“It can happen to anybody” – former CIA analyst Larry Johnson

Any person who shares their views via Russian media outlets can be targeted by the Western repression machine, Johnson warned. “Any of us US contributors to places like Sputnik, Izvestia or RT could become targets,” the ex-State Department official emphasized. “They’ve already gone after Dimitri Simes. Dimitri is an American [citizen] who became a naturalized American in the 1970s because he was a dissident against the Soviet Union, against the Communist Party,” Johnson said, referring to the FBI’s recent raid on the home of the former political advisor. “And now the very country that he fled to for freedom and protection has turned on him and unleashed our version of the secret police on him,” Johnson lamented, musing on the state of free speech in America in 2024.