to these events that happened in the past two weeks? seizure of a Russian tanker, the invasion of Venezuela and seizure of President Maduro,

if you don't call him President Maduro, the seizure of Nicholas Maduro. The CIA's demonstrated involvement in the attacks on Putin's country residents. How does the Kremlin react to all those things? Do they still trust Donald Trump? I think they're going to strike in Ukraine and they're going to strike a definitive NATO target if they can get the assemblage CIA, Mossad, and MI6. If they can get those people in one place, they're going to attack that. But they're going to attack a target in Ukraine that is going to be obliterated and it's going to be a NATO target inside Ukraine.

That's the smallest thing they're going to do. Other things they're going to do are to continue this. program of taking our ships or our commodities on other ships. And they're probably going to start policing their areas of international waters a lot more aggressively than they were with both air, surface sea and subsurface sea. And if you want to see a real problem breakout, we almost had this happen in the exercise in Beijing in 2009. Let some of these countries that have a few quiet submarines, or even in the case of the U.S., Russia, one or two other countries, significant submarines, enter this fray, because then you've unloosed the dogs of war for sure.

Who has the better submarine fleet, the Americans or the Russians? It just depends on what characteristics you're looking for in both countries. And China, too, have built characteristics, Israel, too, with the Germans help. built characteristics that fit their waters. One of the reasons I think their Australians made a bad deal by paying three or four times as much for U.S. submarines that aren't even built yet when they could have got French submarines that were built and coming to them and reasonably priced is just that.

Those submarines are way overkill for Australia. So each country's submarines are more or less tailored to their needs. The two that are world-class are Russia and the United States. I'd say toss up as to who's got the better. And China's right in there close, and in terms of quantity, is probably going to surpass us all very soon. Wow.

Is the U.S. a credible negotiator? Not anymore, I don't think. We don't have any negotiators. We just don't. I mean, we've got some real estate agents, and we've got some money-hungry relatives of the family and others like that. But we really, you say,

is Marco Rubio a negotiator? Anyone who's watched him over the last 48 hours, tongue-tied as he has become on television, understands that Marco Rubio is no match for someone like Wang Yi in China or Sergey Lavrov in Russia, or for that matter, probably half the other secretaries of state foreign ministers in the world. Well, what did Trump's two real estate agents gain by standing up at the coalition of the willing

when they, along with President Zelensky, announced an agreement that in the post, I kept to say this with straight face, not easy. In the post special military operation, Ukraine, these European countries would send troops there that would be stationed there to provide security. I mean, are these people out of their minds that they would even offer something like this?

Germany's chancellor of Meritz said outside Ukraine. So he's been the only one to qualify that. I don't know if that will continue, but he did qualify. He said, well, put the troops outside of Ukraine. In NATO, close, but outside of Ukraine. Here's what I think is happening. And in some sense, it's a tactically positive measure, but I don't know where it's leading. I think Putin has grown convinced by the actions of Trump in the last 96 hours or so,

and certainly those preceding that, that he has no one to deal with, period. No one with power, with the magnitude, with the capability to really influence things to deal with. So he's got to deal with Europe and with us sort of ancillarily. Well, what he's going to do now is figure out just what he can accept that will look like it might appease the Europeans, principally, Germany, Britain, and France, and at the same time not do too much damage to him and get out of this mess if it's all possible. He's not going to accept any of the more draconian.

No way Ukraine's going to get all those soldiers. No way it's going to get any troops from NATO or probably anywhere else now on Ukrainian soil. No way it's going to continue to get money from the Europeans and from Washington. Those kind of things are out of the question. But there are some things that Putin could give a little on. And he might be in the position to do that now, the disposition to do that, because he is probably got the same kind of fear in his heart that the rest of the world does about this empire gone am up.

How likely and if likely how soon will the Americans and the Israelis attack Iran? Very shortly, I think. And that's that of all the items on Trump's agenda and BB's agenda is the one that worries me the most. Because that one is fraught with. peril, including BB getting into such existential circumstances personally and statewise that he goes to nuclear weapons and that we're in there at the time he does and become utterly contaminated,

not in a sense of nuclear weapons, but in a sense of the world's opinion of us, with that use. Well, well, I say to you, Happy New Year, such as it is, Colonel, these are all dangerous, hot spots that we that we talk about my greetings to all my loved ones and everything have been happy new year though hurricane force winds are ahead yeah before we part ways um the videos of the videos of the woman being killed behind the wheel in minneapolis now show that the cop was not in front of the car and that she was trying to drive away from him The latest news is that the feds have seized the evidence and will not let the Minnesota state police, which has a very reputable lab and team of criminalists.

They will not let them investigate or examine the evidence. Don't doubt it for a minute. And I'm telling you, you know, this judge. Americans by and large don't like that kind of authority. I don't care whether a Republican, Democrat, independent, or what have you. They don't like that kind of authority. So when you impose it on them relentlessly and you're everywhere in their face, they're going to do things like shoot you the bird, say some nasty things.

You know, you're going to respond with deadly force. That's what we're doing. There's going to be some sort of a reaction to this, which is not going to be pleasant, which will probably involve harming innocent people. That's the problem. That's the problem. Right. It's like searching for monsters abroad. They have a way of finding you at home.

Yes. And wars and actions abroad, particularly those that are illegal in the eyes of the world, have a way of coming home. Yes. Colonel, thank you, my dear friend. Thanks for making the time for us. Have a great week and upcoming weekend. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Do you have any plans to come to New York? I may. I may. Maybe Ritter will put together another one of those brunches for 500 people, and I can kiss you on your head again and make everybody laugh. I don't know if you know Sandra Levinson, but she runs a little 501c3 in New York for Cuba.

It's the only one that has authority to transport money and goods to Cuba under O-FAC license. So she's doing God's work as far as I'm concerned. We just sent some solar power generators down to Santiago because Melissa just 15,000 roofs it ripped off. I mean, they were in really bad shape, and I might come up there to see her again. Well, if you do let me know, I owe you more than one nice dinner. Ben Cohen paid for 10 solar power generators to go down there and restart their coffee business. He's a great guy, great guy. Thank you, Colonel, all the best. Have a nice weekend.

You too. Take care. Thank you. Coming up later today at 4 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.