Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Who Would Believe the Government?

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Who Would Believe the Government?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, 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? 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 Tuesday, July 28, 2006, my dear friend, Colonel Karen Kratkowski, joins us now. Colonel Karen, a pleasure, as always. So the German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, not someone that you and I are fond of quoting, nevertheless said, everything the government has, it has stolen, everything the government says is a lie. Worth pursuing, worth considering the likely truthfulness of much of that? I think, and it's not even native to our government, and it's not native to whether it's a communist government or a republic or a democracy. What Nietzsche is describing, people throughout history have described.

And so you have to be very careful with government. It is an entity, a living entity, and it has its own objectives and its own agenda. And it pursues its own survival. I think that's really what we all have to come to terms with. Isn't the state just a monopoly of force in a geographical region? I remember debating Justice Scalia with this once. I was privileged to interview him. It wasn't a Fox News product.

It was a Brooklyn Law School product when I was on the faculty there. There were 2,500 people in the audience. And, of course, he disputed this vehemently and claimed that the state had a presumption of morality. I would argue the state. have a presumption of immorality. Government is essentially the negation of liberty, is it not? It is by definition. I'm surprised anybody would defend the other side, but I thought everybody knew it was a monopoly of force. This was two years before he died. He had spent 50 years as a law professor and a judge and a justice. You would think he would have been on our side unless he was

not. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Well, I think we're all learning it the hard way that government is immoral in every way. I mean, look at what we have. And we want to think, all people, I think, want to think well of their governments. Certainly we do in the United States because we are preached at for our entire lives about how great our government is, how good and moral it is. And it takes a little while sometimes to start believing your own eyes and to start looking into the reality a little more closely.

And then you realize you've been lied to. It's all governments do it. Even the best governments. And I guess if you want to be an American chauvinist, which, you know, a patriot, that's great. That's good. We believe we have a good government. It still lies to us constantly. It is still mobilized and motivated by an absolute, an absolute control of power.

You know, monopoly on the use of force. the monopoly of force. Well, let's take Pete Hegseth as an example. I mean, isn't it more likely than not that the reason President Trump did not follow through on his threats about a week ago, midweek last week, to visit the gates of hell on the people of Iran

because the United States cannot sustain a military function of that size much longer because we're running low on ammunition. Nevertheless, Hegseth told the Senate Finance Committee, from whom he's seeking $88 billion on top of the $1.5 trillion, another topic for another time, under oath, that, oh, no, no, we have all the military equipment we need. Yeah, so he doesn't understand what under oath means, clearly.

Yeah, there are multiple sources of information inside and outside of the Pentagon. people that are far outside of the Pentagon, including our near-peer competitors around the world, who are counting and monitoring what we have wasted, expended, lost, had destroyed in this both the Ukraine War, but also particularly in what we're doing against Iran. And so the numbers there are true in the sense that they can be substantiated and they can be validated by people from,

around the world with differing agendas. So to call Pete Hedges that the liar is, you know, an understatement. It's a shame. He did it under oath. I mean, this is, what is it? Isn't lying to Congress something really bad? Well, lying under oath is perjury. Sometimes they forget, forget, I'm doing it in air quotes, to administer the oath to government officials, but lying to Congress, even if you're not under oath in an official capacity, is the same as perjury. Now, members of Congress can lie to us, just like FBI agents when interrogating us can lie to us, but we can't lie to them. You can thank Congress and you can thank the federal courts for upholding that bizarre dichotomy. You remember the Martha Stewart case?

Oh, yeah. She went to jail for lying to an FBI agent in the same conversation, the very same conversation of font the basis for her indictment, the FBI had lied to her. And that guy, that FBI agent got a promotion. Wow. And that's a monopoly on the use of lies. They also have the monopoly on the use of lies as well as the use of force. Well, we talk about lying.

Do we know the casualty figures in Iran? Do we know how many American troops have been injured and how many have been killed? We don't know. We don't know the answer. I'm positive the government has lied to us from the very beginning. And by lying, some of that is delaying the information. You know, they have injuries, they have deaths. They're not reporting them. They're hiding that information. They're delaying it and covering it up. But even what we have heard from our government, I think the recent numbers are like 400 and something injured. What is it, 18 now, 18 or 19 deaths. I don't believe that for a second. If you look at the level of destruction, and this war has gone on six months, six months of an enemy, we call Iran our enemies, and we started this war and we were fighting

them, they're our enemy. That enemy has wreaked havoc on 17 of our 17 bases that we have in the Middle East. So much havoc, we've moved our airplanes so far to the west. We're in Israel now, and Israel never used to allow us to operate from their territory. They must do that now because all our bases. are messed up. And by messed up, I mean, we can't use them. There were people at all these bases. There were civilian contractors at these bases. I doubt we're hearing much about them. There were, of course, active duty military. We didn't protect them. We have heard tiny bits of

early on in the war where we left people in, what is it, temporary shelters or something. And that's, in fact, some of the biggest chunk of casualties early in the war were because of that, I want to say by rain, but I'm not sure which. But yeah, we have definitely suffered loss of life amongst Americans and our allies and contractors in the region that our government is not telling you. And also, I mean, they're not even telling us what's happening. We're losing a lot of airplanes I don't hear Mr. Trump talking about. Airplanes being destroyed on the ground.

Robert Barnes, who's the Tennessee law. who comes on the show from time to time because he has incredible contacts inside the White House, told us that the injured is in the thousands. The thousands. Wow. Chris, do we have a chart showing the numbers the government has revealed or a full screen? Look at that. So the government claims 417 injured and 14 killed.

That's before the four killed. So the government says 18 killed. total and 417 injured. Barnes couldn't dispute the 18, although he said it's probably larger, but he profoundly disputes this 417 saying it's in the thousands. And what is the government gain by lying? Well, one thing that our government did not do in this particular Middle Eastern War or any of them prior to this is they did not talk it up. They did not promote it. They did not really spend time lying to us in advance of the war. They pretty much just acted like we assumed we've always been at war with Iran,

so this must be normal. And then they launched this war. And, of course, Iran fought back because I guess they didn't listen to the right intelligence. I'm not sure what that was about. Maybe Israel lied. I don't know. So Iran really put the hurt to us and did damage. Because they hadn't sold the concept of the war,

that was very unpopular. And that's probably why they didn't try to sell it. They knew they couldn't sell it. But the problem with that is now the cost is the American people can easily say, I told you so. We didn't want this war. It was a stupid war. It was not necessary for our security, not a concern to us. And now you're given us dead bodies on top. So they really don't want to provide that information because they know they screwed up from the very beginning. And I think this is really Trump's problem and the administration. But Trump himself, You know, when they talk about him being in a quagmire or backed into a corner where he has no good choices, he did that to himself by failing to get popular support for the war that he said he wanted. Maybe Israel wanted it. He wanted it for Israel. I don't know. But he didn't try to sell it. He didn't try to really gauge popular support ahead of time, made an assumption, just like we did about the ability of the Iranians to defend their country and their interests. So, you know, he's in his position now where how are you going to convince Americans who already are very unpopular? This war, 70%. We don't like it. It's costing us not just money, but all kinds of lost opportunities. We're not happy with it. How are you going to present the information at, oh, by the way, you know, this war I got us in. Yeah, it was really stupid. We didn't do it for American to put America first or anything like that. Oh, by the way, yeah, we got a lot of troops that are coming home, amputees, brain damage, and, of course, in a box, lots of them.

And that's not a winning hand. You know how Trump likes to talk about who's got the winning hand? Well, he doesn't have it. So they have to lie. And they think if they can drag it out, lie enough, control some of the media outcomes that will happen as these troops eventually do come home to their families. and we get, they're counting on that being something that they can manage with centralized state media. You know, they're not going to celebrate these injuries like we have done in past wars.

We won't be fine. We won't be holding up the great veteran of this war because as soon as you put a mic to that guy's mouth or that gal's mouth, they're going to tell you about the great victory we had against Iran. And it's not going to be the state story. So, you know, the lie will not just, it's not just ongoing. the lies about what this war has meant to this country, to our military, our capabilities, what it says about our military leadership, and what we have left. I mean, this is a terrible story, and they are going to continue to lie.

And really, I think, silence veterans when they come back, because the guys that have been deployed over there understand very well what the cost of this fiasco has been. What are the hidden costs of war that we don't see? Well, your money goes to pot, but we've been a constant war, so our money is devalued. That goes without saying we blame it on the Fed, and it is the Fed. But why does the Fed feel so compelled to provide money to the government? Because the government needs to fight wars, wants to fight wars, seize profit in wars.

So your money goes to pot. When your money goes to pot, your economy goes to pot. And the gap between rich and poor, those connected to government money and those that aren't connected to it grows wider. have social instability, unhappiness, fragmentation. You've got a lot of problems like that. You also have to support the cost of war globally. Like if you, let's say you make new enemies. You think the United States have been making any friends because of our war in Ukraine and our war in Iran? No. No, we've actually consolidated and grown the number of countries that consider themselves

opponents to the United States. So we've lost friends with. With war also comes constraints on trade, right? Because trade is another battlefront of the war. So you're not trading as much. Again, hurts the people at home, alienates our potential partners abroad. And then the soldiers, obviously, the people. Increasingly, you know, we're using AI, robotics, unmanned drones, things like that. And I go, oh, that'll reduce the human cost. But see, you really can't get away from it because productivity, the society, It's made up of humans. It's not made up of AI. It's not made up of robots, you know, and computer programs. Society is made up of human beings. And there's a cost to war that is paid by society. So it comes in many different ways. I think for us in this country, we need to be a little bit concerned that our people are becoming angry and disconnected from the ideas of national unity, disconnected from the idea. that both parties, while they might be different in their solutions, both equally care about our country.

I think I was at a family reunion this weekend. What I heard from my people who don't pay attention to politics is you can't trust either party. And they're telling me that. I'm not telling them that. They're telling me that. They're saying, you know, we really don't have any choices. The past, and one guy told me the past three or four elections, all we have done is, vote against something that we really don't want. And that's considered our choice of leadership. We vote against something that we really, really don't want. And what that does is it destroys your policy, you know, it destroys the people and the society and their sense of what it means to self-govern. Okay. That's damaged. Washington better build quite a few more expensive billionaire bunkers

because if the people, we've got a lot of people, and we are the most heavily armed country in the world, we have this idea that liberty is important. That's something we have had, whether we've lived it or not, we hold it dear. That is a recipe for revolution. That is a recipe for some things that our government doesn't want. Anyway, that's what war does.

It destroys things, everything. Not just your enemy. It destroys you too. We have some interesting video of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the former president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, talking to each other. It looks like there might be translators there. This is at Senator Graham's funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Washington National Cathedral. I'm scratching my head.

What is the federal government doing owning a cathedral? Oh, my gosh. Well, anyway, before Senator Graham's funeral, former President Zelensky and current Prime Minister Netanyahu met privately and then publicly with the president. I wonder what the president said to Netanyahu about the IDF in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, the removal of which is the lynchpin of any peace agreement with Iranians. And I wonder what tricks were up the Netanyahu's sleeve to say to the president to get the war started again. What do you think, Karen? I do think Trump understands that Netanyahu literally sank any chance for peace as equally as he literally started this war and got us into it. But Trump wanted peace. He likes war. He likes to be a tension. You know,

I'd like to be doing something all the time, but he wanted peace and he didn't get it. He didn't get it because of Netanyahu. He also got humiliated in a sense because when Trump said to Netanyahu, you know, wants to move your troops back, this and that, Netanyahu doubled down and put more troops in, didn't respond. I don't listen to the United States. We have our own national interests, and they include taking over all our neighbors and bulldozing their property and genociding them. That is our, that's what we do.

you can don't tell us how to run our country well they tell us how to run our country so Trump is I think in many ways he does share that with a lot of people in the sense that hypocrisy doesn't like it even though he's the beacon of it so I think he's going to probably I don't think he's going to be particularly kind to Netanyahu but again I've said it before too Netanyahu while his party looks to be pulling ahead slightly in this prime minister race in Israel I do think I do think Trump is looking and gaming the system. He never likes to be associated with a loser. So there's a couple things that might make the conversation not very positive. But Netanyahu is a beast. He is a manipulator, master manipulator, his extreme confidence. He knows how to manipulate Trump in particular. He knows how to push his buttons. And I haven't even begun to speculate yet on what they have on Trump.

Okay, the blackmail and the hidden threats that we're not aware of. So Netanyahu has many, many tools to bring to the table. I think Trump is in a situation where I'm not sure what he can really, I'm not sure what he can do about it. Wow. You know, Professor Sachs and Professor Mearsheimer, Mirschimer from his reading, Sachs from personal interaction with people,

both say the universal consensus around the world amongst diplomats is that the United States has lost this war. I have not heard anybody except President Trump make the contrary argument with any credibility of you. No, no. And that's because you can't make that argument. You cannot make the argument. The data that we have, this is the most watched war. Any war today is very well watched and documented by parties of the war. opponents and whatever, but also the whole rest of the world. We have the technology to see what's happening. We have the ability to communicate around the world to talk about and compare notes. So I think the data is clear. Also, even if you didn't have data, let's say we were 300 years ago fighting a war like this. This war on paper was always unwinnable. And the reason why is, not just because

it's far, far from home, and it's 93 million people who aren't going anywhere in Iran. It's not just because of that. It's because we don't have a big enough Navy to haul a big enough army over there to do something about, let's say, regime change, or to do something about managing their nuclear ambitions. We don't have the forces to do that. This idea that you can throw bombs and missiles and drones and threaten people and tariff them into, submission is a false concept. And the guys that taught me ROTC back in the day were Vietnam vets. And I remember a helicopter pilot that I had. And he would have told you exactly the same thing.

Air power win wars. Trump may not know this. He's not, he doesn't listen to anybody and he didn't come up through any type of system that would have taught him these things. But yeah, it's undeniable. So from a theoretical perspective, impossible, we lost it, but from a practical and actual, what have we done? We have lost it. And we've destroyed our own military in the process. We've lost these bases that we had. We've lost friends. We have alienated the funders of our Middle East and Central Asia project, you know, Saudi Arabia, these oil-rich sheikdoms that we have cultivated and that we have to- That now can't sell their oil because our moves is closed. I'm going to read. I'm switching over to

Ukraine now. This is from Vladimir Razelenskyu posted on X after Senator Graham's funeral was over. I met with the team of the Lockheed Martin Defense Company, one of the strongest enterprises in the United States, with which we have been cooperating for a long time. Lockheed Martin is the company that produces attackums, high Mars, F-16s, and missiles for Patriot Systems. It goes on and on and on. and we discussed further development of our cooperation, joint production and technology exchange. Where is the money coming from? Is it coming from the Europeans or from the American taxpayer to pay Lockheed Martin?

Yeah, it's going from the printing press. And then the American taxpayer will pay the interest on all the debt that our government is taking on to give to this little rascal. Yeah, and to the big rascals at Lockheed Martin and the rest of the military industrial complex. Yeah, it's a real shame that, you know, there's so much profit in war. And again, that's not a new concept. You know, Smedley Butler served it well for quite some time, but it dawned on him also that these wars were about profit, about the state-linked industrial sectors who were profiting. And so new wars, never-ending wars, bloody wars, costly wars. I don't want to speak evil of the dead, but Senator Graham championed. All of this.

He sure did. He sure did. And, you know, I've been thinking about him today. Well, last week, you know, I think, I don't think we've really buried Lindsay Graham yet. I don't think we have. I think, but we need to think about burying Lindsey Graham and not just his body, but this whole way of thinking that justifies murder and mayhem around the world on the backs of American taxpayers and American workers.

And as they step and trample on our Constitution as they do it. So this is a big problem. So we need to think about burying, really truly burying Lindsay Graham. Karen Krakowski, Colonel, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much. All the best. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Absolutely.

Thanks, Judge. Of course. Tomorrow Wednesday at 8 in the morning, Gilbert Doctor O at 1.15 in the afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor at two in the afternoon. I don't know where he is, but Chris will find him, Pepe Escobar, at three in the afternoon, the great Phil Giraldi, Judge Napolitano for judging Freedom.