Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL] ZeroHedge Debate - America First on Trial — Dave Smith vs. Dinesh D’Souza

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

[SPECIAL] ZeroHedge Debate - America First on Trial — Dave Smith vs. Dinesh D’SouzaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, January 15th, 2026. Welcome to this special edition of judging freedom in collaboration with our dear friends and colleagues at Zero Hedge. This is a one hour, more or less, debate between Dave Smith and Dinesh D'Souza. You probably know both of these gentlemen. Full disclosure, they each have been friends of mine for a long time. is a well-known conservative writer who will be making the more conservative Trumpian, if you will, argument. Dave Smith is one of the premier defenders of libertarian principles. He'll be making the other argument.

The question is, what is America first? Now, even though I have known both of these gentlemen for a long time, in the case of Dinesh, probably 30 years, in the case of Dave, probably 10 or 15 years, I will do my best to be brutally neutral, though I probably will agree. I'm going to be very candid up front with everything Dave will say and nothing Dinesh will say. So Dinesh, I have your work cut out for you. But I'm not the judge of this. You are the judge of this, the collective judges of it.

I'm merely the glorified timekeeper. Dave's going to go first. He has five minutes with his opening statement. and then Dinesh will respond for five minutes. Then I'll give each of them a couple of minutes to respond to each other. And then I have some very pointed questions for both. If you are a regular viewer of judging freedom, you know that we read the comments that you write in.

You might very well send in a question to me that my producer, Chris, finds is good enough for me to put in this list of questions I've already prepared. I also want to thank Liam Cosgrove, who labored mightily, including getting these two to agree to appear on the same platform at the same time. So, Liam, thank you very much for all of your work. Liam is, of course, one of our friends at Zero Hedge. So we're ready to go. We'll start with Dave Smith.

The question, Dave, what is America first? You have the floor uninterrupted for five minutes. Well, thank you, Judge. And thank you, Dinesh, for doing this. I really appreciate it. I've always considered Dinesh to be one of the coolest and most honorable members of Conservatism, Inc. And part of that is demonstrated in the fact that he's here to do this debate,

whereas a lot of the other ones talk a lot but won't show up to do it. Then again, I will say being the coolest member of conservatism, Inc. is a pretty low bar. But I meant it as a compliment. Look, America First means non-interventionism. It means a preference for republicanism, little R, over imperialism. And that's what it's always meant. And it's got a long, rich tradition in American politics. I believe the first noted usage of the term was by the worst president in the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson, but he used it when he was running and campaigning. As many of you younger people

know, a whole lot of times presidents campaign on one thing and then do the exact opposite. All you got to do is think about George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump. So Woodrow Wilson used the term America First when he was promising to keep us out of World War I. That was what he ran on. Of course, he flipped on that and ultimately got us involved. And then the term America First was used by the old right to oppose military adventurism. It was used by figures like Garrett Guret and Robert Taft. And in fact, I think there was a really big organization that was opposed to U.S. entry into World War II, led by Charles Limbard.

and what did they call it? The America First Committee, of course. And then, of course, Pat Buchanan, when he was running for president, he used the term America first. And what did it mean? It meant we're against the neo-conservatives, we're for a non-interventionist foreign policy. And Donald Trump picked up on the exact same theme. And he said he wanted to break with neoconservatism.

He wanted to break with regime change wars. In fact, when Donald Trump was running for reelection, he bragged about no new wars. This was the entire credo. And so to try to pretend, as many of the Hawks are now, that America First just means this vague, something that's good for America. America First means toppling the Ayatollah on behalf of Israel, or America First means flirting with wars of choice and wars of aggression is nonsense. And that's never what anyone who's been using the term is meant by it. And in fact, all you got to do is go back to 2016 when all of the Hawks who now, are saying they get to define what Trumpism is, they all objected to America first.

There's all types of great quotes that you could find from Ben Shapiro and Bill Crystal and them who said, we don't like that he's saying America first. That's anti-Semitism or something like that. But of course, their beef was always that they knew what the term meant. And the term meant that we're not going to go fight wars to make the military industrial complex rich. We're not going to fight wars on behalf of Israel that are not in the interest of the United States of America.

and that's what Donald Trump capitalized on, and that's what he's abandoned. And that is why there's this huge split on the right wing between the people like me who wish to be America first and the people like Dinesh, who evidently, although he admits he was completely wrong to cheerlead the war in Iraq, has not learned his lesson from that and is still flirting with more wars of choice. That's all. Thank you, Dave. Deneh, your opening statement, which if you wish can include a response to what Dave said, but he used about three and a half to four minutes, you have your full five.

Glad to be here. I always enjoy debate formats, and this is a very important issue because it goes to the heart of the future of MAGA, not just in the Trump era, but beyond. I don't understand America first quite in the sort of particularistic historical context. It's irrelevant to me what Charles Lindberg believed, what people thought in the 1930s or 40s about the term. I think that the popularity of America first is because of the general sort of realism of the term. In other words, we live in America. Our allegiance is to America. This is our country and our patriotism is based on an attachment to our country. Now, our country has ideals and it also has interests. So what are our ideals? Well, an attachment to a constitutional republic, an attachment to freedom, by which we

mean things like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a government that is accountable, at least in some procedural terms to the people, free markets. So these are ideals. But countries also have interests and interests have to do with things like this guy has a lot of oil and we could use some of that. And this country has rare earth minerals and we could use some of that. So quite apart from our ideals, the truth of it is that we are a powerful country in the world. By the way, very different than we were at our founding. One of the problems with people invoking isolated quotations from the founding, you know, we should not go in search of monsters to destroy. is that that is always the natural position of a fledgling republic.

It's kind of like an infant in the playground saying, well, I don't want to get into any fights with anybody. That's because I'm three years old and they're going to run all over me. But that doesn't necessarily become the position of the guy when he's a teenager, when his position of power is completely different to the other guys on the playground. So this is what I mean by realism. Realism is taking account of the fact that we are a powerful country, today. We have ideals and interests, and we live in a hostile world. So living in a hostile world

means that the world is populated by not only good guys and bad guys, there are plenty of those, but people who are beneficial to our interests and people who are harmful or inimical to that. The idea that we should pretend that this is not so, which is essentially the isolationist position, It's closing your eyes, sticking your two, four fingers in your ears, and acting like you're the only country in the planet. This is illusion and this is idiocy. Why? Because the bad guys of the world will never leave you alone. The bad guys in the world recognize your top dog. You have the biggest GNP. They want to displace you as the world's sole superpower. They, in fact, would rather see you flat on your back. They make complex alliances with each other. The BRICS alliance. Let's come up with a different currency and undermine the dollar.

They have all kinds of currencies. Let's Russia and China unite with Iran and let's all move into Nicaragua, which is just a couple of thousand miles from Miami. That's an excellent base from which we can conduct operations against the United States. Let's try to find our way to sneak through the border. So all of these are external threats. And these external threats connect directly with our domestic politics. So America first to me is a recognition that it is good for us to protect our ideals and it is good for us to protect our interests. So we have to always evaluate. Are our ideals at stake, our interests at stake? Does it make sense for us to get involved over here? And that doesn't settle the question of how do we send troops? Do we send advisors

when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Reagan didn't send troops, but he sent some CIA advisors. He gave the Mujahidin some handheld rockets to shoot down Soviet helicopters, and the effect of that was to ultimately weary the Soviet Union, drive it out of Afghanistan. That supported our ideals. That supported our interests. So there are innumerable examples where the U.S. has intervened effectively, where regime change has worked out beautifully. and the counter example generally relies on a single case. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq all over again.

That only works for people who have essentially a two decades view of history. Okay, we're going to stop at this point. You stopped at exactly five minutes. Dave, I'm going to give you two minutes to reply. Okay. Well, first of all, the quote, the John Quincy Adams quote that you mentioned when he said, going around the world looking for monsters to destroy, he said, we will become the dicotress of the world, but we will lose our own soul.

So he certainly was not saying it's because we're weak. He even predicted at the time that we could dominate the entire world. His point is that we would lose those ideals that you're speaking of. And even when you say this, Dinesh, like, it's nice that you say that the Constitution and free markets are one of your ideals, but you've destroyed these ideals. You and all of conservatism, Inc. They're currently asking for a $1.5 trillion defense budget. The Constitution does not allow us to be an empire. And the Constitution is what created this federal government.

And all of the politicians put their hand on a Bible and swear before God and all of us that they will defend it. And all these wars are totally illegal. Donald Trump was not repelling an invasion in Venezuela or in Iran. He had all the time in the world to go to Congress and get permission. But he didn't. And as far as sitting there and saying the isolationist or the position relies on you, closing your eyes and pretending that none of these things exist, This is the exact same thing that you and all your friends said in the war in Iraq. And that you know, it wasn't that they were closing their eyes,

just that they were making a wiser calculation than you and all of your friends who got a million people killed and cost us trillions of dollars. And I'm sorry, but the end that the only example of disastrous intervention we have is Iraq is nonsense. We could go back to the 50s in Iran and Guatemala, where we overthrew the Kami government and hundreds of thousands of people died there. You could look at Ukraine. look at Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen. We got examples all over the place of this thing turning into catastrophes. But every single time that you guys want to sell us on a war of choice,

a war of aggression, you just say, you don't understand how complicated the world is. You don't understand the threats that we have. And then you all have your plans about how Chalabi is going to be embraced and we'll be greeted as liberators. And every single time, it blows up in our faces. So I just think this is totally like you're saying a lot of things that sound nice, but the onus is on you. And the onus is always on you if you're going to launch a war to demonstrate how clearly you know that this is going to work out well. You guys just launch them so haphazardously, even when the last six that you've supported have blown up in your face. It's truly unbelievable. I can't believe you're here still advocating for it again.

Thank you, Dave. Dinesh, two minutes to respond to Dave Smith. The United States, right in the aftermath of World War II, enforced regime change on a whole bunch of societies, including notably Japan and Germany, and the results have been excellent. In the Cold War, which was a war, it might have been a war, as Margaret Thatcher said, quote, without firing a shot, but there was an awful lot of defense spending that went into it. There were a awful lot of missiles that were built, the MX missile, the B-1 bomber, and so on. In the Cold War, you had innumerable examples of regime change. Chowcestershire was out in Romania. There were tyrannical governments that were out in East Germany, in Poland, in Bulgaria, essentially the entire Soviet orbit, including the Soviet Union itself.

Is anyone going to say regime change in the Soviet Union was not a good idea when the Communist Party abolished itself and got rid of it? In the 1990s, George H.W. Bush assembled the coalition to eject Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was forcible regime change. That's why Kuwait is basically a free country today. Is it perfect? No, it's a monarchy. It's a autocratic society, but it's stable.

It has good relations with the United States. So that advanced our ideals and our interests. So again, there's example after example after example. Let's take the two that probably are the only ones that benefit you, and that is Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, there are two aspects here that should be distinguished and they typically get conflated. The first one is the regime change itself, and the second one is the kind of managerial aftermath.

So was the United States wrong to fling the Taliban outside of Afghanistan? Those are the guys who provided the monkey bars for the terrorists of 9-11. We were directly attacked on our own soil. It was completely right. It was both in our interests, and it supported our ideals to go over there and pulverize them. Now, if you fast forward five years, and I see this ridiculous sight of U.S. general, supervising some, you know, tribal meeting and trying to tell them how to conduct the meeting and how their schools should be run and what their attitude should be toward girls.

This is the nonsensical aftermath. This is the Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, nonsense that if you break it, you've got to fix it. We somehow have to own these societies. That's pure bullshit. So I say, let's to the regime change a note of the aftermath. I can tell from the look on your face you want to respond before I start with the question. Dave, go right ahead, please. Two minutes, more or less. Well, okay, so Dinesh points out the successful regime changes in Japan and Germany,

but what he leaves out there is the tens of millions of civilians that had to be slaughtered in order to do that, and the decades and decades of military occupation that followed. And so if you're telling me that anyone in the United States of America has the stomach for anything like that right now, we both know that's just completely off the table, even if you can get past the little pesky more, of it, there's just no way that anyone has the stomach or the political will for anything like that today. And then, of course, you can say that the Soviet Union or the Cold War was a war, even though it was just defense spending, but you got a yada yada over the millions of Cambodians and Vietnamese that were slaughtered in those wars. And then to talk about the Soviet Union

dissolving, I mean, okay, you can say that is a regime change, but we're obviously talking about like U.S.-led regime change wars here. And like I said, look, the, First of all, we went and pretty much took out al-Qaeda's terror cells in Afghanistan by Christmas of 2001. It was mostly done with CIA and special ops. And then we fought a 20-year regime-change war against the Taliban. And so if you want to say that the problem isn't overthrowing the regime, the problem is sticking around and nation-building, okay, but we didn't do that in Libya. We just completely destroyed the place. And we didn't do that in Syria.

And it looks like that place is on its way to being destroyed, too. And yet the fact is that if you're going to do a regime change, well, the only way to really have a say in what government follows is you have to militarily occupy the place. But if you want to go around, if you, again, like I gave you a whole bunch of examples and you're saying the only one I really have is Iraq and Afghanistan. But of course, Libya is an obvious other example. Well, yeah, we didn't make any of those mistakes that you suggested. We just destroyed the place. And there's open air slave markets there to this day. I mean, you guys at this point, I'll wrap up. I'm sorry, Judge, but you guys with your regime change, philosophy, you have a holocaust's worth of dead people on your conscience. Dinesh, how does the United States gain by its extraordinary obeisance to and financing of

the government in Israel? Andy, if I may, give me two minutes to respond to Dave, and then let's launch the questions, just because he got the extra two. I just want to address a couple of specific things. Go right ahead. First of all, I don't agree at all that somehow the United States has turned into a nation of Nambi, Pambis, and would not engage in World War II style operations. We haven't been subject to a World War II style attack.

Yes, if the Chinese came over and, let's just say, bombed Chicago and took out the city or wiped out one-third of our Navy, as happened in Pearl Harbor, I think we'd have a lot of appetite for responding very aggressively. it's just that we've lived in an era of where that kind of attack on the United States directly has not occurred, and therefore we've had the sort of smaller wars, at least by comparison. I think you totally misstated the history of what happened with the Taliban. You said it took 20 years to get rid of the Taliban. That's laughable nonsense.

All of us were there. The Taliban was essentially out in a matter of weeks. They were gone. They were in the mountains. They were in hiding. I remember Dick Cheney saying we'd run out of tariff. So this was a case where the intervention itself was a massive success. Now, you said, and I think this is the fallacy here, that if you knock out the government,

you have a responsibility to go and run the country. False, false and false again, all you have to do, if you're running out a bunch of thugs, all you have to do is go and find the rival thugs who are more friendly to you and say to them, in this case, by the way, they happen to be called the Northern Alliance, We're giving the country to you. You run the country from now on. We're not telling you how to run the country. We're not telling you what policies to have or what your educational system should be.

All we're telling you is you need to be a friend of the United States. That's how a mature foreign policy is run. It's been run that way, by the way, for centuries by powerful countries. When the British, for example, defeated an opponent. They didn't necessarily feel we've got to go over there. No, you basically get your friends in there and they deal with you on a different basis than the bad guys. Dave, I'm going to let you respond.

Well, look, I mean, just to say that this is a mature foreign policy or something, by the way, I just never said. There's just blatantly not at all what I said. I didn't say if you depose the leader, therefore you break it, you buy it. I'm suggesting we don't go around deposing the leader. And to sit here and say that this is a, this is a mature foreign policy. Like it's a, yes, so it's, we're sitting here. Currently, we have a white hot war going on in Europe right now.

which is a proxy war between all of Europe, the United States of America, and the biggest nuclear power in the history of the world. And at that point where Donald Trump has been unable to bring this war to a close, which he promised to do on day one, he's been unable to do that. So at that point, we're going to start flirting with multiple wars of choice, wars of aggression, wars where we have not been attacked that we do not need to fight, that risk catastrophes. There's nothing mature or wise about that. This is reckless. This is a result of living in an era of decadent elites where the most unimpressive have risen to the top. And there is absolutely no tradition of serious conservatism or right-wing thinking that would tell

you that this is the move to make at this point in history. Start attacking and flirting with wars of nations that pose no threat to you based off lies. All of them based off lies. There's no maturity in that whatsoever. Let me briefly answer, if I may, and then we can do questions. I'm just trying to keep the even timing here. Look, so I strongly oppose this Ukraine war, and in no way do I want to take the position

that I'm defending every war, defending every intervention. In fact, I think a key aspect of this debate is to ask when is it appropriate for the U.S. to intervene at all. So my view is that we should intervene only when both our values and our interests are involved. When it is to our benefit,

both in terms of values and in terms of interest. So let's take Ukraine. We may have certain common values with Ukraine. A little hard to say, but let's say we did. We really have no interests over there. It's a very distant country. It is on the Russian border. It comes out of the debris of the Cold War. So our interests there are minimal at best. Now contrasts this, for example, with Iran and Venezuela. Venezuela has been a staging operation ground for hostile powers for 20 years. There are Iranian radicals sitting in the Venezuelan parliament. There are Chinese operatives in Venezuela. There are Cuban bodyguards guarding Maduro.

So the idea that somehow where there's this sort of innocent nation operating on its own, and we just go over there, Iran, Iran is the node center of problems for the United States since the Iranian revolution. radical Islam is for the first time got a hold of a major state. It's difficult enough to deal with rag-tag operations like ISIS and al-Qaeda, but when you have a powerful country, 90 million people, very smart, possibly nuclear capacity or certainly nuclear potential, you're dealing with a serious threat. There's no other way to look at it.

Dinesh, how does the United States gain? What does the United States gain from the billions of dollars it gives to and the utter obsequious behavior it shows toward the government of the state of Israel? The United States is not obsequious toward Israel. Israel is mostly obsequious to the United States. It makes no sense to talk about the rabbit controlling the elephant when quite clearly the elephant controls the rabbit. Case in point, the Israelis would have been really happy after the U.S. took out the Iran nuclear facilities to go in there, wipe out the mullahs, and their hand was stayed. By whom? By us? By Trump. Trump's like I've had enough. I'm done. Now, Trump may change his mind in the aftermath of all the

Iran protests of now, but the truth of it is that's a clear indication of the United States calling the shots and not Israel. Now, why are we friends with Israel at all? Well, first of all, can we wake up to the fact that there is a global red-green alliance? the red representing the socialists and the leftists as the global leftist is allied with radical Islam. And they're basically, who's their target? What does LGBTQ have in common with radical Muslims? Here's the answer. They are opposed to the Jews.

They are opposed to the Christians. They're opposed to Israel. They're opposed to the United States. And they are united by that common hatred. So doesn't common sense tell you that it's better for the Jews and the Christians to come closer together for America and Israel? to come closer together to repel this global threat? The answer is yes. And so to act as if the United States is somehow kind of acting on the orders of Israel,

when A, we have a common interest with Israel, B, the Israelis are the best people in the world to fight radical Islam. They know how to do it. The second best, by the way, are countries like UAE. I just saw one of the leaders of UAE say anti-Semitism is an opinion in Europe and America. anti-Semitism in UAE is illegal. There's no Muslim brotherhood in the UAE. So the best fighters against radical Islam, number one, Israel, number two, countries like UAE. The worst fighters against radical Islam, Australia, Canada, Europe, the United States.

Don't we see that this Islamic infiltration is occurring right in the middle of our own country? I saw after Mamdani won, one of his activists said that the radical Muslim will have 50 congressmen in 10 years. So are we pretending like this is all happening, quote, over there instead of right here? Dave, what does the United States gain by its obsequious behavior and enormous donations to the government of Israel? Nothing but a lot of trouble and a lot of unnecessary wars. And I love just that Dinesh says, well, look, it's not just over there.

Look, we have to fight it over here because I was reliably informed by Dinesh, Asusa 20 plus years ago that we have to fight them over there. So we won't have to fight them over here. And then we spent two plus decades fighting them over there, slaughtering them by the millions, blowing trillions of dollars. And now it's like, oh, look, we got to fight him over here. Yeah, that's an immigration issue. And I think our immigration policy has been horribly mismanaged.

Maybe if we had listened to people like Pat Buchanan and not the neo-conservatives who kicked him out of the old conservatism, Inc. If we had listened to the wiser, older conservatives, we wouldn't have gotten into this mess to begin with. But the rest of this is all just totally circular. Like, look, if we support Israel and then a whole bunch of Muslims hate us because we support Israel, well, then it's proof that, see, the Muslims hate us. And therefore, we have to keep supporting Israel. And as far as, like, the idea that we're the big power and they're a little country,

well, that's true enough. But it certainly doesn't mean that they don't have influence. And I agree. I think Dines just kind of admitted the whole game. Yeah, they wanted. us to topple the government of Iran last summer. They still want us to do that right now. And yet, Donald, so in other words, as he's admitting, they are trying to pull Donald Trump into a war that he resisted. But right after that, they came back and kept doing it. They keep

moving the goalposts, and you're moving them right there with them. It was 60% enriched uranium last summer. That was the big deal. Then they brag that Trump brags that he destroyed their nuclear program. Then they moved the goalpost to intercontinental ballistic missiles, but that's not really true. any that can touch us anyway so now we've moved it to shooting protesters that's something now we got to launch a war over and you know all this talk about we we should launch wars when they're in our interests and when they support our values well how about the value of the just war theory of christianity you don't attack other countries unless they've attacked you first you don't start wars of choice you only fight wars of necessity and how about the value that congress declares the wars i mean you know

you listed as one of your values preserving the Constitution. By the way, conservatism didn't do such a great job conserving that or anything else in this country, for that matter. But the Constitution is very clear. Only Congress can declare these wars. The last war that was declared by Congress was World War II. This is an absolute outrage. And the fact that anyone would even pretend to respect the Constitution at all and not have a problem that every single one of these wars are illegal is absurd. question for Dave under what circumstances can the president use military force well certainly if he's repelling aggression um if there was a situation where a country was attacking us he certainly doesn't

have to go to congress before he can mobilize the military to defend them and perhaps with some of the more like liberal interpretations of the constitution you might even say that in in an immediate emergency, you can take some type of military action, but the idea that when there's absolutely nothing imminent and there's no threat to the country, and it's a war of choice, and you've got months and months and months where you're planning for it and laying down propaganda about drug boats or something like that, the idea that the president does not have an obligation to first get declaration of war from Congress is there is no reasonable way you could read the Constitution and think that's what it meant.

Well, in that's same question, under what circumstances can the president use the military? The president is the commander-in-chief of the military. The way our government is structured, there are certain operations, for example, the passing of taxes, where it makes sense for Congress to drive the whole thing. For the simple reason that you're talking about a law, time is not of the essence. The law can be passed this year. It can be passed next year. And then the president's job is to, quote, carry it out. War doesn't function like that. A war is very often instantaneous. There's an attack and you have to move quickly. Now, you can then seek congressional support. But the president is, in fact, the director of these military operations.

And I can think of multiple scenarios, even whence the don't directly involve some kind of, you know, launching, of a missile attack on the United States. Let's take, for example, something really simple. Let's just say tomorrow the Chinese invade Taiwan. It seems to me that according to Dave, the president is powerless. He has to go to Congress. Now let's remember Congress is completely immobilized. You essentially have an ideological divide. You have block and tackle. You can't get a majority through either House of Congress. And this is why immigration laws haven't been fixed. This is why there's no comprehensive reform of pretty much anything. So our Congress essentially is paralyzed with essentially its intellectual, ideological, and partisan divides. And so you could have all

kinds of mayhem happening. And the president has got to sit tight and say, listen, we have this armed force. We have U.S. interests involved. Vital interests, by the way. You have a rival country. Think of it. The number two country in the world, China wants to become number one. It undertakes blatant military aggression, which if unchecked, will lead to other military aggression in the way that the world actually works. And yet, we need a congressional declaration. And short of a congressional declaration, the president is powerless. This is nonsense. Now, I'm not saying that we forfeit a rule of prudence. The rule of prudence is going to say, listen, are we going to necessarily get into a full-scale war over Taiwan? We've got to decide how important Taiwan is to the world and to us. We might

decide Taiwan is worth sending some forces over to reinforce the power of Taiwan to defend itself. On the other hand, we're not going to commit U.S. troops, or we're going to take this action, but not that. So I'm not resolving the prudential issue of what do we do, but the idea that we are forced to do nothing is absurd. Next question is for Radanesh. Can the president blow away people on speedboats and fishing boats in the Caribbean? The president to do that, has got to make some kind of determination that these boats pose a threat to the United States. And to our interests again,

and in this case, the determination, which I'm not going to sort of attempt to evaluate here, is there is a massive narco-trafficking operation being directed out of Venezuela that once Maduro forfeited his oil revenues, which he forwarded for very bizarre reasons, but he did do it, The oil, by the way, the prosperity of Venezuela was by and large, largely manufactured in the United States.

It was our oil companies that refined that oil. So the United States, in partnership with Venezuela, had made that country really prosperous in the 1960s. But Maduro shifted his operations from oil to basically narco-trafficking. He essentially became the world's biggest drug kingpin. Now, to argue that the drugs in the United States are not a massive kind of killer, They may not be a killer in the same way as al-Qaeda, but they've killed a lot more people than, let's say, 9-11. And so I think for President Trump, this is a real national security threat. And so the president takes action to neutralize where the threat is coming from.

Before you respond, Dave, I'm going to follow up with another question. I'll give you a chance to follow up with both. Shouldn't people be able to put into their own bodies whatever they want, Dinesh? No. In general, yes, of course, but I would not take that principle to its absolute conclusion. I don't think, for example, that people have a right to, let's say, commit suicide. If someone was committing suicide, I was on the street and some guys started running in front of a car, I would jump on them and try to restrain them. Why?

Of course, we appear libertarian. Listen, you're running in the street. I don't see anyone stopping you. It's your choice to run in front of the car. car, so I'm going to let you know. My assumption is that this guy is, A, not in his right mind, B, is in some kind of catastrophe. C, will probably have a different view once he gets to settle down and get some drug, some treatment. And so similarly, I think there are all kinds of things we can do even to ourselves that are harmful to ourselves, but they're also harmful to the body

politic in all kinds of ways. And so drugs, by the way, are not simply a matter of supply and demand. They destroy families. They destroy communities. They have wiped out entire communities in this country. So we can't ignore the larger debris that has been caused by the infestation, I think, of drugs in a widespread sense. By the way, these are drugs that are obliterating your ability to think. I mean, as libertarians, don't we value the mind being clear? Free choice itself depends on the ability to make clear decisions. If I voluntarily take a bunch of drugs that turns me into a zombie, I'm essentially out of libertarian land immediately. Dave, I'll give you four minutes because there's two questions here. One is, can the president blow away people on boats in the Caribbean?

And the other is, can't you put into your body whatever you want? Yeah, you know, ironically, when Dinesh was giving his understanding of the Constitution, I was thinking he must be high on drugs right now, so evidently not. But the idea, I mean, what the Nesches describing is the dictator of an empire. It has nothing to do with the government that the Constitution describes, and certainly nothing to do with a president. And the idea that, I mean, just think about how vague this. It's like arguing with a postmodernist.

Like, America first can mean anything that might be in our interests. And the president can bomb boats when he's determined that the boats. And then on to this drug problem. So first of all, the, you know, the idea that, like, I don't know, we were talking about what's legal, what is legal and what is illegal. And you, not me, said upholding the Constitution as one of your ideals. And so I'm sorry, I guess I must have missed the clause where it says only Congress can

declare the war unless they're ideologically captured, in which case, then the president becomes a dictator with all the war-making power. So I just think that's silly. And in terms of the drugs thing, I mean, look, man. It's not wars. We're not talking about. No, no, no, no. Donish, hang on. Let him finish. Go ahead, Dave.

Yeah, yeah, well, okay, they're not wars. So we haven't fought a war since World War II. Vietnam and Korea and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and all of these. They're not wars. Okay, if that's what you're... Again, my point was that you argue like a postmodernist. Thanks for making the point. I didn't say that. You just invented that. I didn't say all this. Hang on, Don't think any of this personally. Finish, Dave, Dinesh, I'll give you all the time you want to address what he's saying. As far as the drugs go in terms of relation to Venezuela, this is the most obvious pretext for war that I've ever seen. The drugs coming from Venezuela make up a tiny fraction of the drugs that get into the United States of America and almost none of the fentanyl.

And so even if you were really going for the drug argument here, you would be going after Colombia or Mexico or something like that. The idea that Venezuela has nothing to do with any of that. And it's just one of the many lies that were used to sell us into this war. So yes, Judge, to answer your question, I do believe people ought to have the right to put into their own body what they want to. But also, this has nothing to do with drugs anyway. Tanesh, go ahead. You can respond. Okay, number one, we are not at war with Venezuela.

We have taken, we have captured the narco-trafficking kingpin of Venezuela. He's facing trial. The trial will play out as it will. his deputy is in charge. The Chavistas are completely in charge of Venezuela. Some of the Venezuelans don't like that, but that's the reality of it. So the idea that we are at war with Venezuela is just an example of the verbal promiscuity where if the United States takes any action, you declare it to be a war and want to know why Congress hasn't been consulted. Same with the drugboats. Look, I agree with you to a degree that I think for Trump, this is a little bit of a pretext. I agree. This is how

Trump is. So what Trump does is he has a grievance, and sometimes the grievance is a little different than the pretext. I think Trump's real grievance with Venezuela is that Maduro opened up his prisons and he sent a whole bunch of really bad guys to the United States when the Biden administration had the back door open. I think that this is pissed off Trump to no end, and Trump is looking for a reason to sort of whack that guy. So I live in the real world. I'm not saying that the world is a pretty place that Trump even thinks in ideological terms. I don't think he does. I think that the way Trump looks at it, he's the CEO of the team United States of America.

There are rival teams in the world and there are rival teams that want bad things for us. Trump is not like Bush. He's not a neo-conservative and it's a complete misunderstanding of Trump to think, oh, is Bush all over again? No, Trump's idea is to take a middle course between, I think, the kind of vacuous isolationism that you're recommending, Dave, and the overzealous interventionism of the Bush era. And Trump's idea is Soleimani, al-Baghdadi, grab Maduro, support the freedom forces in Iran, do it prudentially short of war and yet get the same result as you would if you won a war. Dave, well, I guess my next question is to Dinesh and not to Dave. When the president says that the only thing that can restrain him is his own mind and his own morality,

has he rejected his oath of fidelity due to the Constitution and to the treaties enacted pursuant to it and to the laws written under it? I think the fact about Trump is that he says things. that are on the face of it, ridiculous. Everybody knows it. His supporters know it too. On the other hand, the weirdness of Trump is he doesn't act that way. So almost everything he says

carries a rhetorical extravagance. He's not just not anti-Semitic. He is the least anti-Semitic person in the world, perhaps the least anti-Semitic person who has ever existed. This is Trump, like it or not. Trump is publicly ridiculously egotistical. He wants the Nobel Prize.

He's happy to take Maria Corina Machado's Nobel Prize if she'll give it to him. But Trump, in reality, is actually quite humble. Narcissistical people, and I've known quite a few, don't show any interest in other people. Trump has great interest in people. He wants to know about you. He knows a lot about the people who work for him. And so the point I want to make about Trump is that he will say, throw out the Constitution. Who cares about the Constitution?

And to you and me, we live in the world of words. We are wordsmits. We're like, oh, my gosh, he needs to be impeached. But then you realize every time there's a judicial ruling that says to Trump, you can't do this, can't send federal troops to Chicago. Trump is like, I don't like it. But I'm going to do it. Trump did not like the results of the 2020 election. But guess what?

He exited the stage when the day came. So you have to with Trump, you do have this. kind of verbal extravagance, but it's accompanied, I think, by prudential action. And we have, we have learned ultimately to judge Trump in that way. Before you respond, Dave, for those who have just joined us, and by the way, gentlemen, the two of you have produced an enormous, enormous audience across all of the platforms that are watching us. But for those of us, or just joining us, I'm Judge Andrew Napolitano. Our host program is Judging Freedom, which is the podcast that I run three or four times a day. We post about 20, 30-minute programs a week. We are doing this

debate between Dinesh DeSouza and Dave Smith on what is America First on our platform and on the platform of our dear friends and collaborators at Zero Hedge. This was a Zero Hedge idea. They sort of had to twist my arm into it until they told me the two debaters would be longtime friends of mine. Back to the debate. Dave, do you want to respond to what Dinesh just said, particularly when he called Donald Trump

humble? Yeah. Well, I think all of what Dinesh just said could be it could essentially be reduced to yeah, Donald Trump says a lot of crazy shit and you never know what he's going to actually do, which I do kind of agree with Dinesh on and I think the point about him leaving office.

He's been president for a term already. We know what he's going to do. Go ahead. Don't interrupt him. Go ahead. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, in other words, of course, all the admissions are kind of buried in what Dinesh is saying himself, that it was never about drugs, that it was never about taking

their oil, that it's some type of revenge for Maduro opening his prison and sending those people up here. But again, if that's the case, then seal the border as Donald Trump has done. attempt to deport those people. It doesn't make any sense to say that we're now, but again, I guess the admission that's in there is that Donald Trump is lying through his teeth to sell this to the American people. And as far as Dinesh objecting to me calling it a war when we bomb another country, when we kill people there, when we, when we kidnap their leader and bring them over here to face trial, I mean, I'm sorry, I remember after 9-11 when Dinesh and all of his friends said, we're at war.

That's all. We got attacked. That means we're at war. And that means you'll go support invading all these countries. And even though they all turn out to be catastrophic and get millions of people killed, you'll continue advocating for more wars in the future. You know, if anything like that were to happen to us, we'd immediately recognize it for what it is. Let me get, let me say if Nicaragua or Venezuela or Mexico, let's just say they bombed an American city. Can you imagine Dinesh D'Souza saying that was a limited military strike? It wasn't an act of war. Of course these things are active wars. Now, how much the wars expand is always up in the air. But again, as you said, yes, Donald Trump's, listen,

it's quite possible that Donald Trump never does anything further with Venezuela, but that's it. He may forget that he said anything about it tomorrow. But what he's saying right now is that we run the country, we're going to determine the next regime, we're going to, we're going to extract the oil. And he told the New York Times it might be a matter of years. He in fact thinks it will be a matter of years. And then he went and requested a $1.5 trillion defense budget, which by the way, all these fiscal conservatives like Dinesh D'Souza have no problem with whatsoever. And so I'm sorry, it's almost impossible in this situation for us to not at least kind of take him at his word and say, maybe he's serious about doing all of these things.

But absolutely, if anybody else did, if anybody else bombed America or attacked America or kidnapped our leader, even Joe Biden, even though most Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, I know Dinesh did a big documentary on that, most of which was completely incorrect. But even if that election was stolen and he was an illegitimate president, if somebody came here and kidnapped Joe Biden in the middle of his presidency, we would all say we're at war with that country now, because that is for us to figure out who the president of our country is. Okay, go ahead, Dinesh. I'll let your respond.

Here is where I think we have to bring the kind of comedian view of foreign policy into line with the way the world really is. Because, yes, I agree with Dave, if we had kidnapped the leader of China, we would be at war. There's a big difference between kidnapping the leader of China and kidnapping the leader of Venezuela. What's the big difference? To Dave, there's no difference because there are a sovereign country. The big difference is that Venezuela can't do anything to us and China can. So there's a big difference in the real world.

Now, with regard to Trump's reasoning or his pretext or whatever, in the real world, we recognize that the language of deploy the language, the rhetoric of action is not the same as the cause of action. Thucydides says, for example, in the opening of the Peloponnesian War, he gives long speeches on the part of the Athenians, on the part of the Corinthians, on the part of the Spartans, and then Thucydides says this key line. He goes, whatever the parties have said, he says, in my view, the real reason for the war was the rising power of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Spartan. That's the real reason.

The rhetorical reason is, oh, you crossed the border over here, you took away my fishing rights over there, you did this, you did that. That's talk. But the real reason is the motive for doing it in the first place. So the point is, I think that strategists of foreign policy, Sun Su, Klauswitz have understood for generations that you have to separate the kind of boilerplate rhetoric from the motives of action. And all I'm saying is that in the real world, we have genuine interest.

in the world. We have friends who can help us. We have allies. We have enemies who can hurt us. We need to ally with our friends and undermine our enemies. And that's going to call for a moderately interventionist foreign policy. Dave, I'll let you respond. And then I have a question for both of you in which I will let you sum up your arguments as well. It's a question very different from what we've been discussing. But Dave, you can respond to what Tanesh just said. Well, from this comedian's perspective, our moderately interventionist foreign policy seems to be us being the dominant force in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. It's a moderate intervention where we have thousands of bases and hundreds of different countries all around the world. Let's say it's like the most interventionist foreign policy in world history.

But, okay. You know, Dinesh, you could say this is the separation between the comedian's understanding of how these things work versus yours. but like you were aligned with the neo-conservatives man i'll put my uh track record on foreign policy up against yours any day and it's not because of me or i'm a comedian i just listen to all the best people like ron paupin and pat you can and judge napolitano and really wise people and you followed like idiots like bill crystal around so you know whatever i mean yeah i'm a comedian but if you want to talk about the way things work in the if you'll notice in this debate there's a whole lot of times where denesh is saying Dave says this but if you'll notice when i'm talking i'm never saying that obviously it would be a different thing to to go kidnap the leader of China because they're a stronger country. Of course, no one's denying that. But if you really want to talk about the real world and how wars actually work and how they actually get sold, well, here's the real world.

Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex that had just been created. And those weapons companies fund think tanks where all of Dinesh's friends work and write papers. They were all sitting there, right, all of the project for a new American century, all the, every think tank, all the ones that Dinesh worked for, every neo-conserved, they all get big money from Lockheed, Martin, and Raytheon because they want to pay for people to write policy papers that advocate for more wars so that they can sell more weapons to our federal government.

So in other words, a giant transfer of wealth, but worse than what the socialists want, which is from the rich to the poor, a giant transfer of wealth from the working class in America to the politically connected makers of weapons of war. And if you drive around this country, all you got to do, this is the results, this is the fruit that Dinesh D'Souza's Conservatism, Inc. has given us. Drive through the middle of this country and see all the destroyed towns all around you, all the closed factories, all the places where people are dying from those OD deaths. And then you go drive around the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Virginia, and see where all the multi-millionaires are living, who haven't produced anything. And it's not because of capitalism. It's not you go there and you see great big factories, and that's why the rich people live there.

It's because they work for think tanks that are funded by weapons companies. I'll let you respond to this, Janish, before I put this final question to both of your. Go ahead, please. Yeah, so for the whole of this debate, we've been hearing that foreign policy is the province of Congress. It's not the president. It is Congress that needs to make these kinds of decisions. Well, who is bought off by the defense industry? Answer, Congress. Why? Because the typical congressman has a choice, and that is to take $50 or $100 from his constituent or to take $100,000 from Lockheed or from Raytheon. This is why Congress has appropriated these massive defense budgets. So this is a place where Dave and I are somewhat in agreement, except for the fact that there is, is a guy, by the way, who can't be bought by Raytheon, and that's because he happens to be a billionaire,

and his name happens to be Trump. So if there's anybody who actually doesn't need the contribution from Lockheed in order, for example, to have a nice house or to have a nice car or to go on vacations, it's not Congress. Congress actually does. They need money for their re-election campaign. They're the ones who sit down with the lobbyists. They're the ones who vote these appropriations. Trump doesn't decide what the defense budget is, Congress does. So, yes, we find an area of some common agreement. We agree that the whole appropriation stuff, domestic and foreign policy, is a racket. But I think where we disagree is that you somehow think that that is what is leading Trump down the wrong path. And I say not at all. That is actually why Congress is, to some degree,

at least, bought and paid for. Right. I'm going to give each of you, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm going to give each of you five minutes to reply you first, Dave, and you can incorporate anything you want. But the initial question for your five minute reply is, who is more faithful to the Constitution, Donald Trump or Thomas Massey? Now, Dave, you can take it from there, take your five minutes, and then Dinesh can respond as he sees fit. This is your closing argument. I mean, you might as well ask who's name is Thomas Massey. That one's pretty obvious. And again, Dinesh is kind of just talking past the point that I'm making, because I'm not saying whether Congress should have the power.

I'm saying the letter of the law is clear. If you believe what you just believe, then you, if you care about the Constitution, then you should be advocating that we amend the Constitution. I mean, it's really that simple. And yes, Dinesh will at the end admit that this whole thing is a racket, including foreign policy. But of course, he's advocating you give that racket more power. And I'm going to do on my closing statement something a little bit more meta. I think I've already demonstrated the America first part. But, you know, it was funny because before we got on, you guys were talking about how in 1983, I guess that's the year Dinesh graduated college, I believe.

And that's the year I was born. So I was born in 1983. Dinesh basically went into conservatism, Inc. in 1983. And she had something, you know, that was real, like Dinesh had a real platform. I mean, worked for a presidential administration. what was in the game in a time where it wasn't like today. It wasn't like everyone had a platform. It really meant something to be a part of conservatism. And obviously, you had a profoundly important goal, which was what, to conserve the best parts of America. Now, juxtapose that to me,

I really started blowing up in 2020. I mean, I had been around for a little bit, but my audience started really growing in 2020. And one might ask themselves, what had been conserved? What had been conserved by the time we got to 2020. Well, was it the Constitution? Was it the Bill of Rights? No. We shredded those long ago. Was it Christianity? The country was more atheist and secular and tribal and divided than ever before. The country wasn't nothing. The cultural dynamics, the racial dynamics, the economic dynamics. By the time I came around, this is how much I'd have been conserved. The debate was over whether my four-year-old boy ought to be turned into a girl. that's what I inherited. That's how good you guys did. But what I did also inherit was $39 trillion

in debt and an ocean fill of the blood of innocent people. That's what we inherited. And I see Dinesh DeSuzza coming back around now, almost trying to gatekeep. You know, I saw, I saw Dinesh on an interview and he said, you know, the problem is we used to have an Irving Crystal and we used to have a William Buckley. And they would decide who's allowed in and who's allowed out. But now we don't have anyone that can say Tucker's not allowed in and Candace isn't allowed in and Nick Fuentes isn't allowed in but the thing is that like you guys blew it you guys completely blew it honestly Dinesh and I mean this I like you like you like you like as a dude I really like you and I've actually enjoyed a lot of your work I've learned things from you I think you're a brilliant

guy but for you to come out I mean I'm sorry after supporting the war in Iraq I think you should leave this game I don't think you should be giving your opinions anymore about a war that you're supporting. I just think that's anyone messes up that bad in any field. You got to leave and go find a different field. But so the fact that you're coming around and saying, Candace is wrong and Tucker's wrong. Honestly, with respect, I think it's time for you to sit down and understand that we're here now. We're leading this movement now. And we've had more cultural victories in the last five years than you guys put on the board in 30. Tenesh, five minutes, please. Number one, in the interview that Dave is talking about, I was deploring the fact that the intellectual quality of our debates has deteriorated.

We used to have debates on firing line with people like Buckley, Gene Kirkpatrick, Irving Crystal, Robert Bork. And now we have debates with Candace Owens talking about Charlie Kirk being a time traveler. And, of course, we have Dave Smith. And then we have Tucker talking about why Sharia is not such a bad idea, why Maduro is a real conservative. So there has been an intellectual degeneration. I think it's true. People like Irving Crystal would be a little embarrassed

to be listening to this kind of clap trap. Number two, the people who haven't lived through the 80s and 90s don't recognize the triumphs of Reaganism, of which I will mention only two. I agree that you are an infant, and I agree that you didn't really have your mental faculties, but the point is you're supposed to read history and look back a little bit

and see important things were conserved. The top marginal tax rate in 1980 when Reagan came to office was 70%. Let that sink in. Of an additional dollar in the top rate, you had to give 70 cents to the government. Reagan brought it down to 28. 28%.

That's a fiscal revolution. Trump can't even come close. So all the victories of right now, you're talking about they pale before the reduction of a top tax rate from 70% to 28. By the way, it's up to about 39% now, but it's not even close to 70. I'm aware. Yeah, all right. Now let's talk about the Cold War. You had a Soviet empire that stretched across multiple time zones that controlled all of Eastern Europe that had giant orbit all over the world and a huge arsenal of weapons pointed at us. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. The world,

is vastly better off. We all fought for that. We were successful. Now, did we win all our battles? No. Andy was there. Andy Napolitano can tell you, the affirmative action battle that I was an active part of. I wasn't part of the Iraq debate. I was part of the affirmative action fight. My early books, the liberal education, the end of racism. Now, the affirmative action, DEI complex had massive support. Every university, every corporation was pushing it. There were about five guys on the other side whom I could name Thomas Sol, Walter Williams, me, Glenn Lowry, maybe two other guys. So six of us are fighting a giant industry, well established across the country, and we won. We get a Supreme Court decision. DEI is now being unraveled. So if you

want to know what we fought for, that's what we fought for, and that's what we can serve. Now, you've come along in a generation where it is your guys who basically promoted the trans culture. It's It's younger people ultimately who have voted in all this stuff. And now you're trying to blame it on the Reagan generation. We didn't do all that. You did. It's your generation that voted for it. It's your activists who are showing up protesting for Palestine, this,

DEI, that, you know, we want to get, we want to open the borders. The immigrants are our friends. They came yesterday, but they're Americans today. All of that stuff. If you want me to take blame for what everyone did in the 80s, You need to take the blame for Obama. You need to take the blame for everything that's happened in the last 12 years. We need to apply an even standard.

I think we conserved a lot, given the forces that were available to us. In some cases, we were grossly outnumbered. But did we promote gay marriage? No. Did I promote the trans movement? No. Yes, I was wrong on Iraq, but I was right on a lot of other things. And so the idea I'm very banished from the conservative movement because I called it wrong on Iraq.

At least I'm man enough to admit it. Whereas you, oh, if the Iran strike will lead to World War III, doesn't happen. Oh, not a word of threat, not a word of apology. Just very quickly. I was wrong. I was an idiot. I didn't call it. Hang on, hang on.

I mean, hang on. I know you want to a second closing statement. No, I'm just going to say, no, no closing statement. No closing statement. It's just I, you made that up. I never said it. That's all right. You thought the Iran strike was a great idea.

No, I never said it would lead to World War III. You just made that up. That was your stuff. All right. All right. We'll stop. I think you guys are both super smart and passionate about what you believe in. And I thank you very much for the time that you've been given us.

I thank our friends at Zero Hedge. If you're watching us on judging freedom, which is the host venue here at 3.30 this afternoon, Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer. Thank you, Dave Smith. Thank you, Dinesh DeSuzza. Thank you, Liam Cosgrove, at, Zara Hedge, thank my producer, Christopher Leonard, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.