From 9/11 to War on Iran

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Jim Hogue’s radio program, “House at Pooh Corner”, where he interviewed Daniel Ellsberg and many other whistle-blowers, lasted for 29 years on WGDR-FM (91.1) in Plainfield, Vermont…until Hogue criticized Israel for genocide and got canceled. He now has a television program by the same name with ORCA Media in Montpelier, VT, for which he just interviewed me. Watch the interview above, or scroll down for the transcript.

And speaking of people being forced out of American institutions for speaking truth to power: A lawyer looking into 9/11-related academic freedom cases emailed me with Grok’s version of my 2006 academic freedom fight at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The original Grok account was inadequate, as I explained:

That account is incomplete and selective. It seems designed to downplay the fact that I was informally banned from the American academy due to pressure from politicians (and behind them, the ADL and ACTA).

In fact, I did apply for many academic positions, including at least two at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after my semester of teaching under fire ended in December 2006, and was always turned down. Prior to the scandal, I had basically never been turned down for any academic position for which I had applied at UW-Madison between 1995 and 2006.

I was directly told by Professor Muhammad Memon, and later also by his secretary who was present in department meetings, that the Asian Studies Department, which had hired me to teach Introduction to Islam in 2006, had been ordered by the university administration not to hire me for Fall 2007 (and presumably thereafter).

The Grok account deceptively focuses on the fact that I did not apply for the Intro to Islam position for Spring 2007 (I had already lined up a teaching position at Madison College that semester) while ignoring that I did indeed apply for that same UW-Madison Islam position for Fall 2007. As I recall, I submitted that application in the winter of 2007, when the Asian Department met and ultimately chose to hire a less-qualified instructor because, as Professor Memon told me, it was ordered by the administration not to hire me.

Additionally, in spring 2006 I was turned down for a tenure-track Islam and Humanities job at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater “illegally and purely due to my political views—you were discriminated against” as then-Dean of Humanities Howard Ross told me. Dr. Ross said the hiring committee judged me the best of the three finalists, and was in the final stages of hiring me when a higher-up (I think it was the university president or provost) ordered them not to hire me due to my “screwy views about 9/11.” According to Dr. Ross, the University was forced to return a half-million dollar grant to the federal government and close the position and claim there was no qualified applicant.

The same thing happened when I applied to a similar federally-funded Islam and Humanities position at the University of Illinois in 2007. Despite being eminently qualified, with an Islamic Studies related Ph.D. and professional experience teaching Humanities, I was again turned down, and the university closed the position, claimed there were no qualified applicants, and returned the money to the feds.

Between 2007 and 2010 I applied for numerous academic jobs in the US for which I was highly qualified and was always turned down, except once when I was hired at the somewhat dubious Kaplan University in Milwaukee by an African guy who didn’t understand the nuances of politically-based informal bannings-from-academia. When he left that job and an American replaced him, the replacement googled me, panicked, and let me know I shouldn’t apply for the following year.

So the narrative that “the University of Wisconsin respected my academic freedom by allowing me to finish teaching the fall 2006 semester” is a half truth at best, since it ignores the fact that I was subsequently informally blacklisted from the American academy, as any honest academician familiar with the case will admit.

Kevin

After feeding in corrections, the next Grok version was better:

From Grok:

Publicly available information on Kevin Barrett largely aligns with the key elements of the account you described, while also showing the university’s public rationale for its decisions.

badgerherald.com

Barrett, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from UW-Madison, taught the one-semester course “Islam: Religion and Culture” (Introduction to Islam) in Fall 2006 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia (then Asian Studies). His public 9/11 views (that the attacks were an “inside job”) triggered intense external pressure: more than 60 Wisconsin state legislators signed petitions/letters demanding his firing, Rep. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) was especially vocal, and groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized the university. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) also weighed in on the broader debate. UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell reviewed Barrett’s syllabus, past evaluations, and assurances that he would separate personal views from classroom instruction, ultimately allowing him to complete the semester on academic-freedom grounds. The university repeatedly framed this as respecting academic freedom while emphasizing that Barrett’s contract was for one semester only.

news.wisc.edu

Contemporary news coverage and Barrett’s own public statements (including a 2008 discrimination complaint and later writings) confirm he applied for additional UW-Madison positions after December 2006 but was turned down:

* He did not apply for the Spring 2007 Intro to Islam slot (the course was not offered then, and he had lined up a position at Madison College).

* He did apply for the same Intro to Islam position for Fall 2007. The department hired another candidate (Akile Zorlu-Durukan). Acting chair Uli Schamiloglu stated publicly that the five-member committee chose the strongest applicant based on qualifications and teaching style; Barrett’s political views were not a factor. Barrett has publicly stated that the late Prof. Muhammad Umar Memon (the regular instructor who was on sabbatical in 2006 and served on the hiring committee) and Memon’s secretary told him the administration had ordered the department not to rehire him.

* He was also denied a 300-level English course (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) in the UW-Madison English department in 2007; the university cited stronger candidates.

In January 2008, Barrett filed a discrimination complaint with the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission against both UW-Madison and UW-Whitewater, alleging he had been blacklisted due to his political/9/11 views. He explicitly named then-Dean of Humanities Howard Ross at UW-Whitewater as a witness. According to Barrett’s public accounts (including interviews and his Substack), Ross told him he had been the top finalist for a federally funded tenure-track “Islam and Humanities” position in spring 2006; the hiring committee was overruled by higher administration because of his “screwy views about 9/11,” the university returned a half-million-dollar federal grant, and the position was closed with the claim that no qualified applicant existed. Ross later appeared on Barrett’s radio show as a whistleblower. The complaint also referenced the UW-Madison Islam position denial. The Equal Opportunities Commission noted it lacked jurisdiction over UW System hiring.

Barrett has similarly described being turned down for a comparable federally funded Islam/Humanities position at the University of Illinois in 2007 (position closed, grant returned). Between 2007 and 2010 he applied for numerous academic posts for which he considered himself highly qualified and was almost always rejected—except for a temporary lecturer role at Kaplan University in Milwaukee (roughly 2008–2009), where he says the initial African administrator was unaware of the controversy; after that person left and an American took over, he was told not to reapply once his background was Googled. His CV (public on Academia.edu) reflects limited post-2006 academic teaching.

ma.linkedin.com

In short, the public record shows the UW system respected academic freedom enough to let Barrett finish the Fall 2006 semester amid heavy political pressure (including from politicians and groups such as the ADL), but it does not contradict his claim that subsequent applications were unsuccessful. University spokespeople consistently attributed the denials to other candidates being better qualified; Barrett and named insiders (Memon, Ross) have publicly maintained the decisions were driven by political blacklisting. No independent investigation or court ruling appears to have resolved the competing accounts, and the Equal Opportunities Commission complaint did not proceed on jurisdictional grounds. This context is documented in contemporaneous reporting (Badger Herald, 2007–2008), UW-Madison archives, and Barrett’s own public statements.

The lawyer showed that result and asked “Do you think I can claim that actions against you influenced other professors to not engage in 911 research and opinion?: I responded:

This Grok result is much better, indeed surprisingly good. My only quibble is that I doubt very much that university spokespeople ever claimed that I was turned down at UW-Whitewater or UW-Madison for Islam positions because other applicants were more qualfied. That would be a blatant falsehood, and I doubt they would lie that baldly. At UW-Whitewater, as documented by then-Dean Howard Ross, I was not only unanimously chosen as the best of the three finalists, but that after that choice had been made, the committee learned that the other two applicants had accepted positions eleswhere. So there was no “better qualified applicant” available, and the position was closed and the federal funds returned to Washington because I was deemed politically unacceptable.

Likewise, at UW-Madison, the person hired to teach Introduction to Islam in fall 2007 was a graduate student with little or no prior teaching experience, whereas I was a Ph.D. holder with extensive teaching experience and very high ratings, including for that very class. Muhammad Memon specifically said that I was clearly far more qualified than any other applicants, but that the university administration insisted that I could not be hired due to the national controversy over my 9/11 views.

And regarding the University of Illinois Islam and Humanities position, there was clearly no “better qualified applicant” because that position, like the similar position at UW-Whitewater, was closed and the money returned to Washington, with the excuse that there were “no qualified applicants.”

Please ask Grok to try to find any documentation that any of the three university administrations ever falsely claimed that there were more qualified applicants for any of those three Islamic Studies positions! I doubt very much it will find any. It may find that kind of statement regarding some other position, such as an English Department job I applied for at UW-Madison at some point, but that is irrelevant.

One more thing: Of course actions against me driven by ACTA, the ADL, Fox News, and the Wisconsin Republican Party discouraged other professors from engaging in 9/11 research and activism!!! That was the whole reason they manufactured the scandal in the first place.

Best

Kevin

—-

Jim Hogue interviews Kevin Barrett

Interviewer:Hello, everybody. Here we are again at the house at Pooh Corner with Dr. Kevin Barrett, whom I have known for about 35 years, I would say, on and off since 9/11 happened. We were in the forefront of 9/11 truth, and in a manner of speaking, still are, I guess.

So he’s living in Morocco now and has a wonderful website and a Substack or podcast—do you call it? I can’t remember which is which.

Barrett:Yeah, Substack.

Interviewer:Okay. Do you want to tell people what it is now and then we’ll remind them and hopefully get it up on the screen later?

Barrett:Yeah, sure. It’s kevinbarrett.substack.com. But you can find your way there easily by going to truthjihad.com. And that’s all run together, too—the word “truth” and the word “jihad,” right? So truthjihad.com, and you can find your way to the Substack there.

Interviewer:All right. And, well, let’s just start out with asking Dr. Barrett to tell us how he ended up in Morocco and a little bit about his activism, which has been in the forefront of activism from all my heroes. So go for it, Kevin. Tell us a little about yourself here.

Barrett:Well, thanks, Jim. Yeah, I don’t really think of myself that much as an activist these days. I’m more of an engagé writer. That’s what the French used to call politically impassioned writers, often critics of aspects of their governments and stuff.

I kind of knew I was a writer since high school. I’ve enjoyed humor and satire, as well as other kinds of writing. I ended up studying literature, which is where almost all the good writing is. I collected four advanced degrees in literature—in French, English, African and North African studies, Arabic, and Islamic studies.

So I was an academic. I was thinking that most of my work would be on North African studies and on medieval Moroccan Sufism and things like that. And so there I was at the turn of the millennium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I finished my Ph.D. in 2004.

So I was teaching there, and of course right at the beginning—actually end of 2003—I heard David Ray Griffin was writing a book that would be coming out several months later called The New Pearl Harbor. David Ray Griffin was one of my heroes before that. He was one of the smartest people in religious studies.

What he was doing was not even really religious studies in a normal sense. He was the best guy you could go to to be the arbiter of empirical disputes, often scientific ones. He was a brilliant man. He gained a reputation for being able to host a conference on a very difficult scientific subject—let’s say the Big Bang theory. Is the Big Bang theory correct or not? One group of scientists says yes, one says no.

So David Ray Griffin would put together a seminar at Claremont College of California, and people would come and argue this. He would be able to digest the pertinent arguments on both sides in like six months of intense reading and host the conference and be totally knowledgeable. A really smart guy.

So I knew about him already. And when I heard that he was going to argue that whatever happened at the Pentagon, it wasn’t a hijacked plane, and that the buildings in New York had been blown up with explosives, I said, wow. I mean, I knew 9/11 was kind of fishy, but I didn’t know it was—if David Ray Griffin is saying this, I’d better look into it.

So I looked into it, and sure enough, yeah, it was obvious. I was just shocked—not so much that insiders would do this, but that they would do it so badly and make it so obvious, and then the media would totally cover it up. That was shocking.

I already knew about the JFK assassination problem since high school, so I wasn’t naïve or anything, but still this was pretty shocking. So at that point I started doing info-activism at the University of Wisconsin—teach-ins and things like that—while teaching classes.

I stayed there probably a year or two longer than I normally would have to do that. I just kept teaching religious studies, Intro to Islam, and I think a folklore class, things like that.

So then in 2006 things really were picking up. We’d had some success in the 9/11 Truth movement. I had put together what was at that time the best event for 9/11, which was David Ray Griffin’s talk at the University of Wisconsin in April 2005, which was broadcast on C-SPAN and provided the first big national coverage for 9/11 truth, and very sympathetic coverage.

So I kind of got roped into being one of the people in the 9/11 Truth movement that was notable. And so then in 2006 the pushback happened. They needed to try to demonize the scholars for 9/11 truth, which at that point had rounded up more than 100 professors who were all saying basically what David was saying about 9/11.

So they had to attack somebody, and they picked me. That was probably because I’m Muslim—I converted to Islam in 1994—so that made it easier to demonize me to the Fox News audience. And I didn’t have tenure and I didn’t have any financial security, so I was an easy guy to pick on, they thought.

So they invited me—well, first they got me onto a big mainstream radio show in Wisconsin and kind of ambushed me about what I was going to be teaching in my class that fall. I mentioned that it’s an Intro to Islam class, 16 weeks, only one week is going to be about the War on Terror, and a little bit of that is going to be about 9/11. I’m going to present all the perspectives—the mainstream perspective, the neocon perspective, and the Muslim majority perspective.

And the majority of the world’s Muslims and the majority of Muslims in the United States at that time believed that 9/11 was a false flag, so I was going to include that as one of the perspectives. But when I teach those kinds of things, I wouldn’t be putting my own opinion out there—I’d just be showing what different groups say.

So anyway, I said that on the radio show and they spun that as, “Oh, he’s going to be teaching 9/11 conspiracy theories.” And the next thing you know, the Republicans were calling for me to be fired from my job at the university.

So this scandal broke out in early July 2006, and I was quickly invited onto Fox News to argue with Sean Hannity. And I did, and that went viral. Everybody loved it—truthers, non-truthers, or just bystanders who’d never heard there was even a controversy.

So that made me really toxic. The media descended on the university. My Intro to Islam class that fall, which should have had maybe 20 or 30 students, went up to almost 200. I had to cap it because of the controversy.

CNN and other media outlets spent that whole semester hanging out in my classroom, sometimes filming. And the controversy just kept popping up. I actually milked some of that—I deliberately cited controversies week by week sometimes because I thought the more publicity the issue got, the better.

So I did that for six months, and the university couldn’t fire me because they did a big investigation and found I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. But the Republicans kept pushing, and the controversy lasted six months.

When it was over, I had this internet paper trail, and I was basically unemployable. The day I went on Fox News, the engineering school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison lost more than half a million dollars in canceled contributions. Donors were pulling funding and pressuring the university.

So basically since then I’ve been writing, broadcasting, and becoming an independent critical intellectual—which is what I always thought you were supposed to do in universities, but apparently it doesn’t really work that way.

Interviewer:Well, I was thinking of the different bases that we had both touched along our paths. I had worked a little bit with Dr. Griffin, and he told me that he had written 23 books on religion by the time 9/11 hit. Then he started writing several books about 9/11. He wrote one on Christianity and 9/11—you’ve probably read all of them.

Barrett:Yeah, I own that book. It’s a great book.

Interviewer:Yeah, I have it. And he said that even though it was essentially a religious text on what Christians ought to be doing, his publisher of 23 books refused to publish it. That actually shocked him.

So we’ve been touching base with these entities that have gotten their knickers in a twist because of those of us who have been advocating 9/11 truth. At a certain point along the way, I realized that the final sticking point—and the reason why they always sent a hatchet man in—was because there was a connection with Mossad.

That hit me later, because I didn’t realize that until the dancing Israelis were caught in New Jersey and thrown in jail, and Chertoff got them out and sent them back to Israel. I thought, what other connections could there be?

As I learned more, I realized that if you took too many steps toward the truth of 9/11, you would run into Mossad. Once I realized that, I talked about it with Richard Gage and others. They were hesitant to go near that, but I did get Gage to acknowledge certain details that I had seen.

Now that we have the current level of antagonism, and you’re allowed to talk about some things more openly, I’ve had my own experiences. I got kicked off the air some years ago for criticizing Israel.

That’s part of my experience of running into hostility—nothing like what you went through at the university, but it’s certainly out there. And Stephen Jones—the one who did the thermite work—he got run out of the university as well.

Barrett:Yeah, Steven Jones.

Interviewer:So wherever we got anywhere with it, there were always gatekeepers in the way. And as I said, I finally figured out that you didn’t have to go too far with 9/11 truth to run into that particular issue.

Barrett:Yeah, yeah, I agree. And actually, in September 2001 when it happened, the first thought I had—and this was very common among people in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic—was that Israel would be a major beneficiary.

We all kind of thought that, but we also knew you weren’t really allowed to talk about it in public because of political pressures. So when I looked into it more deeply later, I saw that there was clearly a large-scale domestic cover-up in the United States involving elements of the military, intelligence community, and government.

So it went beyond any one country. But it was also obvious that certain geopolitical outcomes benefited particular actors.

And I think the problem is that people often know things but feel they can’t say them. That leads to self-censorship. When that goes on long enough, it affects how people think.

As Voltaire said, people who believe absurdities commit atrocities.

And we’ve seen a series of wars and destructive policies follow from that. It raises questions about how major geopolitical decisions are made and who benefits from them.

And what’s striking is how a large and powerful country can end up making decisions that seem self-destructive. That’s something people struggle to understand.

And it leads to questions like: how can the world’s most powerful country be influenced in ways that lead it into these kinds of actions—by a much smaller country, a population of what, nine million people, six and a half million Jews?

What’s with that? How can the world’s most powerful country be hijacked by this small, last little settler colonial entity on Earth?

Interviewer:I mean, how did that happen? It’s just very strange. Well, I have a feeling that you have the answer. But before we get to that, I wanted to mention that I’m glad you gave me your perspective from the point of view of those people who were aware of the geopolitics in that region.

Because when I first saw Leslie Clark talk about those seven countries, my conclusion had nothing to do with Israel in my naivete, but I wasn’t totally naive because they all had something else in common, which was they weren’t connected to central banks. They weren’t connected to the Western banking debt money system. In fact, it was considered a sin, right? In the Muslim world, it was considered usury.

Barrett:Yeah, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I would have to look more closely at the details of every one of those seven countries.

Interviewer:Oh, yeah. Okay. I’m just confessing that that’s where my mind went, was that it had to do with the banking system, because if you look at the, you know, the French got all wigged out about it, the British certainly, the City of London, and they seem to be all on board with these seven countries.

And I couldn’t think of why other than they had given the bird to that central banking system. And so I’m glad that you have said that there was at least a geopolitical coterie of people who realized right from the get-go that it was Israel who was benefiting, and now I can make certain connections.

Having heard what you just said, now I can make certain connections, and relating that to the banking world as well.

So can we leap to, maybe our listeners will either forgive us or enjoy what we think is happening right now, and why that is an example, a carry-through, if you will, of the 9-11 attacks?

So many things have happened since 9-11 that point to someone like Netanyahu and his gang behind them that for years, again, we’re not allowed to mention that. And if I mentioned it on the radio, I would get calls, well, why would you say that? They aren’t killing that many people in Gaza. It’s not a genocide. They’re not killing enough people. I got all this crap from people who just wouldn’t admit what was happening.

But now I’m happy to say it’s out, you know, if Tucker Carlson making a big deal of it and being attacked viciously, supposedly you wrote the article, you just wrote a piece about it about him being attacked by the FBI for supporting America.

It’s out, and you’re allowed to talk about it. And so where do you think we’re gonna go, given that it’s out, especially now that Israel doesn’t have any water as of last night?

Barrett:Well, I haven’t looked into the details of the desalination plants that are being hit by Iranian rocket fire, so I’m not up on that.

But in terms of where we are, in terms of this 9/11 war on the countries that are a problem for Israel, well, yeah, they’re finally going after country number seven on the list, which is Iran. Iran was always number seven, the last and most important. And that’s what General Clark heard, that Iran was the last on the list.

And they originally intended it to be seven countries in five years. That’s what they told Clark. And clearly they’re way behind schedule in terms of Iran anyway.

So why is that? And I think the answer is, of course, partly that the people of Iraq bravely fought back. And all the people of Afghanistan put up a good fight. So there’s been resistance to this project.

But I think that the single biggest reason that it took them 25 years instead of five years to get around to trying to destroy Iran is that what happened was that the neocons, who are 100% Israel firsters, were perfectly happy to destroy the United States. They could care less about it. They hate the United States, actually.

Netanyahu hates the United States. He was recorded at Fink’s bar in Jerusalem saying something like, oh, we hate America, and we’re going to just squeeze it dry and then throw it away, and so on and so forth. Well, that quote is actually authentic. If you Google it on the Internet, they’ll tell you that it’s not a real quote or a documented quote. But I actually talked to the guy who recorded it, Colonel Jim Henke, who was a U.S. military attaché in Israel at the time, and he recorded Netanyahu saying that. And he confirmed to me, I spoke to him on Skype, he confirmed to me that it was authentic.

So anyway, yeah, the extreme neocons, the Netanyahu wing, those people hate the United States.

So what happened after 9-11 was that you had those people who were the really hardcore messianic millenarian nut job Israel firsters. And then you had the realists within the American foreign policy establishment who didn’t really get the memo that these crazy genocidal Israeli maniacs run everything now, right?

So those people, the realists, they said, yeah, they looked into it and they said, wait a minute, I mean, we just ran this huge war games exercise Millennium Challenge in like 2002 or whatever, and it showed that Iran wins. We can’t, the U.S. cannot wage war against Iran, we’ll lose.

They’ve got all these ways that they could defend themselves. You know, it’s a natural fortress. They’ve got that control, you know, they’ve got a great spot overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, and they can use all kinds of unconventional techniques to pin us down and basically thwart anything that we do.

So that was the result of the Millennium Challenge exercise. General Van Riper, maybe he was a colonel, whatever he was, Van Riper ran the Iranian side and he won.

And so in the wake of that and other similar analyses, the realists in the American foreign policy establishment determined that an American war on Iran would be suicide for the United States. And even if they liked Israel, some of those people actually were pro-Israel, very strongly pro-Israel people, but they recognized that destroying the United States, having Iran defeat the United States, would not be good for Israel either. It wouldn’t be good for anybody.

So they pushed back. And so the crazies kept trying to get America to run. And then the not quite so crazies kept pushing back against it.

And this came to a head in 2007, when the crazies had a toehold in Dick Cheney’s office, and they were plotting a false flag. They were going to sink an American ship in the Persian Gulf off Bahrain, and they were going to blame the Iranians and their proxies in the region. And that was going to launch a big U.S. attack on Iran.

Gwyneth Todd, who is the top advisor to the admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, heard about this and was horrified. And so she leaked it to the Security Council. She’d been on the National Security Council before that. She leaked it to some National Security Council people.

They, of course, were, like her, horrified. And so they pulled the plug on those people who were going to do that. But Gwyneth Todd then ended up with, you know, she had to flee for her life. And she was married to an Australian military officer, and she had to basically disappear to the Australian outback in the protection of her military officer husband.

And as last I heard, she’s still been living out there, and, you know, she’s gotten some death threats. She had a rattlesnake in her mailbox once.

Anyway, but she actually stopped what would have been a war in Iran in 2007. And if you Google around, you’ll find some interesting stuff, Washington Post article about this and stuff. It doesn’t quite give you the straight story that I just gave you.

But anyway, so they’ve been pushing for this war in Iran forever. And again, the crazies want to do it because they’re crazy, and then the knowledgeable people say, no, this is suicidal, we can’t do that.

And I’d like to remind people—

Interviewer:Trump was groomed to be crazy.

Barrett:Yeah.

Interviewer:Oh, yeah.

Barrett:Well, he’s a diehard, supposedly he’s a diehard Zionist because he’s admitted it. I mean, he has said it. And he’s been around people who are Israel firsters. So we know that.

Interviewer:I wanted to say the word “crazies.” This is not a word that Dr. Barrett has invented. This is a word that the CIA used to refer to the hardcore neocons, right?

Barrett:Well, I thought it was actually G. H.W. Bush who talked about the neocons being the crazies in the basement, right?

Interviewer:Yes, yes. But I meant everybody used that term. I’m not saying—it’s not a conspiracy theorist term. It’s a term that everybody in Washington used to refer to people like, you know, the gang, Wolfowitz and…

And Ray McGovern always referred to them—I met Ray shortly after 9-11—and he referred to them as the crazies.

So that is who was more influential than many over the years, and they’re still—they won. I mean, they won.

Barrett:Yeah, and it’s funny. They couldn’t do it during Trump’s first term. They tried. They were hoping that killing Soleimani would start a war with Iran, and only great Iranian restraint prevented that.

And then when they got Trump back into office in 2024, I think they managed to surround him with even goofier people than they had in his first term.

And so, you know, Trump’s got like Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic, former Fox News host covered with tattoos. And just listen to that guy. I mean, I’m surprised he was smart enough to even be on Fox, which, you know, isn’t saying that much.

And then Witkoff and Kushner. I mean, those two, you know, those are like, you know, just, you know, New York Jewish slumlords.

A couple of New York Jewish slumlords who belong to Chabad Lubavitch, which is a psychotic end of the world Jewish extremist cult that wants to basically blow everything up so that the Messiah will come and conquer the world for the Jews.

This is a bizarre cult, messianic cult, Chabad Lubavitch. And both Kushner and Witkoff have no credentials whatsoever to be even negotiating on behalf of the local dog pound.

They’re just slumlords. They’re a couple of mafiosi Jewish slumlords. The only reason they have money is because they’re willing to do scummy things, and then they have this ethnic network of criminals to help support them.

So that’s why these sub-two-digit IQ people are able to make a lot of money, people like Kushner and Witkoff.

And so Trump, who’s himself not the brightest bulb in the pack, to say the least, appoints those two guys and guys like Hegseth. They’ve got like a quorum of these morons, just total morons, and Trump being one himself.

And so that’s how they got the quorum here to go ahead and commit national suicide by attacking Iran.

And so here we are, and this is probably gonna end the U.S. empire and create untold economic havoc ultimately in the United States as well as elsewhere.

And when the smoke clears, that’s all she wrote for the U.S. petrodollar.

And so I think people might want to be putting some of their savings into gold, silver, and possibly Chinese currency at this point.

Interviewer:I remember I wrote to you not long ago as though I were Trump. And I said, well, give me a break. My whole life, all my friends have been villains and thieves. And at my time of life, I should start turning over new leaves, which is a line from Oliver.

So that those people who think that Trump appeared out of nowhere—well, if you read Whitney Webb’s books, he was surrounded by Cohn. What was Cohn’s first name? Roy Cohn.

Barrett:Yeah.

Interviewer:Roy Cohn and that gang of thieves that kept him afloat.

Barrett:Yeah, and the rest of the real estate mob and the professional wrestling mob. That was Trump’s gang. Epstein, of course, was one of them.

Interviewer:And so why would you expect a lot more? I expected a lot more from Trump, I admit, because the mainstream went after him. That’s enough reason for me.

And the Democrats told all these lies about him—Russia, Russia, Russia. They threw the kitchen sink at him to get you to believe whatever they wanted you to believe about him.

And they tried to throw him in jail. They tried to take all his money. And I said, well, the guy must be okay if the mainstream is doing that to him.

Barrett:Yeah, there were moments when I thought along those lines too. But I think in retrospect, it’s pretty clear that a lot of the bad publicity that Trump was getting was actually, you know, so bad it’s good.

And it was designed to be so bad it’s good. That is, the way they went after him, I think, to some extent, some of it was calibrated in such a way as to help him rather than hurt him.

If they want to hurt you, they can. There are ways that… well, for instance…

Just one really obvious thing is that when Trump ran in 2016, the story of his rape of 13-year-old Katie was totally out there. She did her deposition, I think, in 2015. I think it was even before Trump was elected, as I recall.

She filed the lawsuit against Trump. She was an Epstein sex slave and Trump just brutally raped her. And that story is 100% credible.

Now the Epstein files have basically confirmed it. There’s a lot more information now that’s come out, that there were corroboratory witnesses, that the FBI took it very seriously and so on.

So that was all there back in 2015, and for some reason that never got any play in the mainstream media.

So rather, you know, the mainstream media did, you know, said, oh, he said something about grab them by their whatever, their private parts, do this.

You know, the mainstream media went after Trump in these areas where it actually wasn’t going to kill him with the people who were going to vote for him.

Had they gone full bore after Katie’s story, two things would happen. One, she and all of the witnesses and the FBI people would all end up dead. That’s possible.

But more likely, I think Trump’s whole campaign would have been taken down.

But the people who run and own the mainstream media in the United States are Jewish Zionist billionaires. And they’re acting in a coordinated fashion to a certain extent. And they do exert a certain amount of control about what the people employed in their organizations are allowed to go after.

And so they can say, no, no, Katie, forget Katie, this other stuff. OK.

And so even the most ferocious anti-Trump person working for, say, The New York Times has to keep that in mind and like, OK, well, I’ll just yell and scream at Trump about these other things, about this, that, and the other. But I guess I can’t do this Katie thing. Management is saying don’t go there for whatever reason, and I’ll be fired or worse.

And so, you know, I think the media is not genuinely as anti-Trump as it appears to be.

Interviewer:OK, well, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I always said that the Democrats have a lot on Trump if they want to use it. And they didn’t.

And I’m thinking, OK, you’ve got Russiagate, you’ve got these fake lawsuits, you’ve got everything. So why don’t they actually do something that could hurt him?

And you have just explained why that is and how it worked.

And I did understand how The New York Times is—I wrote a piece about that for Three Sages, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.

Barrett:Yeah, yeah, sure.

Interviewer:And I explained what happens when The New York Times says something and to whom are they speaking, to whom is The New York Times speaking when it writes something.

And I explained Congress, influencers around the country, and why everybody says exactly the same thing, you know, all the talking heads where they say exactly the same thing. They get their permission from The New York Times.

And what you said about the initial lies about 9/11, they were so obvious to me that anybody with half a brain at least could see that.

Like the passport that fell on the ground—stuff like that. I finally figured out that it was to inform Congress and everybody on their important influencer list that yes, 9/11 was a false flag, but don’t mention it.

If they’re pushing the passport thing and a few of the other lies that were so obvious, it’s to inform people what they are supposed to be thinking and what they are supposed to be saying and what they are supposed to be doing, because they were such obvious lies.

Barrett:Yeah, yeah. I got the sense that, for instance, Senator Barbara Boxer, who was one of the senior senators in the United States after 9/11, actually totally knew the score.

I got her to say something outrageous on Wisconsin Public Radio in, I think it was 2005. That was when Anthony Schaeffer was studying the Able Danger scandal, which was that military intelligence had identified these guys that were later blamed as supposed 9/11 hijackers.

They identified them long before 9/11.

Interviewer:Yes.

Barrett:Including Muhammad Atta. And so Colonel Anthony Schaeffer, who was going to go after those guys, was then told not to. He said, put a yellow sticky over his face on your chart, on your wall, and forget that you ever heard of Muhammad Atta. He was told that ahead of 9/11. So this scandal was breaking. Anyway, I called up Wisconsin Public Radio when Barbara Boxer was being interviewed, and I said, “Senator Boxer, you may have heard of this Abel Danger scandal involving the alleged 9/11 hijackers who had access to secure US military facilities in Florida and other states, who were regular guests at the Officers Club—I forget which military base—who were given access to large amounts of cash and cocaine by parties unknown, partied on Jack Abramoff’s casino boats, and so on. And so, given what we know about these hijackers, do you support Congressman Weldon’s push for a new investigation of Able Danger?”

Interviewer: And then Barbara Boxer said?

Dr. Barrett: She said, “Well, what you just said, it’s not what the 9/11 Commission said, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

Interviewer: You mean, you mean, well, you said Weldon?

Dr. Barrett: Weldon—Kurt Weldon was the congressman who was threatening to investigate Able Danger and then was later railroaded out of Congress for it. So she said, “Yeah, that’s not what the 9/11 Commission said, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. My first priority is to end the war in Iraq, and then we need a real investigation of 9/11.” So that floored me. I wrote that up and stuff. So yeah, I think she obviously knew.

Later, this was confirmed by Four Arrows, a.k.a. Don Jacobs, who was a professor in Arizona who, like me, sort of ended up run out of the country because he was telling the truth about 9/11 or seeking the truth. He had a friend who was a senior advisor to Senator Boxer, and he also wrote a book along with Jim Fetzer on the assassination of Paul Wellstone. Barbara Boxer at one point told this guy, a friend of Four Arrows who was her advisor, she turned to her advisor and said, “You know, you tell your friend that he doesn’t know how right he is about Wellstone. They killed Wellstone, and that was a message to us all. Please don’t quote me, because if I’m quoted, I will have to deny this.”

The last line in one of the chapters I wrote in the book I’m writing now, my sequel to RAC, was: note to self: avoid trips in small planes. Right, because there are a lot of them. Well, Wellstone—that was really very nasty, right? Wellstone was pushing, you know, he was a 9/11 skeptic, and he was right out front about trying to block the Iraq war. And they murdered him. They took his plane down and killed him, his wife, his daughter, and his entire campaign staff.

They went after Cynthia McKinney, but they didn’t kill her because they didn’t have to. Sometimes they just get you thrown out of Congress. Maybe that’s because they were plotting to kill her and something went wrong, and they didn’t get the shot at her. So plan B went into effect. I think, like with Kennedy—you know, I don’t know if you probably read the wonderful book by James Douglas, The Assassination. I interviewed him. He points out that they were going to shoot at Kennedy in Miami. They had a plan to kill him in Miami, and then that got called off because they didn’t have all their pieces in place. Then they had Dallas next, and then Chicago. If he survived Dallas, or if they had to hold the plug on the Dallas shoot, then they were going to get him in Chicago. That’s how they do these things—they have all of these contingency plans.

So the fact that Cynthia McKinney happens to be alive and Paul Wellstone happens to be dead is partly because Wellstone was a bigger threat. But it could also be that they just got lucky with Wellstone. Everything fell into place, and they were able to do it. Maybe they were planning to try to get Cynthia at some point, but they never got their pieces in place. The cost-benefit ratio never rose to the level they wanted. The press did its job, so they didn’t have to kill her. The press made her look stupid. It was easier for them to bribe some Capitol security guard to start a fight with her. They made her look like a crazy person from their point of view, so they didn’t have to kill her. What they did was bribe some security guard at the Capitol to attack her physically. If she fought back, then they put out the story that she had supposedly attacked the security guard.

I met her here; I interviewed Cynthia McKinney a couple of times. I didn’t interview Paul Wellstone, but his son is—what’s the matter with me? The senator from Texas, Ron Paul. I interviewed Ron Paul a couple of times. He balked, of course, at 9/11 Truth, but he congratulated us, those of us working on it. I thought that was a nice touch. A lot of these people know that 9/11 Truth is the third rail. So either they don’t talk about it, or if they do, they’re pretty vague and back up a little bit. They try to avoid saying anything too hardcore.

The big people who say the really hardcore things—I’ve noticed the most illustrious scientist who has really questioned the official story of 9/11 is Lynn Margulis. She was the National Medal of Science winner, the single biggest force in revising Darwinian evolutionary theory. In the past 20–30 years, there’s been a big revision, and she was the spearhead who actually won this scientific fight. She’s huge, one of the most important scientists of the modern era. She looked into 9/11 and figured it out very quickly. She was a smart cookie. She put out statements saying things like, “This was the most successful and most perverse public relations stunt in all of history. If this stands, science is dead. If people believe this story of how these buildings fell down, science is dead.” Those are basically quotes from her. Then she died suddenly. I’m a little suspicious, but who knows.

The more important people like Wellstone, maybe Lynn Margulis, I think are in more physical danger. Jimmy Walter, a multimillionaire who spent millions on 9/11 Truth publicity, had his residence vandalized and was threatened, so he fled the country. He’s been living in Vienna ever since. He was a serious target because he had money and was spending it on 9/11 Truth. That made him more of a threat than someone like me with no money. Wellstone was more of a threat than McKinney.

I went to one of his conferences in New York City and asked some attorneys about how the court system had been rigged against getting near 9/11 Truth. He explained the system by which attorneys on both sides had to agree that the 9/11 attacks caused Building 7 to collapse. It was because of debris from the Twin Towers that hit Building 7 and also damaged the church next to it. So the lie—the legal fiction—starts the lawsuit. You begin with a legal fiction and carry on from there. They couldn’t allow the lawsuit to even start if it involved the truth of how Building 7 collapsed because it would go where they didn’t want it to go.

Interviewer: Now I had another question for you about Alexander Dugin. We’ve got eight minutes left, and I know you’ve been reading him recently. What do you think of his explanation about why we are basically in World War III? He says the attack on Iran is creating World War III, the difference between the unipolar world and the multipolar world, why the U.S. is now—everyone thought Trump was a multipolar guy because he said he was, then he became a unipolar guy—and whether he was led by Israel or worked it out with Israel, now he’s unipolar. That means the U.S. gets to do whatever it wants, and international law is gone. Dugin talks about all that. Can you comment?

Dr. Barrett: I met Alexander Dugin at a conference in Tehran maybe seven or eight years ago. I talked to him after the panel discussion. We had a long conversation about how we both had been influenced by René Guénon, the founder of traditionalism. So we had a lot in common philosophically. I think, like a lot of people, he took too rosy a view of Trump for quite some time, thinking Trump was a multipolar guy. I don’t think Trump ever was. He just said he was. Even so, I think Trump is kind of an idiot who’s basically an idiot savant—he has political instincts far better than his intellect. But his policies, the so-called America First policies, are really neoconservative.

The neocons are Machiavellian, Hobbesian realists, not exactly realists in the sense of Mearsheimer. These people are students of evil, which is how Leo Strauss, the founder of neoconservatism, described himself. He said he was a teacher of evil. He deliberately corrupted his students to take the side of evil. They believe that the strong rules, there’s no such thing as goodness, all forms of morality are just fictions for the stupid rubes. And we—the superior people, in some cases the Jews—are the people who understand that most evil wins. Netanyahu recently said Genghis Khan has it over Jesus. Genghis Khan wins; Jesus loses. That’s their philosophy. They believe in evil and want to be the most evil guy on the block and take over everything, get as much power as they can. They want to take over the world.

These neocons have always known, as they say, that the best thing for Israel is for the United States to be totally taken over by the partisans of Israel and then for the U.S. to be the strongest country on the block. That way they take over the world. Their plan is not for a multipolar UN entity to rule the world for the Rothschilds. No, their plan is for the strongest guy to militarily conquer the world. The strongest guy for them has been the U.S. They own the U.S. The Jewish billionaire Zionist cartel dominates the U.S. more than any other country. They want to use U.S. military power to crush resistance. Some see their project as an American empire-run world; some as a Jewish empire-run world; some as an Israeli empire-run world. But it’s the same thing. Trump has always been a tool of those people. They brag about getting us to do their dirty work. We’re the goyim cattle, the subhumans. They think we’re stupid because we believe in morality, goodness, justice.

I used to berate my audience because they didn’t realize how evil these people were. They thought they were making mistakes. I’ve said this a million times: The Vietnam War was not a mistake for these people. COVID, all these awful things—they’re not mistakes. This is how they control, survive, win. That’s part of their plan. I wouldn’t say all of it, though. We shouldn’t overestimate their intelligence or omnipotence. A lot of them are pretty stupid. Netanyahu isn’t particularly intelligent. Jeffrey Epstein may have been intelligent in an IQ sense but had failures of perception. The people he worked with weren’t super brilliant. It’s sort of an accident of history that these people have been as successful as they’ve been. They can be beaten. Hamas just beat Israel with almost nothing. Hezbollah is beating Israel again. Iran, with a military budget one one-hundredth of the U.S., is beating the U.S. This war is really stupid from their perspective.

We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that everything is part of their diabolical plot. They screw up a lot. But they can be beaten. We need to recognize that they’re not just evil—they’re also pretty stupid, especially the ones around Trump. Let’s go ahead and beat them. We can.

My point isn’t that they always won. My point is that behind them is an evil motive. Vietnam, which I lived through, was not a mistake for them. It was a mistake only in that they didn’t achieve everything they wanted. But the fact that it went on a long time and killed a lot of people was not a mistake. Vietnam was partly a distraction from the 1967 Israeli war of expansion. That’s one reason the Israelis killed the Kennedys and put Johnson in power—to prepare for their war of expansion, first to get nukes because Kennedy was stopping them, second to have the U.S. on board for the 1967 war of expansion. To distract from that, they whipped up all this hysteria around Vietnam. That’s why they pushed us into Vietnam. Johnson didn’t really want Vietnam but protected Israel from the USS Liberty attack.

Steve Green was a friend of mine. He wrote the book on it, Taking Sides. That’s called Chapter First, the whole thing.

Interviewer: We only have about 30 seconds left. This wonderful information comes from Dr. Kevin Barrett, now happily living in Morocco. He’s a scholar, a philosopher. We didn’t get into all the other cool stuff about your bird book.

Dr. Barrett: Yeah, it’s April Fool’s Day. I just published a humorous book of bird nonsense poetry. You can find it via truthjihad.com. Go to my Substack.

Interviewer: Okay, and hopefully we’ll have that on. Thank you again for listening. Today was a straight hour, which is rare. We’ll be up again in two weeks, and you’ll see it on BitChute and wherever Dr. Barrett wants to put it.

Dr. Barrett: Okay, bye-bye.

Interviewer: Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com