Rebuttal to Joel Skousen’s Misleading Claims About My National Security Viewpoints

While accusing me of being an ignorant, establishment geopolitical analyst repeating globalist talking points on history, Skousen exposed his own ignorance on a wide-range of critical topics

Geopolitical analyst Joel Skousen speaking to a conservative group in Utah

January 26th Update: I recently did a couple of radio interviews in which I responded directly to Joel Skousen’s false claims about my views and statements. Here is a link to the one I did with Jon Twitchell and here is the link to the interview I did with Paul Jenson both of them on KTALK AM 1640.

On December 1^st, geopolitical analyst Joel Skousen gave a presentation to the Highland Group, which is the same group that I had briefed last month with my presentation entitled, “Is America on the Verge of World War Three in Ukraine and the Middle East?” While his presentation had some insightful information it was greatly diminished by his statements in support of numerous unsupportable and provably false conspiracy theories.

Skousen is the nephew of longtime conservative icon Cleon Skousen, who was a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the well-known book author of such classic books such as “The Naked Communist” rightly accusing many US leaders of being in league with the Communist conspiracy to take over the world. Joel Skousen, himself, is a prolific author of a number of excellent survival manuals and publishes a newsletter called the World Affairs Briefing available at www.joelskousen.com.

I have long respected Skousen and, until I watched his most recent address, believed I agreed with him on most issues, having read his commentaries from time to time from the late 1990’s onward while spending my life studying nuclear weapons and nuclear war. However, during my presentation to the grassroots conservative Highland Group, I noted that my biggest known disagreement with him was his naïve support of Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and Biden’s policy of national suicide which now threatens to provoke the outbreak of the very nuclear World War Three which Skousen has spent the better part of his lifetime predicting as entirely inevitable.

I believe Skousen may have been invited to respectfully note any major disagreements he had with me during his presentation. However, rather than engage in respectful disagreements, he opted to go on a full-bore tirade against me, someone whom he has never met or corresponded with and doesn’t know in the least.  His critical comments about me begin at minute 1:02 of his linked video presentation and continued throughout most of the remainder of his presentation. As previously noted, Skousen’s viewpoints and statements are full of unproven and oftentimes ridiculous sounding conspiracy theories.

During his presentation earlier this month, Skousen demonstrated a surprising level of ignorance on a number of issues in which he attacked me calling me “a mainstream geopolitical analyst” and semi-conservative.” In response to this accusation, I must ask if I am so “mainstream,” then why did Ukraine put me on their blackllist in July 2022 along with Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Rand Paul and COL Douglas Macgregor and thirty other high-profile Americans who demonstrated the courage to stand for an end to Biden’s unnecessary and destructive war in Ukraine which has cost a quarter of a million brave Ukrainians to date?

Picture of myself and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Ukraine’s infamous blacklist of 35 high profile Americans supporting an end to the war in Ukraine.

Skousen repeatedly accused me of being “ignorant” of the facts and propagating “lies” and false history while ignoring so-called “conspiracy facts” during his presentation. Skousen mistakenly claimed I learned my establishment history from “the most globalist-oriented school in the US” to which I must say I did not spend much time studying history at Georgetown because my Master’s degree was in National Security Studies, where I spent much of my time studying international relations theories. Rather, I learned my history through much study while I was in high school and since doing extensive independent research projects including two never published books on an alternate history of World War Two and “Red Star Rising over America” a hypothetical Communist Chinese invasion of the US West Coast co-written with a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist.

He falsely claims I “continue to play up to the establishment because I am hoping for a position of foreign policy influence.” Quite the contrary, I have been championing my unvarnished non-conformist America First conservative foreign and national security viewpoints relentlessly with full knowledge that refusing to moderate my assertions could very possibly preclude me from being interviewed on mainstream cable news TV shows. He further mistakenly claims all my presentation points, presumably my slide stating that appeasement didn’t cause the outbreak of World War Two but rather Britain’s abrupt abandonment of appeasement caused the war to break out, were all mainstream globalist interpretations of history.

It is impossible to understand where Skousen is coming from with his extreme views without a realization that he views every historical occurrence of the past century from a conspiratorial perspective. He claims Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sent Russians to live in the Baltic states and the Donbass region of Ukraine during the 1940s and his successor Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 in furtherance of a secret long- term Soviet plan was to collapse the Soviet Union and unilaterally surrender its entire empire, including twenty captive nations. Skousen claims they knew that Russia would need a pretext to invade the Baltics, the Donbass and Crimea to reconquer a tiny percentage of their lost territory one day so that is why they did it. Needless to say the idea that collapsing the USSR was a brainchild of Stalin is beyond ridiculous. He also falsely asserts, without supporting evidence, that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and even Putin himself were all puppet leaders of Russian billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, then contradicts himself by admitting Putin ordered his assassination, thereby proving Putin was not his puppet after all.

Skousen further states that I was ignorant of the fact that the Soviets masterminded the collapse of the Soviet Union even though I read Soviet defector Anatoliy Golytsin’s outstanding books. “New Lies for Old” and “The Perestroika Deception” which predicted the Soviet collapse in advance, while I was still in high school and college respectively and I've been writing about the top-down collapse of the Soviet Union since I was 26. The collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union was not “faked” as Skousen claims it was, but it was in fact very real—orchestrated by top Soviet leaders including Gorbachev who opted to pursue a strategy of convergence with the West which was adopted by both of his successors Yeltsin and Putin right up until 2014. In fact, back in 1986, I wrote an extensive “Treaty of Peace with the Soviet Union” which called for the total disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the abolition of all Soviet nuclear weapons, seemingly presciently foreshadowing the collapse of the Soviet Union five and a half years later.

One of the most incredulous claims he made during his presentation that it was that Russian President Vladimir Putin, not Biden, the CIA and the State Department, that deliberately orchestrated the coup that overthrew the pro-Russian President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych to give him a pretext to invade and annex Crimea, a territory which constitutes only four percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. The idea that Putin would rather handover control of the vast majority of Ukraine’s territory to his NATO enemies and greatly imperil Russia’s security and suffer the loss of Ukraine’s buffer state status between Russia and NATO in exchange for meager Russian gains in Crimea and Russian proxy control of one-third of the Donbass region is beyond absurd. It is easily disproven by Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from half of Russian occupied Ukrainian territory in April 2022 in furtherance of its signed peace agreement with Ukraine.

His hypothesis is even more absurd than neoconservative claims that Putin has been attacking and destroying Russia’s own critical infrastructure like the Nord stream pipelines incurring tens of billions of dollars to the Russian Federation. Giving Biden a pass for deliberately provoking the Russian invasions of Ukraine both in 2014 and in 2022 despite the increasing evidence showing that Biden was responsible for inciting both Russian aggressions shows that Skousen is little more than an apologist for President Joe Biden on this issue, particularly with his claim that it was the overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych was not caused by a CIA-funded and Biden authorized coup as it actually was, but rather by Putin himself.

Skousen further outs himself as a supporter of Biden’s foreign policy of national suicide with his calls for the US to increase its military support for Biden’s war in Ukraine, supporting further US conventional unilateral military disarmament in furtherance of this unachievable end. Skousen foolishly buys into leftwing mainstream media disinformation that Russia is being severely weakened by the war in Ukraine when the truth is that Russia’s losses have been three times less than Ukraine’s. In fact, Biden’s war in Ukraine has served to greatly strengthen Russia militarily as it has expanding the size of its military by fifty percent to Soviet levels, mobilizing its entire economy for war by massively increasing arms production and doubling or tripling its military spending to Soviet levels. Russia today poses a much more deadly conventional military threat to NATO today than it posed before the war. Furthermore, after the war began the IMF re-estimated the size of the Russian economy to be twenty percent larger, nearly as large as Germany. He falsely suggests that I think Putin is a good Christian leader which is false. As I have stated, I think Putin is a brutal dictator but unlike Skousen I don’t hate Russia and believe historical evidence strongly suggests if the US pursued friendly relations with Moscow than we could transform Russia from a nuclear superpower adversary to a strategic partner to neutralize its military alliance with Communist China and help deter Chinese aggression.

While admitting I was right in predicting the formation of a formal Sino-Russian military alliance in July 2001, Skousen claims I was wrong in arguing Biden’s war in Ukraine has pushed Russia into an even closer military alliance with Communist China. Skousen falsely claims that I am ignorant of the fact that Russia and China have always been allied to one point or another despite the fact that I have repeatedly stated my belief that the Sino-Soviet split of 1969 was completely faked. That is why I have always considered former President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 to be his most egregious foreign policy mistake and the fact that I have been writing about the existential threat of the Sino-Russian alliance back in 1995. Clearly Skousen has never read my briefing slides or watched my full presentation video which refutes most of his provably false claims against me.

In addition, Skousen falsely asserts I advocated making further disarmament agreements with Russia and China to keep the peace even though I stated in the question-and-answer period of my video presentation that the Russians have cheated on every army control agreement they ever signed which I did so it was folly to sign any more with them. The truth is that I have never supported a single nuclear disarmament treaty in my life and have spoken loudly against them since I was in high school during the 1980s opposing Reagan’s decision to adhere to the never-ratified SALT II Agreement nuclear arms limitation treaties let alone any of the START nuclear arms reduction treaties he falsely claims I supported.

Despite the fact that he has spent most of his life studying the effects of nuclear war, Skousen naively claims that my concerns that Biden is provoking Russia to nuke Ukraine, and NATO, that there is zero nuclear risk to the US in fighting Russia in Ukraine falsely alleging Russia couldn’t occupy Ukraine if he used one or more very low-yield nuclear weapons there, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the immense war-winning battlefield utility of Russian sub-kiloton tactical nuclear weapons. He then not only claims that Russia and China, but also the globalists are hell-bent on starting a nuclear war which is totally false and entirely contradicted by his own misleading claim that Russia would be unable to occupy any country against which it has employed even a single sub-kiloton nuclear weapon.

Further demonstrating his lack of understanding of our adversaries’ modern nuclear warfighting capabilities, he incorrectly states it would take more than one nuclear super-EMP weapon to take out the US electrical grid and that the globalists want Russia to destroy the US with nuclear weapons because he says that's the only way that could convince us to surrender our freedoms. The truth is the exact opposite. A nuclear/super-EMP attack consisting of even a single super-EMP weapon exploded over the center of the US at an altitude of approximately 280 miles would most assuredly destroy America and permanently bring the globalist dreams of a new world order crashing down by making what remains of the US ungovernable. Skousen’s comments strongly suggest he doesn’t know what a super EMP weapon even is, even though the Russians developed these weapons over a quarter century ago with his misleading assertions that North Korea and Iran can't crash our grid with his inaccurate claims they don't have the 7-8 nuclear warheads that he says it would take to do so. In fact, North Korea likely has over 100 nuclear weapons and the Islamic Republic of Iran likely has dozens as well while both countries have super-EMP satellites orbiting over the US that could destroy the US without warning at the press of a button.

Skousen gullibly buys into the deceptive Chinese propaganda that China is currently too weak militarily to fight a war against the US and that they won't be ready to fight the US until 2027 when in fact the PRC has spent the past quarter century preparing to defeat the US militarily. China has been ready to fight and win a war against the US since at least the summer of last year after it began mobilizing its military and economy for war. As I have written Communist China is likely planning on invading Taiwan and going to war against the US sometime next year which will catch the US unprepared as US intelligence has also bought into Skousen’s false belief that China won’t be ready for war until 2027. For reasons unknown, Skousen backtracked from a previous assertion in one of his interviews several years ago, in which he correctly predicted that Russia and China would be ready to fight World War III against us by 2020.

Skousen enters the more nuttier range of conspiracy theories with his assertion that globalist US leaders planned the Al Qaeda attack on the twin towers in advance and that Al Queda leader Osama bin Laden never attacked the US because he was “a CIA plant.” He even incorrectly asserts that the COVID-19 vaccines are lethal and falsely claims the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, of which I am a proud member, were deceived into advocating Church members get vaccinated to help save hundreds of thousands of lives. In so doing, he seemingly buys into Communist Chinese propaganda that the COVID-19 vaccines have killed far more people than the virus itself, which he fails to understand is a Communist Chinese biological weapon designed in their Wuhan biological weapons lab that was deliberately unleashed on the US to kill nearly 1.2 million Americans in a bioweapon Pearl Harbor surprise attack on the US homeland.

While Skousen is right in stating that Communist China is the most murderous and tyrannical regime in world history as I stated in my presentation, he fails to understand that not only do Russia and China not want nuclear war, they don't want a conventional war with the US either. They have limited aims and objectives. Russia’s aims are much more modest than most anyone believes, and they were kind enough to provide us with written copies of their complete wish lists in the form of draft mutual security agreements with the US and NATO in mid-December 2021 which, as the late Dr. Peter Pry, a renowned Russia expert, observed, were mostly acceptable from a US national security perspective.

Russia’s proposed peace agreements with the West didn’t call for the Russian annexation of any territory from either Ukraine or any NATO member state nor did it call for any changes in NATO membership showing Putin is fine with continued NATO membership for all its current member-states so long as the US and western NATO refrains from stationing its troops in Eastern Europe returning to the pre-2016 status-quo.

Communist China's military aims, though more expansive, are limited to Chinese reunification with Taiwan, which serves as a nuclear redline the US dare not cross lest China respond by destroying the US with cyber, super-EMP and nuclear weapons. Beijing’s goal is to become the global economic hegemon monopolizing rare earths and make us even more dependent on them for manufactured goods and the strongest military power while converting the US to a colonial type of economy.

In conclusion, I think Joel Skousen remains a decent geostrategic analyst overall but very disappointedly he got a great many of his facts wrong in this presentation. I would highly recommend that he read my presentation and full video and buy a copy of the book I recently co-authored “Catastrophe Now—America’s Last Chance to Prevent an EMP Disaster” and subscribe to my “Real War” newsletter if he would like to learn what I really believe instead of making up false claims about what he thinks I believe.

© David T. Pyne 2023

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “A Nuclear Posture Review for Advanced Technology Weapons” will be published in spring 2024. He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

November 2nd—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss the chances that the Israel-Hamas War will escalate to a direct war with Iran including major Iranian cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure. Here is the link.

November 3rd—I gave a presentation to the Highland Meeting Group about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Here is the link to both my Powerpoint and video presentation and question and answer session.

November 9th—Interview on “Are You Ready?” podcast discussing the chances that the war in Israel could escalate to a regional Middle Eastern War or even World War III. Here is the link to the interview.

November 21st—Talk with Jon to discuss my recent Real War news articles and answer the question of whether America is on the verge of World War III in Ukraine and the Middle East. Here is a link to my interview:

November 21st-Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss the likely possibility that North Korea’s satellite launch is a guise for putting a third super-EMP satellite in orbit above the U.S. Here is a link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Interview

November 21st-Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss the latest developments in Chinese and North Korean space weapon systems.