Judging Freedom - LIVE TODAY - 3_30p est Jack Posobeic - Everything Ukraine & Biden

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, February 21st, 2023. It's about 3.30 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Our guest today is Jack Krasobik. Jack has had a career in naval intelligence. He now has a fabulously, wildly successful podcast and is more or less a Republican activist, but on the conservative slash libertarian side. We met recently and enjoyed our on-air work together, and I'm happy to have him on the show today. Jack, it's a pleasure. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge, appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Also on the east coast of the United States, the United States Republic here. Good, good. So you and I, I think, have similar views on what's going on in Vietnam. I've been very critical of the president's slow leading of us into war. I think he wants to run for re-election as a wartime president, and I think the people around him are encouraging him to do so. I hear very little resistance to that in the United States. So you're in your 20s or 30s. How do young people, how do young Republicans feel about Joe Biden's slow movement of us into war? And if you say they're opposed to it, where are they? Right. No, that's a great question. And of course,

we just saw President Biden giving this what seemed to me like a campaign speech in Warsaw, Poland, as if this was some kind of kickoff for his 2024 reelection, rather than a speech that was meted with any type of severity, given the weight of the things that he's talking about coming to blows with a nuclear nation, a nation, the Russian state, which, by the way, last time I checked, has more nuclear warheads than we have. This isn't Iraq. This isn't Libya. This isn't Syria, all the places which have been targeted for regime change by the United States in the past. This is Russia. This is a country that we can't exactly just push them around the way that we've done for so many other countries. And to think that we're not going to have some kind of response by them, I think, is foolish at the end of the day. So when you see the pageantry and the theatrics of this massive speech in Warsaw, coupled with the fact of Putin responding very directly and saying, look, we are coming to reject the START treaty because we don't think you're operating in good faith. We are going to place our nuclear weapons on combat readiness, on combat duty. So we're firing up the nukes.

And we are going to point out that we blame you for not only starting the war but also prolonging the war to this point. Okay. And just to answer your question real quick, I do get a sense from some people that, you know, folks may be in the military that are just kind of wrapped up in it and saying, hey, we're defending freedom. We're doing the right thing. But I do get a sense from folks that have been – that remember Afghanistan, that remember Iraq, that remember these crusades that we've sent our military on. I've got a friend who's deployed to Iraq four times. He's still in. And, you know, we talked to him and say, well, excuse me, deployed to Afghanistan for four times and said, well, then, you know, what's the point? What was the point of all that if we're just going to turn tail and leave at the very end, spending 20 years of blood, sweat and treasure only to turn it into to turn it over to the people that we said we were fighting the whole time. All right. So the last time Congress gave Joe Biden a blank check, first it was 40 and then

it was another 60 as a blank check for 60 billion with a B dollars. He's wasted, in my view, I suspect in yours, he's wasted 50 billion of it. Congressman Thomas Massey and the House Senator Rand Paul in the Senate each proposed the same amendments to this legislation, which would have added an inspector general on the receiving end of these billions to make sure that the money's going into the right hands. You know from your own military experience, the inspector general in Afghanistan famously couldn't find $100 million. He reminded us of that the other day, now the former inspector general, when he said we need one now. So why no, in your view, serious national debate? Because I see this as the beginning of the way Vietnam began.

You weren't around at the time I was, and I was of draft age at the time. Why no serious national debate about do we or do we not want military equipment, American cash, and American human beings on the ground? Why not even serious debate in the Congress? Why not even an inspector general why this rush to give old joe 100 billion to spend however the hell he wants look i i'm just going to say it that this is something where i agree with massey i agree with senator paul i don't think there's much of an opposition party right now certainly not on this issue i think the republicans have haven't even given time to actually present any critical questions whatsoever.

You might hear them pay lip service to it every once in a while, but for the most part, you're not hearing anyone ask these questions about why are we sending, and this, by the way, to answer your question on young people, one question I have heard a lot this week

is why are we sending tens of billions of dollars over there when we've got trains derailing in the Midwest full of chemicals with toxins being released and then controlled burns going off into our communities, these parts of America that, you know, we're just supposed to forget about, it's flyover country. And yet, we're also told at the same time we've got the president over there that he's defending the most important thing in the world as if as if that affects anybody back home it doesn't doesn't at all and the republicans though so how does the average young how does the average um young professional college uh educated traditional

or conservative uh leaning instincts uh feel about this they don't have to worry about the draft. Do they just not care that Biden may be dragging us into a war without the consent of the Congress? I mean, here's a president who has authority to spend $100 billion. Congress hasn't declared war on Russia. It can't under the law because Russia poses no military threat to us whatsoever. But the same Congress that can't declare war is willing to spend $100 billion on the war with no serious meaningful debate. Now, mutual friends of yours and mine were at the anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. this Sunday. There were as many speakers as there were people in the rally, almost. There were 25, 30 speakers. There were 50 or 60 to 100 organizers. There were 3,000 people

in the audience. I am told the audience was half over 65 and half under 25. Where is the bulk of youth in America on this issue of war? I guess they don't care. It's very interesting. You know, you're kind of, so where are the millennials? Where are Gen X? You know, and I understand Gen X doesn't necessarily have the most political activists out there, but for millennials, that is a good question. You know, you could say millennials are finally with their families, but most millennials aren't even having families. So that that's a huge issue for it as well. Most where are millennials, they're probably watching the latest Marvel movie right now, because honestly, I think so many people have certainly in the millennial generation, that's sort of your young 30s, or young 40s, mid 30s. They've they've just checked out,

they really checked out after Afghanistan and Iraq, and they're diving into pop culture. They're diving into Netflix. You don't see family formation. You don't see wealth formation. You don't see home ownership for the millennial generation as much. Versus you have people who, and I have friends like this who, because we all got into the job market right as the economy was falling out during the financial crisis. And so people said, all right, well, let's go join. I mean, I even joined the military. No, I didn't join in a combat capacity, but joining the military seemed like a better idea than going back to college and getting into more debt. So at least you would have some job. I

pursued Intel. I had a China route. So I was different than some folks. But a lot of guys, they joined up and did a couple of pumps in Iraq, Afghanistan. Some of them came back. Some of them came back super messed up. Some didn't come back at all. And that's something that really affected the millennial generation. I think that a lot of people haven't pointed out yet. But what gets me, though, is I think there is a cognitive dissonance because people don't want to admit that it was all for naught. They don't want to admit that all of the fighting, all of the war, all of the battles, all of the planning, this plan, that plan, we're going to go after Helmand province, we're going to support Karzai. That at the end of the day, it was all, the entire thing was a snafu.

The entire thing was a snafu. And what they're doing now is trying – Ukraine will end up like Ukrainistan. Ukraine will end up like Ukrainistan in 20 years or maybe 10 years at the end of this because they won't end up any better than they are now. And look, I'll give credit because I saw Governor DeSantis yesterday came out and said that Russia does not pose an existential threat to the United States. And he said he didn't understand why we're giving them a blank check. And then I just saw a video from President Trump a couple of minutes ago before he even came on this, where he even came out and went so far as to admit that it was the Obama State Department that was behind publicly stated this, that the Obama State Department was behind the Maidan uprising in 2013 that knocked

off the duly elected government of Ukraine. Well, that we know. We know that it was the Obama State Department. It was President Obama and Mrs. Clinton themselves using the CIA and various other assets. I don't think they used naval intelligence, but they certainly used other intelligence assets to foment that revolution because they wanted a pro-Western government there. Just switching gears a little bit to talk about veterans, of which you are one. One of my closest friends is a West Point graduate. I met him when he was a student there and I was lecturing there. He's now a financial advisor for one of the large financial advisory companies in Texas. He tells me that just an unofficial poll of the vast majority of his fellow West Point graduates who are now out of the army, that they are fiercely anti-war and

fiercely, using his word, his adverb, fiercely opposed to the buildup of troops in Ukraine. Do you sense the same from your former naval intelligence colleagues? And if you do, is it a generational thing or is it, look, I joined the military so that the military will avoid war. This is not what we joined for. I think there is a general sense of folks looking at the situation and understanding that if we get into a shooting war with Russia, or if we get walked down the primrose path into a shooting war with Russia through this sort of mission creep of, okay, we're going to send tanks and now we need to maintain the tanks. So we have to send advisors. We're conducting precision targeting already from bases in Europe for the Ukrainians, for some of these HIMARS

systems and other systems, probably drone targeting as well, that there is an idea that eventually at some point, Russia will say, look, you are an active participant in this, and we are going to strike out at those elements. And at which point, we are now in a shooting war with Russia. People know there's only one way that ends, and that's nuclear war. That's World War III. And I think a lot of people hearing, and maybe it's's what President what Putin was trying to get at by raising the nuclear question today, bringing that up was to cut across to some folks that are at least willing to listen to reason and say, look, you know, we're no we're no fan of the Kremlin. But we are fans of being able to continue to live our lives in happiness without these missiles raining down on our heads. Because, again, this is not that type of country.

We're coming up three days away from the one year anniversary. And I think you are going to see a renewed Russian offensive. You're going to see these conscripts that have come up. This partial mobilization is going to come online. You'll see the fighters coming in, the planes that have been amassed. And I think it's a huge message to the West

that they mean business and they don't want this Western NATO force on the border. Why is it that my dog Chris here is trying to get in front of the camera? Why is it that veterans like you, like my West Point graduate friend who served his six years in the military and commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, seemed to be more anti-war than anybody else. Why is it when Ron Paul was running for the Republican nomination for president, he received more donations from ex-military than all the other Republican candidates combined? What is it, Chris, about having spent time in the military that makes you realize that much of what the commander-in-chief

puts you through is frivolous and destructive? It's getting in the game. It's understanding that it's not just some romantic notion of American troops fighting for freedom in the Far East reaches of Eurasia against the czar and his imperial fort. No, no, no, no. This is families, moms with sons that don't get to come home, fathers, mothers, in some cases, if you look at the case of Joe Kent and his wife, Shannon Kent, who was killed in Syria, blown up by a suicide bomber, had two little boys back home and that there is a real cost that this isn't some Hollywood movie. This isn't some, you know, Piers Morgan was talking about it as though it's a schoolyard bully and you just have to deal with bullies. What about your kids, Piers? Do you want you really want your kids going into war in Eastern Europe, the same place where and you know, my family's Polish, right? You know, we understand the wages

of war, and what that does to a country, what generational destruction that it does to a country, if you want to open up something like the Eastern Front of World War Two, which was fought on this very ground, one of the most destructive wars, the most most destructive theater of that war in human history, when you look at some of the battles, the Battle of Kursk, Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of, you know, et cetera, et cetera, battles of the Donbass, battles of the Dnieper that were fought in World War II there. The idea of us reopening that same front again, I think to anybody who actually has skin in the game sounds insane the president of Poland of course would like to see an invasion of Ukraine with American and

Polish troops and their goal is to liberate Crimea well I think this is militarily impossible and therefore unlawful and immoral because war has to have reasonable and attainable goals before you can justify it. And of course, he's had Joe Biden's ear all morning today. I don't think it's going to succeed, but it worries me that 40,000 American troops, 10,000 of them from the 101st Airborne, are training with 90,000 Polish troops in your ancestors' homeland, just a couple miles from the Polish-Ukraine border. And they're training under the management of Polish military, the commander in chief of which wants to invade the country. Now, that's not going to happen without the consent of Joe Biden and other NATO personnel, senior personnel. I don't think it'll happen at all. I think it would be crazy. But I'm fearful of that kind of talk and the reaction it'll provoke on the part of the Russians. Are you? Well, I agree with you that I don't think that that's necessarily something that's particularly likely just from a military analysis standpoint.

But one thing, and I have said this before, that I could certainly see happening is potentially, as we've just talked about, this mission creep scenario where, let's say, OK, this Russian offensive kicks off within three days, the one year anniversary, they let's see, they make gains similar to what was made in the opening stages of this war. And then suddenly, if it looks as though the eastern half of Ukraine is going to fall, would it be out of the realm of possibility to hear that a NATO stabilization force is now being set up to establish a green zone in western Ukraine, and that there's going to be a NATO-led force defensively that is going to enter perhaps the area around Lviv, perhaps the wider region around Lviv, in order to establish a corridor for

refugees, for supplies, for weapons, etc. I don't think that would be out of the cards at all. Wow. All right, my dear friend, these are not good times in which we live, but I'm happy that young people like you are out there. I wish there were more criticism of the government in the mainstream media. It seems to be confined to podcasts and websites like yours and mine and lewrockwell.com and our libertarian friends, because Kevin McCarthy, who's now the Speaker of the House, has pretty much given old Joe a blank check on whatever he needs and whatever he wants. And McCarthy wouldn't be doing that without knowing that he had the support of nearly all Republicans and almost all Democrats behind him. It's a terrible state of affairs when the anti-war movement isn't even covered by the media and isn't

even taken seriously for the reasons that you've just argued. Jack, it's always a pleasure. I hope you'll come back again. Thanks so much, Judge. I always appreciate it. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. It's always a pleasure. I hope you'll come back again. Thanks so much, Judge. I always appreciate it. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.