Whitney Webb is a writer, researcher, and journalist who has been a professional writer and researcher since 2016. She was a staff writer and senior investigator for Mint Press News, and she currently writes for The Last American, Back on, and hosts an independent podcast called Unlimited Hangout, which she co-hosts. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on the CIA's support for pro-Moscow rebels in Ukraine, and how the agency may be planning to turn Ukraine into a "Russia 2.0" -- a place where the CIA funds, arms, and trains insurgents in order to force out pro-Russia President Vladimir Putin. She also discusses the CIA s support for the rebels in Syria, and the possible link between the CIA and Hillary Clinton's efforts to arm and train rebels in the fight against Islamic extremism in Syria. Whitney's work can be found at her blog, and you can support her work directly at her website, . You can also find her work at . She can be reached at Whitneywebb@thelastamendment.org and . She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Weekly Standard, and The Huffington Post. She is an avid reader of books written by David Frum, and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and has been featured in The New Republic, The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, The New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, including The Daily Telegraph, The National Post, and National Post. She has a blog post on her own website, which you can find her online here. . Her profile is linked here. She is also on Insta and her blog is here! Thanks for listening to the podcast, Whitney is a great podcast and you should check out her Insta- if you like what she's doing, Insta: You can find me on insta-tweet me! , and her podcast is on Instapreneurship is Instapay, and she also is on Instafeed? Instapaper is Instafee is , Subscribe to Instaparence is Insta= Is she's also on the , Instafaree is Instacaree and Insta is Instagrasmatic is Instaree? and her has a podcast on Instago?
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, it's my great privilege to have one of my favorite guests on the show today, Whitney Webb, who's been a professional writer, researcher, and journalist since 2016.
00:00:11.000I would say she's one of the last living journalists we still have.
00:00:15.000She's written for several websites from 2017 to 2020.
00:00:20.000She was a staff writer and senior investigator for Mint Press News.
00:00:25.000She currently writes for The Last American, back on, and hosts an independent podcast called Unlimited Hangout.
00:00:34.000I wanted to ask you to come on the show because you wrote a really, I think, surprising article from many people about the Ukraine and about the CIA involvement in the Ukraine and kind of supporting and nurturing the insurgency there.
00:00:54.000It's a very, very disturbing article to anybody who kind of understands our recent history.
00:01:01.000And I know that you do not represent yourself as an expert on the Ukraine.
00:01:07.000Your observations about the intelligence agencies and their role in crafting the landscapes of global conflict Are always very, very interesting.
00:01:21.000And I think one of the things that's disturbing about the Ukraine conflict is that we seem to have adopted a single narrative that is being broadcast ubiquitously on Fox News, CNN, etc.
00:01:43.000And I think that's a really kind of troubling thing for democracy.
00:01:48.000But why don't you outline your take on the Ukraine so that our listeners can at least have the advantage of hearing a different point of view.
00:02:07.000I've never been to this part of the world.
00:02:09.000My reason for writing the article that I did write is because I have written a lot about the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA of the United States, and about intelligence operations, both historical and present.
00:02:20.000And there seem to be indications that Coming from former CIA officials, from very well-connected political operators, about plans basically to turn Ukraine into, you know, Afghanistan or Syria 2.0, basically by funding, having the CIA fund arm and train insurgents in Ukraine with the idea of forcing out whatever happens with the assumption that if a pro-Russian president is placed in Ukraine,
00:02:49.000if the current President Zelensky is removed or something like that, or a couple if the current President Zelensky is removed or something like that, or a couple different scenarios that were not necessarily favorable to the West, that there would be, according to Douglas London, a former CIA station chief writing in Foreign Affairs, he used language that there will be an insurgency, a former CIA station chief writing in Foreign I think.
00:03:11.000He basically announces it's going to happen.
00:03:13.000And that was in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is extremely influential, particularly on policymakers within the Biden administration.
00:03:23.000Then, of course, a few days later, you have Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, oversaw the arming of the Syrian so-called moderate rebels.
00:03:34.000By the way, her deputy chief of staff during that time is now national security advisor to Biden.
00:03:42.000Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC to essentially say that what people are looking towards within the Biden administration of implementing in Ukraine is the exact same thing the U.S. did with the 1980s arming of rebels, as they were called at the time, in Afghanistan and what they would do later under her tenure in Afghanistan and what they would do later under her tenure and in charge of the State Department in Syria, in coordination with the CIA, arming rebels there,
00:04:07.000I just want to interrupt you for a second, because it's really astonishing that these high-level State Department, Hillary Clinton, Doug London, and other CIA officials are bragging about About the outcomes in Afghanistan.
00:04:29.000The Syrian project of the CIA essentially created ISIS and then precipitated 2 million refugees, which have flooded into Europe and destabilized every democracy in Europe and resulted in Brexit, etc.
00:04:46.000The CIA project 15 years before in Afghanistan Yielded Osama bin Laden and ultimately the 9-11 attack.
00:04:56.000So there just doesn't seem any kind of accountability for the globe.
00:04:59.000And it's really, really frightening that these global leaders, our foreign policy panjarams, are looking at those as success stories.
00:05:12.000And I just wanted to put that in as a footnote.
00:05:16.000No, I would definitely agree with you.
00:05:19.000In fact, in Hillary Clinton's interview where she's talking about this, she laughs about the unintended consequences of having armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which, as you mentioned, gave rise to al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban, which the U.S. spent, I guess, the largest military occupation and war in American history, you know, in an extremely expensive war as well, that we only recently withdrew troops from there.
00:05:45.000And I guess it seems like if you hear some people in DC, some people seem very eager to send them back out to Eastern Europe and potentially to the Ukraine.
00:05:54.000We'll see if that actually comes to pass.
00:05:59.000So the question is, why would they do that?
00:06:01.000And then it turns out, from a report that was released in January...
00:06:07.000That the CIA has been essentially training in insurgency since 2015.
00:06:11.000So there's been, what I posit in my article is, you know, we had this weird situation over the past couple months where the CIA was telling the Biden administration, and then the Biden administration would repeat that to the American public that there was going to be an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
00:06:28.000And this was left off by the Russian governments, the Ukrainian government, and lots of analysts in the U.S. and elsewhere.
00:06:35.000It was essentially not taken seriously.
00:06:38.000And then those acts essentially come to pass.
00:06:41.000But there's a few things that happen between those claims first being made by the CIA and this military operation being conducted by Russia occurring, one of which is the meeting of the president of Ukraine and some of the major and high-ranking intelligence one of which is the meeting of the president of Ukraine and some of the major and high-ranking intelligence officials in Ukraine
00:07:03.000And then you also have various other things that took place, including the provisioning of lethal aid coming from the U.S. and I believe some other countries arriving at the beginning Since 2017, there's been Russian military officials saying that lethal aid to Ukraine would essentially be considered a declaration of war from the Russian military perspective.
00:07:24.000And then what allegedly, at least this is coming from the Russian side, of course, so it's worth keeping that Thank you.
00:07:36.000the president of Ukraine speaking at the Munich Security Conference, essentially saying that there was an intention to violate the, I believe it's called the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, that essentially established Ukraine as a non-nuclear state, and that they would essentially be looking at how that essentially established Ukraine as a non-nuclear state, and that they would essentially be looking at how to reacquire nuclear weapons, which was explored in a really excellent recent article published at Consortium News, because the New York Times attempted to paint the claim that Zelensky because the New York Times
00:08:11.000It was painted by the New York Times as conspiracy theory, but the Consortium News piece really dismantles those talking points.
00:08:25.000The Munich Security Conference is a really odd annual event.
00:08:30.000It essentially is a conference for spies.
00:08:32.000The leading spy agencies from all over, particularly the Western world, but even Iran, et cetera, all come to this very weird conference in Munich.
00:08:42.000And for Solinsky to go to that conference And announced that the Ukraine is going to reacquire nuclear weapons.
00:08:51.000When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the provisos for Gorbachev to dismantle the Soviet Union was, number one, that NATO would stay out, would not move east, or would stay out of Oregon, or inviting in the former Soviet satellites.
00:09:11.000The other was that Ukraine would give up its nuclear arsenal.
00:09:15.000The Soviet Union kept many of its nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and they did not want a country at their door that was now independent, being a nuclear nation.
00:09:28.000So those were the two things that, you know, that were red lines for the Soviets for Gorbachev.
00:09:33.000And since then, we have surrounded the Soviet Union with NATO. And then Zelensky's announcement was really another red line.
00:09:44.000And Zelensky's, the kind of hints that Zelensky was giving about bringing NATO into the Ukraine was another red line.
00:09:54.000And then the third red line was the Ukraine's war on the separatists in eastern Ukraine who were ethnic Russians.
00:10:05.000And maybe 30,000 ethnic Russians killed during that war in the last couple of years.
00:10:12.000And this was clearly something of great concern to the former Soviet Union.
00:10:19.000The NATO expansion part is definitely a part of the red lines that were crossed here.
00:10:23.000And so before this Munich Security Conference, where Zelensky made these claims about potentially acquiring nuclear weapons, Ukraine, I believe, relatively recently, but in the last couple of years, has been sort of being integrated into NATO without formally being part of NATO. And then also after the 2014 coup,
00:10:44.000which had a lot of involvement from people in the U.S. at the time, like Victoria Nyland, among others, the Constitution adopted after that coup included an intention to try and integrate Ukraine into the NATO bloc.
00:10:56.000And so basically, Ukraine becoming part of NATO is considered, and it has been established for a long time as one of these red lines, but the idea that they would essentially have NATO-controlled nukes in their territory, even if they weren't formally part of NATO, is a red line that I think they would have known would have been crossed, right?
00:11:15.000So what I posit in the article is that Zelensky didn't just go to this big-time security conference and And just say, oh, we're thinking about getting nukes and not know the ramifications of that, right?
00:11:30.000So what I sort of posit in the piece, and I call it a possibility because I don't know exactly what happened, obviously, but if the CIA has been training in insurgency since 2015 and that insurgency has yet to fully emerge, Yeah, as emerging because of the Russian military operation in Ukraine right now and the conflict there.
00:11:54.000It seems to me that there was an effort to get those lines crossed so that the necessary requirements were in place in order to allow this pre-planned insurgency to emerge.
00:12:06.000And And that may sound very conspiratorial to people, but I point in the article that former and current intelligence officials telegraphed that this would happen back in 2020.
00:12:16.000There's this bizarre article that was published in Politico by one of the directors of the Aspen Institute, which is a non-profit think tank that sort of works in this milieu of We're good to go.
00:12:41.000Oh, which I forgot to mention earlier, talking about Hillary Clinton.
00:12:44.000The Clintons decided to relaunch the Clinton Global Initiative as this crisis was taking off, which is interesting, given what she's been going around talking about in relation to the insurgency or the plan for an insurgency and how it's a good model.
00:12:59.000Very, very odd things going on in Clinton land, I guess.
00:13:02.000But anyway, this Politico article, there's a couple things to know about that article.
00:13:06.000So it's essentially titled, Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming and Here's What They're Worried About Next.
00:13:12.000Basically, it cites all these former and current intelligence officials, anonymous thought leaders, who, according to the author, this Aspen Institute guy, knew that COVID was going to come, and they're essentially saying this is what's going to happen after COVID-19 wanes.
00:13:29.000This was written back in May 2020 at the very height of, I guess you could argue, the hysteria around COVID-19.
00:13:35.000So a lot of people weren't really paying attention, I would argue, to articles like this one.
00:13:39.000They were paying attention to a lot of the news instead about COVID-19 and the proposed solutions to it and things of that nature.
00:13:49.000And this is interesting because 2020 was a very odd year for For the national security apparatus in the US in the sense that there was a major, what I would argue is a major pivot taking place that year.
00:14:00.000So in the beginning of 2020, it's traditional for the heads of the intelligence agencies to have a rare appearance in Congress where they testify about the big threats facing the world.
00:14:11.000And this coincides with their release of something called the Worldwide Threat Assessment.
00:14:15.0002020 was the first year since they started doing this decades ago where they didn't issue one.
00:14:22.000And they had some weird answer about why they didn't do one.
00:14:25.000Like, oh, we don't want to upset Trump.
00:14:26.000I don't think that was really why, because, you know, these are the heads of, you know, the CIA and all the intelligence agencies.
00:14:33.000I don't think they're actually scared of someone like Donald Trump, but that's just my opinion.
00:14:37.000So this article per the author was this Aspen Institute guy.
00:14:42.000He was creating what he called a domestic threat assessment because there was no worldwide threat assessment this year.
00:14:48.000So he said he was going to make his own, talking to former and current spooks and all these different individuals who knew, according to him, that COVID-19 was coming about what is going to happen next.
00:15:01.000And then not long after this article comes out, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, which has existed for the better part of 20 years, decides that 2020 is the first year they're going to issue a Homeland Threat Assessment.
00:15:13.000So you have a phasing out of the Worldwide Threat Assessment and a phasing in of the domestic threat assessment.
00:15:19.000And I would argue that was, it represents a major pivot from the intelligence agencies because DHS is basically a domestically focused intelligence agency away from foreign terror in the post-9-11 era to domestic terror.
00:15:33.000And there were some other things that went on in 2020 as well, like a high-ranking official at DHS at the time, Elizabeth Newman.
00:15:40.000Going in front of Congress, essentially saying, we can see another 9-11 building and we can't quite stop it, and making all these declarations about an imminent 9-11.
00:15:52.000And she was basically credited with predicting January 6th that would take place, you know, not that long afterwards, and would be used as the justification, not just to create this war on domestic terror infrastructure within the Biden administration, but it would also be immediately compared to The next 9-11 that, you know, Elizabeth Newman had supposedly predicted.
00:16:13.000So returning to this political article, they have a couple different threats that are coming next.
00:16:21.000The picture of painting is going back historically is that we basically created and armed and trained an Islamic radical jihadist who then became the justification, their actions and became the justification and unleashed them on the world.
00:16:41.000Their actions then became the justification for these clamp downs and the Patriot Act, Security state totalitarianism, the constriction of civil liberties, constitutional rights, and otherwise absent the terrorism caused by those groups would have been unacceptable to Americans.
00:17:06.000These same agencies are now warning the world about right-wing terrorists and, meanwhile, right-wing white supremacist terrorists.
00:17:16.000Meanwhile, since 2015, they have been training people who have been characterized as neo-nazi and insurgency in the Ukraine that is an extremely racist right-wing group.
00:17:33.000And at the same time telling the world we're about to see this right-wing conspiracy that's going to be the new threat to inherit the mantle from Islamic terrorism.
00:17:48.000So yes, as you touched on, these groups that have been trained by the CIA include neo-Nazi factions, the most well-known of which is known as Azov Battalion, but there's other groups as well that sort of emanate from these far-right parties that rose to prominence really after the 2014 coup.
00:18:07.000I believe it's called the Who are openly anti-Semitic.
00:18:30.000They're also very open about the need to eliminate ethnic Russians from Ukraine.
00:18:36.000And that is part of why it's so disturbing that they've been so involved in the Donbass conflict, because those regions that declared their independence and sought support from Putin, that sort of set a lot of what we're seeing now off initially, have the largest majority of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, aside from the Crimea, which voted in a referendum to join Russia, you know, not that long after the events of 2014.
00:19:01.000So essentially, some of these groups that are involved in fighting these separatists that are, you know, have declared their independence from greater Ukraine, I guess you could say, there's some of them, not all of them, right?
00:19:13.000But some of them have called for essentially the genocide of ethnic Russians and said it's necessary to terminate them and all of these really genocidal language.
00:19:21.000So there definitely is some truth to the Russian side of that.
00:19:24.000But I do think it is a gross oversimplification to say the entire Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi and everyone in the Ukrainian army is a Nazi, but they definitely are.
00:19:33.000Well represented and they do have influence.
00:19:35.000So, you know, the truth often ends up somewhere in between the two sides, right?
00:19:41.000But there definitely is this neo-Nazi element and that seems to be...
00:19:45.000I'll just point out that for people who don't know that President Zelensky is Jewish and much of his cabinet and his advisors are also Jewish.
00:19:56.000Right, which is odd that they would, you know, it seems odd to people that they would ally with these groups within Ukraine, but really because of the post-2014 power structure, and there's even comedy routines.
00:20:07.000Zelensky was a comedian before becoming president, where Zelensky openly talks about, you know, the prominence of these Nazi groups there.
00:20:15.000And it seems kind of odd to some people how someone of his background, you know, being Jewish, would be willing to ally with groups that are openly anti-Semitic.
00:20:25.000So, you know, basically after the 2014 coup, these far-right groups within Ukraine, you know, during the coup itself, they were probably, according to their own estimates, about 10%, but they carried a lot more weight because they were the violent actors within that.
00:20:40.000Even if their numbers aren't necessarily a majority position, it's known in this political milieu that they have a way of getting what they want that other people that aren't willing to use those tactics don't necessarily have at their disposal.
00:20:54.000So I think that may explain in part why Zelensky...
00:20:59.000Was willing to sort of ally himself with those forces within Ukraine, but it may have also just been out of political necessity in order to be and stay president, given how things have developed in that country since the events of 2014.
00:21:13.000But it definitely is odd, I would say, but...
00:21:16.000Because, I mean, being someone of a Jewish background, it doesn't make a lot of sense why you would back any sort of group with these stated goals and these racist ideologies.
00:21:28.000But that seems to be what's happening.
00:21:30.000But anyway, that was sort of a tangent I can...
00:21:33.000I should probably return to this Politico article now, if that's okay.
00:21:38.000Basically, in framing these threats, in this threat assessment in this article, he divides it into short, medium, and long-term.
00:21:46.000And so the first thing they basically, these experts...
00:21:48.000According to Graffer saying about what's to follow COVID-19 is what they call the globalization of white supremacy or white supremacist terror.
00:22:35.000organization, in part because it's trying to train and seed adherents around the globe, inspiring them to carry out terror attacks.
00:22:43.000And so in revisiting this article in the context of what's going on in Ukraine now, that designation came out in 2020, probably a month or two, just one month before this article was published in Politico.
00:22:58.000This group, we're told, the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM, They were designated a specially designated global terror entity, which is a step below a foreign terrorist organization or the FTO designation given to groups like Al-Qaeda, for example.
00:23:15.000But they were the first white supremacist group given this designation in 2020.
00:23:20.000But there's a lot of weirdness, for lack of a better word, around this.
00:23:25.000So this RIM group has been connected to no deaths through acts of terror.
00:23:29.000The acts of terror ascribed to them were actually committed by a man who was the member of another group called the Nordic Resistance Movement.
00:23:37.000He was allegedly trained by members of RIM. The Russian Imperial Movement, but was not a member at the time of the attacks he conducted.
00:23:45.000He conducted, I believe, three bombings, two of which he did alongside with an accomplice that had no connection to RIM at all.
00:23:52.000He was allegedly trained by RIM. The last of these bombings took place in 2017.
00:23:57.000And as I said, no people were killed, I believe, out of the three.
00:24:02.000And so the State Department waits three years and then decides to designate them as a global terror entity, essentially, which just seems odd.
00:24:11.000And before this designation, the estimates of their membership basically deemed this movement to be very, very small, essentially insignificant.
00:24:21.000And then all of a sudden, this designation is made, and a month later, some institute at Middlebury decides that they number in the several thousand, but doesn't really give have any good justification for that.
00:24:33.000They sort of say they appear to now number in the several thousand, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of publicly available evidence to make that claim.
00:24:40.000You know, so you have this designation happen and around the same time you have members of the FBI in the State Department going around talking about how this Russian imperial movement is such a threat and saying they're training people in the U.S. But again, a lot of these same think tanks that are allied like these with the establishment, like it's one of the security institutes.
00:24:59.000At Stanford, for example, you know, they basically talk about the U.S. ties of this group as also essentially being non-existent and linked to very allegations that even they regard as dubious.
00:25:09.000A lot of them center around their alleged ties to this man named Matthew Heimbach, I believe is his name, that was affiliated with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
00:25:19.000But his organization hasn't been active since 2018.
00:25:23.000And the extent of his contacts is around allegations of funding received from RIM, but there's no proof of that funding actually having taken place.
00:25:32.000And it's alleged there were contacts established, but no definitive proof.
00:25:35.000And again, there's an allegation that RIM offered to train members, people that attended the Unite the Right rally, but there's no evidence for that in both RIM and the people allegedly contacted to deny that that took place.
00:25:47.000I mean, these are all the sorts of allegations around RIM. As I mentioned earlier, their main alleged contact in the U.S. hasn't had an active group For two years before the designation was given to this RIM group, it's just very odd that they would have been designated this from my perspective.
00:26:04.000Why not instead, if you're going to use these three bombings that took place in Sweden, by the way, as justification to label this group as a specially designated global terror entity, why would you not also, under the justification given by the State Department at the time, Why would you not also label the Nordic resistant movement of which this bomber in Sweden was actually a member of having been trained by RIM, but was a member of another group?
00:26:29.000Why wouldn't you at least label both, especially considering this Nordic resistant movement is provably much larger and has much more political influence, particularly in Scandinavia, than this RIM movement does even within Russia?
00:26:42.000It doesn't really make a lot of sense, at least at the time it didn't make sense.
00:26:45.000But what's interesting, in the context of everything we've already talked about, the CIA talking about an insurgency in Ukraine and white supremacists and all of this stuff.
00:26:54.000Yeah, so this Russian imperial movement is described as white supremacist, but it turns out, according to history's From think tanks and produced by think tanks in the US about this group's history, you know, profiles on them.
00:27:05.000Their history began with the Ukraine conflict in the Donbass, and they allegedly were backing the separatists side.
00:27:15.000It seems like this is the only group, really, that you could describe as white supremacists that supported the other side of the Donbass conflict, whereas the neo-Nazi factions within Ukraine were backing the other side.
00:27:29.000So at some point, we would be hearing about, you know, how Russia is backing the white supremacist and not the U.S. and all of this stuff, using this Russian imperial movement as justification.
00:27:42.000There's a think tank called Just Security in D.C. that's attempted to use the Russian imperial movement as justification for the claim that Putin and the Russian government are behind and really at the root of the transnational network of white supremacists.
00:27:59.000And oddly enough, Just Security used to be advised by, until they joined the Biden administration, Avril Haines and Jake Sullivan.
00:28:07.000So Jake Sullivan, I already mentioned, is Biden's national security advisor and former deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton.
00:28:13.000Avril Haines is former deputy director of the CIA. She was one of the main participants at Event 201, which I'm sure your audience is quite familiar with.
00:28:23.000And she's currently the Director of National Intelligence, making her the top spy in the entire U.S. government under the Biden administration.
00:28:31.000So that's the people advising this think tank.
00:28:35.000One of the great things that you've done throughout your career, Whitney, is to try to harm Americans with the defenses against orchestrated propaganda.
00:28:45.000And through your lens, we need to be guarded.
00:28:50.000about what's happening in Ukraine and be guarded against the possibility that we are all being subjected to propaganda from both sides.
00:29:01.000And one of the things that we need to understand is that there's been a pervasive involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies in Ukraine for at least since 2014.
00:29:13.000And the other thing that we need to understand is that we need to be guarded against is perhaps the deliberate creation as a fear project by US intelligence agencies of a rising right-wing racist terrorist network globally.
00:29:37.000So what my concern is, is that we talked about how they're citing the Afghanistan and Syria models.
00:29:43.000Obviously, people that have studied those models, as you mentioned, are familiar with the blowback, as it's often called, from that.
00:29:49.000It seems like to me, and what I explained in the article, is I think they want blowback.
00:29:53.000there's an intentional desire to create this insurgency for the purpose of blowback because it gives them the justification to launch this infrastructure that's already been created and was created last year by the Biden administration for this war on domestic terror.
00:30:07.000It was effectively launched, but it hasn't really kicked off yet.
00:30:09.000It needs some sort of big justification.
00:30:12.000And my concern is that someone with some sort of tie to the Ukraine conflict, or they'll say that, whether it's the Russian imperial movement, someone from Azov Battalion pretending to be the Russian imperial movement, or someone from one of these neo-Nazi factions allied with the current government of Ukraine, conducting some sort or someone from one of these neo-Nazi factions allied with the current government of Ukraine, conducting some sort of attack That's really all they would really need to kick this off.
00:30:37.000And of course, my other work on the war on domestic terror infrastructure, it's very vaguely worded.
00:30:43.000It's very much focused on social media.
00:30:46.000It uses mass surveillance and pre-crime at its core, really.
00:31:35.000A couple quick things I do want to say about the Ukraine conflict in general.
00:31:39.000As far as what's going on there, it's very hard to know because there's really no reporting from within Ukraine about what's happening.
00:31:45.000So that's why there's been this proliferation, I guess, of fake video game footage and things like this that are being attributed to as having been filmed in Ukraine during this current conflict.
00:31:56.000Pictures of Zelensky from 2021 are being played off as if they were taken away.
00:32:02.000Relatively recently, there's just a lot of, you know, either outright propaganda or fake news or whatever you want to call it.
00:32:08.000So I think people need to be really vigilant in forming their opinions about what's going on and wait for actual footage to come out there.
00:32:16.000There's not a lot of reporters on the ground.
00:32:19.000Also, there's been a lot of calls by people for a no-fly zone in Ukraine, which even neoconservative figures like Marco Rubio say would essentially mean entering into World War III, which is totally insane.
00:32:35.000I mean, it really speaks to the power of the media to...
00:32:39.000We play a lot of people in the United States and beyond like a fiddle, essentially, and it's very problematic, but I think it's something that people need to be aware of.
00:32:47.000With the conflict in Ukraine, it's, I guess you could call it outrage porn.
00:32:51.000It's stuff that's intended to make us mad and drag us into a war with a nuclear power.
00:32:58.000I mean, people need to sit back and rationally assess what's going on to the best of their ability, look for to the best of their ability, objective information, because we can't repeat the same errors where people were swept up by the media hysteria.
00:33:11.000We can't let that happen again with something that could lead to a major military conflict between nuclear powers.
00:33:17.000My last point is that a lot of this, what's going on now actually plays into the so-called Great Reset to a significant degree because it's already a lot of these outrageous responses from various governments about cutting off Russian oil and Russian imports, even going so far as to outlaw the sale of Russian what's going on now actually plays into the so-called Great Reset to a significant degree because it's already a lot of these outrageous responses But ultimately,
00:33:41.000The stuff on the energy and the food supply that are taking place because of these sanctions really play into the Great Reset in a huge way and will likely create a massive supply chain crisis that not enough people are aware of.
00:33:55.000Because between Russia and Ukraine, I mean, those are some of the top exporters of wheat in the world.
00:33:59.000It's already leading to a major jump in food prices.
00:34:02.000And of course the energy issue is going to lead to a great increase in the cost of heating your home and gas for a lot of people in Europe and also in the United States.
00:34:13.000So, you know, that's not being talked enough about either, but it's all very convenient for different aspects of this great reset agenda.
00:34:21.000And I would argue that's why some of these politicians so eagerly adopted it, despite the negative impacts it'll have for their domestic populations.
00:34:28.000Whitney Webb, thank you very, very much for joining us.
00:34:32.000Thank you for your piercing of the propaganda.
00:34:36.000Her article is Ukraine and the new Al-Qaeda.
00:34:40.000Follow Whitney on The Last American Magabond and on her own website, which is called Unlimited Hangout.