Truth Jihad Radio

Larry Johnson of The Son of the New American Revolution blog is a well-informed and eloquent critic of the official US government and media line on Ukraine. In this interview, Larry Johnson casts severe doubts on much of what we’re hearing from the media, including the claims that “Ukraine is winning”:

“What you would expect to see if the Ukrainians functioned as an effective army: number one, in the east, they would have broken out. They would have actually launched a counterattack against the Russians and pushed the Russians back to the border. That hasn't happened. In fact, the reports show steady progress by these Russian backed forces in Donetsk and Luhansk in pushing back the Ukrainian military.

“Number two, the Russians have basically they have sealed, completely shut down, the southern coast of Ukraine and their access to the Black Sea. Again, if the Ukraine had a viable, capable army that could fight against that, they would be launching counterattacks to push the Russians out and to open those ports. They haven't done that. What we're seeing is that this group of neo-Nazis that are in the steel plant area of Mariupol are slowly being encircled and killed. So again, if Ukraine had a functioning army, you'd expect to see artillery strikes coming in to try to push back the Russians. We're not seeing that. You'd expect to see air strikes, some sort of air operation, whether with fixed wing or rotary wing. We're not seeing that. Cruise missiles. We're not seeing that. So do they not have it or are they just incapable of using it in an effective manner? And I think it's the latter. Because it's irrational for them not to use it if it's still viable. I do know that their ability to conduct air to air intercept with fixed wing combat aircraft was curtailed the first 24 hours of the war on February 24th because the ground radars were blown up and those ground radars were what the pilots needed in order to vector themselves in on a target.”

Below is a full transcript of our April 11 interview. -KB

Larry Johnson interviewed by Kevin Barrett

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. Kevin Barrett here, looking for the ugly truth hidden underneath the festering piles of lies. And the lies just keep on festering, getting worse all the time, from 9/11 and the 9/11 wars to COVID to the current Ukraine situation. It's gotten to the point that the mainstream media is almost a parody of itself, infinitely worse than it was back during the Cold War days that I grew up in. I don't know what to compare it to. So now I have to bring on independent experts who actually know what they're talking about to dissect the situation and tell us what's really going on. And one of those is today's guest, Larry Johnson. Larry has a background in military special ops and strategic analysis and stuff like that. He's got the Son of the New American Revolution blog or sonar21.com. It's one of the best go-to sources for off-script reporting on the Ukraine situation. So, hey, welcome, Larry. It's good to have you.

Larry Johnson: Hey, thank you. Good to be with you.

Kevin Barrett: Okay. So let's start just quickly get your background. You obviously seem to know what you're talking about and have a certain amount of military and strategic analysis background. So where did you get that? And then how did you come around to these off-propaganda-script views?

Larry Johnson: I started working with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985. I was there until 1989, moved from there to the US Department of State's Office of Counterterrorism. I was there for four years and then moved off and began again doing consulting in 1993-94. And I worked for 24 years with the U.S. military special operations forces. So one of the unique insights I've had is being able to integrate CIA, State Department, FBI and the rest of the intelligence community with military operations and capabilities.

Kevin Barrett: A very interesting background. That's actually kind of similar to the background of my friend, Veterans Today Editor Gordon Duff, who's certainly an interesting character, and who's been on the show quite a few times. Gordon saw that there were some problems with the official story of everything in the mainstream from the moment he went to Vietnam as a marine and saw what was happening in Vietnam. It didn't match the patriotic story. And it just kind of got worse from there, apparently, culminating after 9/11 with that obvious big lie and the controlled demolition of the Trade Center pissing him off enough that he would eventually start Veterans Today. What was your trajectory that led you to your current views?

Larry Johnson: Well, I just I just try to assess information. I mean, it's got to add up. And we've seen enough lies over the years from the government that I realize you can never take them at face value. So particularly with the Ukraine situation, when you step back and look at it objectively, recognizing that Ukraine spends more money on lobbying in Washington, D.C. than than does Saudi Arabia. Now, that doesn't compute. Or if you consider that, of all the countries in the world, the number one donor to the Clinton Foundation is Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine is not this wealthy principality. So that just doesn't add up—the political influence that's going on there. And then just watching how the US media so completely misrepresents or lies about the history of what's been going on in Ukraine. And the attacking people and using ad hominems is usually when you don't have facts to stand behind, that's what they go to. And so "Putin's like Hitler." Well, so Donald Trump was like Hitler and George W. Bush is like Hitler and Muammar Gadhafi is like Hitler.

Kevin Barrett: Don't forget Saddam.

Larry Johnson: Yeah. Oh, my God. So...I'm a healthy skeptic.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And I can see how your background would contribute to that. Do you think the propaganda has gotten worse post Cold War? I remember my political awakening initially was watching seventh grade John Birch Society filmstrips shown in social studies class. And at the time, little did I realize that actually the Birchers were onto something to a certain extent. At the time though, I just saw how outrageously one-sided this anti-communist propaganda was. Then I looked into the Vietnam situation and realizedwhat a fraud and a war crime that was. And then a couple of years later, I saw Mark Lane give a talk on the JFK assassination, and he showed the Zapruder film. This is when they first got hold of it. And that boggled my 15, 16 year old mind enough that I've never really been believing official stories ever since. But the Cold War propaganda seemed like there was a sort of a kernel of truth to it in that, for example, NATO was to some extent a genuinely defensive alliance that was concerned about a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Whereas post Cold War it seems that NAITO has morphed and become purely a tool of wars of aggression, and that they're indeed targeting Russia. And yet the propaganda is kind of even more shrill and one-sided than back during the Cold War. Then there really was an enemy to watch out for. Would you agree with that?

Larry Johnson: Well, yeah, we've actually reversed roles from when the Soviet Union was an entity. Pravda (the leading Soviet news agency) was ironically named Pravda in Russian meaning "truth." And it was anything but true. And it was sort of the precursor for Baghdad Bob denying that there were US tanks in Baghdad when you could see the pictures in the background. And so the Russians used to be very, very clumsy at their information management. But now I've lived long enough to see a complete reversal of roles. Russia Today is a far more honest presentation of news than anything that the West is offering. Western media comes with a heavily ladened agenda, and that agenda is to support a particular narrative. So nobody wants to point out that the United States with the United Kingdom in 2014 was involved with helping manufacture a coup that removed an elected president in Ukraine from office and then installed somebody who was seen as more pliant with the West. And then on top of it, it's no great coincidence that at the same time that the United States was forcing out this pro-Russian president, Hunter Biden nailed an $80,000 a month gig with Burisma, and that Joe Biden himself was put in charge of policy in Ukraine. It's just a level of corruption that we always used to laugh at foreigners for doing. And yet the United States has become far more blatant and far more corrupt, frankly, than some of the third world despots we used to ridicule.

Kevin Barrett: I agree completely. And it's ironic, isn't it, that in the mainstream we hear all about the Russian oligarchs and the incredible corruption in Russia, when the reality seems to be almost the opposite, that the US oligarchy has gotten corrupt to that point. And the Ukrainian oligarchy of course is even worse. Whereas Putin has actually sort of whipped his oligarchs into line, got them under control to a certain extent, you know, jailed a couple and threatened the others, told them to play ball, stay out of politics, let the state seize the oil works and use the oil money for the Russian people. And of course, that was not what the Western oligarchs wanted. They wanted to extend their neoliberal oligarchy across the planet, especially into Russia, so they could get their mitts on all those Russian raw materials and energy. It seems to me that's really the bottom line here, and that this is ultimately the Western oligarchy's war against Russia. So the corrupt oligarchs are actually on our side. But nobody seems to recognize that.

Larry Johnson: Yeah. And and with that, it's actually sort of ironic that we're now punishing Russian oligarchs, and Putin is quite happy with that. It saves him having to do it.

Kevin Barrett: Right.

Larry Johnson: But the real craziness, though, is just the virulent anti-Russia attitude and language and propaganda that has flooded western airwaves and print media. It is just over the top. It's really unjustifiable.

Kevin Barrett: It makes you wonder what was the point of winning the Cold War and having Russia renounce communism and actually decide to become a normal country defending its own interests rather than having this messianic, millenarian ideology that they're going to try to push on the whole world. It seems like we could have had peace with Russia quite easily just by respecting the promise not to push NATO one inch eastward. And I guess the unipolar moment led people like Wolfowitz with his Wolfowitz doctrine to say, hey, we're running the world now, let's run it forever. And to do that, we're going have to just keep going after anybody that could possibly build up enough strength to think that they're actually autonomous and independent and sovereign. And so the Russians now are declaring themselves sovereign, and apparently that's really why they're under attack.

Larry Johnson: Well, again, I emphasize facts and being objective. So if you look over the last 30 years, the country that has carried out more invasions, actual military invasions, where you put military troops on the ground and you kill the natives of that particular country, that country is the United States. There's no other country in the world that has conducted more invasions of foreign countries. Now we always claim that we have a really good reason for it. But it's like that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, which says, Have you killed anyone? He says, Yeah, but they're bad people. They always deserved it. Well, that's been our rationalization for these these wars that really, when you look at them objectively, appear to be nothing more than jobs programs for major defense industries and the consulting firms that help keep them alive. It's absurd. I don't know if you ever saw the Saturday Night Live skit with Jon Voight where he kept hollering for more cowbell? No matter what happens, more cowbell. No matter what happens, we need more defense spending. No matter what happens. And yet to sit back and objectively look at the United States, the mess that's been created: We fought a war for 20 years in Afghanistan, and all we did was burn up a bunch of ammunition and get probably 20,000 troops maimed and wounded and a number of others killed. But not to mention the number of Afghan citizens that we murdered. And what have we accomplished in Iraq? Same thing, Syria, same thing, Libya. So start down the list. It's a long and bloody list. And I guess if anybody believes in something like divine retribution, America has a pretty expensive butcher's bill to pay, in my view.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, that's true. It's kind of a frightening thought, especially as we're in this era now where the Russians seem to have a couple of years of a lead on the U.S. in hypersonic weapons. That leads us into the military analysis department which you excel in. Do you think that the Russians chose this moment to accelerate their pushback against the US war on Russia that initiated in 2014 with that that coup d'etat which set off a civil war in Ukraine, which was had kind of Russia cheering for one side and the U.S. supporting the other...Do you think they chose this moment because their military has reached the point that they can actually deter the U.S. from moving in and having its way?

Larry Johnson: No, I actually I think that they were sort of forced into it with the continued expansion of NATO to the east, coupled with the bioweapons labs that were being supported, funded and used for possible preparation of bio weapons against Russia. And then the fact that the Ukrainians were actually planning to launch a major military move, to up their military activity in the Donbas, to try to really secure those from the Russians, the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, that had declared independence from Ukraine. So the combination of those three things is what I think finally compelled Putin to say, okay, no, we can't let this go any longer. We're just going to nip it in the bud.

Kevin Barrett: Well, people like Andre Martyanov and The Saker have argued that the Russian military capability is much better than is generally portrayed in the West. Of course, we keep hearing that the Russians have lost, the Russians are losing. They'll be finished in another week or two. And you discuss that in your recent blog post, The Dog That Ain't Barking in Ukraine. So, yeah, maybe you could give us the rundown on that.

Larry Johnson: Well, what you would expect to see if the Ukrainians functioned as an effective army: number one, in the east, they would have broken out. They would have actually launched a counterattack against the Russians and pushed the Russians back to the border. That hasn't happened. In fact, the reports show steady progress by these Russian backed forces in Donetsk and Luhansk in pushing back the Ukrainian military. That's number one. Number two, the Russians have basically they have sealed, completely shut down, the southern coast of Ukraine and their access to the Black Sea. Again, if the Ukraine had a viable, capable army that could fight against that, they would be launching counterattacks to push the Russians out and to open those ports. They haven't done that. What we're seeing is that this group of neo-Nazis that are in the steel plant area of Mariupol are slowly being encircled and killed. So again, if Ukraine had a functioning army, you'd expect to see artillery strikes coming in to try to push back the Russians. We're not seeing that. You'd expect to see air strikes, some sort of air operation, whether with fixed wing or rotary wing. We're not seeing that. Cruise missiles. We're not seeing that. So do they not have it or are they just incapable of using it in an effective manner? And I think it's the latter. Because it's irrational for them not to use it if it's still viable. I do know that their ability to conduct air to air intercept with fixed wing combat aircraft was curtailed the first 24 hours of the war on February 24th because the ground radars were blown up and those ground radars were what the pilots needed in order to vector themselves in on a target.

Larry Johnson: I'm told that American AWACS can now substitute for that. But even with having the AWACS able to offer that capability, we are not seeing those combat aircraft of Ukraine go out and engage the Russians. Part of the reason is the Russian air defense system is extremely sophisticated. They've demonstrated that whatever the US has cannot stop Russian missiles, but the Russian system can absolutely shoot down a whole host of things, including stealth aircraft. So when you start adding all of this together...and again, with the invasion of the Russian troops from the north, when they went in and started surrounding Kiev, this has not been a conventional military invasion by Russia. And what I mean by conventional military invasion is you just go in and destroy everything in your path. You blow up bridges, you blow up railroad centers, you blow up power plants, you cut off the power, you eliminate the Internet. The Russians have done exactly the opposite. They've kept the power on. They've kept the Internet up in most places. And so you've got to wonder, why aren't you seeing the social media posts that would reflect the valiant fight by the Ukrainian forces? You know, the Internet is virtually silent on that front.

Kevin Barrett: And some other fronts as well. But we've seen heroic Ukrainian grandmothers allegedly blowing up Russian tanks. And we've seen them handing out weapons like candy to people who aren't trained on them. That doesn't really suggest that they've got a very good military position, does it?

Larry Johnson: No. Handing somebody a firearm—because I'm a certified firearms instructor—all that means is they're likely to kill themselves or kill somebody they don't intend to because they they don't know how to use it. And even being able to know how to fire a rifle, how do you use it from a tactical standpoint? And do they even understand the concepts of shooting from cover, by shooting from concealment? Do they understand how to integrate with a unit of people with rifles, the fire team, in order to lay down effective fire on a particular target? There's a reason that when people go through boot camp that it's a ten or 12 week process, because it takes time to start getting just the basic skills down. And then once you have those basic skills, then you move on to more advanced training like in the US is called Advanced Infantry Training. So we've got to recognize that there are some fundamental things missing in the Ukrainian military response. And then on top of that, we've seen the Russians with their new hypersonic missiles, launching precision strikes on Ukrainian bases that killed NATO personnel. NATO's been very keen to keep this quiet. How many actual NATO military advisors have been killed in these strikes?

Kevin Barrett: So the narrative "Ukraine is winning and Russia's losing, they only have another week or two" and so on and so forth... It seems like maybe that finally wore out. And with the apparent false flag in Bucha, one of the purposes of that may have been to bring on the new narrative, which is that "the evil Russians who, it turns out, are not losing after all, at least not as abjectly as we had been telling you, are now just frustrated and slaughtering civilians randomly and for no military purpose." But that narrative doesn't really make much sense either.

Larry Johnson: Right now, actually, the only thing that NATO and Ukraine are doing well is waging information warfare. The Russians didn't kill civilians at Bucha, at least directly. There may have been some that were killed through artillery strikes that were unintended. But for the West to start moralizing about Russia killing civilians! When you look at what the US did to Germany during World War Two or to Japan and bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, you know, we kill we killed far more civilians and we killed military personnel. But we were willing to accept that as the cost of war. So the hypocrisy on this just reeks. Or the bombing of Dresden. The firebombing there probably killed as many as were killed in the nuclear blast at Hiroshima. So this is an effort to blame Russia for what was really done by Ukrainian nationalist forces. Because Russia pulled out on the 30th. The mayor of Bucha was out celebrating the liberation on the 31st. Not one word about, "oh, my God, we've had these people killed." At the same time, you didn't see on social media grieving mothers, fathers, spouses, siblings grieving about this this husband, this father, this brother was taken out by the Russians and shot and killed. "Oh, we've got to find his body." None of that. It was not until April 2nd, three days later, that all of a sudden these bodies were discovered and "oh my God, the Russians were executing them." Except in their haste to film these bodies they forgot to point out that many of the bodies are surrounded by Russian meals, ready to eat food packages. So we're asked to believe that the Russians on the one hand would hand out food packages and then tie their hands behind them and shoot them. Right. It's just insanity.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. A lot of the victims seem to have had the white armbands on indicating more of a pro-Russian orientation, suggesting that they may have been executed by the Ukrainian forces after they took Bucha back.

Larry Johnson: Right.

Kevin Barrett: But still, none of this shows up in the mainstream media. It's kind of odd. Back in the Vietnam days, I remember there were some off script reports that managed to make it into the mainstream. The My Lai massacre was reported on by Seymour Hersh, and there were other incidents like that. But today it seems that somehow they've gotten the media totally under control. How have they done it? Is it Operation Mockingbird going into overdrive? How do they get that unanimity?

Larry Johnson: It's just lazy. Number one, it's the consolidation of the media with a few corporations. And you've got lazy, fearful reporters who don't want to lose their jobs and they're willing to go along with whatever the popular meme is. Tt's very much like what the Soviet system once was. It really is a genuine form of fascism, where the government now, in concert with these large corporations, is able tocreate a narrative and a truth that is not actually in touch with reality.

Kevin Barrett: It's strange, though, that it's it's gotten so much worse over time. I noticed that prior to 911, it seemed that there was a lot more questioning, at least in the academy, which is where I was hanging out mostly. Most of the professors that I talked to all accepted that the JFK assassination had been some kind of coup d'etat. People could talk about that openly in faculty lounges and in their courses. And the 9/11 happened and I ended up getting railroaded for talking skeptically about 9/11 at the University of Wisconsin in 2006. And that to me was kind of surprising because I spent my whole academic life in an environment where everybody knew that the Kennedy assassination was a coup d'état and the orientation was to be a critic of of the official system. And there were a lot of harsh left-wing criticisms of the state of affairs. Then post-911, it seemed like somehow things changed. And if you were raising these questions, suddenly you were outside any kind of acceptable discourse. You were a conspiracy theorist and you'd be forced out, like I was forced out of the American University system for talking about that. So do you think some things changed after 9/11? Or is that just my experience?

Larry Johnson: No, I think 9/11 became the justification for imposing unconstitutional limits on speech. And we could justify taking people to Guantanamo and torturing them because it was for a good cause, even though it was a complete violation of the Constitution and it was a complete violation of the laws of war. So and the media went along with it because there was money to be made from taking that that approach, that attitude. And now we're in a situation where we've seen actual political prisoners being held in in DC jails. And nobody, or very, very few, raise any complaints or challenges to that. In fact, the the ironic reality is we've got more political prisoners in the United States than Russia, than the supposedly terrible Vladimir Putin is holding.

Kevin Barrett: That's pretty ironic, isn't it? It's also ironic that now it's the left side of the political spectrum that seems to be the most rabidly pro-war and anti-civil liberties, which is the exact opposite of what I remember from my younger days back during the Cold War. How did that happen?

Larry Johnson: Yeah. It's all about the money.

Kevin Barrett: Follow the money. Yeah. Speaking of the the so-called January 6th insurrection, which led to even more crackdowns on free speech, I actually got a strike on my YouTube channel, a second strike—and fortunately I stopped posting for long enough to not lose the entire channel—I got a strike because one of my guests opined that the most recent presidential election may not have been correctly tabulated. So now they actually have a rule explicitly stated at YouTube that you're not allowed to cast any doubt on the authenticity of the results of any American presidential election, which means we can't talk about Gore Vidal's novel, 1876, about Rutherford B Hayes stealing the election from Tilden, anymore. We can't talk about the 2000 Gore versus Bush hanging chad, or in 2004 John Kerry apparently having his victory stolen by massive computer fraud directed by Karl Rove by way of his vote theft guru Mike McConnell who then died in a plane crash right before he was supposed to testify against Rove. And on and on and on. So so you can't question election results anymore. That's pretty strange. What's your take on that controversy?

Larry Johnson: It's indicative of what's become an authoritarian society. Part of it is just the flat out ignorance of the American people. The education system is now really more for indoctrination in social games as opposed to actual education with the hard sciences and history. And there's no objective, firm understanding of history, it's just become an ideological echo chamber. So it's just the inability to...we ought to be able to discuss and debate things without being forced to to admit that there's only one way. And that said, we are faced with this other irony that we're told that it's all about science, and yet there's the completely unscientific acceptance of transgenderism, the notion that there are 52 genders. It's just a complete violation of biology. I think one of the causes for this is that as the population in the United States has become more urban, less rural, we've got fewer and fewer people that grew up on a farm or around a farm. I'll tell you, when you're on a farm, there's no such thing as a transgender pig or a transgender cow or a transgender bull. You're dealing constantly with male and female sexual issues with animals. And there is no in between, no gray area. And yeah, we are biological mammals. And we try to pretend that despite being mammals, that we can reinvent our own (gender identities) just because we say so. That becomes the foundation of society. Good Lord. You can make anything up and then force people to accept it.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. There's a strange contradiction between the trust the science rhetoric, and the postmodernist idea that it's all just being made up, that there is no hard basis to reality. And it seems like the authorities or the people, whoever it is, keeping watch over the sheep in their ideological pens, are having those two contradictory thoughts in mind all the time. First "trust the science. Science is what we tell you. Do what we tell you." And at the same time, "oh, actually science is meaningless because it's all just being made up anyway," which is of course the postmodern philosophy. And somehow they're using both at the same time. How about that culture war dimension of the conflict with Russia? Russia has famously passed a "horrible homophobic law" against propagandizing children for homosexuality. And here in the United States, apparently you can do that, but you have to wait till they're in third grade, at least in Florida. And you can you can do it in kindergarten or nursery school everywhere else. So there's a culture clash. And I'm wondering how is it that Russia, which used to be the ideologically crazed reality-denying side of the Cold War, has become the normal, natural and reality-accepting side of this new war while the West has gone bananas.

Larry Johnson: Yeah, well, remember, Russia used to be the Soviet Union, they were godless communists. They did not believe in God. They believe the state was God. Well, Vladimir Putin converted to Christianity, orthodox Christianity, about 30 years ago. And the people try to discount that as being real. But it actually is real. And as a result, he sees himself as trying to uphold Christian values and preserving Christian society and preserving the family. The real irony for me, another irony out of this, is that with the invasion of Ukraine, you could make the case that Vladimir Putin has embarked on an effort to try to save Western civilization from itself. Because throughout the West, which is really founded on Christianity and Judaism, there have been efforts to erase that religious foundation, turn it into a secular society, and in the process of turning it into a secular society to eliminate and erase all vestiges of religion and replace them with the state being the God. Well, there we are. We're back to what the Soviets once were. People don't even see it or comprehend it.

Kevin Barrett: There you go. And so, as you said, you worked in the CIA, the State Department, special forces. Are your former colleagues in those areas concerned about this as well? And if so, is there any hope? I talked with Gordon Duff, who's been through exactly these these same worlds that you've been through, about "why didn't you guys who knew the score about 9/11"—like Gordon and a lot of other military folks who knew right away that the official story of passenger planes flying all over the country for hours after being obviously hijacked and turning around halfway across the country andflying a beeline for the Pentagon without being seen on any radar whatsoever, military or civilian, because they turned off their transponder, and then a guy who couldn't even fly a Cessna taking this corkscrew dive into the Pentagon, coming in and clipping the grass and hitting the side where it had just been reinforced, far away from the top brass. And the obvious demolitions of the three towers. Indeed, every WTC prefix building was blown up with explosives and on and on and on. A whole lot of folks in the military intelligence communities obviously didn't believe any of the offical nonsense from the get-go. I said, Well, Gordon, why didn't you guys push back against this? And he said "It would have meant civil war." So I imagine that today the same kind of people, the reality based, patriotic element of the military and intelligence communities and maybe even the State Department, would be as concerned as you are about these things. And one would think that some of them might imagine that there's something that could be done about it. What's your take on the possibility that people in those communities could at some point stand up and try to restore some sanity to the situation?

Larry Johnson: No, that's not going to happen. These are people who don't want to rock the boat. They want to get promoted. They want to continue to make money and have a job. So they're economic hostages.

Larry Johnson: The only thing that will force America to come to grips with reality is going to be an enormous tragedy and chaos. Unfortunately, the likelihood of facing a massive inflationary spike over the coming year has really grown. And once once that happens, you're going to see the virtual destruction of the middle class. And once you get the destruction of the middle class, then the foundation of this country is completely at risk. So unfortunately, sometimes you have to suffer a tragedy to really get the impetus or the will to make the fundamental changes that need to take place.

Kevin Barrett: And do you think those changes could happen through the normal political system?

Larry Johnson: No.

Kevin Barrett: Not at all? So, like, if somebody like Douglas MacGregor were nominated by acclamation to run for president, that's still not going to work.

Larry Johnson: No. No. Because, again, you have an entrenched bureaucracy and the very foundations of that bureaucracy have got to be attacked.

Kevin Barrett: And how does that happen?

Larry Johnson: When the country runs out of money, when the government is destroyed? Unfortunately, I think we're we're up against some real challenging times. There's no way to have the revolutionary change without a revolution. That's the reality. That's our history. You go back and look at the history of the the creation of the United States of America. It was a British colony, and the colony rebelled and refused to accept the existing social order. And there was as much animus between friends and families then as exists now. So when you get institutions that no longer are responsive or willing to protect the rights of citizens, then you must take action to make sure that that is correct. You hope it can be self-correcting, but the self-correcting rarely works.

Kevin Barrett: So have you heard about the Fourth Turning theory of the sociologists Strauss and Howe who've talked about how there's an uncanny 80 year cycle in American history, each one being a four-generational cycle of 80 years, starting with the revolution around 1780, the Civil War around 1860, World War Two around 1940, and now here we are a few years after 2020 and going into the same kind of thing. As you said, the first, 1776 revolution was in some sense a civil war with people turning on their neighbors, horrific violence within communities between the British sympathizers and the rebels. And likewise the Civil War, which was the same kind of thing. With World War Two we didn't experience so much domestic chaos, although there was a very sharp domestic divide between the side that didn't want to go into the war, and those who managed to orchestrate the US into the war through the Pearl Harbor eight point plan and things like that. And now here we are in 2020 with a sharp divide, with the fanatical Yankees on one side. And I would say the fanatical Yankee side would have been the pro-revolution side in 1776, the North in in 1860, and the FDR plus the Jewish interest side that pushed us into the war in 1940, and today, the Yankee side would be the wokesters and the current establishment. And so far in each of the three cases, the Yankee side won. Do you think that if it is the case that we're repeating this kind of pattern, you think the Yankees might finally be defeated if they're the ones who are in charge as the nation crumbles?

Larry Johnson: Well, I disagree a little bit with the history on that, because if you go back to the American Revolution, there was an establishment element, but that establishment element literally put everything at risk. They they were not growing more prosperous out of it. And several of the individuals who signed on to the Declaration of Independence lost their lives and lost their property, and families were split and divided. So...what changed for the United States in World War Two? The reality is World War Two would not have happened were it not for World War One. And World War One was a completely useless and unjustified conflict. But it certainly killed millions and then sowed the seeds for World War Two.

Larry Johnson: The wealthy elite in this country are helping push these lies right now. There comes a time when the accountability catches up. It doesn't matter how much money you have. If they're rioting outside your house and preparing to burn your house down, all the money in the world doesn't necessarily help you, unless you could hire an army.

Kevin Barrett: And do you think that that kind of collapse situation that people like Dmitri Orlov have predicted for the U.S. could come about sooner rather than later, given the possible collapse of the global trade system after this Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Larry Johnson: Well, I wouldn't use the term collapse. I think collapse conjures up an image where everything stops working. And we saw that even during World War Two with enormous military battles around the world, there are still people who still have needs and hungers and wants and will trade valuables to satisfy those. So inevitably, these kinds of situations create an opportunity for criminal organizations to exploit. Black markets arise, and still the commerce goes on. So it's not so much a collapse as a redirection of income and wealth. But it does make it more difficult for a government to actually provide for the common welfare of its citizens.

Kevin Barrett: So how soon is that?

Larry Johnson: I think we're on the threshold of it. I think 2023 is going to be a very, very difficult year economically in the United States. We'll see double digit inflation at least, and you'll start seeing financial collapses on order of what we saw in 2008. And this time we won't have control of the international financial system.

Kevin Barrett: What's the effect of that? Especially if international trade is declining, as it seems to be.

Larry Johnson: There will be a demand for certain items. One of the sad things about today's America compared to where we were in World War Two, the beginnings of World War Two, is that then we had an enormous manufacturing capability. We could produce everything here. We didn't have to rely upon foreign imports in order to build ships and planes. Now we do. So the sharp contrast to that is Russia. Russia does not need anything. They are largely a self-sufficient economy, so the damage to them from these sanctions is not nearly as great as the West was hoping. And if anything, it's reinforced for the Russians the need to be independent, and not be dependent on the United States.

Kevin Barrett: And so, if you're right, 2023 will be a year of sharp economic downturn. What does that bode for the 2024 presidential elections?

Larry Johnson: There will be a lot of pandering about how they're going to fix the economy. And if the suffering is great, there's always the tendency with great suffering to look for the, quote, strong man to come in and save the day.

Kevin Barrett: Well, that's not going to be Biden or Harris.

Larry Johnson: No, no. So it will not be.

Kevin Barrett: I don't see a whole lot of candidates out there.

Larry Johnson: Frankly, I think at this point, we're likely to see the return of Donald Trump.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. For better or worse. I think Trump has some serious flaws and weaknesses, even though the MAGA movement that he rode definitely has some some good points in its agenda. The return of Trump, though, would be ferociously opposed by the current establishment. And one could almost imagine a civil war scenario. As you said, look at how they're treating these political prisoners in the DC jail. They're flogging the pro-Trump forces and flogging Trump unmercifully at every opportunity. If these folks see Trump heading back into the White House, being the man on the horse, they're probably going to shoot his horse out from under him somehow, aren't they?

Larry Johnson: Yeah. They're going to try. But this is real. Trump is like one of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead, he keeps coming back at them. But he understood he didn't appreciate the depth of corruption in the Washington, DC bureaucracy. He just didn't see it.

Kevin Barrett: Well, he appointed swamp creatures to half of the cabinet posts.

Larry Johnson: Yeah. He got an education. I don't think he'll repeat the same mistakes twice.

Kevin Barrett: Well, I don't know. The worst swamp creature in his cabinet was Kushner. And that's his son-in-law. Can he really break with that crowd?

Larry Johnson: Well, I don't know. I do not know. He probably should. But, again, you never know.

Kevin Barrett: What I would be concerned about would be the scapegoating, the tendency to always find somebody to blame for problems. We see this right now, of course, as Russia is being scapegoated for everything. Trump was scapegoated for everything. But even if Trump comes back, then the Trump side could also become a kind of a witch hunting brigade that conceivably could continue this tendency that we've already seen towards shutting down the opposition in unfair ways. We could move from the current situation where the anti-Trump side is shutting down free speech on the Internet in these really maddening ways, but not really the brutal, straightforward ways that Trump or someone like him could be just shutting down free speech brutally the way it's been done in so many places and so many times. Is that something that would concern you?

Larry Johnson: Yeah. We're entering an unknown. And I don't think people have thought this through carefully, particularly the way the international dynamics are going to change. The United States has gotten away over the last 50, 60 years with being able to go out and bully other countries and get away with it. I think that time has now come to an end.

Kevin Barrett: So if we're going to try to organize with our friends and neighbors, and get ready for the next American Revolution, so we can try to contribute to it going in the most productive, least terrible way, where would we start?

Larry Johnson: I would start by making sure that your own situation is economically stable, that you've got enough food, an abundant supply of food.

Kevin Barrett: Larry, sorry you're breaking up again....

Larry Johnson: I'm saying from a practical standpoint, buy food and be able to defend your family. That's a all. Just be able to take care of, defend, and feed your own family first. Take care of yourselves first, because when you're self seeking, then that actually creates more of a foundation for dealing with your neighbors.

Kevin Barrett: That's true. And if things get bad, the people who aren't able to take care of themselves will be the ones probably driven to the worst and most desperate kinds of behavior. And we don't want to contribute to that. It also strikes me as a good idea to maybe get to know your neighbors a little bit, especially the ones who are aware of these things.

Larry Johnson: Yes. I'm fortunate in that regard. I live in a great neighborhood with great neighbors.

Kevin Barrett: Cool. Yeah. I've got good neighbors, too. Probably should get to know a couple of them a little better, though. Some interesting folks around here that I probably should go knock on their door. Well, Larry, we pretty much hit the end of the show. I appreciate your excellent work at The Son of the New American Revolution blog. That's Sonar21.com. And I do look forward to checking in with you down the line. I think your analysis is spot on in most respects.

Larry Johnson: Well, we'll see.

Kevin Barrett: Okay. I guess we.

Larry Johnson: Will.

Kevin Barrett: Okay. Take care. Bye.

Speaker3: The other side of the river.

Tanya. It's. The ever.

Speaker3: Looking. Yeah. I can see. You see? You think? You think you can? I don't quite see. Across. Neither side.

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Australian biochemist and avoidable mortality expert Gideon Polya, author of US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide, discussing "Epitaph For Madeleine Albright: Complicit In US Mass Murder Of Millions Of Non-European Children." He notes that the West condemns the Russian war in Ukraine and bemoans the relatively small number of civilian casualties, "but only a tiny few humanitarians are also condemning Western hypocrisy in ignoring hundreds of millions of deaths from violence and imposed deprivation through US hegemony, subversion, sanctioning, robbing, bombing, invasion and devastation of non-European countries over the last 70 years. Black, brown and non-European lives matter."

Then Henry Makow arrives halfway through the hour to discuss "Russia vs. West = Men vs. Femmes." He writes:

"Listening to the eye-opening interview with Scott Ritter, I was struck by how MASCULINE the Russian game plan is. The Russians perceived a threat to home and hearth from corrupt Nazi-ridden Ukraine and acted decisively. This is what real men do...Russia Vs. the West is very much healthy heterosexual males versus sexual misfits: pedophiles, homosexuals and transvestites.

"Look at the Western leaders.

"Biden is a pedophile. So probably was Trump. Fidelito, Zelensky and Macron are homosexuals.

"In contrast, Putin has banned the promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism.

"Sexual dysphoria is an aspect of Satanism. It is anti-nature and anti-God..."

We'll also discuss Henry's take on Ukraine as a neo-Khazaria. See: "NATO is Khazaria in Drag"

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Monetary analyst Ellen Brown discusses her new article “The Coming Global Financial Revolution: Russia Is Following the American Playbook.” She offers a succinct summary of the rise of the petrodollar, then argues that Russia is demolishing dollar hegemony with its petroruble. Unlike Michael Hudson, she does not view the coming demise of the petrodollar as global reserve currency as a disaster for the US economy.

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The show begins with Matthew Ehret of CanadianPatriot contemplating the political demise of neoliberal Russians including Anatoly Chubais and whether or not Russia and China are in on the Great Reset.

Halfway through the hour John Titus of the Solari Report joins to discuss ongoing financial warfare, including Russia’s recent decision to demand energy payments in rubles. John says “the pandemic narrative is nothing but a cover story to conceal from the public what in reality is the biggest asset transfer ever.”

John Titus is a lawyer who makes videos and films about financial and monetary events that undercut the rule of law. Titus practices in the area of patent litigation and is licensed before the U.S. Supreme Court and several lower courts. He holds bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering. Titus currently co-produces a weekly video podcast for Solari Inc., “Money & Markets,” with Catherine Austin Fitts.

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Meryl Nass, MD, biowar expert and medical advisor to RFK Jr., argues that inexpensive COVID treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been suppressed by big pharma and friends using bad science and bogus studies. Meryl says her newly-updated article “How a false hydroxychloroquine narrative was created, and much more” is “the most important article I ever wrote, as it is key to understanding the past two years.” We’ll also discuss the controversy over US biowar labs in Ukraine.

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First half-hour: Eric Walberg discusses his latest book review "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl" and expresses his dismay with the media's moronic anti-Russia propaganda.

Second half-hour: Eric Zuesse nominates Douglas Macgregor!

From Eric Zuesse:

We need Douglas Macgregor for U.S. President.

Here is why:

Democrats, Republicans, and independents, all need this person in the U.S. White House. We are the American people; and he represents, more articulately than anybody else does, on the most urgent and important issue confronting the world, what all Americans — and all of the people in the world — need. That’s a fact. That need is a fact. How can it become implemented?

This need has become desperate. On March 13th, Fox News headlined “US senators dismiss ‘World War III’ worries, say US would dominate Russian troops”. Almost none of the 5,000+ reader-comments there cared much about the fact that WW III would destroy all life on this planet, and most of the readers were concerned only about whether ‘we’ would ‘win’ that war — a war that would utterly destroy the entire world. The American public no longer consider a war between the world’s nuclear superpowers (U.S. and Russia) to be fundamentally different from, and enormously more unacceptable than, any prior war. The massive fear of nuclear war in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis is gone, though nuclear war would be hundreds of times more destructive in 2022 than it would have been in 1962. The rabidly neoconservative American press has whipped up the international hatreds and blocked out the crucial facts in its international news-reporting, so as to produce America’s present misinformed and zombie-like public. This is idiocy on a massive scale, in our own nation, right now; and, so, America will have no public opinion restraining its leaders from destroying the entire planet in order to ‘save’ Ukraine — a previously unimaginable lunacy, but the reality today.

Only leadership such as Douglas Macgregor could provide would offer the type of leadership that might overcome this ugly present reality and transform America into a decent nation again — one that takes deadly seriously the deadliest of dangers, not only dangers to Americans, but dangers to the entire planet. America’s existing leadership is atrocious beyond anything in all of human history. We’ve not had the type of leadership that Macgregor can supply ever since at least the time of JFK, but the post-9/11 period has been especially nonchalant about the unacceptability of any WW III. For warfare, the atomic age brought with it a change of type, not ONLY a change of ITEM, but that basic fact has now been effectively forgotten in America, and this poses the greatest threat to the world in all of the world’s history — and this reality of Americans’ stunning ignorance and nonchalance about what a WW III would mean must change, and fast. Before nuclear weapons, there could have been any number of World Wars (superpower-conflicts); but, after the 1945 advent of nuclear weapons, there can be only one more World War, and it would begin the process that would soon end all life on this planet. Our nation’s leaders now are no longer restrained by the public about bringing it on. Shall we acceptthat?

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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Richard Cook, the NASA whistleblower who stopped the Challenger disaster coverup, discusses his latest article “Pro-Zionist U.S. Politicians Dead Set on War with Russia.” It begins:

“World affairs are rapidly moving toward their culmination as the U.S.-instigated war between Russia and Ukraine threatens to escalate into a nuclear conflagration. The charge to world war is being led by U.S. Zionist politicians and bureaucrats, especially President Joe Biden and his chief implementer, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. As usual, the dirty work on the ground is being carried out by the ever-present CIA and its compliant military superstructure. By now the Zionist march to world domination has been thoroughly documented and will not be reprised here. It has been accomplished largely through infiltration and control of the English-speaking nations—chiefly Great Britain and the U.S…”

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Note: Eric Zuesse has been rescheduled for this Friday. -KB

International Relations professor Michael Brenner discusses his new article "Why the Unhinged Russophobia and Anti-Putin Hysteria?"  It begins:

"Among the many oddities of the Ukraine affairs, the most astonishing is the frenzy of hostile passion directed at Putin, Russia, and everything Russian. Nothing close to this has been seen since World War II when Hitler and the Nazis were Satan incarnate...The first thing to be said on this score is that the passion and drive have come from American elites. There has been no great wave of popular outrage, no mass demonstrations, no blood-curdling calls for revenge and punishment. No post-9/11 national trauma. Instead, the fury is generated by our government leaders (Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Harris, Pelosi, Cruz); from the media world’s clueless news presenters cum propagandists, from the demonically possessed editors of The New York Times who have discovered the thrills of ‘yellow journalism,’ from the likes of Peter Gelb, from the scores of Nobel Prize winners who in concert have lent their weight to the crusade; from the university presidents presiding over pious vigils who are thankful that the spotlight is shifting away from the innumerable scandals they are paid hefty sums to whitewash; and Gold Medal to the IOC who ban crippled athletes from competing in the Winter Paralympics because their passport says ‘Russia’.  All are hugely self-satisfied. None of them ever blinked an eye as the United States for 20 years has killed, maimed, starved, and tortured hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria et al in exercises of brutality that have left the country’s security in a more precarious state than when the onslaught began."

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Marilyn M. Singleton discusses her new article “Real Americans and the American Oligarchy.” In it she writes:

“Federal and state governments have used Covid as a justification to cross the line from public safety measures into tyranny. Despite the decreasing Covid cases, the national Covid emergency declaration was extended beyond March 1, 2022. The national emergency designation gives the President more than 100 special powers that can bypass legal procedures ranging from banking to public health and anything else the government wants to control.

“Despite a long tradition of differing opinions regarding medical disease processes and treatments, the government discouraged such discussions regarding Covid. First, the Surgeon General simply asked us to help stop ‘misinformation’ because it ‘pollutes our information environment.’ A few short months later, the feds are demanding that social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites. Translation: divergent opinions will be censored once the government discovers how to do so. What happened to our respect for the marketplace of ideas?

“If tracking our computer use doesn’t work, we have the National Patient ID, a single number issued by the federal government containing all the details of a person’s medical records from cradle to grave…”

Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) Board member. She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School.  Dr. Singleton completed two years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law.  She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law.  She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.

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Watch the Orlov video interview on Rumble

First half hour: Dmitry Orlov weighs in on Ukraine. In today's Orwellian America, "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength"—or so the mainstream media tell us. But in reality, the truth is usually pretty much the opposite of whatever the MSM says. That seems to be the case with Ukraine, where the people we're told are good guys are actually bloodthirsty zio-nazis, and the Russian cleanup (of US race-specific biological weapons, among other things) is more than justified, according to Truth Jihad Radio guest Dmitry Orlov.

Dmitry Orlov was born in Leningrad, USSR, into an academic family, and emigrated to the US in the mid-1970s. He holds degrees in Computer Engineering and Linguistics, and has worked in a variety of fields, including high-energy physics, Internet commerce, network security and advertising. He is the author of several books, including Reinventing Collapse and The Five Stages of Collapse

Second half hour: Nahed al-Husaini agrees with Dmitry and then some. She discusses the US bioweapons labs in Ukraine and says Russian sources tell her the labs harbored an ultra-lethal strain of COVID-19 among other things.

Nahed is Veterans Today Damascus Bureau Chief. She is a member of the American Institute for Middle East Strategic Studies (USA) and serves as Assistant Director of Arab-American and Muslim Congress (Detroit, USA). She has a Diploma in English Literature from Damascus University (1987). She’s also been a reporter for Turkish newspaper Aydinlik, Special Coordinator for Arab-Armenian International Law Assembly, Correspondent for Qatari News Agency, Al Ayam news Paper in Bahrain, Al Liwaa in Lebanon, Correspondent for Petra News Agency in Jordan, correspondent for the Associated Press in USA, and worked as a freelance journalist for CBS, ABS and CNN in Syria. She is fluent in both English and Arabic.

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