If you follow me on Twitter or listen to my podcast, Noor Bin Ladin Calls… you probably know the name Richard Poe.  If not, there’s a good chance you may not have heard of Richard at all. He is possibly the most shadowbanned person on social media.

Richard is a New York Times-bestselling author, who was formerly a contributing editor for NewsMax, editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com, a senior editor of SUCCESS Magazine, and managing editor of The East Village Eye, among other positions.

Nowadays, Richard is probably best known for The Shadow Party, which he co-wrote with David Horowitz. It was the first book to expose George Soros and his color revolutions. Glenn Beck’s famous “Puppetmaster” series was based on The Shadow Party, and featured Richard as a guest.

I call Richard the OG Regime fighter, because he’s been fighting the Cabal most of his life. On his very first newspaper job, in 1984, Richard wrote an exposé of the Trilateral Commission. Since then, Richard has never relented from practicing what he calls “underground journalism,” which he defines as “the kind of journalism that will eventually get you cancelled and unpersonned, if you do it correctly.”

Richard’s most recent articles, published on LewRockwell.com, delve into a subject most of us never knew existed—the hidden power of Britain’s globalist elites. Richard argues that globalism is a British invention, which was foisted on a reluctant America, over a period of many decades, through Anglophile front groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations. He believes that British elites still drive the globalist agenda to this day. Richard’s latest article is, “How the British Caused the American Civil War.”

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: Richard, as an avid admirer of your reporting, it is an honor to interview you for Man’s World issue 5. As a friend, I am delighted to be able to offer readers a glimpse of who you are and your extraordinary life’s work. Let’s start from the beginning. Where did you grow up, and how has your background shaped you?

 

RICHARD POE: Thank you, Noor. I’m honored.

I was born and raised in a place called Syracuse, New York, which is located just about dead center of New York State, about 40 miles south of Lake Ontario, and about 250 miles from New York City.

Central New York is really the American heartland. A lot of people don’t realize that the movie It’s a Wonderful Life was set in upstate New York. The fictional town of Bedford Falls was partly modeled after Seneca Falls, which is about 40 miles west of Syracuse.

So I grew up in a kind of 1960s suburban version of It’s a Wonderful Life.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: In our conversations, you’ve often talked about how the upheavals of the Sixties influenced your life. Tell me about that.

 

RICHARD POE: I was born in 1958, at the peak of American prosperity and power. And so I’ve spent my whole life watching America sink into decline. It began with the Sixties.

I was a child during the Sixties, so I experienced that era from a child’s perspective, and very much through my parents’ eyes. As any child does, I watched my parents closely, watched their reactions. And I could see how the turmoil of the Sixties affected them.

My father was an engineer for GE. He worked in semiconductors and integrated circuits, and a lot of his work was top-secret, for the military and space program. My mother was a microbiologist at a local teaching hospital.

Both were brilliant people, doing ground-breaking work in their fields. But you would never know it from their demeanor. They had an innocence and modesty about them, a natural selflessness which one often sees in people of that generation, the World War II generation.

Part of it has to do with the selflessness of parenthood, I think. People of that generation tended to have lots of kids. My parents had six.

So when the Sixties psyop was unleashed on America, it really stunned people like my parents. They weren’t expecting it. They were unprepared for its ferocity. It was a culture war, a direct hit on the American middle class, the American way of life.  It was like the nightmare sequence in It’s a Wonderful Life, when Bedford Falls turns into Pottersville.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: What specifically did your parents find so upsetting about the Sixties?

 

RICHARD POE: The whole point of the Sixties psyop was to attack my parents’ generation and their values, to tell them they had failed, that all their hard work and sacrifices were for nothing, and that their children hated them. That was the message.

This was particularly jarring for people like my parents who had come from immigrant families and grown up poor. All my grandparents came to this country as refugees from war. They came here for sanctuary.

My father’s parents were Russian Jews who escaped from the Russian Civil War in the early ‘20s. My mother was half Mexican and half Korean. My maternal grandmother fled Mexico to escape Pancho Villa. My maternal grandfather fled Korea to escape Japanese occupation after the Russo-Japanese War.

My grandparents wanted what every immigrant wants, a better life for their children, and their children found that dream in the great American suburbs.

But things got strange in the Sixties. It was almost as if someone had torn a hole through the fabric of reality.

When we walked out the front door, we were in suburbia, the land of plenty. Our world was backyard barbecues, drive-in movies, washing machines, cars, road trips, and split-level homes.

On the other hand, when you turned on the TV, you were transported to another world. The TV kept telling us we were living in a failed state, on the brink of collapse. The media showed us assassinations, race riots, cities in flames, young people blowing their minds with LSD, young people running around naked having sex in public, young people gunned down at Kent State by the National Guard, and, of course, Vietnam. Always Vietnam in the background, this endless war we were fighting against guys in pajamas, and, for some reason, we were losing. Why were we losing? Why couldn’t we beat these guys in pajamas? It didn’t make sense. It was like living in the Matrix. Where did reality end and the simulation begin?

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: You call it the Sixties psyop. Did people of your parents’ generation see it that way? Did they understand they were being psyopped? That it was a deliberate plot?

 

RICHARD POE: Oh yes. People knew it was deliberate. It was obvious. Back in the Fifties, Joe McCarthy had warned everyone what was coming, and the Sixties proved him right.

The obvious part, the part that everyone could see, was the phenomenon of pressure from above and below. Now I doubt my parents ever heard that term. It was a term of art used by activists. But my parents understood it instinctively. They could see it happening before their eyes.

Pressure from above and below means that the government and the street protesters are working together.  They’re both on the same side.

A good example today would be defund the police. The street protesters apply pressure from below, saying, “Defund the police!” Then their allies in the government apply pressure from above, saying, “The people have spoken! Let’s defund the police.”

In reality, no one in their right mind wants to defund the police. But the conspirators raise such a great clamor that dissenting voices are drowned out. Normal people—those who aren’t in on the plot—feel alone, surrounded, outnumbered. They feel that everyone is against them, and no one agrees with them. And so they just hang their heads and let it happen.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: We discussed this in our last podcast, this concept of pressure from above and below. This was the subject of your book The Shadow Party. You and David Horowitz showed how George Soros had taken over the Democratic Party and turned it into an instrument for conducting color revolutions and soft coups, using this very technique of pressure from above and below.

 

RICHARD POE: Yes, and we showed how this strategy was implemented in the Sixties. Back then, you had protesters chanting things like, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is gonna win!” NLF stood for National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong. These were the guys who were killing American boys in Vietnam.

So this was horrifying to ordinary people, whose sons were fighting and dying over there.

Yet you would see politicians on TV praising these protesters, agreeing with them, treating them with deference, and it was like the Twilight Zone. It was like slipping into an alternate universe.

This is why people like my parents voted for Richard Nixon. In a world where everyone seemed to be going crazy, Nixon came across as normal and sane. He won every state in the Union except Massachusetts when he ran for reelection in 1972. Forty-nine states! And he won New York by a landslide, 59 percent compared to McGovern’s 41 percent.

This is why they had to remove Nixon through the Watergate psyop. He was too popular, too strong. The people were with him.

Machiavelli said that if you’re raised up by the nobles, the nobles will despise you. But if you’re raised up by the people, the nobles will fear you. The nobles feared Nixon because the people raised him up. So he had to be removed.

Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. I was 15 years old, still in high school, but I just happened to be living in a college dorm that summer, on the Syracuse University campus, participating in a National Science Foundation pre-college studies program.

So I watched Nixon resign in a crowded lounge in my dorm, filled with hundreds of college students cheering and laughing and carrying on. They were so happy. But why? I couldn’t understand them.

The fall of Nixon was devastating to most people, but nobody cared what we thought because we were the “Silent Majority.” We kept our mouths shut. In some ways, it was like the JFK assassination all over again. The Establishment was telling us, “Your vote doesn’t matter. We will appoint whom we please.”

Some people say the Sixties ended that night, with Nixon’s resignation. Maybe that’s correct. If the Sixties was a color revolution, it achieved its objective the night Nixon stepped down.

And the method they used was pressure from above and below. The American people loved Nixon. They voted for him overwhelmingly in 1972. But the activists and their government allies applied pressure from above and below, and they overruled the people.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: If the Sixties ended that night, what came next?

 

RICHARD POE: The fear lived on. All that fear they generated in the Sixties didn’t just evaporate. It poisoned the American spirit for decades. And this was intentional.

The biggest fear they managed to instill in our parents was the fear of losing their children to the counterculture, to the mad culture of sex and drugs.

The media played on this fear. All through the Sixties and into the Seventies, the TV was showing us white middle-class kids on drugs. White middle-class kids having sex. White middle-class kids hating their parents, dropping out of school, running away from home, and living on the street.

The counterculture was like a stalking predator, stalking the suburbs, looking for kids to snatch.

In August, 1969, the Manson murders broke in the news. Here was a hippie cult breaking into suburban homes and slaughtering people with knives. It confirmed Middle America’s worst fears that, beneath its seductive veneer, the counterculture was a raging beast thirsting for blood.

A few months later, in April, 1970, antiwar activist Jerry Rubin said, “Kill your parents.” It was all over the news. The exact quote was, “Unless you’re prepared to kill your parents, you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are our first oppressors.”

I remember the anger and fear in my mother’s eyes, when she heard that.

I wanted to protect my parents from the madness, to reassure them, to comfort them, to tell them everything would be all right.

But I failed. I couldn’t protect them. In the end, I did exactly the opposite. I made their nightmare come true. I joined the counterculture myself.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: How did that happen?

 

RICHARD POE: As the Sixties morphed into the early Seventies, the political crisis died down, but the counterculture just kept getting stronger. It invaded every part of American life.

I started college in 1975, at Syracuse University. I was only 16, having skipped two grades, so I was very impressionable. And I was quickly absorbed into the counterculture, pot-smoking and all the rest.  And I started making hideously bad decisions.

My parents had always hoped I would become a doctor. One of the first things I did in college was to drop out of pre-med and become a creative writing major instead.  I dropped all my science courses and immersed myself in literature, history, comparative religion, Jungian psychology, and the like.

As I sank ever deeper into a morass of mysticism, I immersed myself in the literature of the counterculture, reading the drug-fueled rants of Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson and others of that sort.

The one thing of lasting value that I did in college was to study Russian. My grandparents had lived with us briefly in the early Sixties, when my grandmother was ill, and the beautiful sound of the Russian language is one of my earliest memories. As I grew older, I resolved that I would learn it.

So I studied Russian in college, and, in 1978, between my junior and senior year, I did a summer session in the USSR, at Leningrad State University.

I went with a big group of Americans.  It was a total immersion program, to build fluency. All the classes were in Russian and we Americans were supposed to speak only Russian all summer, even with each other, though we often broke that rule.

We had been warned in our orientation briefings to be wary of any young Russians who tried to befriend us, as they would undoubtedly be KGB operatives bent on compromising and recruiting us. I’m sure that was true. Even so, we had many vodka-fueled conversations with Russian students who complained freely about the oppressive Soviet system, and who told us, with what appeared to be perfect sincerity, how they longed for reform.

All that summer, I met young Russians who loved America with unquestioning abandon. Even in those days, the allure of Levis and Pink Floyd for Russia’s youth was a standing joke among Americans. But I discovered that their passion for American Pop didn’t stop with rock bands. They evinced a surprising taste for our pop politics as well.

My Russian friends grilled me ceaselessly about the hippie counterculture, the race riots, and the antiwar movement of the Sixties. They were obsessed with the subject. Many were deeply shocked to learn that American college students in 1978 considered the Sixties passé.

Some went so far as to suggest that the USSR needed its own Sixties uprising.  With some amazement, I realized that the Sixties psyop which had so horrified my parents made a completely different impression on this side of the Iron Curtain. And it gave me pause.

On the evening of July 4, 1978, I went with a number of my American dorm mates to Palace Square, the immense courtyard in front of the Winter Palace where so much somber history has unfolded. Rumor had it that rock impresario Bill Graham had arranged a free, open-air concert that night featuring Santana, Joan Baez, and The Beach Boys.

But it never happened.

When 5,000 young Leningraders showed up for the event, the only thing they found was a battalion of gray-uniformed militiamen blocking the square and a monotonous voice intoning on a loudspeaker, “Comrade Leningraders, you are blocking traffic. Please disperse to your homes.”

For the next six hours, those 5,000 young people absolutely refused to disperse.  They whistled at the police in mockery. They kicked the sides of patrol wagons as they wheeled by on the street. Bottles were thrown. Water trucks sprayed the crowd.

What amazed me, though, was not the occasional bursts of violence, but the overall restraint of the militsya. They treated the crowd with kid gloves. I wouldn’t have expected that in Brezhnev’s Russia. The police could have cleared the square in minutes. But it was obvious they’d been ordered to tread lightly.

At one point, I caught sight of a pretty, blonde girl, college age, neatly scrubbed and groomed, her hair in two thick braids, standing quietly and gazing across the square at the ranks of militsionyeri.

From all around came screams, shouts, and harsh laughter; the crackle of loudspeakers, the padding of thousands of feet, the angry beeping of car horns.

But around this girl a quiet aura of peace seemed to hover. There was a tiny smile on her lips, and she breathed softly and slowly, like someone waking from a deep, pleasant sleep.

Her gray-blue eyes were like steel. In those eyes, I saw strength, pride and courage.

I’ll never know for sure, but I have a strange feeling that girl may have been thinking the same thing that I thought the moment I saw her. I think she realized that evening, maybe in that very instant, that her generation was destined to be free.

And so my summer in the USSR impacted me in an unexpected way, opening my eyes to a dimension of the Sixties counterculture I had not fully understood. I came to realize that the spirit of rebellion has a power of its own, transcending the manipulations of propagandists, provocateurs, and psywar operators. I wanted to learn more about it.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: This reminds me of something you’ve said in our interviews, that you’ve never liked people telling you, “This is your enemy. You must hate this person.” Whenever people tell you that, it makes you want to do the opposite, to learn more about the “enemy’s” point of view.  So when your parents told you to hate the counterculture, maybe that kicked off a similar reaction.  Part of you wanted to obey your parents, but another part wanted to defy the taboo and investigate further.

 

RICHARD POE: Yes, I think that’s right. There’s always another side to the story, and there’s always something to be learned from the other side. Even if the other side is wrong.

My favorite novel, as a kid, possibly my favorite novel of all time, was Gone with the Wind.  When I was 10 or 11, I got hold of my parents’ paperback copy and read it so many times, it literally fell apart.

Gone with the Wind is our country’s national epic, in the same way War and Peace is the national epic of Russia. What makes Gone with the Wind such a masterpiece is that it takes the most dreadful event in our history, the Civil War, and helps us to understand it, not as history, but as real human experience.

History is written by the victors. So the history books can never tell us how the Southerners felt. Only art can do that. Margaret Mitchell made us empathize with the other side. She helped us understand the people who lost. In doing so, she made sure that the people of the South, her people, would never be forgotten, and their suffering would not be in vain.

Please understand, I don’t support the Confederate cause.  I am pro-Union, pro-Lincoln, and totally opposed to secession. I think the Confederates were wrong, and I explain why in my recent article, “How the British Caused the American Civil War.”

But just because we disagree with someone doesn’t mean we have to hate them or demonize them. And that’s why I believe Gone with the Wind is one of the greatest epics ever written, right up there with the Aeneid or the Iliad, because it captures the soul of a nation. It helps North and South understand each other and maybe even forgive each other, after so much bitterness and bloodshed.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: So when you set out to explore the counterculture, you were really defying the teaching of your parents that the counterculture is the enemy. In a sense, you were deliberately going into the enemy’s camp to learn the enemy’s point of view.

 

RICHARD POE: That’s exactly right. And it was a hard path. The counterculture is a drug culture, at root, and I got sucked into that, especially psychedelics, which appealed to my mystical bent. Eventually, I gave up drugs. It’s been more than 30 years since I’ve so much as smoked a joint. But I paid a price. Time is precious, and you can never recover wasted time.

After graduating from SU in 1979, I had no plan, no idea how to build a career as a writer. I got a job as a bookstore clerk. I scribbled short stories. I hung out with the local avant-garde crowd. I lived the bohemian life.

Eventually, I enrolled in SU’s graduate program for creative writing, but then dropped out after my first year to go study with Allen Ginsberg.  This was in 1981.

Now Ginsberg was really the poet laureate of the counterculture. He’d been pushing psychedelic drugs and sexual revolution since the 1950s.

Norman Podhoretz told a story about getting in a huge, four-hour argument with Ginsberg in October, 1958, berating Ginsberg over his plan to break down America’s morals. At the end, Ginsberg told him, “We will get you through your children.”

Now this was 1958. The Sixties hadn’t started yet. But the plan was already there. “We will get you through your children.”

My mother was carrying me in her womb when Ginsberg uttered those words. I was born two months later. In a very real sense, Allen’s threat was directed not only at Podhoretz, but at my mother and her whole generation. And, in my case, the threat came true.

Allen and his friends really did “get” me, in the sense that I came under their spell. I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and became enthralled by his vision of rootless youth hitchhiking aimlessly across America.

A whole movement grew up around Kerouac which ultimately gave rise to the Sixties counterculture. In the Fifties, Kerouac and his followers were known as the Beat Generation. Kerouac died in 1969, but the surviving Beat icons—Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso—all ended up teaching at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. I got to know them all.

When I was accepted into Allen’s writing apprenticeship program, it was a dream come true.

I headed to Colorado and never went back to grad school.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: In The Shadow Party, you told a fascinating story about the friendship between Allen Ginsberg and George Soros.  What a strange coincidence that your life would intersect with both of them!

 

RICHARD POE: Yes, it’s strange. When I was researching The Shadow Party, I discovered that Allen and Soros had been close friends. Apparently Allen was a frequent guest at Soros’s Fifth Avenue apartment and his El Mirador estate on Long Island.

According to Soros, it was Allen who got him interested in drug legalization. This may or may not be true, but, if you know Allen, it’s no surprise. Allen was all about drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, and he was extremely evangelistic in encouraging others to use them.

Soros’s biographer Michael Kaufman implies that Allen and Soros met in the early ‘80s and became “life-long” friends, as Kaufman puts it. Another author provides a little more precision, suggesting that Soros and Ginsberg may have met around 1980.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: What was the basis of their friendship? What did Soros and Ginsberg have in common?

 

RICHARD POE: There’s a little-known portion of Soros’s life that you might call his bohemian period, when he was living in the West Village in Manhattan, trying to write a book on philosophy, which he never finished. Certain mysteries surround that period.

If it’s true that Soros and Ginsberg met around 1980, they would have known each other 22 years by the time Kaufman called them “life-long friends” in his 2002 book, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire.

Soros would have been about 50 and Allen about 54 when they met. So why did Kaufman call them “life-long” friends? Is it really possible to have a “life-long” friendship with someone you met in your fifties?

On the other hand, suppose they met earlier, perhaps 20 years earlier, during Soros’s bohemian phase in the West Village. In that case, they would have met in their 30s, and Kaufman’s description of a “life-long” friendship would make more sense.

Soros lived in Greenwich Village, in Sheridan Square, from 1961-1965. At that time, his life’s ambition was to become a philosopher. While working as a stock trader, he struggled to write a book called The Burden of Consciousness, based on the philosophy of Karl Popper, who had been Soros’s teacher at the London School of Economics.

Only half a block from Soros’s apartment was the famous White Horse Tavern, frequented by all the top literary figures of the day, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Now I can’t prove that Soros met Allen during those years, but it does seem likely. It’s hard to imagine an aspiring young philosopher such as George Soros missing the chance to rub elbows with the White Horse Tavern crowd, since he only lived half a block away.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: What finally happened with you and Ginsberg?

 

RICHARD POE: Allen was a great teacher. I learned a lot from him. But the summer ended, and it was time to move on.

After leaving Naropa, I tried to live what I imagined to be a Jack Kerouac sort of life, hitchhiking around the country, working odd jobs, and, of course, writing.

My big project was an autobiographical novel, very much in the confessional, tell-all tradition of Jack Kerouac. I started the novel while living in San Francisco, then finished it in Syracuse. When it was done, I realized, with an almost sickening sense of horror that I could never publish it. The novel was intensely personal and autobiographical in the mode of Kerouac’s On the Road. It was full of drugs and sex.

My middle-class upbringing kicked in. I couldn’t bear the thought of my parents reading this. I couldn’t inflict such embarrassment on my family. So I stuck the manuscript in a box and left it there.

And that’s when it hit me. I realized that I’m not Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or Henry Miller or any other such person. I just didn’t have the same burning hatred of conventionality that seemed to drive them. I had to find a different path. And so I went into journalism.

I freelanced at first, then finally got my first newspaper job at the Syracuse New Times, in January, 1984.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: That’s where you wrote your article about the Trilateral Commission.

 

RICHARD POE: Yes. I was still under the spell of the Sixties counterculture, still trying to live up to the Sixties “ideal” in some way. I decided that, if I couldn’t be the next Jack Kerouac, I would be an “underground” journalist, in the tradition of the Sixties underground press.

So I was always testing the limits at the New Times, trying to see how radical they would let me be. And, since the New Times was a left-leaning, “alternative” paper, they let me get away with quite a lot.

In April of 1985, I moved down to New York City and took a job as managing editor of the East Village Eye, not to be confused with the famous East Village Other, which went out of business in 1972. The Eye was founded by a guy named Leonard Abrams in 1979, and mainly covered the art and avant-garde scene in downtown Manhattan.

In the 1980s, The Eye was about as close as you could get to the Sixties underground. I was hugely excited to work there. I felt I was born for this. The wind of fate was in my sails.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: At the East Village Eye, you wrote an amazing investigative story about the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia.  Not only was the reporting brilliant, your piece was also eerily prescient.

 

RICHARD POE: Thank you. In that story, I revealed that FEMA and the FBI were training local police to carry out preemptive paramilitary strikes against Americans deemed to be “terrorists.” They had done a trial run in 1985, dropping explosive charges onto a house in North Philadelphia, from a helicopter. The house was occupied by an armed group of black urban survivalists called MOVE.

The explosives started a fire that destroyed not only the MOVE house, but two city blocks and 61 homes in the surrounding neighborhood. MOVE members trying to flee the burning house were forced back inside by automatic gunfire. Eleven people were killed, including five children. Only one 30-year-old woman and a 13-year-old boy survived.

It turned out the FBI was deeply involved in setting up the MOVE bombing, even providing the explosives. By designating MOVE a “terrorist” organization, the feds had stripped them of all rights, purportedly making them legitimate targets for counterinsurgency strikes.

While researching that story, I discovered that a US Army counterinsurgency handbook from 1966 had recommended creating fake insurgencies to justify harsh counterterror measures. The manual literally recommended that the government create a so-called “pseudo-insurgent force”—a fake insurgency—to generate “incidents among the population,” which could be used to “indicate to the people the need for government-sponsored population control…”

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: That sounds so much like the fake insurgency of January 6, where the government planted pseudo-insurgents among the protesters to commit acts of violence.

 

RICHARD POE: Yes, it seems they keep using the same playbook.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: The concluding paragraph of your East Village Eye story was prophetic and chilling.  You wrote: “Americans who value their freedom ought to ponder hard and long… For we may wake up some grim morning not too far from now, to find out that all along, the real ‘terrorists’ against whom all these preparations have been laid, were us.”

 

RICHARD POE: Yes, I think that sums it up. The MOVE bombing was target practice. The big event lies ahead.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: Some say the big event is already on us, that the cabal is preparing the final crackdown, to take our freedom. I’m more optimistic. I believe all their efforts will fail, as people are finally waking up.

 

RICHARD POE: It’s possible that people will wake up. But it’s also possible there may be a false awakening, as there was in the Seventies. I’ve seen that psyop before.

What happened in the Seventies is they created an illusion that a great cleansing was occurring.  After Nixon resigned, all the talking heads were saying, “The system worked.” That was the mantra. It was all Nixon’s fault, and getting rid of Nixon solved everything.

Then came the investigations, the blue-ribbon panels. We had the Church Committee, the Rockefeller Commission, the Nedzi Committee, the Pike Committee, all these government committees supposedly investigating the alphabet agencies. Every day brought new revelations about the FBI and the CIA, and their alleged crimes against the American people.

We learned about the MKUltra mind control program, the LSD experiments on unwitting victims, CIA recruitment of journalists and clergymen. That’s right. Clergymen. We learned about COINTELPRO, an FBI program which targeted political dissidents, using surveillance, infiltration, disruption, assassination, and black propaganda, that is, smearing people with the use of forged evidence and fake stories planted in the media.

Even the JFK assassination was reinvestigated in the Seventies. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially determined that Oswald most likely did not act alone.  The Committee’s report stated, and I quote, “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Unquote.

Yet they never took it further.  They just left it at that.

So all these revelations came pouring out of these government committees and people were just overwhelmed. We couldn’t keep track of it all. But it gave Americans the vague impression that responsible people were on the case, looking into things, that a new age of openness had dawned, and reform was in the air. Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief and said, “Thank God, the system is working.”

But the system wasn’t working. It was all a whitewash, a coverup. Nothing was fixed that needed fixing. Today, the alphabet agencies are far more pervasive and destructive in our lives than they ever were in the past.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: Nowadays, Richard, you’re best known for your exposés of George Soros. How did you start writing about him?

 

RICHARD POE: In the early ‘90s, I did a lot of work in Russia. I had become a business writer and a senior editor for SUCCESS magazine. SUCCESS sent me to Russia several times to report on the rise of free enterprise there. Also I did some TV work in Russia with my wife Marie, who’s a producer. So I had pretty good contacts and knowledge of the business scene in Yeltsin’s Russia, and I ended up writing a book for McGraw-Hill called, How to Profit from the Coming Russian Boom, published in 1993.

George Soros had turned down my request for an interview, but he allowed me to interview some of his people who were working in Russia, and I wrote very positively about Soros and all his good work helping the Russians convert to a free-market economy.

What I didn’t know at the time is that Soros and others were lining their own pockets, taking ruthless advantage of Russia’s economic crisis to buy up state properties cheaply, thus corrupting the privatization process for their own gain.  That didn’t come out until later.

In 2004, I got a call from Chris Ruddy at NewsMax, asking me to do an exposé of Soros for the cover of NewsMax magazine. At that time, I was a regular columnist for NewsMax. And the issue with Soros was that he was making a lot of inflammatory statements to the effect that he was going to do a “regime change” against President Bush, and that he intended to do in America what he had done in other countries.

Most people didn’t understand what Soros meant by that, but I knew he had taken part in many regime change operations throughout the world, of the sort we now call “color revolutions.” So these threats were worrisome.

I ended up writing a cover story for NewsMax called, “George Soros’s Coup,” in which I exposed Soros’s history with color revolutions, and argued that employing such methods in the United States posed a threat to our democracy.

I believe this may have been the first detailed exposé of Soros’s color revolutions in an American publication. A UK writer, Neil Clark, had previously written on this subject in a 2003 article in The New Statesman.

Anyway, the article immediately got me on The O’Reilly Factor, and David Brock from Media Matters for America wrote an open letter to Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes demanding equal time to defend Soros. So the article caused quite a ruckus.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: It also caused a ruckus internally at NewsMax, didn’t it?

 

RICHARD POE: Well, yes. The chairman of NewsMax Media at the time was a guy named Lord William Rees-Mogg. In my recent article, “How the British Invented George Soros,” I dubbed Rees-Mogg “the man who created George Soros.”

As a journalist, Lord Rees-Mogg helped create the myth that Soros singlehandedly broke the Bank of England.  In fact, Soros had a lot of help from major financial institutions, and the whole operation appears to have been sanctioned by the British establishment.

Rees-Mogg also went to great lengths to build up Soros’s reputation as a financial guru.

It’s a fascinating story. I can’t go into all of it here, but suffice it to say that Lord Rees-Mogg was a major promoter of Soros, and he also happened to serve as chairman of NewsMax Media, Inc. from 2000-2006.

So Chris and an associate of his, the late Nick Simunek, had basically gone behind Rees-Mogg’s back to assign me this story.  Rees-Mogg apparently wasn’t even aware of the story until after it was published.

Some days later, I was present at a meeting in New York where Chris and Nick did their best to convince Rees-Mogg that Soros had become dangerous and that NewsMax needed to go after him, but Rees-Mogg didn’t go for it. The policy was hands off Soros.

Now, at that point, I felt I was onto a pretty big story with Soros, and I didn’t want to stop, so I had to find another outlet. I had previously worked for David Horowitz as editor of his news site FrontPageMag.com in 2000-2002. So I went back to David in 2004 and he hired me to do all this Soros-related research for DiscovertheNetworks.org, a new website he was launching, and eventually, in 2006, David and I used that research to co-write a book called The Shadow Party.

In 2010, Glenn Beck aired his famous “Puppetmaster” series, a three-part expose of Soros based on The Shadow Party. It was seen by a record audience of 3 million people. Unfortunately, the “Puppetmaster” was partly responsible for getting Glenn kicked off Fox News.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: The role of Lord Rees-Mogg in helping to “create” George Soros is something very few people know about. I highly recommend your article on that subject, “How the British Invented George Soros,” posted on LewRockwell.com.

 

RICHARD POE: Thank you.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: You are writing a whole series of articles now on LewRockwell.com, exploring the theme of British influence in US affairs, and unfortunately much of that influence seems to be quite negative.  Your articles are well-researched and persuasive. My question is, why don’t more people know about this?  So many people think of the UK as an obedient satellite of the United States, but you seem to be saying it’s the other way around.

 

RICHARD POE: A lot of our history with Britain has been suppressed, and I think it needs to be restored, for our own good. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

If you talk to an educated person from India or Ireland, they can recite by heart a litany of British misdeeds against their country, off the tops of their heads. That knowledge protects them. It enables them to have good relations with Britain today, because they can negotiate realistically, with an accurate understanding of how the British system works, how the British think, and how to avoid problems with them.

Americans, on the other hand, tend to be naïve about Britain. We have forgotten huge portions of our past experience with the British Empire.

This ignorance puts us at a disadvantage. When we deal with the British, we’re not able to do so effectively. We’re like children trying to negotiate with an adult.  The adult knows what’s going on. The child does not.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: What specifically do Americans need to know or re-learn about the UK, in order to manage that relationship better?

 

RICHARD POE: The most important thing to know is that globalism is a British invention. British elites created it, and, to this day, British elites are the world’s leading promoters of it.

Americans, on the other hand, have traditionally disliked globalism, and have periodically rebelled against it quite forcefully, as, for instance, when the U.S. Senate rejected the League of Nations in 1919, or, more recently, when President Trump put forth his America First policy.

The part we need to understand better is that, when we, as Americans, oppose globalist policies, the British establishment takes that very personally. They take it as a threat to their vital interests, and they respond accordingly.

Thus, when Trump announced that he was running for president on an America First policy, the British establishment not only opposed him, but took covert action against him. The British eavesdropping agency GCHQ actually boasts of being the initiator of the so-called Russiagate fiasco, according to an April 13, 2017 article in The Guardian.

Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015. Shortly after, GCHQ went into action. The agency claims it discovered “interactions” between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence in “late 2015,” then passed on this “material” to then-CIA chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016.

The Guardian states that, “US and UK intelligence sources acknowledge that GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation… One source called the British eavesdropping agency the ‘principal whistleblower’.”

This is just one example of the kind of influence the British can exert over U.S. affairs when they believe their vital interests are threatened.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: In your latest article, “How the British Caused the American Civil War,” you reveal that the British continued to exert economic control over the United States even after the Revolution.

 

RICHARD POE: Immediately after signing the 1783 peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War, the British started dumping huge quantities of cheap manufactured goods on the U.S. market, at prices lower than their English ones, and often below cost.

America’s fledgling manufacturers could not meet those prices and went under. This led to a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. economy, an armed rebellion in Massachusetts, and threats of secession from many states.

By this means, the British demonstrated that they had both the will and the power to continue enforcing their colonial monopoly on manufacturing in America. Prior to the Revolution, manufacturing was forbidden in the Thirteen Colonies.

Our Founding Fathers created the Constitution specifically in response to this British trade war. We needed a new federal government which could retaliate by imposing tariffs. Under the existing Articles of Confederation, the national government had no such power.

To punctuate the point, George Washington wore a suit of homespun cloth to his inauguration—an item that would have been illegal and subject to seizure under British rule.

In the years ahead, the British continued using various financial and economic maneuvers to bring the rebellious Americans to heel, all of it culminating in the American Civil War.

Over time, the British had managed to re-establish a colonial economy in the South, based on the cotton trade. The South exported 70 percent of its cotton to England, and purchased British manufactures in return.  The North tried to replace England as the South’s leading trade partner by building its own textile mills and imposing tariffs on foreign trade.

The British fought back. They secretly encouraged the South to secede, promising diplomatic and even military support, if necessary.

For more details, see my article, “How the British Caused the American Civil War.”  While researching that article, I discovered that British strategists actually planned to split the United States into four or more pieces, some of which would be shared with France.

I was also fascinated to discover a January 3, 1860 article from the London Morning Post calling for the reestablishment of British rule over America, in the event that North and South should separate. The Morning Post was widely known to be a mouthpiece for Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister at the time.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: Today, once again, many Americans are calling for secession. Do you think the British are involved?

 

RICHARD POE: Well, I don’t have a smoking gun. But I can say there have been many secession movements in America, starting almost immediately after the Revolution, and continuing right up through the Civil War, and the British always seem to be involved, one way or another.

Realistically, it’s in Britain’s interest to split up the United States, to make us easier to handle, easier to manipulate. That’s always been true, and always will be, I’m afraid.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s “national divorce” movement might have some British influence behind it, as well as other sorts of foreign influence perhaps.

We Americans are a cantankerous bunch. We don’t always get along with each other. But my research indicates that there has never been a serious secession movement in America that did not involve foreign influence, to some extent.

Is it possible that today’s “national divorce” movement is the single exception to this rule? Maybe, but I doubt it.

 

NOOR BIN LADIN: You mentioned that the Seventies brought false hope, the illusion that things were being cleaned up following the exposure of government misdeeds. Today as well, more and more information is coming to light. Yet some are disillusioned. They don’t believe things will change. Others, like myself, are highly hopeful and undeterred. What keeps you motivated to continue to fight to expose the Establishment to this day?

 

RICHARD POE: I suppose what motivates me now is simply faith. I don’t believe we live in a senseless universe. I believe we’re all here for a purpose. Each and every one of us has a mission, a destiny.

When we’re young, we waste a lot of time on trial and error.  But, as we get older, things become clear.

I know what my mission is, because life has never allowed me to do anything else. Each time I step off the path, something happens to put me back on it.

Everything I’ve experienced, everything I’ve learned has prepared me to do one certain thing, which seems to be solving riddles, solving mysteries, unraveling the Gordian Knot. And once the knot is unraveled, once the mystery is solved, the solution has to be broken down and explained to people in simple terms.

This is what life has taught me to do. After 63 years on this earth, this appears to be the one set of skills that I’ve managed to master.

And so I don’t need to worry about the big picture. I just need to focus on my task, to keep writing and researching as long as I can, until someone or something stops me.

And, if the task is worth doing, it doesn’t matter if someone stops me.  Others will take my place, and the job will be done.