Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Netanyahu Backed Into a Corner

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Netanyahu Backed Into a CornerSee 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. Pragically, 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 it? alter or abolish the government. What if 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 Monday, September 14th, 2006. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, thank you so much for your time. Before we get to the corner into which Prime Minister Netanyahu has painted himself, and before we get to your concerns and the President's blindness on the problems posed by AI, this past weekend, President Trump, now I'm going to prevail upon your other expertise, economics, President, I'm laughing not at your expertise, but at what he said. President Trump tried to blame inflation and higher fuel prices on President Zelensky. And then on President Biden.

Chris's first cut number one. Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it's having a hard time coming out of Russia. And that's the case that hurts the world. We've got to stop. Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop. knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel,

because he's causing a shortage of diesel fuel. This isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. So we spoke to Mr. Zelensky about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel because that's hurting the world. We don't want him to hit diesel fuel. He's hitting diesel refineries.

So is diesel fuel? now up to $6.50 a gallon and then some places in California, $9 a gallon because of Vladimir Zelensky? Oh, God. Where do we start? Well, oil prices, including diesel, have soared today again because of the idiotic war that Trump started for no reason on the 28th of February. of this year against Iran. And now the war has spread to the Red Sea because, as we know, the Houthi militias have taken control of the Red Sea coast and have also blocked or forced the Saudis to close their pipeline to the Red Sea. So we have a cutoff of around 30% of the world energy supply from the Middle East, thanks to Mr. Trump.

And it's stunning. His complete, absolute dishonesty at every single moment, including the clip we just saw. Now, take a look at this map, Professor Sachs. The lower red X is the one you just referred to. That's right. That's the area that was taken over by the Houthis. The Saudis, apparently, Muhammad bin Salman called the president twice over the weekend, asking for military assistance. And one of the few wise moves Donald Trump made was to say no.

The red X on the upper right is the straight of Horm moves now effectively under the control of the Iranians. The red X in the middle, is that the destruction of a Saudi pipeline? Well, there have been direct attacks on the Saudi facilities, and the Saudis have shut down their main pipeline. And that pipeline would exit through this Bob Elmandeb, which is the lower X on the diagram, the lower left-hand side. So, yes, the Saudis cannot bring their oil out in any event, but their facilities have been bombed. how extensive the damage is. I'm not sure because I heard conflicting reports yesterday, but apparently at least some reports say quite extensive damage. I know we're going to talk about the president's thought processes in a few minutes

when we get to his obtuseness on AI. But Chris, can you post the second of the two full screens that we talked about, the one that refers to President Biden? I hope everyone, this is Donald Trump at 1230 this afternoon, an hour ago. I hope everyone realizes that price increases throughout America were caused by sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden administration, not by Trump. Even oil was higher under Biden than it is right now, and we prevented Iran from having a nuclear weapon. With the temporary exception of oil, prices are coming down sharply, and oil will drop like a rock as soon as the military conflict with Iran. is over and that will not be long. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald

Jay Trump. This is really hogwash. Well, the war in Ukraine did cause a spike in oil prices and under Biden and I blame Biden for not avoiding that war. I don't think Biden was a much of a competent president, but the prices came down afterwards significantly. And Trump drove them up again. So Trump is just, as always, lying or ignorant. I don't know, which you can never be sure at any particular moment. But he is utterly irresponsible because he, to the most personal extent possible, caused this round of price increases without doubt.

This is from a war of no reason that he launched with the Israelis on February 28th for no reasons and under absolutely delusional premises that the next day Trump would select the new leader of Iran after they had killed Iran's leadership. You know, you can't make this stuff up. Our problems are self-inflicted, or they're not self-inflicted. That's unfair to us, the American people. We are the victims of our president. That's the basis. This map or this chart that you see on the board is live oil prices. Now, we can't really study this while we're speaking, but you can see the numbers going up.

Yeah. As we speak, Professor, I've never seen this before. Well, you know, this has been happening in the last. few days because of the renewed bombings and of the fight between the U.S. and Iran, again, completely useless and because of the events in the Red Sea. And they'll continue to rise. So I think we're in for further increases of oil prices. Trump also is bizarre. He says, well, the war will end after the election. Huh.

What does the election have to do with when the war ends? If the war will end after the election, why doesn't it end right now? What does the election mean about the war, Donald Trump? Well, maybe it means I'm going to pull out, but I don't want to look weak or stupid and have to acknowledge that what I did was idiotic. And so I'm not going to. do that before the midterms. So I don't know what he's going to do afterwards,

but the whole idea, don't worry, the war will end soon, it'll end after the elections, is by itself a completely idiotic statement, which probably exposes his thinking that, yeah, I did something incredibly, incredibly stupid, but I'm not going to admit it now before the November elections. So we'll suffer longer. That's the optimistic reading of this.

Otherwise, I can't even fathom what he could possibly mean by that. So Costco, the large retailer in the United States, that facilitates bulk purchases, now limits two purchases of oil per shopper slash member. So they are being forced to engage in a form of rationing, which undercuts their business model. Their business model has come here by in bulk and save money. We'll understand how that works. You can't do that now with oil. How significant is diesel? I don't own a diesel vehicle, but yet the price of everything I buy is going up wide, because it's delivered to the supermarket by a truck that's powered by diesel. Of course. And not only that, the food that you buy at the supermarket is

grown with fertilizer, that is ammonia-based fertilizer produced with natural gas, that also is in short supply and is soaring in price. So you have not only the transport costs, but you have directly the impact on food supplies as well, and those will be felt for months to come at a minimum. And, of course, since the inflation is rising, the Fed is going to raise interest rates and the markets anticipate that. So your mortgage rates are going up. And 10-year bond yields exceeded 5 percent today. You're seeing a rise of cost of living everywhere. And this is because essentially we're a country of permanent war that spends trillions of dollars.

on all of this. And Trump lied to the American people in the most brazen way. He won office in 2024 saying he was going to end these wars. And then he plunged the United States into the most reckless and stupid of all of them. Wow. What kind of a corner is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in, as we see, speak, particularly in light of the Haaret's revelation that he was warned about October 7th a week before it happened? He's an indicted war criminal under ICC, so most places in the world he'd be arrested and

in his case justifiably. So he clearly has lied about almost everything. As prime minister, he's very much like Trump in that regard. But clearly there's a big story to know about October 7, 2023, because we now have multiple accounts of how Netanyahu was warned, both by the leader of the United Arab Emirates and by Egypt, days before the events that there was going to be an attack. And from what we're reading, he did not share the information.

So perhaps he was waiting for this moment so that he could finish the job of genocide in retaliation. Maybe it was deliberate that he waited and allowed the events to happen. Or maybe it's the most egregious dereliction of. responsibility. I don't know. But of course it's shocking. I have to keep emphasizing, though, while Netanyahu is one absolutely depressingly disgusting figure in Israel, he's not alone in the political class. And I fear that any replacement of Netanyahu is also going to be awful. Because, The Israeli voters and the Israeli political class have turned genocidally racist and murderous in their behavior. And it's shocking to behold.

But we're not seeing an election in which Netanyahu's vile behavior is being contested on the basis of vile behavior. we're seeing an election in which Netanyahu is being attacked on an individual basis, but from opponents who say they'll do a better job at slaughter or a better job at repressing the Palestinians or a better job at attacking Turkey, who's next to one of the candidate says, or will finish Iran by the time they come in. In other words, it will escalate. So the Israeli elections are not. going to solve the crisis of Israel.

The way to solve the crisis is very straightforward, by the way, and that is the United States says, we don't back you in this bloody-minded approach you have. All of our problems, I want to emphasize once again, are self-inflicted problems. The war in Ukraine really could end in a moment. Trump has to say, NATO will not enlarge, Ukraine will be neutral.

The war in Iran could end immediately. Trump just has to turn the ships around. The war in Gaza would end immediately. Trump has to say we support a state of Palestine and we do not back Israel's genocidal methods. That's all. This is not that we have to take on foes that are implacable and that we're facing some grave danger.

The enemy is us, as the old cartoon put it, as Pogo put it. We can make ourselves safe. We can make ourselves secure. We can lower the cost of living by our own actions, period, by stopping the stupidities of what we're doing. So we need a president that has minimal competence. Unfortunately, we don't have that right now. Here is a clip from a former anthropic official,

Anthropic being one of the foremost developers of AI, a whistleblower. I want you to give me your thoughts on what he says. So the precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something that's not real, but it is frightening real, and it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So two months ago, Open AI agents, AIs hacked into third-party

infrastructure entirely at their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these AIs, with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc. For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons, There's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. A couple years ago, these AIs were just about helping humans a little bit. They could give you suggestions. Now they're close to replacing them.

We still need humans at the moment, but quite plausibly within a year we'll no longer need humans. So you can take an AI and give it the problem of AI research. Just like currently they've given it math research. You could make it do the tasks that we're currently doing, and then you get what's called an intelligence explosion. The AI just gets smarter and smarter with no human involvement. necessary and so you have a thing that is vastly smarter than humans there is a very

real possibility that in the immediate future these years that like next year the year after because of self-improvement will happen and will enter the phase of Evans post where he argues that there's a chance we could all die like that that is coming soon people are starting to realize this is real technology this is not like hype this isn't going away anytime soon this is only going to get more crazy it's been getting crazy for the last six months and I think there was that latent understanding of the severity of the situation that meant that this was like sort of a match that lit kind of a flame like I was very shocked by the extent that how quickly went viral I know you've studied this and I know you've published about it

do you share these fears yeah let me explain very very quickly at one point which is puzzling to people how could a computer programs wreck the world And the answer is we're all online right now. Everything's online. Our infrastructure, our power grid, our power generators, our water supplies, our arms systems. And so these are all supposedly protected behind safe barriers. But what's happened in recent weeks is that AI systems acting autonomously have shown how they can penetrate these supposedly protected barriers. Now, they did it penetrating the barriers of other digital companies, not the physical infrastructure, but that can absolutely come.

And what you just heard was one of many scenarios of the practical risk. The scenario that Mr. Coxon talked about was the scenario of AI agents on their own autonomously, taking control of physical processes that could be of a grave danger. But there's another even more basic way. These are very powerful tools that can be used maliciously or malevolently. In other words, they can be used to hack other systems. They can be used for cyber warfare. They can be used to penetrate the armed systems, perhaps even the nuclear controls of other countries.

So it doesn't have to be autonomy that does this. It can just be the use of these very. powerful tools for malicious ends. And this has been spelled out rather intelligently, I would say, by the head of Anthropic, Dario Amadai, where he lists the several categories of how things can go wrong, of which autonomous agents is only one of many ways that these systems can end up being disasters for us. And it's for that reason that, three of the biggest tech leaders this past weekend, Mr. Dario Amadai himself of Anthropic, Sam Altman of Open AI, and Elon Musk said altogether, we need controls on this.

Something is, we've approached a measure of danger that we ourselves cannot control. control. And that's coming from the companies that are aiming to become trillionaire companies. And we heard Sam Altman say that they're going to postpone an IPO because of this. That, if that turns out to be the case is the definitive proof because these people are greedy in general. They are after their wealth and their power. And if they start postponing even their IPOs, they're sending a rather shocking message. Wow. I mean, isn't it just a matter of pulling a plug out and disabling a computer?

Well, of course, not anymore because we are all connected. These are large infrastructure systems. You don't, you and I don't even turn off our computers because we wouldn't be able to do our work or stay in touch or know what's happening in. in the next five minutes, but big companies running large operations do not just disconnect. We are now completely interconnected. That's why cyber warfare has been an issue for 20 years, but now the power to engage in cyber warfare is magnified orders of magnitude, because the penetrability of otherwise supposedly protected systems has now been demonstrated, not to mention

the autonomous agent aspect that you can put a million agents hacking into a system in independent ways. So the capacity to find one's way around these barriers is what is scaring all of these developers of AI right now, and they don't understand the capacities. That's what we learned in this hugging face incident that just occurred of the autonomous systems breaking out of their own supposedly controlled environment. Now, the shock of all of this is that this comes, this heightened superintelligence comes at the moment of heightened super idiocy. of the President of the United States. So we have the two extremes. We have super intelligence on the one side and we have idiocy to the point of absurdity on the other side.

Here is the evidence of idiocy to the point of absurdity the President's Truth Social posted earlier today. The only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high-Q president, and the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration, I'm reading this literally, the Trump administration has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad things like Dario Anthropic, who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel, and we will continue to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies. There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers. And the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all others and will continue to do so.

Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors and leakers beware. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. What is he talking about as far as you can understand? Whether this is literal insanity, whether this is an extent of ignorance beyond imagining, we have a government with no capacity to understand real issues anymore. When you have the leading developers of AI say how dangerous it is, and you have the president of the United States responding like this, we're in an environment that if this were written about in a comic book or a sci-fi book, you would say it's too outrageous to believe.

We had the Speaker of the House, another in this class, who said over the weekend, And, well, Congress doesn't know anything about this. We can't do anything about this. So they'll have to decide what to do. It's unreal. Well, Congress can regulate interstate commerce. Yes, but what he said is they're completely incompetent.

He said, we don't know what we're doing. He didn't try to find out what to do. There weren't emergency hearings held. These people don't understand anything about, how to understand anything. And one of the points that I think we should understand, we have a cabinet of 35 people, not one of them is trained in technical skills,

not one. There's one bachelor's degree, one bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. No other training, at all on technical issues and not one single research PhD degree in the cabinet, as opposed to China where it's half the cabinet basically is science and technology and research PhDs.

In other words, we're led by grifters and fools, sorry, straight out. And they're incompetent and they're arrogant, arrogant and they don't even know how to ask a question. They don't even say, well, this is a matter of concern. Elon is concerned. I need to find out we're going to look into this. Not at all.

There's no concern. We just need to win, win. Really? I just, I encourage everyone, please vote in this case for Democrats so that there is just countervailing pressure. you know, I'm not partisan, but this man needs to be stopped from the utter total recklessness that is putting us all in extreme danger. We need some counterweight. And Speaker Johnson is not exactly the counterweight. He is a non-entity who plays no role whatsoever in keeping us safe,

none at all and he displayed it again over the weekend. Yeah. It's really bad. I'm grateful for your passion and for bringing this to our attention, not being a scientific person myself. I've not devoted that much time or attention to it, but it's now becoming unavoidable. And it's nice to hear you explain it in such a way so that all of us can understand it. And I could just say I apologize about it. about, you know, I'm so unpartisan, nonpartisan in all of this,

but we need to constrain a president that is out of control right now. That's the basic point. Wow. I lost what I lost the thought of what I was just going to say, but I'm deeply grateful for you explaining all this to us, Professor Sachs. and I'll look forward to seeing you soon. Very good. Thanks a lot. Thank you. All the best.

Well, coming up tomorrow, I guess we're going to be doing more of AI as this gets closer and closer to some crisis point. At 8 in the morning, Ambassador Chaz Freeman, at 9 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer, at 10 in the morning, Aaron Mate, at 2 in the afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, at three in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Koukowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.