Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Challenging An Authoritarian

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Challenging An AuthoritarianSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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2000 and 25. Colonel Karen Kutkowski joins us now. Is there, well, let me ask you this, did you secretly or publicly smile as I did watching the five to seven million marchers in the no-kings rallies this past weekend? I mean, I couldn't resist. cheering them on. I mean, I probably disagree with them on almost everything, but not on this.

No, I think we have to, they picked a good topic. They really picked a good topic. You know, I kind of poke fun at them a little bit. And I actually took some heat from readers who said, oh, you have to take it more seriously and you shouldn't, you shouldn't paint him with a broad brush. But I do agree with the No King's idea and anything that gets us to think about why we you know why the founders wrote what they wrote what they cared about they cared about no kings they cared about preventing the you know a new king to take over and be very powerful now of course we these guys are thinking about the president has become a king and I think they're missing the point we have kings now they're not they don't get elected they run things and

we are as surf as surf like as uh as european serfs in many ways today. So we have a problem with kings. It's not the way they are seeing it, but I like the phrase. I'm fine with it. Is there a growing movement in the country, whether from the left or the right, whether from progressives or libertarians or anarchists or whatever these people want to call themselves, of a disgust with the federal government? I think so. I think so. And one of the group, the No Kings group is picked on for two things. One is that they're paid demonstrators, which I don't know if they are or not. Some of them might be. But the other thing is that they are kind of boomers. They get, they're older folks who have really benefited from the rise of the state that we have seen, the rise of government growth, the massive inflation over the past 60 years. And these are the guys. This is the demographic sector that has most benefited from the state and state activists.

and, you know, manipulation of our money. And so it's good to pick on them. And they want government. They want their own king. A lot of these folks don't want no kings. They want a king of their choosing. But the actual people that work and produce in this country, and many of them are struggling. I mean, what used to be called the middle class is now sort of a vast working class

and poor class of people. They live precarious economic lives in many cases, two incomes. If one is gone or a paycheck is late, they're in big trouble. These people do not look upon the government as their beneficiary, like a lot of the boomers have come to embrace government. A lot of these people blame government. They do not trust politicians. You know, we saw this with MAGA.

You know, Trump, his attractiveness as a candidate, particularly among libertarians, independence, you know, because rhinos didn't like him, right? but a lot of average people did like him because he was contemptuous of the state. I'm talking about during his campaign. He talked about the power of unelected people to be corrupt, you know, the deep state, the swamp. He was speaking the language of so many in this country. And I think it transcends racial groups and some economic groups. And it's really a class thing.

So we have a coming class struggle in this country. It's ongoing, actually. I was delighted by a line you used in your recent publication at Judge Knapp and elsewhere. The title is called, Will We See a New Era of Truly Popular Anti-Statism? But the line you used is from Thomas Payne, a historical hero of mine. I'm thrilled to know that he is of yours also. Do we raise taxes to wage war, or do we wage war in order to raise tax? taxes. Yeah. Yeah, very, very wise man. And again, it tells us that, you know, using government

and using wars to strengthen government to increase government's control over the people. This is not a new idea. This is something's been around for quite some time. It's a European type of thing. In fact, we, you know, we see it with this European, the EU and NATO desire to continue the Ukraine war because they need to continue the grift and they need to continue the grift. And they need to continue the justification to maintain, you know, the tax rates and to tell the people how important government is, right? Because we're at quote-unquote war. It's a very old tradition of government. And Payne, of course, got it direct. I mean, you know, a very outspoken guy, right? I mean, he said it. You know, I may have played this for you before, but I want you to see it

again, General Millie, on taking the oath that members of the military take. It's incendiary, but it's beautiful. Chris. You see, we in uniform are unique. We are unique among the world's armies. We are unique among the world's militaries. We don't take an oath to a country. We don't take an oath to a tribe. We don't take an oath to a religion.

We don't take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator, and we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that it's America, and we're willing to die to protect it. Every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian, and coast guardsmen, each of us commits our very life to protect.

and defend that document, regardless of personal price, and we are not easily intimidated. You know, you can't really disagree with that. It was obviously aimed at Donald Trump at the time, referring to him as a wannabe king. I think so. But you can't really disagree with the essence of what he's saying, can you? Well, as I recall, the oath is that we will protect the Constitution. From all enemies, domestic and foreign. That's right. Foreign to domestic enemies. So we are protecting, I think the military people and many government servants who take the oath, they're protecting the ideas that are in the Constitution. Correct. They're protecting the Constitution itself as law. But the way Millie presents it, you know, he says, we don't take an oath to a country. We have these

ideas that we fight for, implying that we fight for them around the world, you know, a very interventionist type of opening, I think. So I would have to disagree with that. I think it's much simpler than that. You know, we have a system of government. It's not perfect, but it's bound by law. And the law, of course, has its own source, which is in God or nature, you know, the idea of what is the right way to be, what is the value of individuals, what rights we have, that are inalienable. So the law protects that, and the military protects that document in the law.

It's this idea that he's going to fight to the death for something. Millie, in particular, doesn't strike me as someone who would fight to the death for much. You know, he's a political hat, quite frankly. I'm sorry. But, yes, I agree with some of what he's saying, but I think the overall tone is misleading. Can the Israelis be trusted in this so-called,

after the curveball, I'm throwing a softball, after the so-called Jared Cush, Steve Whitkoff, Donald Trump, Gaza, wedding without a bride or groom, as Laura Johnson calls it. Yeah. Well, you know, Israel has never, well, Israel can't be trusted at all. And most governments really can't be. But Israel is unique and that they have demonstrated their untrustworthiness to any document that is signed, they, anything they say they're going to do or not do. All of it is totally amenable to whatever they wake up in the morning and decide to do. Or they're lying and they had a plan all along and they're going to continue with that. And I think with Gaza, the plan is very clear. They're going to decimate the territory and destroy the people. They want them either dead or moved out. or killed in such numbers that there will be just maybe, I think they would find acceptable

half a million, or I'm sorry, 500,000, Palestinians remaining in a very small portion of Gaza, and then the other 1.5 or 1.8, whatever the starting point was, gone. And they don't care if they're buried. They don't care if they're starved, dive disease, or bad water, or they go to Libya or Egypt or Jordan or wherever they don't this is not a factor they have decided the government of Israel has decided the people of Israel have decided this is their land and they want it and they want it they want it now and now is the time now was the time with the what happened on October 7th and of course the precursor events the decisions that were made prior to October 7th to

make sure that it that it worked I mean you know I have no doubt in my mind they stood down There's just too much evidence that this was put together to facilitate the expansion of Israel into Gaza, but also it's part of the larger plan, which is to expand Israel into Syria, into southern Lebanon, wherever they need to go. You know, from the river to the sea is the Euphrates River, not to Jordan. So you can't trust them, but if you understand what their real objective is, which they don't hide, you can trust them to act towards that interest. Here's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gavir. Now, in fairness, everybody listening to us,

he is either the most fanatical or the second most fanatical in Prime Minister Netanyahu's coalition. But he's roughly the head of what you would consider the Israeli FBI, domestic police force, a national police. force. And here's what he's saying, now that the hostages are home, we can fill in the blank. Chris cut number 15. Right now, we have the opportunity, especially today, to stop everything

and say for a moment the hostages, thank God life has returned. That was the main argument for why we are not continuing the war. And now we need to return to fighting. We need to go back to war. We need to unleash the gates of hell upon them. We need to unleash the gates of hell upon the Palestinian people. Well, they're not people. They're not people to... You're right. You're right. They are, you know, it's as if you had a rodent problem, you know. You want to unleash...

Do you think this was the plan all along? I do. Yeah. I mean, it's not easy to figure out that that was the plan, because in the Israeli media and in the coalition voices, which Smotrich and Ben-Gaville, are part of, they have continually said this, you know, this is not, this is not new or different for them. So you actually can trust Israel to tell their own people in their far right circles, which are running the government. You can trust them to speak truth amongst themselves. So that's who you listen to. You listen to what they're saying to each other. That's truth in their minds. Anything else that they sign or say publicly, anything they say in English. You know,

We obviously know it's almost a joke when Netanyahu speaks English, right? We know who he's speaking to. And he has totally different messaging for his English audience, his American audience, or, you know, his own country. So, yeah, they totally intend to do it. And why wouldn't they? It's like Jared Kushner said. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off over here. That was Kushner's description when he went into, I guess, northern Gaza.

Well, that's not all Kushner said. listen to this cut number 14 before the hostages actually come out you decide to go to gaza and what did you see it looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area and then you see these people moving back and i asked the idea where are they going like i'm looking around these are all ruins and they said well they're going back to the areas where they're destroyed home was onto their plot and they're going to pitch a tent and it's very sad because you think to yourself they really have nowhere else to go would you say now have having been there, that it was genocide.

No, no, absolutely not, no. They're denying reality. Of course they are, of course they are. And both of those guys, and I'm not, I don't want to be too harsh on Whitkoff, because I'm not opposed to Whitkoff as a human being. I kind of don't like Kooster on a personal level, so maybe my prejudice against him it will show.

But both these guys are financially connected to what's coming, for Gaza. And what's coming for Gaza is, of course, a continuation of genocide, I think. But hopefully what these guys hope to do as Americans, along with the Israelis and some of the Arab countries as well, is to profit from what has been done in Gaza. And I think it was Smotrich that said not long ago that the clearing of Gaza has already happened. We are the preparing part of this building that we're going to be doing there has already happened. Our bulldozers are doing that. Our bombs did that.

Our bombs will continue to do that. So the plan is this is coveted territory for a lot of reasons. And Trump knows what some of those reasons are, right? Because he was the one that started pushing the Gaza Riviera. It's a coveted reason. There's people that will make money and are in position to make billions of dollars in taking over this land. over this land.

And I think what they expect is that the Palestinians will live in much as they do at the local chicken factory. They'll live behind the factory in trailers. And they will do the grunt work of processing whatever needs to be processed. They will work in these hotels. They will be employed in low level jobs to support the money and the industry

and the recreation that is being put together and plan So they also talk about this. So they're not lying when they say, I think it's like, oh, they're not going to do that. The world will, the world will stand up for Palestinians. No, it won't. It hasn't. And it won't. There's money to be made and they're going to make the money.

And the U.S. people who are connected to Donald Trump will profit for sure. So it's really quite tragic. Here's Trump himself alluding to all that profit. He wants to call Gaza freedom. place. I'm kind of surprised he doesn't have his own name in it, but they haven't, they haven't landed the first shovel yet. Cut number two. In the past, you've said Gaza could be beautiful. It could be developed and you said you wanted to develop it. Do you have plans for that? Not me as an individual. The U.S. I liked it as like Freedom Place. You called Freedom

place. And we would get all of the people that live there into decent homes throughout the region. If you look, Egypt has a lot of land. Jordan has a lot of land, you know, right next door. A lot of countries have a lot of land. So I had an initial vision that we would get them, look at Gaza. I mean, there's nothing standard. The whole thing is it's all rubble. So it's not too hard to top that. And we'd build houses and would be paid for by the wealth of the, you know, the wealthiest countries are there. Yeah, it looks like Rubble because we turned it into Rubble.

The pictures of Gaza, even though it was a concentration camp, an open-air concentration camp, the pictures of the cities there in Gaza and the beach is quite beautiful, okay? even under horrendous, you know, lockdown-type economy, you know, controlled by Israel, periodic bombings, periodic mowing of the lawn. Even with that, it was quite beautiful. And people who have traveled to Turkey or to the Mediterranean, you know, Italy, if they've seen beautiful places, beautiful cities, old cities, you know, in that area. So Gaza certainly, certainly met that criteria, despite what Israel had it under for 40 years, 50 years. So for Trump to be this stupid, to be this cruel and casual, oh, it's rubble now, like somehow a big hurricane came through.

No, that was American taxpayers' dollars. That was Donald Trump making those decisions because he's bought and paid for by Israel and his main supporters encouraged him to do this. you know, Trump, if it was his own money, which it isn't, it's taxpayer money and his friends are going to make the billions in redeveloping. But if it was his own money, he would have done research. He would have done his due diligence as to what's actually happening. And so as president, I think a lot of people thought maybe he would treat Americans money with that same due diligence now that he's in charge of the country, as he would like to say. And yet he did no research. He acts like he doesn't even understand how any of this happened. So

it's very it's very upsetting so he's obviously in favor of ethnic cleansing egypt has a lot let me finish karen egypt has a lot of land jordan has a lot of land you know they're right next door a lot of countries have a lot of land what could it be talking about but the forced migration of human beings from their homeland because of their ethnicity that's known as ethnic cleansing which when you used with violence is a war crime. That's right. That's exactly right. And for him not to be aware of that, given that he's been president once already, and he has lived a long life, and he's consorted with people from all over,

theoretically learned many things in his life, for him not to be aware of that is just criminal. And if he is aware of it, and he's cheering it on and planning on how he and his friends will profit from it, that itself is a war crime in my view. So, you know, I mean, I'm sorry. I just don't, if average people can figure this out, why can't Trump, you know? He can figure it out, but he's made promises to people with the mentality of his son-in-law and Mr. Whitkoff. Today began destroying the house that to Thomas Jefferson built in order to build a Trump ballroom. So there's a wall of the White House, which is now being demolished. He also served a demand today on the Department of Justice that he should be sent to check for $230 million for his pain and suffering during the impeachment and other investigations of him in his first term.

and the people deciding about whether or not he'll get that $230 million are his former lawyers who are now running the Department of Justice. In the real world, this would be inconceivable. In the real world, any lawyer in the DOJ that facilitated this would immediately lose his or her license to practice law. But we don't live in the real world. We live in a world where money borrowed in the taxpayer's name is used to buy bullets that go into the heads of Palestinian babies.

That's right. We live in the real world where Mrs. Adelson's $109 million buys a presidency. Right. You know, I had some hope when Trump embarrassed Mrs. Adelson, particularly when he spoke at the Knesset, and he talked about how often the Adelson's would visit. And when he talked about B.B. calling him about, I need weapons. I need weapons. And he was, I thought, I hoped, it was a little bit of slim, a slim glimmer of hope that

Trump was trolling these guys. That was, he was purposely embarrassing them because they got it. And they were embarrassed by being pointed out like this. And it turns out he wasn't even trying to embarrass him. He has such a lack of self-awareness and apparently a lack of understanding of what he is making happen, not just in Israel. but in lots of places, that, yeah, it's just, you know, maybe I should have marched in one of the No Kings rallies, you know.

Oh, gosh. If I didn't have certain streams of income from certain sources that don't agree with that, I would have marched myself. Let's not go there. Colonel. All right, true confessions after my week in Moscow. Colonel, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. I love these pieces that you post at Judge Knapp.

I love our conversations. Me too. Thanks so much. Thank you. What are we looking at, Chris? Gaza? Oh, that's behind the White House. Oh, I'm sorry. This is right. Oh, my goodness. Jefferson's flipping in his grave.

This is the wall of the White House. How about that? I looked at it and I thought it was Gaza. And it's the home of the President of the United States because it's not big enough for him. I don't even know if this monstrosity that he's going to build. It's 90,000 square feet, which is larger than the White House itself. I don't know if it's going to be done while he's still in office. Maybe it'll be a hotel for donors. Yeah.

Life goes on. Karen, thank you very much. My dear friend, we'll see you next week. All the best. Absolutely. Thanks, Judge. Bye-bye. Wow.

Fooled me. I thought it was Gaza, and that's the White House. Coming up tomorrow at 8 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctor, 11 in the morning, Aaron Matte, three in the afternoon, Phil Giraldi, 5.30 in the afternoon. I don't know where he is on the planet, but he wanted to do it at 5.30. And for him, the answer was always yes. Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Joseph Palantan for judging free.

Thank you.