Judging Freedom - Karol Markowicz - NY Post journalist Putin's War, Gender Identity schooling

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, May 18, 2022. It's about one o'clock in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. My guest is a columnist whose works I have been reading and admiring for a long time, and I only recently discovered that she was born in Russia and has had family in Ukraine. And she came over here as a child of two. Carol Markowitz is a distinguished columnist for the New York Post and for other publications as well. Carol, it's a pleasure. Welcome, my dear friend, to Judging Freedom. Thank you so much for having me, Judge. You and I have both written, I from the constitutional perspective, you from the human suffering perspective, of the exquisite unfairness

of the sanctions visited upon the Russian people and the effects those sanctions have had on Americans' attitudes towards all things Russian. Tell me how you feel about this. So to start, I was part of a Jewish migration out of Russia, out of the Soviet Union in the late 70s, early 80s. Jews were allowed to leave because of religious persecution. So most people that you'll encounter from the former Soviet Union who moved around that time to the US will be Jewish. So you have the situation where all these people are Jews from a country that no longer exists for, you know, the former Soviet Union, and they're being targeted as Russians, because we, for a long time, shorthanded ourselves to Russian. We would say, you know, what are you?

I'd say Russian. And while I was born in Russia, that's very rare. My father's from Ukraine. Both sides of my family are from Belarus. There was a lot of displacement post-World War II. So while, again, while I was actually born in the country of Russia, most Russians you'll encounter in the U.S. very much. And these same

Russians, same Russians are having their windows smashed and their restaurants, you know, targeted. I in my column about this, I wrote about one of my favorite Russian restaurants is called Tatyana. There's one on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and there's one in Hollandale Beach in Florida. And it's owned by this woman, Tatiana, who is Ukrainian, Ukrainian Jew. But again, for decades, we just referred to it as Russian. And so now she gets these threatening phone calls to her restaurant saying, you better change the cuisine, you better change the name. He's like, A, I'm from Ukraine, but B, I'm Jewish and was never considered Russian. On my passport, it said I was a Jew.

It never said I was Russian. So we were this other thing. And now we're being held accountable for, you know, things that we have nothing to do with. What is your understanding of the morality of what President Putin is doing? Is he justified in trying to bring Ukraine back into Russia and using violence to do so? Or are the Ukrainians justified in defending their homeland from an unwarranted, unlawful, immoral invasion? Right. I mean, to me, it's an easy answer. It's the second one. Ukrainians are absolutely, should be defending their homeland. Absolutely. I have absolutely no love for Putin whatsoever.

I do, however, have feelings about what's happening to ordinary Russians. I still have family in Russia. These are not free people. It's not like me and you could say whatever we want and really not face the kind of consequences that they would face. They're incapable of standing up to their leadership. This is not a leadership. What would happen if your relatives in Russia went on a podcast like this from their apartment in Moscow and said, the war is wrong, Putin's a butcher? Right. They would likely be imprisoned, and that has happened to many Russians. My relatives absolutely don't talk about anything like this with us or anyone because they know,

again, this is not a country that has ever had a legacy of freedom. We assume being Americans and we have this constitution that gives us the right to say whatever we want and to challenge the government. We assume that people around the world live similarly. My relatives have never known freedom ever. When we moved to the US in the late 70s, my mother's family couldn't leave because of her. Her father had been a very low level government official, but it didn't matter at the time. So her mom was allowed to visit us when things were kind of thawing. She would not in America in Brooklyn, visiting us in

New York would not speak about anything. She was terrified. She was being followed. Somebody would hear her. She would be arrested. And this was already when things were better. So it's very, very tough to imagine what Russians would say. How about the flip side of this? What do you know from your Ukrainian relatives? Can they get on a podcast in Kiev and say, Zelensky's a Nazi, he's out of his mind, Ukraine is really the rightful part of Russia? What would happen to them? That's an interesting question. I really don't know. I imagine also nothing good. Again, this is once again, not countries that are very familiar with the concept of freedom. My relatives in Ukraine

left in the first few weeks. They were older women. These are like kind of my grandmother's cousins that were still there. And they're in Germany now with the rest of their family. I don't know. So I can't really speak to that part of it. But that is a fascinating question that I think should be answered. I imagine it would be not maybe as, you know, gruesome as what would happen in Russia, but I think they would similarly be punished. How have the sanctions that President Biden has unilaterally imposed on Russia affected the average Russian? So from the communication that I had early in this war with various people in Russia was that things were very tough, very hard. But it doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I think things have really improved there, which just shows that these sanctions aren't working. Also, I mean, it just we're, i feel like we've handled this so poorly under biden's leadership

i think there's there could have been a lot more space for conversation um with putin with various parties involved in this and i think we didn't we disregarded all of that um and look again no love whatsoever for putin he's a madman. This is insane. I want the war to end immediately, and I want Ukraine to be victorious. But the idea that the U.S. just sat back and let this happen can't be dismissed. And it doesn't mean that we need to. I think the argument was like, oh, well, what do you want, boots on the ground? Like, absolutely not.

Absolutely no, absolutely. But I would love a leader. I would love a president who was a leader. And the American government, the American government has sent military equipment valued at fifty three billion dollars to the Ukrainians or it's in the pipeline on its way there. That number is greater than the entire military budget of Russia in a year. What more would you have the government do? And before you answer that, think about that. Some of our guests on this show, ex-military and ex-American military and ex-American intelligence community, have argued that we are doing nothing more than prolonging the inevitable, that Russia is so much more powerful, it will inevitably win. And by giving Ukraine military equipment,

we're just causing more deaths of Russian soldiers, more deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, and more deaths of Ukrainian civilians. How do you view that argument? I am not sure about that argument. I think what recent history of wars has shown us is that the people defending their homeland tend to win. It doesn't matter how powerful they are. I mean, look what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually the U.S. had to leave. And, you know, it went right back to being basically what it was. So I don't know. I don't think that the argument that Russia will definitely win

because they're a greater power makes any sense anymore, especially look how long it's taken. Nobody thought it would take this long. I absolutely thought this war would be over in a few days. I thought Zelensky would be dead. Russians would have captured the whole country and it would be over. And that didn't happen at all. And now, you know, and again, I get this from the news media, right? It's the media that presented Russia as this undefeatable foe that Ukraine would be, it would just be impossible for them to fight back. What do you get from your relatives about what life is like in Ukraine?

Are they hopeful? So they are hopeful. The ones from Ukraine absolutely think that they're going to be victorious. I think that they think they're going to go home, the ones who have left. And I don't know, again, I can't speak to what my Russian relatives think just because it's impossible to talk to them. But I don't think that anybody thinks that this is the kind of cakewalk that it was supposed to be. But again, back to us, what the US role is, yes, what we're doing is makes no sense. But I'm talking early leadership. I wish we had the kind of leadership that could stop something like this from happening before it happened. I know, you know, President Trump obviously, constantly says that if he would, if he were in charge, this war would not have happened. I actually saw him

at Mar-a-Lago a month or two ago, and he said that to the audience. He said, if I were in charge, this war would not have occurred. So is he right? I don't know. He said, I wonder what he would have done, because as you just said, there is no appetite in America for Putin. No, no, no, no. I don't think he meant that at all. I think he meant that Putin would have thought twice about invading. Look, Trump is a wild card, and I think that that helps sometimes, and it might have helped here. All right, let's switch gears a little bit. Something else you and I have also been writing

about. You've been writing about the cultural aspects else you and I have also been writing about. You've been writing about the cultural aspects of it, and I've been writing about the constitutional aspects of it. And that is efforts by public schools in America. Carol, I prefer to call them government schools. That's what they are. Yeah. To teach five, six, and seven-year-olds about gender identity. Here in New Jersey, the curriculum is repellent. There's actually a line in the curriculum that they want the teachers to say

to five-year-old girls, this is a little bit repellent, I've said it before on air, you don't need a penis in order to be a boy. I think it's normal and natural that parents would not want government authority figures talking like this to their children, that this is an area of human behavior and development reserved by human nature. And I might add by the Supreme Court to the parent-child relationship, not to the government-teacher-child relationship. What do you say? I think the New Jersey curriculum is insane. And the fact is that it came about, we learned about the New Jersey curriculum over the last few months, where it was, at the time, the Florida law that Governor DeSantis had signed, making the parental rights and education law, making it,

you're not allowed to teach this type of thing to K to three, kindergarten to third graders. And the comments from the left were, why do we need this law? Nobody's teaching this kind of thing. And New Jersey was like, oh, hi, here we are. We're teaching this kind of thing. So it was really an interesting timing for this. In the New Jersey law, kids can change their gender from day to day. You can be a boy today, you can be a girl tomorrow, and the teacher has to adjust on those pronouns. And what we're seeing now, I have a column coming out about this, but it's used as a weapon to a middle school. These middle school girls went by they and the boys in their class did not call them that.

And now they're being targeted for actual prosecution because of this, because they misgendered their middle school classmates. So this afternoon at 4.30 Eastern on Newsmax, I'm going to be discussing with my former Fox colleague, Eric Bolling, the prosecution of three eight-year-old boys in Wisconsin for using the word she instead of the word they, not denying the fact that the first amendment, which prohibits government from infringing on

speech, also prohibits the government from compelling speech. That's right. And the truth is, if I were a preteen or a teen right now, I would 100% make everybody call me they. Why not? I'm a plural now. Where did Carol go? They went to the bathroom. For sure, I would have made my teachers do that. Come on, judge, you know you would have to. Why not? Why wouldn't you force everyone around you to call you something ridiculous? If I can get away with her highness, I would do that too. I can understand the frivolity. And I appreciate the frivolity and the humor.

Sure, because they're kids. But what I condemn is the government teachers saying to five-year-olds, you can be a boy today and a girl tomorrow, and then the school system punishing people that don't accommodate that. That's absolutely right. And in my picture of this, obviously the teacher would say, that's crazy, you couldn't do that. But the way things are going right now, teachers are absolutely catering to this kind of madness,

and we need to tell them to stop that. Carol, it's a pleasure. I hope you'll come back. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.