INTERVIEW: Col. Richard H. Black (Ret.)

U.S. and Ukraine Disinformation Boards
Are ‘Instruments of Tyranny’

The video of this Aug. 23 interview is available here.

Mike Billington: Hello. This is Mike Billington. I’m the co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review representing the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Organization. I’m here today, August 23, 2022, with Colonel Richard H. Black—Senator Richard Black—who, after serving for 31 years in the U.S. Marines and in the Army, then served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1998 to 2006, and in the Virginia Senate from 2012 to 2020. I’ll allow Colonel Black to describe his military service himself.

Colonel Black, my interview with you April 26, which focused on the difference between the U.S. and the Russian military operations in Syria and also in Ukraine, now has had nearly 3 million views, a million in English, over half a million in Russia with Russian subtitles, and many, many other languages. The thousands of comments have been mostly of the nature of high praise for a military veteran telling the truth about the extreme danger of the failed U.S. leadership, which is driving the world towards global war, perhaps even nuclear war. So, you have a very large following around the world!

For Ministries of ‘Truth,’ Truth Is the Danger

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that you are one of the 72 people who were placed on the blacklist published July 14 by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which of course means Censorship Board, or Ministry of Truth, you could say. The CCD was set up by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. and British intelligence in Kiev to label any challenge to the approved narrative about military operations in Ukraine as “Russian propaganda,” even calling the people on the list, i.e., you, “information terrorists” and “war criminals.” What is your view of this?

Col. Richard Black: Well, let me start, if I could, by just giving our listeners a little bit of my background. I want to make it very clear that I love my country. I’ve risked my life for it hundreds of times. I volunteered to fight in Vietnam. I was a helicopter pilot, flew 269 combat missions. My helicopter was hit by enemy ground fire on four of those flights. In one case, bullets that were aimed directly at me tore through the cowling of the cockpit just behind my head. They very nearly hit me.

I was flying off the carrier Iwo Jima in the South China Sea off the coast of the Philippines, when the flight operations officer who briefed us in the morning, told us our squadron has been tasked with providing a volunteer to fight on the ground with the 1st Marine Division, which was at the time heavily engaged in combat. I immediately volunteered, went to work with the 1st Marine Division, and fought in 70 bloody combat patrols. During my final patrol, I was wounded. Both my radiomen were killed next to me after we had launched a rubber boat assault and crossed a river under enemy fire.

I served a total of 32 years in uniform, first as a marine pilot, then as an Army lawyer. I ran legal offices at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, Fort Ord, California, and at Fort Lewis, Washington. In each of those I supervised 25-40 Army lawyers. Finally, I retired as Chief of the Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, where I testified before Congress. I advised the Senate Armed Services Committee and prepared executive orders that were signed by the President.

That said, I am adamantly opposed to our current wars and especially the very dangerous war that we’ve engaged in, in Ukraine. I believe the U.S., the UK, and the European Union have embarked on an imprudent course of action that has carried a significant risk of triggering an all-out nuclear war.

Moving on to the issue of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation. It’s very interesting—this woman, Nina Jankowicz, created quite a media frenzy when it was discovered that the Department of Homeland Security was going to set up a disinformation board, a “Ministry of Truth,” to decide which versions of facts would be permissible and which ones would be censored. This was censorship at the very highest levels of the federal government.

Nina Jankowicz is a rather bizarre, young, narcissistic woman with an extensive background of working within the Ukrainian system and informing those people about how to control so-called “disinformation.” Now, she was President Biden’s pick to be the Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s new Disinformation Governance Board. Literally, the sole purpose of that board was to censor critics of government policies. This is a woman who supposedly is going to make things more truthful by suppressing voices like yours and mine. It’s interesting that she issued some tweets that implied that reports about Hunter Biden’s laptops were somehow Russian disinformation.

Well, I think practically everyone in the country, Democrat and Republican, understands that there is something gravely wrong with Hunter Biden’s laptops and the information revealed on them. Jankowicz has said that she shudders to think of what free speech abolitionists would do if Elon Musk loosens the restrictions on free speech imposed by Twitter. In other words, if there is somehow an explosion of freedom in America, she just doesn’t know how the world would deal with the truth.

You know, the truth is quite a danger. We do know that she has very close connections with the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian government has set up a Disinformation Board, which issued essentially a blacklist which contains 72 names, 30 of whom were speakers at a conference of the Schiller Institute, which has done some excellent work in keeping people informed about what’s going on. This blacklist is clearly intended to instill fear and to silence critics, to censor critics.

Here we have a situation where the Department of Homeland Security is giving guidance to the Ukrainian government, to the SBU, which is sort of a terroristic secret police in Ukraine, telling them how to suppress the voices of American citizens. Not only American. There is an Italian General, a lot of prominent people. We’ve got a very real problem where we have American taxpayer dollars being spent by the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of silencing free speech. That’s where we stand right now.

The Targeting of the Schiller Institute

Billington: As you mentioned, 30 of the people on that list were either leaders or friends of the Schiller Institute, who spoke at one of the Schiller Institute conferences. You spoke at several Schiller Institute conferences with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. What is your sense of why there’s this extreme targeting of the Schiller Institute by these Ukrainian forces?

Col. Black: I think if you look at the people who have appeared at these various conferences and interviews that have been done by Schiller Institute—the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review publish highly accurate, very balanced foreign policy assessments, and also raw intelligence from which people can simply look and see what the media from all different nations are saying. You have this aggregation of open source intelligence, which allows people to sift through and to some extent, to arrive at their own conclusions. And I think that the Schiller Institute is viewed as a genuine threat to the new world order, the globalist, the deep state, whatever you want to call them. For them, truth is the ultimate disinformation.

Billington: You were one of 16 Americans on that hit list who this past week signed a letter to six congressional committees—the Intelligence, Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees in both the House and the Senate—a letter which demands an investigation of, as you said, the use of taxpayer money to finance a foreign entity in Ukraine, which is threatening the right to constitutionally guaranteed free speech of Americans, as well as threatening the personal safety of American citizens, given that people are accused of being propagandists for Russia with whom Ukraine is at war, and therefore to call these people war criminals and terrorists, is clearly a threat that something might be done physically. Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer who’s also on the list, made the point that when you’re dealing with the Ukraine regime, such a list is a “kill list.”

As both a former military officer who headed the Army’s Criminal Law Division and a political leader who served in the Virginia House and Senate, what is the impact of this U.S.-sponsored and -funded threat on you and others? And what must the Congress do?

Col. Black: You know, it’s interesting. At the at the height of the Islamic caliphate that was set up by the terror group ISIS, I was among three Americans who were named as enemies of ISIS. ISIS called me “The American Crusader,” and that was certainly a hit list. And so it’s ironic, but here we are and we now have not the infamous terror group ISIS, but we have the Ukrainian government operating, probably under the specific direction of the Department of Homeland Security, to put me on a target list, which frankly, today I think is far more dangerous. I think ISIS ended up having much more to worry about than whether I liked them or didn’t like them. But I think today the hit list published by the Ukrainian government is probably a more deadly hit list.

Just this week, Daria Dugina, the daughter of an activist, a pro-Russian activist, was murdered in Moscow, apparently by a Ukrainian assassin who killed her using a bomb that exploded under her car, ripping her body to pieces and burning her to death. Since the United States has admitted being involved in targeting 13 Russian generals for assassination in Ukraine, it is possible that the CIA provided the targeting information to go after this young woman.

Apparently, they were actually targeting her father. He’s an established pro-Russian pro-war journalist. And they wanted to show that they have the ability to go right into Moscow and to carry out a mafia-style hit. So, they did it. I would not be surprised if the CIA provided the targeting information to go after her. It was just a last-minute switch of automobiles that caused the daughter to die instead of the father.

I would agree with Scott Ritter to this extent. The CIA and the Department of Homeland Security have a common interest in blocking access to the truth about the Ukrainian war. The SBU, the secret intelligence agency of Ukraine, is being molded through a series of rather violent purges by Zelensky into one of the most ruthless intelligence agencies in history. It is possible that the SBU could view the Ukraine/Department of Homeland Security’s joint list as some sort of a kill signal authorizing them to go after individuals, to attempt to assassinate them.

The Case of Senate Candidate Diane Sare

Billington: Another person on the CCD list is Diane Sare, the independent LaRouche candidate from New York State for U.S. Senate against Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer was one of the leading members of the Congress pushing the massive funding of the Ukraine government and war, including their National Security and Defense Council, which set up this hit list. She’s on the hit list, and running against Chuck Schumer. So, Chuck Schumer is financing a foreign entity which is threatening a candidate against him. This would appear to be a quite virulent intervention into an American election. Do you have some thoughts on that?

Col. Black: I do know that Diane Sare is on the hit list. I’ve listened to her discuss this issue in an interview with Scott Ritter. She is an amazingly bright, informed, articulate, appealing candidate. I can’t imagine anyone being a better representative of the American people than Diane Sare. She would certainly have my vote if I were in New York. She makes clear what’s going on.

Here we have a senatorial candidate, a prominent woman in New York, and you’ve got Chuck Schumer in a position where he’s funding Homeland Security. I’m sure that he’s quite comfortable with the idea of a Disinformation Board, because there’s a lot of “disinformation” about him that he’d like to suppress! It shows the darkness and the challenge that the American Disinformation Board, and the Ukrainian Disinformation Board—the threat that they pose to freedom. These are not instruments of the people. They’re not instruments of liberty and freedom. They are instruments of tyranny. These are the kinds of things that the Gestapo, that the Bolsheviks, that the great tyrannies of the world imposed—some sort of preclearance on what you can say and what you can’t. I think it’s a very, very bad sign.

The FBI Raid on Donald Trump’s Home

Billington: U.S. taxpayers are also funding our Department of Justice, and the FBI, and that means they are also financing the raid against the former President’s home. In February 2020, Donald Trump, as everybody knows, was impeached for allegedly trying to influence President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine to investigate alleged criminal behavior by President Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, and especially his son, Hunter, as you mentioned. And yet here is Joe Biden raiding the home of his possible opponent in the 2024 presidential election. What are your thoughts on this raid?

Col. Black: The raid is absolutely outrageous. It is amazing. If you look at what happened here, this is an election year stunt. There’s no justification for it. It is clearly designed as a Hail Mary pass by the Democrats to say, “Look, let’s do a raid and play it up with publicity, and hopefully it’ll somehow taint the Trump campaign for President.” As a practical matter, what has happened since the raid occurred, the American people are waking up. They’ve said, “Hey, wait a minute, we just don’t go for this idea of raiding your political opponent.”

Think about this. When Richard Nixon was in the White House, he was overthrown over a third-rate political prank at the Watergate. It was like Republicans vs. Democrats. In the election prior to Watergate, the Democrats had broken in and burglarized the Republican headquarters. Here we were, and the Republicans burglarizing the Democratic headquarters, and yet they managed to overthrow the Presidency over this. Think of how trivial that event was relative to conducting an all-out FBI raid on the residence of the President of the United States or the former President.

Now, if you look at the way that the FBI did it, of course, you know, they’ve got a very dark history of this. They did it in a way that was designed for maximum publicity. The FBI tipped off the news media to when they were going to be there so that the news media would be able to be on the scene. They chose to maximize the visual setting so that they had emergency lights flashing. They had 30 FBI agents swarming all over the place carrying fully automatic submachine guns in full view. Democrats hate the AR-15, except when their agents are descending on their political opponents, and then they don’t care whether they use machine guns or mortars or whatever. This was set up. They may have had Hollywood directors telling them how to do it—I’m not saying that for a fact—but they thought it through. They thought, “How can we play this out in the media?” It was deliberately designed as a media circus.

Let’s look at their justification for this. They say that President Trump had some classified papers in some cartons that he took when he left the White House.

I have old documents that I’m going through for the first time now, that date back to 1963, and they’ve sat in dusty containers ever since. The idea that somehow President Trump, in between his incredible schedule of making appearances, is going through all these old dusty boxes—I don’t find that too convincing.

But here’s something that I think will interest your listeners. Seymour Hersh is probably the finest investigative journalist of our times. He won the Pulitzer Prize over the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He exposed the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He’s a magnificently talented individual. He has spent many, many years, while he’s writing other books and doing other investigative things. He has been, for over 30 years now, preparing a book called The Dark Side of Camelot. It’s a book about President Kennedy and his administration and so forth.

In that book, Hersh interviews a woman named Suzanne K. Forbes, a national security archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She’s responsible for maintaining the National Security Archives that are held by the Kennedy family, essentially, at the Kennedy Library. She told Hersh, referring to the Eisenhower administration, that the Eisenhower administration left virtually none of its national security files behind when it vacated the White House, and that this typically is the case with outgoing presidential administrations.

Reflect on that. You have national classified holdings today at the Kennedy Library, just as you have in other Presidential libraries. You have the national security archivist at the Kennedy Library saying that this is a typical thing that’s done by different outgoing administrations, specifically the Eisenhower administration, which had some very dark secrets in its time.

If all other Presidents take archives when they leave office, and later on release them at their pleasure from their Presidential archives, why does that suddenly become a crime because Donald Trump does it and the deep state doesn’t like Donald Trump? This whole thing is a total fabrication. We’ve got the Attorney General of the United States, working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration, to suddenly create something criminal out of thin air. It’s just a total hoax. It was an attempt to try to influence the midterm elections and nothing else.

No Peace in Ukraine Before Mid-Term Elections

Billington: Let me switch to the global strategic crisis. In our April 26 interview, you warned very stringently that we’re facing the threat of global war and even a nuclear war, and that continues today. The U.S. continues to pour billions of dollars in heavy military hardware into Ukraine. Just last Friday, the Pentagon announced another $775 million in arms shipments, including additional ammunition for the HIMARS system, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which the spokesman claimed has “really changed the dynamic on the battlefield.”

What is your professional opinion of that claim and the military situation in general in this ongoing conflict?

Col. Black: HIMARS appears to be a very effective system. The HIMARS fires rockets that are GPS guided, so it’s extraordinarily accurate. However, they talk about the HIMARS as though it is somehow going to turn the tide of battle. There is never a particular single weapon that turns the tide of battle. The HIMARS does make a difference, but it will not be decisive.

What we have seen, if you’ve been watching the war from the beginning, the Ukrainians have fought a very fine defensive war, very tenacious. But at the same time, here we are at the six-month point, and they have never once launched a significant counteroffensive. They’ve had limited counterattacks. You know, you can have a single company that launches a counterattack and goes back and forth. But I’m talking about a counteroffensive where they actually make a drive to seize territory somewhere. Not a single time have they done that. At the same time, NATO, the United States had a flood of weapons pouring in to Ukraine. A great many of those have been destroyed. Many of them are being sold on the black market.

Just recently, a very, very good friend of mine, the former military attaché of the Pakistani embassy, Lieutenant General Sarfraz Ali, one of the corps commanders in Pakistan, died in a tragic helicopter accident. There are very strong rumors that he was shot down. Now, the United States has been so loose with control over its anti-aircraft weapons that those things are literally being sold on the dark web. So it’s quite possible that he was shot down either by one of these weapons that was lost in Afghanistan, or perhaps one that’s being sold by the Ukrainians.

In any event, there’s a tremendous bleed-off of weapons that are being sent to Ukraine, and then sold off by oligarchs, diverted in different ways to terror groups and so forth. The flow of weapons to the Ukrainian army has slowed very dramatically since the beginning of the war, and yet the flow of weapons on the Russian side continues. It’s very steady.

People looking at the Ukraine Russian war are somehow saying, “Well, look, the Russians haven’t staged an enormous blitzkrieg.” But you have to realize that the eastern part of Ukraine is heavily industrialized. What the Russians are really doing is fighting urbanized combat on a very massive, regional scale. You don’t do that with some sudden rush. It’s not as though you’re going off across empty plains, rolling your tanks, like might have happened sometimes in the Second World War. It is urban combat. It’s very, very difficult, very brutal. And yet the Russians continuously move forward and they are inflicting enormous, just a terrible number of casualties on the Ukrainians.

I’m confident that nothing will be done to achieve peace before the mid-terms, because there’s no way that the United States is going to allow Zelensky to talk peace with the Russians. But I hope that they will do it, because I hate to see these young Ukrainian men being slaughtered, they’re just being used as cannon fodder for the Russians and also that the West can achieve certain political gains and sell weapons and so forth.

‘The Effort To Destroy Russia Has Failed’

Billington: In particular, Secretary of Defense, Gen. Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Tony Blinken were in Kiev at the same time as our previous interview in April. Austin said at that point, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Now, this is not a military policy. This is a geopolitical mission to destroy Russia and its people through the massive sanctions policy, as well as the proxy war in Ukraine. What do you think about this? And is the effort to destroy Russia working?

Col. Black: When we first went in there, there was all sorts of excited talk, from the President on down, about how we were going to turn the ruble into dust. We would destroy it. We would impose sanctions like nobody had ever seen. We would just cut off Russia and they would all starve or whatever. And we have moved to do everything that we claimed we would do. But the fact of the matter is that there was an initial sort of a shock wave in Russia. The ruble initially declined. There was a sudden outflow of capital, a momentary outflow.

But then, the Russian Central Bank moved quite aggressively, very effectively to limit capital outflows, to devise ways to work around the sanctions. The ruble today is at a seven-year high, during the time since the invasion. The ruble has become the world’s strongest single currency in terms of its appreciation against other currencies. Instead of being turned to dust, it has become much stronger than any other currency. Part of this comes from the fact that Russia has heavy gold reserves and very low debt, unlike the United States, which prints money on a whim. Russia has to follow budgets and they don’t spend money that they don’t have. So it’s given them tremendous financial resiliency. As far as the sanctions were concerned, the Russian balance of trade is now triple what it was before the war. The reason for this is that they have found alternative markets for their oil.

Russia is selling to China. They’re selling to India. They’re selling to Japan. They’re even selling to Turkey, which is one of the NATO countries! They’re selling oil all around the world. They’re selling all of their commodities. They do it at a heavily discounted price, but they produce them at a low price; they’re making lots of profits. It’s interesting how the media talk about, “Well, there’s a recession going to hit them,” and they call Putin a dictator, even though he’s elected, in fairly fair elections relative to our own. I guess he’s an elected dictator! But then they always acknowledge that he is reluctant to declare full mobilization because the people might not like it. So he is far more responsive to the Russian people than our government is to our people. I don’t think he’s a dictator. I think he is a duly elected government representative of the people.

In any event, the effort to destroy Russia has failed. And now, as we approach the Winter, there is a growing sense of panic in Europe. Russia didn’t impose sanctions, the U.S. imposed sanctions, and the U.S. forced the European Union to impose sanctions. Who did the sanctions hurt? They hurt Europe more than anybody else. They hurt the United States somewhat. But we have really just thrown Europe under the bus because they depend on the Russian gas, oil, and other commodities. So, no, it has not worked.

Flouting the ‘One China’ Policy

Billington: We have a parallel situation now developing in Asia. As you know, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s third in line to the presidency, recently visited Taiwan, even though President Biden had a phone call with President Xi Jinping just days before the trip, during which President Xi Jinping called on Biden to stop it, saying “those who play with fire will perish by fire.” Biden even said publicly that the U.S. military was advising Pelosi not to go, although that might have been just him saying it. But it appears that the same military-industrial forces who launched the surrogate war against Russia in Ukraine want to do the same thing with Taiwan, that they’re trying to force China to act militarily to defend their sovereignty, and then blame them and impose massive sanctions and decoupling on China as they have with Russia. What is your view of the Asia ploy?

Col. Black: This whole thing about Taiwan has been a concoction of the U.S. State Department. If the United States were not constantly putting a sharp stick in the eye of the Chinese, things would be quiet around the Taiwan issue. The United States recognized long ago that there was One China and that Beijing was the seat of government for One China. But we did it in a very delicate way that sort of preserved some autonomy for Taiwan. We didn’t officially recognize their government, but unofficially, there was sort of an acknowledgement that we saw some legitimacy to it. There’s a very delicate balance.

Henry Kissinger has recently spoken about it—I know he’s not one of your favorites. He’s not one of mine. But as he grows old, he said a few things that were accurate. And one is, he’s been rather distraught about how cavalier we have been in upsetting this very delicate balance. As he said, and I agree with him, that the One China policy established by Richard Nixon—I think generally acknowledged as one of his great achievements—has preserved peace in that region for 50 years. It’s enhanced trade enormously.

I tended to agree with President Trump that we needed to renegotiate some things on the trade scene, but it didn’t mean that we had to become hostile, and I don’t think President Trump intended any hostility toward China. I think he just intended to try to gain a little bit of advantage for American firms. And I didn’t disagree with that.

President Biden has not been good on China, but at the same time, he at least had the sense to recognize that what Pelosi was doing was her swan song—I don’t know what she gets out of it personally, but she obviously hopes for something because, she’s going to be out of office after November because she will almost certainly step down when the Republicans take over.

So, what is it? What motivated her to make this extremely provocative visit? She was forcing the Chinese to react in some way. Fortunately, they’ve done it in a balanced way that was probably the minimum of what they could have reasonably done. They’ve done a little bit of a show of force, flying aircraft and ships and that kind of thing. But we always run the risk that something like what Pelosi’s done, or one of these very provocative movements of ships, something that we do, triggers an inordinate response. Somehow, we’re relying on the maturity and the good judgment of people in China to prevent some catastrophe from happening. At the same time, we’re allowing ourselves to take the most reckless, provocative steps, totally in reliance on their good judgment over on the other side. It’s not wise.

Contempt for Americans of Military and Civilian Officials

Billington: You may have seen that Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two leading journalistic promoters of the regime-change wars around the world—they’ve never seen a war they didn’t like—recently published an article in The New Yorker about Gen. Mark Milley, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and still is so today. The article is called “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals.” They report that Milley opposed Donald Trump, his Commander-in-Chief, on many fronts, but especially on Trump’s orders to end the “endless wars” in Afghanistan and in Syria. Glasser and Baker, of course, support Milley in rejecting those orders, to therefore continue the wars.

Milley is still Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You’ve strongly criticized him in the past. In your professional view, what do you think about what is going on there with the top military officers of our country?

Col. Black: First of all, the article is a very, very interesting article. You have to read it understanding the enormous bias and prejudice of the two people who wrote the article. They obviously have no concept of self-governance, of the right of the people to govern themselves. They seem to think of the American public as a bunch of buffoons who need to be governed by an unaccountable elite, which, unfortunately, is the case now. When President Trump was elected, he had no governmental experience. His greatest single failing was that he selected a cabinet and he selected general officers who literally despised him and disagreed with every policy that he had campaigned on and promised the American people.

Keep in mind, the American people elected Trump because of those policies, not because they liked his style—well, some of them did probably like his style—but they liked his policies. They liked his foreign policy, among other things. But unfortunately, Trump was sort of enamored of people with Ivy League degrees, with Generals who have lots of stars on their shoulders. He didn’t realize the cultural change that took place under Clinton, Obama, now continues under Biden, where we no longer have the great American patriots in the Pentagon and the State Department. We now have people who are very disdainful of the American people. They have sort of a contempt and a hatred for the people that they govern.

As you read the Glasser and Baker article, you see that within the national security establishment, Department of State, the CIA, the FBI, there was quite a contempt for a government of the people. A comment by one of the authors reflects this: “Yet the Constitution offered no practical guide for a General faced with a rogue President.” Now, if that doesn’t tell you something about the way the elites look at our system of government—how can the President be a “rogue President”? He’s the highest elected official in the land. He is the person who is entrusted by the public with carrying out their will. How can he be a “rogue President”?

I think all of the people who were opposing him were rogue Generals, rogue cabinet officials. This Mark Milley’s made some rather bizarre statements. One of them was after Jan. 6, when we had the demonstrations at the Capitol. He calls together the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he makes this bizarre statement. He says: “This is a Reichstag moment, the moment of the Führer!” This man is a histrionic buffoon. He is a dangerous individual who truly is a threat to the Constitution. That kind of bizarre type of reaction—we’ve seen the same thing when he’s testified before the U.S. Senate in June 2021, defending the teaching of Critical Race Theory in our service academies.

Gen. Milley made this angry statement: he said, “I want to read Critical Race Theory,” or something like that. “I want to read this Critical Race Theory so that I’ll understand white rage.” Well, if you hate white soldiers, then get out of the uniform. Get the heck out of there. You have no business there. White rage. This isn’t white rage.

The Jan. 6, 2021 demonstrations had about 900,000 people in the nation’s capital, and they were a cut of Americana. They were black, they were white, they were Asian, they were Hispanic, almost in the same proportions as the entire country. There were plenty of all of these. It wasn’t a token here and there. There were lots of blacks, lots of Asians, lots of Hispanic, lots of whites. It was a mix of America rising up not to overthrow the Constitution, but to ensure that the Constitution was followed and was not overthrown. And it was not a violent revolution. There wasn’t a single person caught in the Capitol with a weapon. The only person who was killed, who was deliberately killed that Jan. 6, was killed by an officer, an agent working for Nancy Pelosi, who gunned down an unarmed woman who had no arms, had nothing. Without warning, he just shot her through the neck and killed her. That was the only killing that took place on that day.

Three times, the President ordered that we remove U.S. troops from Syria. When he ordered it done, he just gave a blank, no nonsense order, “You will withdraw by a date certain.” Gen. James Mattis, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, resigned in order to throw some chaos into the chain of command. John Bolton, who was National Security Adviser, flew over to Tel Aviv and announced over there that we were not withdrawing, simply countermanding the order of the President of the United States. Later on, after the President had totally reshuffled his cabinet to try to get some loyal people in, he again ordered that American troops withdraw from Syria. Again, they simply refused to obey the order.

There is a danger that when you have a military establishment that is not responsive to the President of the United States, we begin to set ourselves up for a military coup and the imposition of a military dictatorship. I think the leadership in the Pentagon today is inclined in that direction, and I think it’s a very dangerous thing. I’m hoping that whether it’s Trump or whether it’s someone else, whoever takes over in January 2025 must conduct an organized, orderly purge of the general officers and replace them with people who are loyal to the Constitution of the United States. That is absolutely imperative.

Today’s Global Crises Require Global Cooperation

Billington: If there is any chance of preventing the danger that you’ve indicated now for months of heading into a global war, a global nuclear war, perhaps, it would require that the U.S. and Russia and China sit down together, not go to war, but sit down to resolve all of the global issues that are now confronting mankind in this perfect storm: the rush to war; the hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar-based global financial system; famine, which is now reaching “biblical proportions,” according to the head of the UN World Food Program; the continuing pandemic; and more. The Schiller Institute has announced a conference for Sept. 10-11 under the title “Inspiring Humanity to Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.”

What, in your view, is required to move the U.S. off of its suicide course and to join in the necessary deliberations of all nations to find solutions based on the dignity of all nations and all people?

Col. Black: I do think that over the years, there’s always a tendency towards hyperbole, that this and that is the worst thing that we’ve ever faced, and so forth. However, I do believe we have reached a point, particularly during the Biden administration, where the foundations of democracy have been severely weakened and undermined. We have had an election which was highly questionable at best and transparently fraudulent by another viewpoint. We’re in a posture where if we continue in this direction, we can see the emergence of a censorship state, a state that no longer recognizes the right to free speech. We see it where government uses private companies like Facebook, Twitter, all of the Internet, social media companies. There is undoubtedly some coordination and a tremendous amount of censorship is emerging. There is beginning to be a certain level of acceptance of censorship.

We are at a turning point, because right now, through the Schiller Institute, through various other outlets, there still is the means of communicating to sort of a policy elite, a group of people who are sufficiently intellectual and sufficiently educated to understand the gravity of where we are. Whether those voices will be silenced if the elections do not go in the right way, I think is certainly a very genuine question.

Now, I don’t say this as some kind of a hardcore Republican. I’ve always voted Republican, always very, very Republican. But at the same time, I have some very grave concerns about elements of the Republican Party that I’m not sure that all of the Republican Party is that devoted to freedom and liberty. But we’ve got to win the next two elections, and we’ve got to do it in the face of what will undoubtedly be widespread voter fraud. Watch the polls.

People must not sit this out and say, “Well, it’s a crooked election. I can’t do it.” There’s always been a certain level of fraud in our elections. We have a long and storied history of voter fraud. Many major elections have been decided by voter fraud and Presidential elections certainly have. We know that the Kennedy-Nixon election was rigged. I think that’s fairly widely acknowledged today. So, we’ve got to watch the polls, but we’ve got to get out. We’ve got to vote.

The new President, whether it’s Trump, whether it’s someone else, has got to nominate and have confirmed a cabinet that is loyal to the American people. Loyal to the things that the president campaigned on. If they don’t believe in what the President campaigned on, they have no business being there. Why does he want voices of dissent? It’s one thing to have people say, “Mr. President, I don’t think it’d be wise to implement your policy this way. I think we should do it in another way.” That’s the kind of dissent that’s positive. But we have people who simply hate what the President stands for and despises the man personally. Those people had no business in government. It’s not supposed to work that way.

The President’s got to confirm people who are representative of the American people and not simply beholden to the globalist elites. We’ve got to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, which is a tragic war. We’ve got to get out of Ukraine. We’ve got to get out of Somalia. We sent troops into Somalia to start a war in Somalia, intervene in a war in Somalia. They didn’t even bother to explain to people why, it’s just some little one paragraph: “We’re sending troops.” We’re going to war in countries without even bothering to inform the American people, to concoct some kind of a justification. It’s just we’re going to send them off to war. We’re in Somalia.

Why are we occupying Germany 75 years after the war? Why do we still have an occupation force in Germany? Why do we still have an occupation force in Japan? I mean, for goodness’ sake, these have been our strongest allies. There’s no excuse for that. And it certainly doesn’t benefit the American people in any way.

Now, I do think one of the one of the most hopeful signs I have seen is that if you look at the Supreme Court decisions from the last term, not just singling out this one or that one, but as a whole, there is at least a genuine hope that the Supreme Court, as it’s constituted today, is moving towards a restoration of Constitutional governance with the separation of powers, with the recognition of the rights of states, with a withdrawal of authority from the faceless, unelected bureaucrats.

I think there’s a great deal of hope, and I think that should inspire Americans, because up until now, really, since the 1950s, Americans would have some enormous drive to change the law, and then the Supreme Court would wrap them on the knuckles with a hickory stick and say, “Get back in line. You’re not going to have your will through the ballot box. You’re going to shut up and be in your place.” The new Supreme Court, I think, offers some help.

We’ve got to build and enforce a wall on our southern border and stop tinkering around with it, saying, “Let’s do a little of this and a little of that.” I think we need to be prepared to use military force against the cartels, which are killing 100,000 people a year.

My goodness! In the 10 years of the Vietnam War, we only lost 60,000. And that was the last truly bloody war we fought—60,000, and the cartels kill 100,000 every year! And then when President Trump suggested, I think it was to his Chief of Staff, “We know where these cartel leaders are. Why don’t we just take them out, you know, use missiles, take them out,” apparently the Chief of Staff was just aghast: “Oh, my goodness, you would hurt the cartels? The cartels are wired in with all these politicians, they’re where all the money comes from!”

Well, the United States needs to be prepared to take action and not to fly some FBI clowns down and arrest these guys. We have a war going on with these cartels across the southern border. We need to take them out. We need to kill them. There is no excuse for these cartels murdering 100,000 people a year in the United States while we sit back and our so-called Department of Defense has all of its troops all over the world, and they’re not defending the southern border. They’re not defending us against the death of 100,000 people a year in the United States. What the heck use are they if they cannot defend the United States border?

Billington: Well. I thank you. We will be circulating this widely. It’s a moment of crisis for mankind as a whole. I’ll repeat that we’re organizing for a conference on September 10-11. I encourage all of our listeners to prepare to register for that. I, again, thank you for working with the Schiller Institute, for making your voice heard.

Col. Black: I very much appreciate what you’re doing personally and what the Schiller Institute is doing. I’m not sure what we would be doing if you were not disseminating the information that you do. So, thank you very much for it.