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Home » Transcript: Judging Freedom LIVE from the Ron Paul – Blueprint for Peace Conference

Transcript: Judging Freedom LIVE from the Ron Paul – Blueprint for Peace Conference

Read the full transcript of Judging Freedom LIVE from the Ron Paul – Blueprint for Peace Conference in Washington DC on August 16, 2025 with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Col Douglas Macgregor, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil.

Speaker Introduction

DANIEL MCADAMS: He said, “Daniel, how about if I come do my show during a conference?” And I said, “Judge, that sounds like a pretty neat idea.” I love doing the judge. It’s the only one I can do. But what I did and I rarely decide on speakers early because I want to get the sense of what’s happening now. But one speaker I did decide on early and that’s Professor Jeffrey Sachs and I bugged him. And I bugged him.

And I sent him emails over and over and he said, “I’d love to do it but I’ve got a really challenging travel schedule this summer.” And I was just about to give up and I even said a little bit, “This is the last time I’ll bother you” and I finally heard back from him. So my persistence has paid off and we will all benefit from the insights of the incredibly brave Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Dan, thank you. Thank you so much for being persistent. I’ll tell you the trick, why it worked. He was persistent and extraordinarily polite and it really worked because I said that’s a meeting I want to do everything I can to make. So it is a little bit rushed today, but an honor to be here. And really a special delight to be at a conference whose title is “Blueprint for Peace.”

Professor Jeffrey Sachs Lecture

We don’t hear much about peace in this world, strangely enough, other than on the judge’s show, and from the Ron Paul Institute. Today, I was looking at all of the banner headlines about the failure yesterday in Alaska. The failure because we didn’t launch World War Three, because the two presidents had a good meeting together because they announced progress. This was taken as failure in our media, which of course is hawkish by the moment and manipulated by, controlled by, paid by, or simply aligned with the military industrial complex in the country.

So it’s extraordinarily hard to hear a word about peace in this country. It’s not so complicated actually to end these conflicts. It’s a little surprising how long it takes and how hard it is to accomplish this. But it’s not so hard in substance because the underlying reasons for the conflicts that the United States is in perpetually are not sound reasons from the point of view of America’s interests, from the point of view of our security, from the point of view of our well-being, or our economy.

All of the conflicts that we are in and those that we could get in are misguided, misdirected, provoked by us to a very large extent, and solvable. That’s the basic point. It really is not so complicated.

# Eisenhower’s Warning

I think the wisest words which we repeat and Dan just started us with that we’ve heard in the eighty years since the end of World War Two were those in President Eisenhower’s farewell address on January 17, 1961. And I’ll just repeat them because they summarize all that has come to pass. He said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

This is a man who knew what he was talking about as the supreme allied commander and as president of the United States and I might add as president of Columbia University, his most important job. He knew what he was talking about. And he was reporting to us a reality that existed already in January 1961.

# The Cuban Missile Crisis

That reality almost led to the end of the world actually, just a year and a half later in the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy experienced the full nearly catastrophic weight of the military industrial complex at that time because if President Kennedy had followed the overwhelming advice of absolutely almost every adviser in that ExComm that was famously preserved for history through its recordings of the days of that crisis, we would not be here today.

And I think people know or you should know that even after Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis through a kind of genius of decency and humanity against the advice of all of their military advisers, we nearly had the world end anyway because of a disabled Soviet submarine that was out of communication. And when it began to surface some jackass in the US military was dropping live hand grenades as a joke rather than depth charges.

They thought they were under attack, and it happened to be the one submarine in the squadron that had nuclear tipped torpedoes and they were entered into the bay. And a man named Mr. Arkhipov, who was senior to the captain, countermanded the order and saved the world, only to go back home by the way and be reprimanded and live in obscurity, but literally the man who saved the world.

Saved the world within one second because US doctrine at the time was that any attack by nuclear atomic weapon would be met by the full force of the US nuclear armaments and the estimation at the time was 700 million dead across the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, but good reason to believe that all of humanity might have perished. And we came within a second of that.

# Kennedy’s Peace Speech

Next year, Kennedy made peace with the Soviet Union in one of the most brilliant and illustrative episodes of modern history. I commend everybody to listen to Kennedy’s peace speech of June 10, 1963.