Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Putin Interview and Big Media

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Larry Johnson: Putin Interview and Big MediaSee 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 Monday, February 12th, 2024. Larry Johnson is here with us in just a moment to talk about the continuing fallout in the media from the Tucker Carlson interview of Vladimir Putin, as well as the latest military events in the Middle East, which Alistair Crook says is leading the Middle East to Armageddon. But first this. Judge Napolitano here. Do you know that we the people have reached $34 trillion plus in debt? It's unsustainable and it's growing. Our government is addicted to printing money and it's not going to stop.

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And when you talk to my friends at Lear, tell them the judge sent you. Larry, welcome here, my dear friend. I know you've been doing some fascinating research on the number of people that have been watching the Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin interview as compared with the number of people who've watched the efforts of mainstream media to avoid it. And I want to get to that. But first, some of your comments, please, on the latest events in the Middle East. Last week, the United States killed a militia leader in Iraq, drone sent from Iraq to another place in Iraq. This is a militia leader who had ordered his team, his troops, whatever you call them, his militia members to stand down and would agree to stand down, we killed them anyway. What is gained by that? Nothing, just satisfying people within the United

States who are calling for blood and revenge, but it doesn't advance the ball any distance down the field with respect to changing strategy or improving security of U.S. forces overseas. And I always say, let's put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say that Baghdad or Iraq or Iran had the capability to strike within the United States, to kill a particular leader of some faction, and they take it upon themselves to decide, hey, this guy's a threat to us. And they carry out the execution here in the United States. We would be outraged. We would see that as an act of war. We would seek to retaliate. And yet here we are launching this attack in Baghdad. They go, well, you know, those Iraqis, they just need to get over it. It's dangerous. It's foolish. The reason the Constitution invested Congress with the right to

declare war is they didn't want some crazy president starting things on his own. One, it's important to have the backing of the people. you don't have that This is like Joe Biden and his team's personal vendetta It also has to be dangerous, Larry, to do something like this In terms of arousing the ire and anger of the Arab communities In that part of the Arab communities in that part of the world. Not only are we supplying Netanyahu with the equipment with which he is conducting a genocide, but we are killing innocents ourselves.

I mean, at some point, do you think al-Sisi in Egypt and Erdogan in Turkey and maybe even some Mohammed bin Laden, or not bin Laden, bin Salman, forgive me, in Saudi Arabia will not be able to keep their people's anger contained? Well, the United States has a long history of leaving bodies of civilians around. I mean, let's be candid about it. Vietnam, we killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, claiming in some cases they were Viet Cong, but they weren't. I know that in Panama, I was in Panama doing an investigation some years back, and there's this one port called Cocosolo, the Lone Coconut. And one of the women I met there described how her children had been killed by U.S. bombings during Operation Just Cause,

and her children were under the age of 10. So this habit, I'll call it that, because we did it in Iraq as well. We did it in Afghanistan. We killed wedding parties. Whoops, sorry. So we continue to murder civilians without any regard for the consequences of it because the fact is we've not suffered any consequences yet. But I think that streak of luck, if you want to call it that, is coming to an end. Do you think that the United States will honor the wishes of the Iraqi government

and get out of Iraq? We have thousands of troops there and a dozen bases. Ultimately, I think we're going to have to, but we're going to try to delay, coerce them into allowing us to stay as long as possible. Because this troop presence isn't about fighting terrorism. That's a lie. That's put up as the front. This is about oil and the money interests behind that oil and the benefactors who received that oil? The Israelis told the Palestinians to flee to the south.

As many of them did as they could. Now the Israelis are invading the southern part of Gaza in an effort to force the Palestinian refugees. There's about a million of them, some of them have only the clothes on their back, most of them haven't eaten in between three and ten days, to force them into Egypt. And the Egyptian government doesn't want them. What do you think is going to happen?

What's the likely outcome here? I think there's going to be a massacre. You know, look, since the start of this military operation by Israel or you know let's call it the attempt to systematically exterminate the Palestinians

when they started up north they told the Palestinians who were in the northern part of Gaza flee to this location Yonkunas I think was one of them. And every time they went to a designated area, then Israel would bomb it. So there was never a safe haven, a safe zon. You know, the vast majority of the Palestinians there were not Hamas activists

and soldiers and trained military personnel. By God, the vast majority of them are women and children. Yet this persistent violation of their humanity by Israel is engendering a level of rage and thirst for revenge that's going to be generational. This is not going to pass in a year or two. I think Americans are really bad at understanding how long some of these grudges last in that part of the world. They do have memory, and it is passed on. So what Israel is preparing to do, it's finally, I think,

evoked outrage from Egypt and from other countries that makes this now very dangerous if Israel goes ahead. Even sleepy Joe Biden has warned them against it. But Israel doesn't care. It has gotten away with these kinds of activities without any consequence in the past. Has the United States given Netanyahu a red line over which he can't cross? And if he does cross, we will do something? I don't know why. No.

Verbally, yes, but in practicality, no. The AIPAC lobby is just too strong in the United States. There are too many members of Congress beholden to them that are getting money for their campaigns that are not going to, quote, abandon Israel in its hour of need as they perceive it without any regard whatsoever for the Palestinians. I don't know if you saw the video of Aaron Maté the other day cornered Senator Chris Coons on an Amtrak train going north.

And Coons was in the quiet car and Aaron kept asking him, what about the murder of all these children? And Coons said, get out of here. Leave me alone. This is the quiet car. But I applaud Aaron for trying to dog him down. Aaron's a tough cookie to deal with. And I've taken that train many times, including a few times sitting next to Senator and then Vice President Joe Biden. But Larry, he's a different Joe Biden than the one that confused Mexico and Egypt. Look, anybody can

confuse two countries. That's just the tip of the iceberg of his mental impairment. I'm sure you were not surprised that mainstream media has trashed the Tucker Carlson interview, referred to him as a useful idiot. It wasn't just Hillary Clinton. She may have been the first one that said that, but a lot of the others picked up on it. Brett Stevens of the New York Times on CNN. And of course, the numbers that you came up with are staggering. Tell us about the numbers who watched that interview, what it's up to now compared to the numbers who watched the trashers or the ignorers. Yeah. So I started thinking about the ratings. I said, yeah, I wonder, you know, I heard Hillary Clinton and then Aaron Burnett. Oh, this, he's a

tool of Putin. And, you know, so I'm thinking, well, you know, the TV industry is about ratings. Well, hell, even the internet. I mean, you've got 300,000 people subscribed to you or heading towards that direction. And so people want numbers. It makes a difference. So I started thinking about it and I said, hey, let's look at all the late night comedy shows. Let's line those up and see what their ratings were. So Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Fallon, and Greg Gutfeld. I put him into that group. And then I said, and let's look at the top rated TV shows on cable news. So MSNBC, Fox, CNN, I went through, pulled the ratings for those. And I said, hey, and for grins, let's pull in the nightly ratings

for nightly news on the TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC. And I added all the numbers up, 32 million total for all, 32 million. And just to put that into context, in August of 1968, Walter Cronkite alone at CBS had 28 million viewers of his news program every night. 28. And so here are all these other networks. They can barely scrabble together 32 million. Aaron Burnett's show, top rated on CNN by God, 733,000. That was it.

That was it. Which I laughed because, yeah, you know, if we had that on the internet, that'd be great numbers for us. But on TV, with all the money they're paying her and all the money that goes into the overhead, that's ridiculous. So then I looked at Tucker's numbers. Last I saw it was 195 million. And that was just on the Twitter platform. That doesn't include YouTube. I saw one YouTube channel with over a million. What this demonstrates is that the legacy media, including the relatively recently arrived cable channels, their history. They're no longer relevant. They're relevant only to themselves. They speak in an echo chamber. And that's why they felt compelled to attack Tucker. And they never attacked him on the substance. They tried to insult him. I mean, Hillary Clinton's stupid insults were just highlighted. He's a useful idiot. And someone cleverly noted, well, Hillary,

at least he's useful, unlike you. You know, the only thing they really talked about in a mildly positive way was the comments that Tucker succeeded in eliciting from President Putin about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter whom the Wall Street Journal says is falsely arrested and accused of espionage and whom the Russians say there's a case. Who knows? I haven't seen the evidence. There's a clip of Mr. Gershkovich in a holding cell in a Russian courtroom. But I think just like when Cy Hirsch scooped the media on what really happened at Nord Stream, they're bitter that somebody else beat them to the punch. Who wouldn't want one of their anchors to interview Vladimir Putin? The numbers, of course, are staggering. I'm going to crow a little bit.

Last week, we had 4 million views. That's the highest we've ever had in just a week. Now, I won't mention names, but that's more than some of the networks whose names you just mentioned

a few minutes ago. Go ahead, Larry. I'll mention them. Yeah, you're beating the pants off of CNN, Fox, MSNBC. And, you know, you don't have a $40 million budget or $100 million budget for publicity and to hire producers and to hire editors. You know, you got you and a small team, competent team, but it's just, I mean, it really puts it into stark contrast. This wasn't possible 20 years ago.

It is possible now. And it is changing because it, frankly, it just pisses these people off. They can no longer control the narrative. They tried desperately to control it. They can't control it. White House says they're not interested in talking to President Putin. Isn't it interesting that the diplomacy has sunk to such a terrible level that the president of Russia has to go on the internet with a world famous interviewer and say, what's there for me to talk about? I'll talk to him if he stops

supplying the weapons that are killing my people. And of course, Joe Biden's people say, we're not going to talk to him. So we're back to square one. How much longer can Ukraine last, even if Congress is foolish enough to throw good money after bad and send another $60 billion? Well, it's not good money after bad. They're going to give the money to the military industrial complex, and they'll send the equipment over to Russia or to Ukraine. I don't see how they get out of 2024 alive. At the end of the summer, I think they'll be hard-pressed to continue to sustain operations. It would be one thing if the West was fully focused on Ukraine and to the exclusion of everything else, but it's not. The situation in the Middle

East has tremendously diverted its attention. And along with attention, that means resources, that means personnel, that means weapon systems. And the United States military industrial complex is no longer in a position to do two things well at once. It has to focus on one. And so without that kind of support, Ukraine, just from the material level, Ukraine can't sustain operations. They're already demonstrated they can't do that. But then there's the issue of the personnel. And soldiers are not made in six months. It usually takes 19 to 20 years. They have to be born. They have to be born, they have to be raised. And then they go through the training and the training process alone.

If it's going to be complete to, you know, make them combat effective to at least give them a chance of surviving on the front line means at least a year of training, year minimum, you know, go back and watch the series Band of Brothers on HBO. It's over 20 years old now, but it really highlighted that they went through that basic training period. Then they went through what was called advanced individual training. And then they learned how to work in units and groups. And that doesn't come in a week or two. Sorry, it takes literally months. Ukraine doesn't have months. They don't have the luxury of time.

That's what people don't understand. Is it fair to say that the generation of young males, say age 18 to 28 or 30, in Ukraine has been decimated, that they don't have the human beings, no matter what general is going to command the troops and no matter what cash he has to spend and no matter what ammunition has come from the U.S., they don't have the human beings to operate this stuff. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. That's why they're saying that the average age of their soldiers on the front line are 43 years old. That means it's, it's the fathers of those, you know, boys, those young men that are out there on the front line, not them. They, you know, they've been, they've been chewed up. And when, when you've got an average age of 43, that means you've got a good contingent of people

who are 50 and some into their 60s uh you know i'm sure that there are some people who are physically fit and can maybe endure some of that but uh you know fighting fighting in a war fighting in these terrible uh conditions with weather it's a young man's game. And Ukraine doesn't have a solution to it, not in the short term, not in the medium term, not in the long term. It's really sort of committed suicide with this operation. Before we go, just back to the Middle East, our mutual friend Alistair Crook, says Armageddon strikes at midnight and the clock's about 1130. Yeah. Anybody that's had the pleasure of knowing Alistair and talking to him in person, he is, I would describe him as a gentle man.

He's not one given to overstatement. He is very circumspect, sort of quintessential British in that regard. And so when he makes that kind of observation, I think it's one that people should take with great seriousness, because the prospects for this spinning out of control, and with the United States right now, not in a position, we're in a self-delusion. We have convinced ourselves that we're bigger, better, stronger, and faster than we really are. And it's only when you get put into a combat environment,

like we're discovering off the coast of Yemen. You know, people thought, oh, boy, U.S. Navy will take quick, you know, clean up quickly what's going on in Yemen. Well, here we are two months later, and we're lobbing bombs, and they're lobbing anti-ship missiles, and they're just going back and forth tit for tat. It's like a long extended tennis match. Do you fear, as do I, you know, there's that old one-liner, when all else fails, they take

you to war, that the Biden administration, in order to get the public's mind off of his mental deficiencies, which are now obvious to the vast majority of Americans, will engage us in war in the Middle East. I can't rule that out as a possibility. I think that what is going to prevent that is the chaos that's unfolding right now within the Democrat Party. They realize they've got to get rid of Biden. I mean, when the New York Times editorial board comes out with an article today, I believe, they're telling Biden, hey, your time's up, dude. Submit your resignation papers, get out, let somebody else step in who can do the job. You know that that's just a gang fight that's

going to get ready to erupt. So there are a lot of people that would want to be president or want to replace him, and Kamala Harris is going to fight for her bit of this as well. So what I'm saying is with that kind of, this is actually sort of a mirror image of what's going on in Kiev. In Kiev, you've got all this drama of Zaluzhny in, Zaluzhny out. Now Sursky's in, he's the butcher, but there's all this unrest or firing other people. United States

is going through that same thing. And when you have that, you don't have any kind of coherence and policy out on the front lines. Do we have a competent, capable, physically well Secretary of Defense. I believe he's in intensive care again as we speak. Yeah, I think his medical condition is far more serious than they've admitted to at this point. And, you know, I guess he's one year older than I am, and to be the second bout of ICU, they don't put somebody into ICU just because they have some fame or they're a high profile person. I know that firsthand because my wife ran the critical care unit, the ICU at the National Institutes of Health. She was there for 40 years. So I have some insight into it because I live with an expert.

Wow. Larry, thanks very much, my dear friend. Even when the news is not good, it's a pleasure to be able to pick your brain. We'll look forward to you and that youngster McGovern back with us on Friday afternoon. All right, Judge. Thanks. All the best. Coming up at 1.30, Eastern Congressman Andy Biggs. Where is the Congress on all of this? Why are they giving money away to Israel?

They really want to waste another $60 billion in Ukraine. What do they think about Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin? We'll find out. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.