Larry Johnson TERMINATED by YouTube, Failed Regime Change and the Iran Crisis.

## YouTube Censorship & Lack of Due Process What emerged from the conversation is a stark reminder: platforms that mediate public speech can remove a person’s entire public life in an instant, and do so without explanation or meaningful recourse. Several participants described waking to find long-running channels simply gone, replaced by a terse violation notice that offered no examples, no context, and no practical route to remediation. The platforms’ control is not merely operational but existential—channels are a checkbox in a corporate database that can be unchecked at a higher level, and years of archived analysis, interviews, and argumentation can be erased with no human explanation. This is not a problem of one-off technical glitches. The episode recounted in the conversation blended several dynamics: automated spam and impersonation policing triggered removals; opaque policy categories such as “hate speech” and “spam and deceptive practices” were applied inconsistently; and appeals processes were reduced to a ritual with little hope of success. The conversational thread also highlighted an important wrinkle: the explosion of AI-generated impersonations and automated channels creates a legitimate enforcement challenge for platforms. Yet the participants argued persuasively that an enforcement problem does not justify the removal of due process. Where takedowns are automated or invisible, platform governance becomes a power exercised without accountability. A corollary concern is that the deletion of a channel is often accompanied by other systemic deplatforming techniques: banking relationships can be severed, third‑party hosts can be pressured to disassociate, and the removal of “the checkbox” for one high‑profile account can cascade through partner networks. The result is a web of administrative controls that mimics coercion without requiring due legal authority. The conversation framed this not as isolated misadventure but as a structural risk to the public sphere—one that leaves dissidents, critics, and alternative voices vulnerable to sudden erasure. ## The Death of Open Debate in Mainstream Media A powerful strand of the discussion traced the decline of pluralism in mainstream outlets and its alignment with evolving state interests. Historically, participants recalled, mainstream media allowed genuinely adversarial debates—visible disagreements on public stages, argued and adjudicated in public. Over recent decades, however, the space for sustained dissent narrowed. Critiques of state policy on war, intelligence, and foreign intervention moved from being controversial but permissible to being delegitimized, marginalized, or reclassified as extremist. This narrowing has political consequences. When mainstream institutions consolidate a single script—about enemies, about threats, about acceptable war narratives—public debate shrinks. The conversation connected this shrinkage to the management of casualty narratives and the selective amplification of claims that justify military posture. One recurring claim was that casualty and threat statistics are often spun to create a sense of imminent danger that legitimates coercive responses. Whether the numbers are inflated, selectively reported, or framed without context, the effect is the same: a conducive environment for interventionist policymaking. Participants also pointed to the interplay between journalism, propaganda, and covert action. The conversation suggested that planting narratives, manufacturing consent, and using media ecosystems to legitimate policy are not marginal practices but central components of statecraft. Where divergent voices are pushed out of mainstream channels, the informational architecture favors those with institutional power and resources to shape the public narrative. The erosion of mid‑range institutions that once hosted substantive disputes—debate programs, investigative shows, editorial plurality—accelerates homogenization and reduces the public’s capacity to interrogate foreign policy choices. ## Fighting for Free Speech & Online Communities Faced with deletion, censorship, and the weaponization of platform governance, the discussion advanced a dualist strategy: build resilient alternative spaces while simultaneously fighting to preserve the public commons. On one hand, participants endorsed migration to alt‑platforms—sites that commit to non‑censorship, decentralized hosting, and content permanence. Such refuges can function as digital samizdat: places for dissenting opinion to circulate regardless of mainstream gatekeeping. The conversation praised platforms that prioritize platform neutrality and were willing to host content even when it was unpopular or offensive to some. But migration alone was not presented as sufficient. The other prong of the strategy is active political and legal engagement—organizing creators, pursuing legislative remedies, and litigating procedural safeguards. The conversation emphasized collective action: creators and their audiences need to treat deplatforming as a labor and civil‑rights issue, organizing for contractual protections, transparent appeals, and legal clarity about the limits of private platform authority when it intersects with public communication. This approach also includes media literacy: documenting removals, preserving archives, and building resilient distribution networks so that erasure never becomes total. A key practical point in the conversation was the importance of redundancy. Backups, mirror sites, diversified monetization, and alternative banking arrangements were described as essential contingency measures. Yet the emotional heft of the discussion made clear that these are not only technical fixes. Deplatforming carries reputational and psychological damage; it affects careers and civic participation. Strengthening community ties, mutual aid among creators, and the institutionalization of support for those targeted were all proposed as ways to mitigate harm. ## International Law vs. The Law of the Jungle Shifting from platform governance to geopolitics, the conversation drew a parallel between the erasure of dissent at home and the normalization of violence abroad. The interlocutors argued that if domestic public debate is hollowed out, then the public cannot meaningfully contest foreign operations, covert actions, or the legal rationales for intervention. That vacuum, they claimed, enables a “law of the jungle” mentality in international affairs—where might makes right and where force and clandestine operations replace legal restraint. Examining recent episodes in the Middle East and historical episodes such as support for proxy wars, the discussion framed Western state practices as systematic uses of force and influence with catastrophic human consequences. The participants contended that casualty figures are often mischaracterized to rationalize escalation, while the histories of violence—where external powers armed autocrats, supplied chemical precursors, or catalyzed conflict—are left out of mainstream accounts. In this telling, international law becomes a rhetorical veneer while power politics and covert sponsorship do the real work. Yet the conversation did not descend into fatalism. It suggested that international law and multilateral norms matter precisely because they provide frameworks that can constrain worst impulses. The collapse of open debate at home makes it harder for citizens to demand adherence to those norms. Conversely, a public empowered by robust platforms and fair process is better positioned to hold governments to account for violations of the laws of war, extraterritorial coercion, and proxy violence. The restoration of procedural fairness online and the protection of speech thus have implications far beyond domestic policy; they are part of the architecture that underpins a rules-based international order. ## The Importance of Open Platforms & Conclusion

Larry Johnson TERMINATED by YouTube, Failed Regime Change and the Iran Crisis. Fight censorship. Stay connected via substack. Subscribe here: https://pascallottaz.substack.com What really stopped the US carrier group from launching strikes on Iran? Is it possible to fight back when the algorithmic gods delete your channel and your bank account simultaneously? I’m diving into these jagged edges of reality with Larry C. Johnson. As a former CIA analyst and key voice within Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Larry doesn’t just speculate on the machinery of empire—he knows the blueprints, having watched the system turn its crosshairs from foreign adversaries to domestic dissenters. Links: Sonar21: https://sonar21.com/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall. com Timestamps: 00:00:00 YouTube Censorship & Lack of Due Process 00:04:39 Government Influence on Social Media 00:10:27 The Death of Open Debate in Mainstream Media 00:16:22 US Foreign Policy: Casualty Counts & Gaslighting 00:23:04 Fighting for Free Speech & Online Communities 00:28:18 The Failed Regime Change Attempt in Iran 00:35:42 International Law vs. The Law of the Jungle 00:41:09 Presidential War Powers & Media Manipulation 00:46:56 The Importance of Open Platforms & Conclusion #Pascal Welcome, everybody. We are back on Neutrality Studies, and today I'm joined once more by Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and member of the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Larry, welcome back. Thanks, Max. Good to be with you, man. I was recently deleted from YouTube for 16 hours, and it was a really dramatic experience for me, even though I knew this could happen at any time. It’s really, really disturbing when it does. Then my channel was put back up. In the process of that, I actually learned that I had missed the fact that your own channel was deleted by YouTube about a year and a half ago, and it wasn’t put back on. I mean, I apologize — it just didn’t pop up on my radar, also because you’re still around on YouTube on many other channels. But can you tell me a little bit about what happened to you about 18 months ago? #Larry Johnson Yeah, I just, you know, one day—just like you—you wake up, go to get on the channel, and boom, it’ s gone. Then I notice, hey, they’re accusing me of hate speech. I’m like, what did I say? What was the offending video? Oh, they won’t tell you that. So there’s absolutely no due process. I was -- 1 of 16 -- fortunate, though—I got in contact with Jeffrey Wernick, who’s the owner of BitChute. And Jeffrey is firmly committed to non-censorship. He won’t allow any kind of pornography, and he won’t allow anything that involves children on his channel. But politically, you know, if you want to argue that the Holocaust was not real, he’ll allow that—even though he’s Jewish. He’ll allow things that offend him. But he’s really made some strides forward. And so, you know, I had no recourse. I was just pleasantly surprised to hear that you at least got an answer back from them and they finally reconsidered. But in my case, no—it was a death blow. I had years of video that I unfortunately hadn’t backed up. #Pascal Yeah, that’s the other thing that’s so absolutely hurtful. If this option—or this possibility—wasn’t on the radar, then, you know, a lot of people put videos up, and since it’s always there, the belief is that it always will be. But it isn’t. Right, right. When this happened, did you have the chance to at least click on the little appeal button? #Larry Johnson Oh, yeah, I did—multiple times. And they’d come back and basically say, “Go pound sand.” #Pascal The problem is, they have absolute control—total control—over the channel. I keep saying the channels are nothing but a checkbox in a very large spreadsheet somewhere at Google HQ. And they can take away that checkbox any time they want. But they have different policies. The policy I was accused of violating was “spam and deceptive practices.” The policy you were accused of was “hate speech.” Of course, they didn’t provide any example, I suppose, of yours… None at all. #Larry Johnson You know, it’s one thing if you say, “Hey, this one particular video was considered hateful,” and then you give me the chance—well, I can either take it down, or I can re-record it and try to clarify. But I wasn’t… you know, the only “hate” I was engaged in was hating the genocide that was happening to the Palestinian people. But I wasn’t responding to that by making anti-Jewish remarks. I’ve always made a point of saying I speak out against Zionism because Zionism is not Judaism. There are Jews who embrace the concept of Zionism, just as there are Christians who embrace the concept of Zionism. But again, there was no recourse, no appeal, nothing. #Pascal -- 2 of 16 -- Do you think you were the victim of an earlier regime of censorship in the US? Let me explain that a bit. It’s all speculation, because we really don’t have any insight into these processes. But what we’ ve seen under the Biden administration—and what we saw under the COVID regime that emerged— is that it’s now proven there was government influence directly in the social media sphere, right? The Twitter Files luckily exposed that. And thank you, Elon Musk, for actually making that available. And thank you, Matt Taibbi and others, for actually working through those documents. Sure. So, they created a system, right, where the White House would basically send emails and flag content, and then Twitter would selectively act on it—either suppress it or take it down. On YouTube, we saw several channels removed during the Biden era, and yours seems to have been one of them. This kind of thing has changed—or at least, in my perception, under the Trump administration it calmed down. What’s your observation on this, you know, over the last five or six years of this up and down? #Larry Johnson Well, it’s calmed in some ways and gotten worse in others. Now, if you criticize Israel—if you criticize the conduct of the war against the Palestinians—that becomes a charge that you’re engaging in anti‑Semitic speech. And what’s really crazy about it is you get people like Max Blumenthal accused of being anti‑Semitic—as a Jew, yes. Same for Aaron Maté, who’s Jewish. Jeffrey Sachs too. #Pascal And his dad, Gabor Maté. Actually, there are a lot of very prominent anti‑Zionist Jews on YouTube, you know, including John Mearsheimer. #Larry Johnson Yeah, so in that regard, I think it's still just as bad. It can still be used. In fact, we learned yesterday that Scott Ritter was debanked—the Citizens Bank took his money. The problem is, he's supposed to get it back in two weeks, but all of a sudden they can just say, “OK, we're no longer going to allow you to bank with us.” And again, there's no legal recourse. They pull the plug on you. And it turned out that the plug‑pulling came from the Trump administration. Did it? Yes. Yeah. #Pascal Do we know anything about that? What can you share with us? #Larry Johnson When he was tracking it, he actually called the Office of Foreign Assets Control—OFAC—and they said the decision had been made at a higher level within the federal government. So again, they were targeting him. And, you know, they can do the same to me. They did try to do it to you. I -- 3 of 16 -- mean, to accuse you of spam and deceptive practices is ridiculous—you’ve got one of the most anti‑spam shows on the Internet. #Pascal I still believe, in my own case, that this was a genuine IT glitch, in the sense that over the last six months we’ve seen an unprecedented rise in AI videos on the internet. We’ve had AI pretending to be Mearsheimer, pretending to be Jeffrey Sachs, pretending to be Alexander Mercouris. You were also impersonated? Oh, man. There are at least three channels out there with me. So there’s real AI spam going on, and YouTube must, must do something about it. It’s just ridiculously easy to make a channel. These bots create them—it must be a constant cat‑and‑mouse game. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of channels a day, is my guesstimate. So they have to do something. And I actually have another project running, through which I know that a year ago it was really easy to create a channel in anyone’s name. I mean, I work on a project where we run channels for others, and there was no problem. But now, whenever we try to create a new channel, it immediately gets taken down with exactly that message. So I do think my case might be one of YouTube’s spam filters going haywire at the moment—which is, of course, very bad for them. The problem is that they don’t provide any human interaction to resolve the issue. But in my case, I believe it’s an honest mistake, whereas in your case, and what happened to Scott Richter and so on, it’s probably outright interference from above. #Larry Johnson Well, and let’s not forget what Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi found out: there are a significant number of former CIA employees sitting in top positions at places like Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Just a coincidence. #Pascal And one must not underestimate the power of a phone call—someone saying, “Hey, by the way, just call your guys,” and then the people downstream remove the checkbox, and that’s it. Because you’re then at the short end of the doom stick, where you can’t do anything about it. #Larry Johnson Right, right. Yeah, if they get to the point where they start saying, “Okay, this person is banned,” then anybody who hosts that person—well, their channel can be taken down. I mean, that’s where I think the next step in censorship is going. You know, you’re pretty young compared to me, and I recall when I first started doing punditry back in 1994—so, you know, 32 years ago—and at that -- 4 of 16 -- time, alternative voices were allowed. I used to do CNN’s *Crossfire* quite a bit, back when they actually had opposing points of view. I debated Alan Dershowitz on the whole Jonathan Pollard spy business. I learned how to defeat Alan Dershowitz—by laughing at him. Because he got so... He said something like, “Jonathan Pollard wasn’t spying,” and I just started laughing. And he got mad. He said, “Stop laughing at me.” Well, you know, that fourteen‑year‑old in me said, “Oh, you want me to stop laughing?” So I laughed more, and it really irritated him. But at least we could have two different positions. And that continued up until the start of the Gulf War—the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Back then, PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service here in the United States, on the *Jim Lehrer NewsHour*, they called it “the three colonels.” They had three former military guys. One of them was a friend of mine, Pat Lang. Pat had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East division. I forget who the other two guys were, but at least you had different points of view that were allowed early on with respect to the war. But after that, you weren’t really allowed to criticize the U.S. effort. The real hit on me came with the rise of Barack Obama. When I started criticizing Obama on air—his previous associations with, you know, known terrorists like Bill Ayers, who had been charged with terrorist acts—that’s when things changed. And I don’t mean “terrorist” as a pejorative; he had literally been charged with that. Then I got cut off. I was no longer welcome on air. And we saw the same thing with the coup in the Maidan. And now, with the Israeli actions against the Palestinians after October 7th, and with respect to Iran—no alternative voice is allowed. In fact, I was just watching someone talking about the thousands of Americans supposedly killed by Iran. Thousands. Well, you know, go to any AI search engine and ask, “How many American civilians has Iran killed in terrorist acts or direct attacks?” Th