Truth Jihad Radio

Chicago-based journalist AJ Smuskiewicz recently doubled down on his May 2023 article “Why I’m for Kennedy” with the new “Why I’m Still for Kennedy.” While admitting Kennedy is “wrong on Gaza” (understatement of the century) AJ says RFK Jr. is articulate and intelligent, right about a lot of things, and not as long of a long shot as the media would like you to believe.

I see AJ’s point. Compared to the likes of Biden and Trump, RFK Jr. looks pretty good. AJ says “I’m not going to reject a candidate because I disagree—even strongly disagree—with him on one issue (Gaza).” But is Gaza just “one issue” among many? Or is the most transparent genocide in history a whole lot more than that? Isn’t the real issue, for Americans, America’s complicity in that genocide? And isn’t that complicity the outcome of neocon (Jewish-Zionist) occupation of the USA? And isn’t that occupation, which began with Israel’s murder of JFK and RFK and reached fruition with the Jewish State’s demolition of the World Trade Center on 9/11, by far the most important issue of our time?

Extract from the interview:

AJ Smuskiewicz: I probably would not disagree too much with your previous guest (Alan Sabrosky) in the sense that I am quite a pessimist regarding America's future, especially all the nonsense that we've experienced with the past few years with the COVID lockdowns and the censorship and the rigging of the election. I am quite a pessimist actually.

I was a big supporter of Trump and I still like Trump in a lot of ways, but I was disappointed in him in many other ways, mainly because of the idiots that he surrounds himself with, like his son-in-law and Bolton and Pompeo.

And the Democrats are just become totally hopeless. They used to be the party of the working class and the party of peace back in the seventies. And I was a kid and now they've become just as big war mongers, if not worse than the Republicans. And they're the party of the Hollywood and Wall Street elites.

So when I, when I saw Kennedy come around last year, he initially said a lot of things that I found very refreshing. I never heard anyone articulate so clearly and intelligently what I consider the core problem of this country right now: This corrupt merger of state and corporate power, which Mussolini defined as fascism.

And the other thing that he articulated very clearly and intelligently was the problem of the military industrial complex and the war machine, which is causing all of these endless wars all over the world. It’s the last gasp of the dying empire is how I look at it.

I consider those key issues, as well as many other things he's talked about that I guess we could get into. I know he probably most likely has no chance of winning. But the most useful purpose of a third party or an independent run for any offices to raise awareness of issues even if he does not win. Just like Cornell West, he is raising important issues.

And I support, really, any third party or independent candidate for any office. I don't think people should ever vote for Republicans or Democrats. Again, they're the same thing. At least if you show support for an independent candidate, whether it's a West or Kennedy or Jill Stein or whoever else might be running, you're rejecting the system and you're trying to draw public attention to these issues. And that in itself, I think is a useful endeavor.

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

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

I just Googled “Quds Day,” which was yesterday. Though millions of people in dozens of countries rallied for Palestine and against Zionism, I couldn’t find any Western mainstream media stories. Instead, I got a long list of non-Western outlets: Al-Jazeera, CGTN, Xinhua, Al-Mayadin, Press TV…

And speaking of Press TV, here is a rough transcript my interview, alongside Shabbir Rizvi, during rolling coverage of Quds Day protests.

-KB

Welcome to another edition of the News Review. In this edition, people across the world have taken part in the international Quds Day rallies taking to the streets as Israel continues its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. Protesters across Iran waved Palestinian flags and condemned the Israeli regime for its crimes in the besieged territory. The participants also slammed the U.S. over its support for Tel Aviv. Iranians called on the international community to take action and stop the onslaught in Gaza. Protesters also demanded an end to Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestine.

International Quds Day was also observed in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where hundreds of Palestinian refugees attended the ceremony. The attendees also saluted the parading resistance fighters elsewhere in Yemen and Sana'a. They reaffirmed their unwavering support for Palestine in another Million Man March. Pakistan and Bahrain were also among those West Asian countries that held nationwide rallies. Jordanians also staged a massive protest in the city of Erbid, which they called Friday of Anger. They fully rejected the Arab country's normalization agreements with Israel.

Rallies have also been held in several other countries across the world, including in London, Tanzania, India, Malaysia and Nigeria.

International Quds Day was established by the late founder of Iran's Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, in 1979. It aims to maintain and raise awareness about the plight of the Palestinian people and their struggle. It is held on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in most countries and on the last Sunday of the month in some others.

To discuss the significance of International Quds Day, we have with us Shabir Rizvi, political commentator, who's joining us live from Chicago. We are also joined by Kevin Barrett, political commentator, who is joining us live from Morocco. Thank you very much to both of you gentlemen. Let's begin with Mr. Shabir Rizvi. Tell us about the international Quds Day rallies. When are they going to be held in the U.S.? Is it going to be on Sunday or was it today? And what is the significance of these rallies, particularly at this point in time?

Shabbir Rizvi: That's a great question. The rallies are starting now. As you can see behind me, I am in Chicago. This rally is just getting started. We are actually in front of the Zionist consulate here, which gives us a good opportunity to make our voices heard, to make our discourse heard. Chicago has a large Palestinian community, one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States. So we will have this demonstration today. Then we have it tomorrow. And then Joe Biden is actually coming here Monday. And so we plan to demonstrate then.

I would say something that's very different about the United States as opposed to more other countries is that there's a heavy police presence here. You can't see it in my camera, but on the other side, there are a lot of cops. To the opposite of me, there are a lot of cops, and there's a line of cops protecting the Zionist consulate, which is over there. And it just really goes to show you how many people are pouring into the streets of the fruits of the Islamic revolution that was started by Imam Khomeini and the cause of Quds Day and how it's become international to the point of even being on American soil attended by thousands of people in the very heart of America, in the very Midwest. It just goes to show how popular the Palestinian cause is.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rizvi. Let's bring in Mr. Kevin Barrett. So in your opinion, considering the Israeli atrocities, the nonstop bombardment despite UN resolutions, several UN resolutions demanding a ceasefire, why the Israeli regime continues these atrocities, and how significant is international Quds State under these circumstances?

Kevin Barrett: It was founded many, many decades ago because the Zionist entity is now in a death spiral. They are unable to accomplish any of their military goals. All they are able to do is mass murder civilians, women, children, and then the aid workers who are trying to feed them. All they can do is try to exterminate a civilian population in the most transparent act of genocide in all of human history. And this is utterly demolishing any legitimacy that they may have enjoyed in the eyes of any substantial portion of the world's population.

So this year, Quds Day is happening under the shadow of this transparent genocide that is taking Israel down. And it's really a testament to the faith of the Palestinians and their supporters around the world, and the courage of the Palestinians who've been standing against this onslaught, not only against Palestine, but the Zionist genocide of Palestine is also an all-out war against the entire world of Islam, and to a lesser extent, the world of Christianity as well.

This Holy Land is holy to all of the major Abrahamic religions, We have 3 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims. That's a clear majority of the world's population. A tiny handful of Jews, 15 million with an M, who believe that their tribal god gave them this land and they have the right to commit genocide, to come and steal it after thousands of years. It's utterly ludicrous.

And this war of extermination against the Palestinians and this war to desecrate the Holy Land, has gone on long enough. It is the responsibility and the duty of all Muslims and Christians to stand against this genocidal attack on the Holy Land, and Quds Day gets that right.

Quds Day was a brilliant move to put in the foreground the religious duty of all God-fearing people to do the right thing and stand against the forces of the satanic dajjal forces of Zionism.

It is a religious issue, this is a religious war, it's a war of satanic offshoot of the religion of Judaism, that is Zionism, which idolatrously worships themselves. It's a cosmic narcissism, and they have gone into the Holy Land to spill vast amounts of blood in hopes that that will somehow trigger the coming of someone they call their messiah. And the Zionist messiah obviously would be the Antichrist or Dajjal.

This is a religious issue. And Quds Day has put the religious dimension of this conflict front and center, and as the Zionists head towards Armageddon with their utter lunacy, this mass, meaningless mass slaughters of civilians, we're reaching the point where this criterion between good and evil becomes absolutely clear to the entire world.

Thank you very much. And Mr. Rizvi, before I say goodbye, I can see that you're providing us with first-hand footage of this International Quds Day rally, which is going to take place in Chicago. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to see what's going on there in Chicago. But could you please also compare this year's rally with previous years and the number of people in terms of the number of people who are taking part in.

Shabbir Rizvi: Yeah, that's a great question. I've been coming to Cook's today at this very location for at least six years now. I've never seen a crowd like this. We are numbering in the thousands. There is a plan to actually march downtown to the city. And I think really this is how all of this is going to be done is—Now there's a police helicopter flying above us. We have never seen a police helicopter. It's the first time we're seeing it. You can take that as a sign of just how popular the Palestinian cause is and just how afraid the ruling class of the United States is. In fact, they're sending all their police mercenaries, they're sending their cops, they're sending Zionists to spy on us and take pictures of us.

They're afraid, and they're afraid of the change that's coming. And the order of events that have started, the cycle of events that started since October 7th is irreversible. The world has changed forever. The plight of the Palestinians has changed forever. And it's looking like from where I'm standing, the Palestinian cause will prevail and Zionism will be eliminated.

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

I just Googled “Quds Day,” which was yesterday. Though millions of people in dozens of countries rallied for Palestine and against Zionism, I couldn’t find any Western mainstream media stories. Instead, I got a long list of non-Western outlets: Al-Jazeera, CGTN, Xinhua, Al-Mayadin, Press TV…

And speaking of Press TV, here is a rough transcript my interview, alongside Shabbir Rizvi, during rolling coverage of Quds Day protests.

-KB

Welcome to another edition of the News Review. In this edition, people across the world have taken part in the international Quds Day rallies taking to the streets as Israel continues its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. Protesters across Iran waved Palestinian flags and condemned the Israeli regime for its crimes in the besieged territory. The participants also slammed the U.S. over its support for Tel Aviv. Iranians called on the international community to take action and stop the onslaught in Gaza. Protesters also demanded an end to Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestine.

International Quds Day was also observed in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where hundreds of Palestinian refugees attended the ceremony. The attendees also saluted the parading resistance fighters elsewhere in Yemen and Sana'a. They reaffirmed their unwavering support for Palestine in another Million Man March. Pakistan and Bahrain were also among those West Asian countries that held nationwide rallies. Jordanians also staged a massive protest in the city of Erbid, which they called Friday of Anger. They fully rejected the Arab country's normalization agreements with Israel.

Rallies have also been held in several other countries across the world, including in London, Tanzania, India, Malaysia and Nigeria.

International Quds Day was established by the late founder of Iran's Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, in 1979. It aims to maintain and raise awareness about the plight of the Palestinian people and their struggle. It is held on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in most countries and on the last Sunday of the month in some others.

To discuss the significance of International Quds Day, we have with us Shabir Rizvi, political commentator, who's joining us live from Chicago. We are also joined by Kevin Barrett, political commentator, who is joining us live from Morocco. Thank you very much to both of you gentlemen. Let's begin with Mr. Shabir Rizvi. Tell us about the international Quds Day rallies. When are they going to be held in the U.S.? Is it going to be on Sunday or was it today? And what is the significance of these rallies, particularly at this point in time?

Shabbir Rizvi: That's a great question. The rallies are starting now. As you can see behind me, I am in Chicago. This rally is just getting started. We are actually in front of the Zionist consulate here, which gives us a good opportunity to make our voices heard, to make our discourse heard. Chicago has a large Palestinian community, one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States. So we will have this demonstration today. Then we have it tomorrow. And then Joe Biden is actually coming here Monday. And so we plan to demonstrate then.

I would say something that's very different about the United States as opposed to more other countries is that there's a heavy police presence here. You can't see it in my camera, but on the other side, there are a lot of cops. To the opposite of me, there are a lot of cops, and there's a line of cops protecting the Zionist consulate, which is over there. And it just really goes to show you how many people are pouring into the streets of the fruits of the Islamic revolution that was started by Imam Khomeini and the cause of Quds Day and how it's become international to the point of even being on American soil attended by thousands of people in the very heart of America, in the very Midwest. It just goes to show how popular the Palestinian cause is.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rizvi. Let's bring in Mr. Kevin Barrett. So in your opinion, considering the Israeli atrocities, the nonstop bombardment despite UN resolutions, several UN resolutions demanding a ceasefire, why the Israeli regime continues these atrocities, and how significant is international Quds State under these circumstances?

Kevin Barrett: It was founded many, many decades ago because the Zionist entity is now in a death spiral. They are unable to accomplish any of their military goals. All they are able to do is mass murder civilians, women, children, and then the aid workers who are trying to feed them. All they can do is try to exterminate a civilian population in the most transparent act of genocide in all of human history. And this is utterly demolishing any legitimacy that they may have enjoyed in the eyes of any substantial portion of the world's population.

So this year, Quds Day is happening under the shadow of this transparent genocide that is taking Israel down. And it's really a testament to the faith of the Palestinians and their supporters around the world, and the courage of the Palestinians who've been standing against this onslaught, not only against Palestine, but the Zionist genocide of Palestine is also an all-out war against the entire world of Islam, and to a lesser extent, the world of Christianity as well.

This Holy Land is holy to all of the major Abrahamic religions, We have 3 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims. That's a clear majority of the world's population. A tiny handful of Jews, 15 million with an M, who believe that their tribal god gave them this land and they have the right to commit genocide, to come and steal it after thousands of years. It's utterly ludicrous.

And this war of extermination against the Palestinians and this war to desecrate the Holy Land, has gone on long enough. It is the responsibility and the duty of all Muslims and Christians to stand against this genocidal attack on the Holy Land, and Quds Day gets that right.

Quds Day was a brilliant move to put in the foreground the religious duty of all God-fearing people to do the right thing and stand against the forces of the satanic dajjal forces of Zionism.

It is a religious issue, this is a religious war, it's a war of satanic offshoot of the religion of Judaism, that is Zionism, which idolatrously worships themselves. It's a cosmic narcissism, and they have gone into the Holy Land to spill vast amounts of blood in hopes that that will somehow trigger the coming of someone they call their messiah. And the Zionist messiah obviously would be the Antichrist or Dajjal.

This is a religious issue. And Quds Day has put the religious dimension of this conflict front and center, and as the Zionists head towards Armageddon with their utter lunacy, this mass, meaningless mass slaughters of civilians, we're reaching the point where this criterion between good and evil becomes absolutely clear to the entire world.

Thank you very much. And Mr. Rizvi, before I say goodbye, I can see that you're providing us with first-hand footage of this International Quds Day rally, which is going to take place in Chicago. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to see what's going on there in Chicago. But could you please also compare this year's rally with previous years and the number of people in terms of the number of people who are taking part in.

Shabbir Rizvi: Yeah, that's a great question. I've been coming to Cook's today at this very location for at least six years now. I've never seen a crowd like this. We are numbering in the thousands. There is a plan to actually march downtown to the city. And I think really this is how all of this is going to be done is—Now there's a police helicopter flying above us. We have never seen a police helicopter. It's the first time we're seeing it. You can take that as a sign of just how popular the Palestinian cause is and just how afraid the ruling class of the United States is. In fact, they're sending all their police mercenaries, they're sending their cops, they're sending Zionists to spy on us and take pictures of us.

They're afraid, and they're afraid of the change that's coming. And the order of events that have started, the cycle of events that started since October 7th is irreversible. The world has changed forever. The plight of the Palestinians has changed forever. And it's looking like from where I'm standing, the Palestinian cause will prevail and Zionism will be eliminated.

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

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

Alan Sabrosky returns to his “first Friday of the month” slot to discuss the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge as a metaphor for the collapse of America; will the Zionists start World War 3, and/or finish the genocide of Gaza, with no interference from the US; where did these crazy Zionists come from originally; is the two-party system just a “faction fight” with the Jewish-dominated uniparty; and “what do we do when we realize the Left has won?”

Dr. Alan Sabrosky is the former Head of Strategic Studies at the US Army War College. He expresses his Jewish heritage via cuisine, not foreign policy.

Extract from the interview:

Could the Baltimore bridge disaster have been caused by a cyber-attack?

That's entirely possible. But if I were going to do something, I would probably do it to something other than the Francis Scott Key Bridge. I was talking to Paul Adams yesterday. He said, well, what would be an equivalent false flag to what happened in 2001? I said, well...It'll be kind of hard to top the Twin Towers. Maybe Capitol Hill and the State of the Union Address.

All a bridge does is take down some infrastructure, have other bridges used, have roads used. This will be an expensive inconvenience and probably a way to funnel a lot of money to Baltimore, most of which will be stolen by public officials.

How are they going to do a 9-11 on the State of the Union address?

I was joking. I don't think they would bother at this point. They have it too much in their control. They would take out something inanimate that wouldn't bother them. Now the 14th Street Bridge, that would be something.

Well, there were rumors that on 9-11 there were Israelis ready to blow up bridges and tunnels. You may recall that Veterans Today ran some investigations.

Yeah, I think it was, I'm trying to think which one it was…

The George Washington Bridge.

Dan Rather actually had a show on that, or rather had a news clip on it, that the police had captured two individuals in a van filled with explosives heading toward the GW, and they, you know…They caught them. They averted the problem. They turned these people over to the FBI. And like all of the rest of the Israelis who were turned over to the FBI or Homeland Security, they somehow managed to find their way back to Israel.

Right. That's the story I've heard as well. With the added detail that painted on the side of the truck full of explosives was a mural of a plane diving into the World Trade Center.

That I didn't hear. I knew that they were supposedly from Urban Moving Systems, which is a New Jersey-based Mossad front, as was the van with the five Israelis on it taking camera shots of the Twin Towers. But I hadn't heard about the mural.

And according to Gordon Duff, our ex-comrade at Veterans Today, he's now over at the IntelDrop.com website…He claimed that Bernie Kerik, the then New York police commissioner, took charge of the cover-up, and Kerik allegedly has connections to organized crime, which supposedly eliminated some witnesses, including police officers, before sending everybody involved back to Israel. So who knows? Gordon's got a lot of interesting stories.

There's also something very interesting, and that was after J6. Four or five police officers, Capitol Hill police officers, supposedly were so traumatized by events there that they committed suicide. I haven't heard of that ever happening anywhere else. I would be far more willing to think that there were some decent police officers who were willing to break ranks and blow the cover story and that they had unfortunate accidents, although I don't think any of them were friends of Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, well, that sounds plausible to me, too. I really wondered about that business of the poor police officers were so traumatized they killed themselves after January 6th. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

There is a video clip on it. It's not one of those that was released after that brief episode where Tucker Carlson's released some and a few others. But it looked like it was from a cell phone or a tablet camera outside of it. And here's this, I was going to say elderly couple, but I realized they were probably no more than in their 50s and 60s. From my perspective, they're just youthful kids out there playing games. But here's a man and his wife, or his woman anyway, a couple, a heterosexual couple, walking into, holding arms, showed them holding arms and walking up the steps into the Capitol. And I thought, there's your insurrection.

So they're still persecuting the evil insurrectionists. And yet here's Trump possibly heading back into the White House. And that leads to the question that you posed when we were talking about what we were going to put on the show or what themes we would cover: Is the two-party system just a faction fight within the Jewish-dominated uniparty? And could RFK Jr. help make it an interesting election?

Well, yeah, but Bobby Kennedy doesn't have a chance in terms of electoral votes, regardless of that. He may very well mirror the experience of Ross Perot, who really did pretty good for coming off as a third party candidate. But it's something that in terms of our national history, no one at the Constitutional Convention or during Washington's terms as president really anticipated a two-party system. It was set up for one party, the Federalist Party, that the president would be the one who received the highest number of electoral votes. The vice president would be the one who received the second highest number of electoral votes.

So a uniparty was perfectly consistent with the constitutional order. What you had within it were factions. And those two factions eventually coalesced around John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and from that it was a very simple step to go from factions to two parties. There's no constitutional or legal reason or rational reason for the reverse not to occur, for those two parties to become two factions when both are owned by the same or by competing sets of Jewish money, with a Jewish-owned media, mainstream media, orchestrating the inflow of information to the adherents of both parties.

You have today, something very close to the situation between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin, of course, had an axe to grind with Trotsky and had it done in Mexico City.

It was actually an ice pick, not an axe.

I know, I know. I was trying to play metaphors here and I couldn't do it with an ice pick.

He had an ice pick to grind.

Yeah, I know. Very, very picky, but it was a sharp blade.

But what we're seeing really is something very close at a different political level and a different political genre to what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s in China between the more traditional communists, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and some of the generals, and the quote-unquote radical faction, including the Red Guards, led by Madame Mao, a general named Lin Piao, that these people competed, and there was a kind of upheaval based around the Red Guards.

That's sort of what we have here. We have a real... I'm not going to say neoliberal, but we have a faction...largely Jewish-run, Jewish-financed, Jewish-based, which is pushing the woke, trans, LGBTQ, plus, plus, plus, plus, I'm losing touch with the number of pluses out there, agenda, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, all the rest of this. And they want to remake America from within and raise a new system on the ashes of the old. That was sort of the Red Guards thesis in China.

And you have the neoconservative group, mostly coalescing around and controlling the Republican Party, which see an America that has to be fairly stable in size, fairly stable domestically, in order to serve as Israel's 800-pound gorilla in the world, carry out regime change when and where needed, be used to further Israel's international interests without any cost to Israel itself, and provide support to Israel, which is what we've done for the last 20-odd years,

Now, the first group doesn't discount the second. They're both strong supporters of Israel. They're both obviously inside of that. There's no kicking against the traces. The brief hiccup that's happened from a lot of people in their teens and 20s mostly on college campuses over the Gaza event is because they're seeing on their cell phones what is actually happening in Gaza. And the mainstream media hasn't yet figured out a way to circumvent that other than these perpetual streaks of anti-Semitism rising on the campuses and throwing out some presidents and deans who have allowed this to happen.

But on everything else, the mostly under 25 crowd and certainly the younger crowd is fully in line with the agenda, the domestic agenda of the left-wing, I'll call them neoliberals only to set them off from the neoconservatives on the Republican side, but they're neither liberal nor conservative, neither one of them.

But on everything else they're supporting this. Eight to two, roughly, of college-age women were fully in support of the Democrats in 2022, and it's probably increasing by now. They pull a lot of their boyfriends and the males along with them for the good old-fashioned Adam and Eve scenario. And this is the split between the two parties, and there isn't any other split.

What actually depressed me a little bit, more than a little bit, and gives you some insight into Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy Jr., sorry, he's not risen from the grave yet, he may be resurrected, but not in that sense, is that he backpedaled a lot in the last several months on the positions that he originally took which would not have been pleasing to the Jewish money masters and the Jewish media masters, showing once again that in any democracy, no matter who controls the money and who controls the media, if you control both money and media, your politicians will dance to your tune, and they would do that.

I mean, if Arabs did it, if the Irish did it, whoever did it, if they controlled most of the money and most of the media overseeing the political campaigns and the news…

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

Alan Sabrosky returns to his “first Friday of the month” slot to discuss the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge as a metaphor for the collapse of America; will the Zionists start World War 3, and/or finish the genocide of Gaza, with no interference from the US; where did these crazy Zionists come from originally; is the two-party system just a “faction fight” with the Jewish-dominated uniparty; and “what do we do when we realize the Left has won?”

Dr. Alan Sabrosky is the former Head of Strategic Studies at the US Army War College. He expresses his Jewish heritage via cuisine, not foreign policy.

Extract from the interview:

Could the Baltimore bridge disaster have been caused by a cyber-attack?

That's entirely possible. But if I were going to do something, I would probably do it to something other than the Francis Scott Key Bridge. I was talking to Paul Adams yesterday. He said, well, what would be an equivalent false flag to what happened in 2001? I said, well...It'll be kind of hard to top the Twin Towers. Maybe Capitol Hill and the State of the Union Address.

All a bridge does is take down some infrastructure, have other bridges used, have roads used. This will be an expensive inconvenience and probably a way to funnel a lot of money to Baltimore, most of which will be stolen by public officials.

How are they going to do a 9-11 on the State of the Union address?

I was joking. I don't think they would bother at this point. They have it too much in their control. They would take out something inanimate that wouldn't bother them. Now the 14th Street Bridge, that would be something.

Well, there were rumors that on 9-11 there were Israelis ready to blow up bridges and tunnels. You may recall that Veterans Today ran some investigations.

Yeah, I think it was, I'm trying to think which one it was…

The George Washington Bridge.

Dan Rather actually had a show on that, or rather had a news clip on it, that the police had captured two individuals in a van filled with explosives heading toward the GW, and they, you know…They caught them. They averted the problem. They turned these people over to the FBI. And like all of the rest of the Israelis who were turned over to the FBI or Homeland Security, they somehow managed to find their way back to Israel.

Right. That's the story I've heard as well. With the added detail that painted on the side of the truck full of explosives was a mural of a plane diving into the World Trade Center.

That I didn't hear. I knew that they were supposedly from Urban Moving Systems, which is a New Jersey-based Mossad front, as was the van with the five Israelis on it taking camera shots of the Twin Towers. But I hadn't heard about the mural.

And according to Gordon Duff, our ex-comrade at Veterans Today, he's now over at the IntelDrop.com website…He claimed that Bernie Kerik, the then New York police commissioner, took charge of the cover-up, and Kerik allegedly has connections to organized crime, which supposedly eliminated some witnesses, including police officers, before sending everybody involved back to Israel. So who knows? Gordon's got a lot of interesting stories.

There's also something very interesting, and that was after J6. Four or five police officers, Capitol Hill police officers, supposedly were so traumatized by events there that they committed suicide. I haven't heard of that ever happening anywhere else. I would be far more willing to think that there were some decent police officers who were willing to break ranks and blow the cover story and that they had unfortunate accidents, although I don't think any of them were friends of Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, well, that sounds plausible to me, too. I really wondered about that business of the poor police officers were so traumatized they killed themselves after January 6th. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

There is a video clip on it. It's not one of those that was released after that brief episode where Tucker Carlson's released some and a few others. But it looked like it was from a cell phone or a tablet camera outside of it. And here's this, I was going to say elderly couple, but I realized they were probably no more than in their 50s and 60s. From my perspective, they're just youthful kids out there playing games. But here's a man and his wife, or his woman anyway, a couple, a heterosexual couple, walking into, holding arms, showed them holding arms and walking up the steps into the Capitol. And I thought, there's your insurrection.

So they're still persecuting the evil insurrectionists. And yet here's Trump possibly heading back into the White House. And that leads to the question that you posed when we were talking about what we were going to put on the show or what themes we would cover: Is the two-party system just a faction fight within the Jewish-dominated uniparty? And could RFK Jr. help make it an interesting election?

Well, yeah, but Bobby Kennedy doesn't have a chance in terms of electoral votes, regardless of that. He may very well mirror the experience of Ross Perot, who really did pretty good for coming off as a third party candidate. But it's something that in terms of our national history, no one at the Constitutional Convention or during Washington's terms as president really anticipated a two-party system. It was set up for one party, the Federalist Party, that the president would be the one who received the highest number of electoral votes. The vice president would be the one who received the second highest number of electoral votes.

So a uniparty was perfectly consistent with the constitutional order. What you had within it were factions. And those two factions eventually coalesced around John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and from that it was a very simple step to go from factions to two parties. There's no constitutional or legal reason or rational reason for the reverse not to occur, for those two parties to become two factions when both are owned by the same or by competing sets of Jewish money, with a Jewish-owned media, mainstream media, orchestrating the inflow of information to the adherents of both parties.

You have today, something very close to the situation between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin, of course, had an axe to grind with Trotsky and had it done in Mexico City.

It was actually an ice pick, not an axe.

I know, I know. I was trying to play metaphors here and I couldn't do it with an ice pick.

He had an ice pick to grind.

Yeah, I know. Very, very picky, but it was a sharp blade.

But what we're seeing really is something very close at a different political level and a different political genre to what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s in China between the more traditional communists, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and some of the generals, and the quote-unquote radical faction, including the Red Guards, led by Madame Mao, a general named Lin Piao, that these people competed, and there was a kind of upheaval based around the Red Guards.

That's sort of what we have here. We have a real... I'm not going to say neoliberal, but we have a faction...largely Jewish-run, Jewish-financed, Jewish-based, which is pushing the woke, trans, LGBTQ, plus, plus, plus, plus, I'm losing touch with the number of pluses out there, agenda, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, all the rest of this. And they want to remake America from within and raise a new system on the ashes of the old. That was sort of the Red Guards thesis in China.

And you have the neoconservative group, mostly coalescing around and controlling the Republican Party, which see an America that has to be fairly stable in size, fairly stable domestically, in order to serve as Israel's 800-pound gorilla in the world, carry out regime change when and where needed, be used to further Israel's international interests without any cost to Israel itself, and provide support to Israel, which is what we've done for the last 20-odd years,

Now, the first group doesn't discount the second. They're both strong supporters of Israel. They're both obviously inside of that. There's no kicking against the traces. The brief hiccup that's happened from a lot of people in their teens and 20s mostly on college campuses over the Gaza event is because they're seeing on their cell phones what is actually happening in Gaza. And the mainstream media hasn't yet figured out a way to circumvent that other than these perpetual streaks of anti-Semitism rising on the campuses and throwing out some presidents and deans who have allowed this to happen.

But on everything else, the mostly under 25 crowd and certainly the younger crowd is fully in line with the agenda, the domestic agenda of the left-wing, I'll call them neoliberals only to set them off from the neoconservatives on the Republican side, but they're neither liberal nor conservative, neither one of them.

But on everything else they're supporting this. Eight to two, roughly, of college-age women were fully in support of the Democrats in 2022, and it's probably increasing by now. They pull a lot of their boyfriends and the males along with them for the good old-fashioned Adam and Eve scenario. And this is the split between the two parties, and there isn't any other split.

What actually depressed me a little bit, more than a little bit, and gives you some insight into Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy Jr., sorry, he's not risen from the grave yet, he may be resurrected, but not in that sense, is that he backpedaled a lot in the last several months on the positions that he originally took which would not have been pleasing to the Jewish money masters and the Jewish media masters, showing once again that in any democracy, no matter who controls the money and who controls the media, if you control both money and media, your politicians will dance to your tune, and they would do that.

I mean, if Arabs did it, if the Irish did it, whoever did it, if they controlled most of the money and most of the media overseeing the political campaigns and the news…

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I first seriously read Emerson for an American Renaissance seminar at San Francisco State University in the mid-80s. I was the only student who actually enjoyed the sonorous cadences of the sage of Concord. My classmates thought I was bluffing, or, failing that, perverse.

Emerson’s encomiums to authenticity, nature, and the transcendent resonated with me. This was the best of the American spiritual inheritance, of what Harold Bloom called the American religion. Among all the cults and Bible-thumpers and maladapted European sects, Emerson’s Unitarianism was uniquely nourishing, and uniquely “American in a good sense.” It had inspired Thoreau, a hero of my days in the high school library. I recognized belatedly that this was the religion I had inherited, to the extent I had inherited any, from my grandmother, a member of the congregation at the famous Frank Lloyd Wright church in Madison, WI.

Unfortunately, by the late 20th century, Unitarianism had abandoned its Enlightenment roots and become a religion of “anything goes.” As long as you can sing Kumbaya off-key, you’re in. Today we have Unitarian ministers who don’t believe in God. No doubt there will be Satanist Unitarian ministers in the not-too-distant future. (Will they perform human sacrifices during Kumbaya sing-alongs?)

Unitarianism and America have gone crazy. That is one reason I accepted Islam (“Unitarianism with camels”) and eventually found my way to Morocco. I now find myself agreeing with E. Michael Jones and the Ayatollah Khomeini that America is “the Great Satan.”

But is that Emerson’s fault? Dr. Jones thinks the sage of Concord was some kind of proto-satanist who bears responsibility for all that followed. That may not be as unfair as blaming Jesus for the Crusades and Inquisition, but still.

Below is my recent debate with E. Michael Jones on the question, “Was Emerson a satanist?” Note that Emersonian Unitarianism, like Islam, rejects the Trinity in favor of Divine Unity, focuses on Jesus’s message rather than his mode of death, and does not accept the doctrine of Original Sin.

Was Emerson a Satanist? Kevin Barrett Debates E. Michael Jones

KB: Well, we'll talk about that more, but here's another interesting long story on the demographic revolution. Everybody who is susceptible to the propaganda from the modern secular world pushing us towards hedonism, individualism, and anomie will not have children, or very few, whereas the minority of people who are immune to that propaganda and continue to have large families will leave all of humanity as their descendants. And those people are, by and large, religious.

So demographers are noticing that the future is likely to be more religious than the present, because that minority of people who are still having large families is disproportionately religious. And that's going to lead up to our discussion of Emerson and matters of religion, because religion is going to matter in a world that goes back to religion.

EMJ: Yeah, well, the meek will inherit the earth.

Was it Emerson who that said that?

No. Quite the opposite.

And that leads us to “Cherchez le Juif,” which is the article that set off the Emerson debate. That was your latest article in the form of a book review of La Défaite de l'Occident by Immanuel Todd. It’s an excellent review. I agreed with just about everything. Let’s talk about the rest of the article and then the part about Emerson.

Yeah, so I'm saying America's the great Satan. How can you disagree with me?

I don't. I think you got that part right.

Well, then let's get into the woods. Let's get into the weeds here of how it became the great Satan, which is basically my new project. I'm working on a book about American identity. And that's what Todd is talking about. He said basically that the American empire is failing because the hidden grammar of the American empire is Protestantism and Protestantism has evaporated. That's, I think, a sound thesis. I think that's exactly what's going on.

But then we have to get into the weeds here. Well, what do you mean by Protestantism? What is it? He goes to the Max Weber thesis, which is a total cliché that distracts everyone from the real story, which is that Max Weber's Spirit of Capitalism was written in reaction to Sombart's book, which says basically the Puritans were Jews.

That's a key issue. He doesn't understand what Protestantism is. He just has this cliché.

What is the essence of Protestantism? Especially Puritan Protestantism? Who wrote the epic, the Protestant epic? It's John Milton, the Puritan, who signed the death warrant of the king and then wrote Paradise Lost.

And who's the hero of Paradise Lost? It's the devil. And so Satanism is the essence of Puritanism, which is the essence of Protestantism, which is the essence of America.

He also doesn't really give full justice to the fact that the group that dethroned the Protestants is, of course, the Jews.

Because he's a Jew. And if you're a Jew, “Jew” is not a category. It's like asking a fish, “are you wet?” No, the fish doesn't know he's wet. And the Jew doesn't understand his own category.

Was Emerson a Satanist?

Let's move on then to the part that we're planning to debate, which is the question: “Was Emerson a Satanist?” I certainly wouldn't disagree with you that the hero of Paradise Lost is Satan. William Blake famously made a big deal out of that. And yes, certain kinds of highly individualistic mysticism can veer off into Satanism.

And the question is, is this the case for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American Unitarian? And since I'm a lapsed Unitarian who then ended up on a camel—Muslims being Unitarians with camels, as you informed me long ago—I feel it’s incumbent upon me to defend the turgid prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I see Emerson as more of a mystic who would be comparable to a drunken Sufi.

Sufism, Islamic mysticism, split into the sober Sufism of Junayd and the drunken Sufism of people like al-Hallaj, who famously blurted out, I am the truth. And al-Haq, The Truth, means God. So Hallaj was taken by his peers as saying, I am God, which of course would be a satanic kind of thing to say. So he ended up getting literally crucified for that, and for various other political intrigues going on at the time.

In any case, he blurted out these things from deep in his spiritual state, some of which were far from consistent or prudent. That's the drunken Sufi tradition.

Certainly in “Self Reliance,” Emerson veers off in that direction to a certain extent. That kind of “drunken mysticism” is probably not something you want to recommend.

But does that make him a Satanist?

I think if you read the whole essay in context, and especially in the context of his larger body of work, there's no way that Emerson is a Satanist. His main disciple is Thoreau. Does Thoreau remind you of Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino? I don't think so.

So he's something other than Satanist.

What about that passage? I've already cited the passage in “Self-Reliance” where someone says to him, “well, suppose they (your inspirations) come from below?” “And I replied, they do not seem to me to be such, but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” That's Satanism. That's the devil. He's saying it himself. Now, the interesting question is, is he the devil's child? Who said he was the devil's child? What you have here is the reaction against Calvinism. Because Calvin the Puritan said that you were totally depraved, and that was the legacy that he grew up with.

There were people who could not- the drunken Sufis you're talking about were known as antinomians in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ann Hutchinson was one of them. The Quakers are examples of this, where you just sit there and wait for God's inspiration, the Holy Spirit, to inspire you, and then everything you say is infallible. This is why nobody could talk to a Quaker in Philadelphia. This is why they gave up on talking and they decided to do art.

You have to contextualize this, okay? So you're talking about Anton LaVey. There's a certain period in the decline and decay of American culture that led to that, okay?

Perry Miller wrote an interesting essay about what happened here at this particular moment in time (the mid-19th century). You had these people who were Satanist revolutionaries theoretically, but they lived conventional bourgeois lives when it came to their families. And that's precisely the the moment we're talking about here with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who understood what it meant to be the devil's child, and wrote “Young Goodman Brown” about that.

All this recognition of what Emerson was doing, but he was still the guy…Rose Hawthorne would write memoirs about how “Mr. Emerson came over and gave me a piece of candy and patted me on the head.”

That doesn't sound like a Satanist.

But intellectually, he was a Satanist, the same way in a sense that John Milton was a Satanist, because I'm saying Satanism is the essence of Protestantism because it's based on rebellion. That's the quintessence of America.

Yeah, well, I think there's some truth to that. But again, let's look at what he's saying in context, especially the quote" “if I'm the devil's child, then I will live from the devil.” Let's start with the opening to “Self-Reliance,” where he says, “I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter, which were original and not conventional.” What he's talking about is what in Islam we call niyyah or “intention.” Polishing your niyyah is having good intentions. And purifying your heart is another way of thinking about it.

Now, I think Emerson is reacting to a specific situation. It's not just that he's surrounded by Puritans who are terrified of the evil of (allegedly) depraved human nature, and he's reacting against that. Worse, he's surrounded by hypocrites. Nifaq, hypocrisy, is one of the cardinal sins in Islam and probably everywhere else as well. So he's surrounded by people who are not living in tune with their true natures. That is, they feel one thing and they say another thing. They're preaching virtue while practicing vice. And Emerson, as a serious religious person, wants to get his heart to the point where his heart is virtuous. But what he sees around him is a profoundly corrupt society, as this puritanical American society has become super materialistic. And now everybody is worshiping “the Jewish God of money,” as Marx said. And they're saying things about charity like “weshould all be saving the poor, starving people of Haiti” or what have you. While they're maybe not taking care of their own families and people in their own community. There are all sorts of hypocrisy all around him.

So what this essay is really about is eliminating hypocrisy by purifying one's intentions and going from “just faith” all the way to spiritual beauty or purity. In Islam, that's going from iman or faith, which could also be translated as “heart knowledge,” to ihsan, or beautification of the soul.

His friend asks, “But what if that's from the devil?” Because his friend is still this Puritan who's afraid of his own impulses. He's been turned into a conflicted soul by the puritanical tradition colliding with American materialism.

So Emerson's saying, totally trust yourself. “Your heart is vibrating to that divine string.” (The line about trusting your real nature “even if it were from the devil”) is hyperbole. They (intuitions from his true nature) “do not seem to be to be such” (from the devil) because they're not. It's divine inspiration. It's not satanic inspiration.

When hyperbolically, he says, “but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil,” that’s a rhetorical, hyperbolic statement. And when he talks about a foolish consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds, he's talking about people who take him too literally when he says something like this without understanding the context.

Okay, that's great. It's always been a mystery to me how you could go from “Self-Reliance” to Islam because Islam means submission, right? So here you have the opposite of submission. You have rebellion. I mean, you're trying to explain it, but once you say this, if you're a writer, you release something into the ether and you don't know where it's going to go. If you say you're of the devil's party and you're promoting “trust thyself”…it happened to Emerson during his lifetime, because one of his great followers was Walt Whitman, the poet, who dedicated Leaves of Grass to Emerson, causing him much embarrassment because of its homoerotic descriptions.

So I'm saying that the intention of the writer is not always the best guide to how his works are going to be received. And I'm saying he situates himself in a trajectory that has led to where we are today, which is basically “nobody can tell me what to do.” It's kind of like the libertarian stupidity that you find in so many people, where they're being led around by the nose, by the manipulation of their desires, and they consider themselves the most independent group of people in the world.

I don't disagree with you that his work situates itself in a trajectory that has led to extreme narcissism and self-indulgence. If there was somebody following up on Emerson today, expressing the spirit of this age the way he expressed the spirit of his age, they might call their essay “Self-Indulgence.”

I think the crucial issue is sexual morality. There's a passage where Emerson goes to England and he meets Carlyle. And Carlyle introduces him to German idealism, which is basically where he got this idea that the mind is its own place. That's what Satan said: “The mind is its own place.” And now you've got Germans saying the same thing, interpreted according to this Puritan understanding. But Emerson got into an argument with Carlyle, and I think Coleridge as well, about sexual morality. He said, “if you think that most American men are not virgins when they get married, you're crazy.” I think this became the crucial issue. This is what allowed the respectability in Concord, where Hawthorne and Emerson were good married men—they’re fathers, they’re pillars of the community—at the same time Emerson harboring the satanic notion of rebellion that would reach its crucial turning point with the collapse of sexual morality in America, which is what the Jews brought about, and that's how the Jews eventually took over our culture.

Well, again, I agree. There's a lot of truth to that. But I think that Emerson's assumption was that the self that you're being true to is the higher self, not the lower self. And I think he just took that for granted in the essay “Self-Reliance”—although with his hyperbole, maybe he confused some people. But I think that stark difference between the higher self and the lower self is one of those things that you should (intuitively) know, right? You should know within yourself that the bestial lusts after all kinds of ego gratification, sensual gratification and so on, the part of you that wants to stuff your face when there's some junk food that's superficially tasty, the same kind of thing in sex and all kinds of other physical pleasures—that's not what he's talking about, obviously.

But as you say, it can lead there. So you're right to some extent, Mike, that Emerson's rebellion against the hypocrisy around him, which was tied into the institutional form of religion in a very materialistic society, had something dangerous about it. Just like the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism—and perhaps, though I know you wouldn't agree with this, the Catholic rebellion against original Christianity which may have been best preserved in Orthodoxy. Each time Christianity goes west it gets worse, from Orthodoxy to Catholicism to Protestantism to secular atheist materialism.

In that context, Emerson is rejecting the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of the people around him in that situation (of puritanism giving way to materialism). And that hypocrisy has been integrated into the institutional church. So Emerson is rebelling to some extent against the institutional church. And that institutional church is necessary and it can't be completely thrown away. You can't just live for yourself.

Well, that's the problem. He had an institutional church that had no right to be the institutional church because it was conceived in rebellion against the church that Christ founded. I'm talking about the Puritans. That is not a church. That's a sect that the English thought it was so crazy that they basically drove them out and hanged Cromwell's body because it was so repugnant in so many different ways. But when it came over to America, it was the only game in town.

But I think there's something to this about this journey westward, certainly in America, because at this point you've got, what do you have? You have a bunch of Englishmen showing up in a world that they had never seen before and they're trying to make sense of it. How do you do this? The only thing they had was the Bible. And so one minister said, we are on an errand into the wilderness. And the wilderness he was talking about was John the Baptist. It was a gloss on John the Baptist.

Well, the desert on the other side of the Jordan has nothing to do with Massachusetts, the forest, but that's all they had. And what happened is as this settlement moved west, you had the essence is Calvinism coming into relationship with existence. Which is the woods. And it had to be modified. They had to modify it because it didn't work. They had no legitimacy. The Protestants had no legitimacy as a church, but they were the only game in town in New England. They tried to come up with a Puritan explanation of their legitimacy. They failed completely. By the time of Solomon Stoddard, who created the halfway covenant, they knew it.

Wait a minute. Is election, which is a requirement for the church—can you pass that on to your children? Well, nobody could figure that one out. And so by the time of Jonathan Edwards, it collapsed. But what didn't collapse was this constant movement westward of all these people who had to survive. So they had to come into some type of alignment with reality or existence, and that's what formed the American character. And I'm saying the classic example of this is Daniel Boone, who started off life as a Quaker. How are you going to move into Indian territory as a Quaker? So what happened is that he had to modify this ridiculous—He had to change his hat.

He had to make a different hat, a coonskin hat instead of a Quaker hat.

He had to pick up a gun. That's what he had to do. He had to pick up a musket. So he's a Quaker carrying a musket.

He had to eat wild game instead of instant oatmeal Quaker oats.

I think that this is what Emerson is trying to do. He's trying to come to some type of understanding of what is happening. I think Paul Johnson called him the first American. He's the first American because he's understanding the mutation that had to take place in the identity of Americans, because they had a foundationless sect

Yeah, I think you're right. That's why he's the real thinker of the American Renaissance. But getting back to that issue of institutionalized religion that gets woven into a social fabric full of hypocrisy, and then authentically religious people and especially mystics seek genuine religious experience by purifying their souls…Let me quickly mention that Laurent Guyenot last night on my show said that I should ask you about the beginning of Protestantism, with Luther standing against the selling of indulgences, those “get-out-of-jail-free cards” absolving sins. Laurent said “E. Michael Jones would have been on the side of Luther.” Is that true?

No, absolutely not. And secondly, if you think indulgences caused the Reformation, you're a superficial thinker. And if you think that Yahweh is the devil, you're a blasphemer. And that's the problem with Guyanaud's analysis. He's crippled by Marcionism, okay? We have to make a distinction between people who are hypocrites and religions which are intrinsically hypocritical. Quakerism is by definition a hypocritical religion. Ben Franklin discovered this. There's a passage in the autobiography. They're sailing to Philadelphia and suddenly a ship appears on the horizon and the captain says, “women and children below board, all able-bodied men take up a gun.” And one of the guys was a Quaker. And he picks up a gun because they had to defend themselves. And William Penn was one of the Quakers who goes down below board with the women and children. It turns out that it wasn’t a pirate ship. So afterwards, William Penn upbraids the Quaker for taking up a gun. And the Quaker said “thou didst not complain when thou thought was a pirate ship.”

This is complete hypocrisy baked into their religion, because they wanted to retain their property but they would not defend it when it was threatened. And that's the hypocrisy that is institutional, that had to go before America could… And that's what Daniel Boone learned. And there's a difference there.

And to talk about the Reformation either in England or in Germany without talking about the avarice of the lower aristocracy who simply wanted to steal church property and then cook up a theological justification after the fact is not to be in contact with reality. There was hypocrisy on both sides. Or maybe more of it on the Protestant side. Look, hypocrisy is not—there's always hypocrisy, okay? It's the tribute that vice pays to virtue. So it's always going to be here.

That is not the driving force behind the Reformation at all.

Okay, and then just in half defense of Marcionism, it does seem to me that some of the ultraviolence around the American conquest of the Americas by the Puritans and all their various successors is very beautifully captured in one of the greatest-ever American novels, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is kind of hard to read. It's so bloody. Some people can't go to movies because they're too violent. Well, this is a book that's hard to read. Maybe one of the very few books that I've ever read that's that hard to read. But it echoes with Old Testament thunder and brimstone as it describes massacres.

You're absolutely right. The Puritans were Judaizers. That means that they went to the Old Testament for the models that allowed them to understand the world, and one of them they took away was Amalek. The Jews are still talking this way about Palestinians. It is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, like Marcionism is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, but it is one that the Puritans had, and it characterized, it epitomized, and it directed their whole attitude toward the Indians and the conquest of the Indians that was not shared by Catholic France and by Catholic Spain.

This is a purely English phenomenon. When the English showed up in Nova Scotia the Presbyterians said, we're bringing Christ to you people. And at that point, the French had already intermarried with the Mi'kmaq for centuries. And they said, no, we're Catholic. Well, at that point, they said, no, you're not, because Catholics are an abomination. And if you don't go along with this, there will be consequences. And then they put bounties for scalping the French Micmac. And when that didn't work, they shipped them off to Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns. This is the historical difference between the Protestant attitude toward the Indians and the Catholic attitude toward the Indians. And if you don't understand it, you don't understand history of the United States of America.

Well, the Protestants refused to intermarry with the Indians because they viewed them as goyim or a lesser race due to their Old Testament focus, etc. And they were somewhat more genocidal, maybe due to the Old Testament's genocidal aspects: Amalek, for example, to quote Bibi Netanyahu. But ultimately, the main difference was the intermarriage, right? The Catholics, especially the Spanish, enslaved and massacred and looted the Native Americans every bit as much as the Protestants did.

Are you talking about Cortez? This is a paradigmatic example of the conquest of Mexico. It's one of the greatest stories ever told. And the fact of the matter was that the Aztecs had established this genocidal hegemony over every other Indian tribe in Mexico at the time, and they would march them up the pyramids and cut their hearts out. A regime like that is not going to go quietly. It had to be brought down by military force.

But long after that, Indians, because they were available to be captured as slaves, were rounded up, made slaves, put to work in the mines of Potosi and other places, worked to death under horrific conditions. Overall, as I understand it, the atrocities committed by Catholics in the Americas were probably at least as great as those committed by Protestants.

I disagree. And even if you're talking about individual acts of injustice, you're talking about what happened to the Mexican people. The Mexican people are the cosmic race because of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a fact of history. It's not some pious Catholic myth. Her tilma is in Mexico, you can look at it if you want, at which point she appeared as a mestiza, which meant the intermarriage of the Spaniards and the indigenous people.

I'm saying this is fundamentally different than the attitude that English Puritans had toward the indigenous people. The Catholic Church in Mexico did not view Indians as Amalek. There's a fundamental difference there.

I think the Old Testament thumping Puritans did indeed share some of that mentality with Bibi Netanyahu and his friends over in Occupied Palestine. Anyway, my pro-Emerson side—I don't have any foolish consistency about being totally pro-Emerson—I admit that you're right about some of these things, especially his place in overall intellectual history and what egotism, which people could draw from this essay, Self-Reliance, has led to. So, yeah, I'm still split, just like our image here suggests, without any foolish consistency at all.

Any last thoughts on Emerson and Cherchez le Juif?

Yeah, I think we're at a crisis because we don't know what it means to be an American. It's important for you and me to understand what it means to be an American, because we obviously come from different traditions, whether it's the Emersonian Protestant or the Islamic tradition. And we have to have some type of lingua franca that allows us to talk together as Americans. And I think the only way that we have to hammer out this issue right now is the Jewish control of our culture. This is the issue that has to be resolved. It has to be resolved by Americans, for Americans, even if they differ in terms of fundamental issues.

That is the essence of what America was. The essence, we have to have a moral consensus, which is what John Adams said. And which means we cannot tolerate either abortion or Zionism. These are beyond the pale. This should be beyond political difference. We should have a unanimity. We have to come back to this unanimity in support of the moral law, because otherwise we're going to end up very badly. We're already in bad shape and the future looks even gloomier.

Yeah, I agree with that. And as far as the Emanuel Todd's claim that Protestant American culture has collapsed, I think that's true. And to me, one of the better sides of that Protestant American culture is represented by Emerson. Maybe it's a personal thing for me, because my grandmother, who was a bit of a nature mystic—she was the only person with any religious sense in my family—was a Unitarian and a follower of Emerson and Thoreau. But whether it's due to that kind of partisanship that I inherited or my reading, I have found the Emerson side of American Protestantism had a lot of positive aspects compared to the Jewish-dominated culture that we've had since World War II and especially since the coup d'etats that overthrew John F. Kennedy and then the coup d'etat on 9/11, which were supreme expressions of the Jewish takeover of the United States from the Protestants.

So maybe we need to use that African proverb, “if you're lost, go back to where you were before you were lost,” and say we need to go back to the very best of pre-World War II Protestant-led America. I don't know where else we're going to go. Maybe what we need to do is go back there and then get on a camel. In other words, start praying five times a day, start looking to the Quran for guidance, and submitting to God in islam, surrendering to God.

So if Emerson would just get off that high camel and surrender to God: “Get off that camel, Emerson, spread out your carpet, and perform sujood with your forehead on the earth!”

Self-reliance and Islam are completely incompatible. They're the complete opposites. But you seem to have brought them together in some miraculous way.

What I'm saying is that America needs to get back to its Emersonian virtues, and then “get off that high camel and put your forehead on the floor.”

That's where we're going to have to leave it. So thank you so much, Michael Jones. Always enjoy communicating with you across this vast gulf of cultures and religions that's actually probably not even as far as Wisconsin to Indiana was, back when I was in Wisconsin. Looking forward to a lot more conversation in the not too distant future, inshallah.

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

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I first seriously read Emerson for an American Renaissance seminar at San Francisco State University in the mid-80s. I was the only student who actually enjoyed the sonorous cadences of the sage of Concord. My classmates thought I was bluffing, or, failing that, perverse.

Emerson’s encomiums to authenticity, nature, and the transcendent resonated with me. This was the best of the American spiritual inheritance, of what Harold Bloom called the American religion. Among all the cults and Bible-thumpers and maladapted European sects, Emerson’s Unitarianism was uniquely nourishing, and uniquely “American in a good sense.” It had inspired Thoreau, a hero of my days in the high school library. I recognized belatedly that this was the religion I had inherited, to the extent I had inherited any, from my grandmother, a member of the congregation at the famous Frank Lloyd Wright church in Madison, WI.

Unfortunately, by the late 20th century, Unitarianism had abandoned its Enlightenment roots and become a religion of “anything goes.” As long as you can sing Kumbaya off-key, you’re in. Today we have Unitarian ministers who don’t believe in God. No doubt there will be Satanist Unitarian ministers in the not-too-distant future. (Will they perform human sacrifices during Kumbaya sing-alongs?)

Unitarianism and America have gone crazy. That is one reason I accepted Islam (“Unitarianism with camels”) and eventually found my way to Morocco. I now find myself agreeing with E. Michael Jones and the Ayatollah Khomeini that America is “the Great Satan.”

But is that Emerson’s fault? Dr. Jones thinks the sage of Concord was some kind of proto-satanist who bears responsibility for all that followed. That may not be as unfair as blaming Jesus for the Crusades and Inquisition, but still.

Below is my recent debate with E. Michael Jones on the question, “Was Emerson a satanist?” Note that Emersonian Unitarianism, like Islam, rejects the Trinity in favor of Divine Unity, focuses on Jesus’s message rather than his mode of death, and does not accept the doctrine of Original Sin.

Was Emerson a Satanist? Kevin Barrett Debates E. Michael Jones

KB: Well, we'll talk about that more, but here's another interesting long story on the demographic revolution. Everybody who is susceptible to the propaganda from the modern secular world pushing us towards hedonism, individualism, and anomie will not have children, or very few, whereas the minority of people who are immune to that propaganda and continue to have large families will leave all of humanity as their descendants. And those people are, by and large, religious.

So demographers are noticing that the future is likely to be more religious than the present, because that minority of people who are still having large families is disproportionately religious. And that's going to lead up to our discussion of Emerson and matters of religion, because religion is going to matter in a world that goes back to religion.

EMJ: Yeah, well, the meek will inherit the earth.

Was it Emerson who that said that?

No. Quite the opposite.

And that leads us to “Cherchez le Juif,” which is the article that set off the Emerson debate. That was your latest article in the form of a book review of La Défaite de l'Occident by Immanuel Todd. It’s an excellent review. I agreed with just about everything. Let’s talk about the rest of the article and then the part about Emerson.

Yeah, so I'm saying America's the great Satan. How can you disagree with me?

I don't. I think you got that part right.

Well, then let's get into the woods. Let's get into the weeds here of how it became the great Satan, which is basically my new project. I'm working on a book about American identity. And that's what Todd is talking about. He said basically that the American empire is failing because the hidden grammar of the American empire is Protestantism and Protestantism has evaporated. That's, I think, a sound thesis. I think that's exactly what's going on.

But then we have to get into the weeds here. Well, what do you mean by Protestantism? What is it? He goes to the Max Weber thesis, which is a total cliché that distracts everyone from the real story, which is that Max Weber's Spirit of Capitalism was written in reaction to Sombart's book, which says basically the Puritans were Jews.

That's a key issue. He doesn't understand what Protestantism is. He just has this cliché.

What is the essence of Protestantism? Especially Puritan Protestantism? Who wrote the epic, the Protestant epic? It's John Milton, the Puritan, who signed the death warrant of the king and then wrote Paradise Lost.

And who's the hero of Paradise Lost? It's the devil. And so Satanism is the essence of Puritanism, which is the essence of Protestantism, which is the essence of America.

He also doesn't really give full justice to the fact that the group that dethroned the Protestants is, of course, the Jews.

Because he's a Jew. And if you're a Jew, “Jew” is not a category. It's like asking a fish, “are you wet?” No, the fish doesn't know he's wet. And the Jew doesn't understand his own category.

Was Emerson a Satanist?

Let's move on then to the part that we're planning to debate, which is the question: “Was Emerson a Satanist?” I certainly wouldn't disagree with you that the hero of Paradise Lost is Satan. William Blake famously made a big deal out of that. And yes, certain kinds of highly individualistic mysticism can veer off into Satanism.

And the question is, is this the case for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American Unitarian? And since I'm a lapsed Unitarian who then ended up on a camel—Muslims being Unitarians with camels, as you informed me long ago—I feel it’s incumbent upon me to defend the turgid prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I see Emerson as more of a mystic who would be comparable to a drunken Sufi.

Sufism, Islamic mysticism, split into the sober Sufism of Junayd and the drunken Sufism of people like al-Hallaj, who famously blurted out, I am the truth. And al-Haq, The Truth, means God. So Hallaj was taken by his peers as saying, I am God, which of course would be a satanic kind of thing to say. So he ended up getting literally crucified for that, and for various other political intrigues going on at the time.

In any case, he blurted out these things from deep in his spiritual state, some of which were far from consistent or prudent. That's the drunken Sufi tradition.

Certainly in “Self Reliance,” Emerson veers off in that direction to a certain extent. That kind of “drunken mysticism” is probably not something you want to recommend.

But does that make him a Satanist?

I think if you read the whole essay in context, and especially in the context of his larger body of work, there's no way that Emerson is a Satanist. His main disciple is Thoreau. Does Thoreau remind you of Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino? I don't think so.

So he's something other than Satanist.

What about that passage? I've already cited the passage in “Self-Reliance” where someone says to him, “well, suppose they (your inspirations) come from below?” “And I replied, they do not seem to me to be such, but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” That's Satanism. That's the devil. He's saying it himself. Now, the interesting question is, is he the devil's child? Who said he was the devil's child? What you have here is the reaction against Calvinism. Because Calvin the Puritan said that you were totally depraved, and that was the legacy that he grew up with.

There were people who could not- the drunken Sufis you're talking about were known as antinomians in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ann Hutchinson was one of them. The Quakers are examples of this, where you just sit there and wait for God's inspiration, the Holy Spirit, to inspire you, and then everything you say is infallible. This is why nobody could talk to a Quaker in Philadelphia. This is why they gave up on talking and they decided to do art.

You have to contextualize this, okay? So you're talking about Anton LaVey. There's a certain period in the decline and decay of American culture that led to that, okay?

Perry Miller wrote an interesting essay about what happened here at this particular moment in time (the mid-19th century). You had these people who were Satanist revolutionaries theoretically, but they lived conventional bourgeois lives when it came to their families. And that's precisely the the moment we're talking about here with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who understood what it meant to be the devil's child, and wrote “Young Goodman Brown” about that.

All this recognition of what Emerson was doing, but he was still the guy…Rose Hawthorne would write memoirs about how “Mr. Emerson came over and gave me a piece of candy and patted me on the head.”

That doesn't sound like a Satanist.

But intellectually, he was a Satanist, the same way in a sense that John Milton was a Satanist, because I'm saying Satanism is the essence of Protestantism because it's based on rebellion. That's the quintessence of America.

Yeah, well, I think there's some truth to that. But again, let's look at what he's saying in context, especially the quote" “if I'm the devil's child, then I will live from the devil.” Let's start with the opening to “Self-Reliance,” where he says, “I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter, which were original and not conventional.” What he's talking about is what in Islam we call niyyah or “intention.” Polishing your niyyah is having good intentions. And purifying your heart is another way of thinking about it.

Now, I think Emerson is reacting to a specific situation. It's not just that he's surrounded by Puritans who are terrified of the evil of (allegedly) depraved human nature, and he's reacting against that. Worse, he's surrounded by hypocrites. Nifaq, hypocrisy, is one of the cardinal sins in Islam and probably everywhere else as well. So he's surrounded by people who are not living in tune with their true natures. That is, they feel one thing and they say another thing. They're preaching virtue while practicing vice. And Emerson, as a serious religious person, wants to get his heart to the point where his heart is virtuous. But what he sees around him is a profoundly corrupt society, as this puritanical American society has become super materialistic. And now everybody is worshiping “the Jewish God of money,” as Marx said. And they're saying things about charity like “weshould all be saving the poor, starving people of Haiti” or what have you. While they're maybe not taking care of their own families and people in their own community. There are all sorts of hypocrisy all around him.

So what this essay is really about is eliminating hypocrisy by purifying one's intentions and going from “just faith” all the way to spiritual beauty or purity. In Islam, that's going from iman or faith, which could also be translated as “heart knowledge,” to ihsan, or beautification of the soul.

His friend asks, “But what if that's from the devil?” Because his friend is still this Puritan who's afraid of his own impulses. He's been turned into a conflicted soul by the puritanical tradition colliding with American materialism.

So Emerson's saying, totally trust yourself. “Your heart is vibrating to that divine string.” (The line about trusting your real nature “even if it were from the devil”) is hyperbole. They (intuitions from his true nature) “do not seem to be to be such” (from the devil) because they're not. It's divine inspiration. It's not satanic inspiration.

When hyperbolically, he says, “but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil,” that’s a rhetorical, hyperbolic statement. And when he talks about a foolish consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds, he's talking about people who take him too literally when he says something like this without understanding the context.

Okay, that's great. It's always been a mystery to me how you could go from “Self-Reliance” to Islam because Islam means submission, right? So here you have the opposite of submission. You have rebellion. I mean, you're trying to explain it, but once you say this, if you're a writer, you release something into the ether and you don't know where it's going to go. If you say you're of the devil's party and you're promoting “trust thyself”…it happened to Emerson during his lifetime, because one of his great followers was Walt Whitman, the poet, who dedicated Leaves of Grass to Emerson, causing him much embarrassment because of its homoerotic descriptions.

So I'm saying that the intention of the writer is not always the best guide to how his works are going to be received. And I'm saying he situates himself in a trajectory that has led to where we are today, which is basically “nobody can tell me what to do.” It's kind of like the libertarian stupidity that you find in so many people, where they're being led around by the nose, by the manipulation of their desires, and they consider themselves the most independent group of people in the world.

I don't disagree with you that his work situates itself in a trajectory that has led to extreme narcissism and self-indulgence. If there was somebody following up on Emerson today, expressing the spirit of this age the way he expressed the spirit of his age, they might call their essay “Self-Indulgence.”

I think the crucial issue is sexual morality. There's a passage where Emerson goes to England and he meets Carlyle. And Carlyle introduces him to German idealism, which is basically where he got this idea that the mind is its own place. That's what Satan said: “The mind is its own place.” And now you've got Germans saying the same thing, interpreted according to this Puritan understanding. But Emerson got into an argument with Carlyle, and I think Coleridge as well, about sexual morality. He said, “if you think that most American men are not virgins when they get married, you're crazy.” I think this became the crucial issue. This is what allowed the respectability in Concord, where Hawthorne and Emerson were good married men—they’re fathers, they’re pillars of the community—at the same time Emerson harboring the satanic notion of rebellion that would reach its crucial turning point with the collapse of sexual morality in America, which is what the Jews brought about, and that's how the Jews eventually took over our culture.

Well, again, I agree. There's a lot of truth to that. But I think that Emerson's assumption was that the self that you're being true to is the higher self, not the lower self. And I think he just took that for granted in the essay “Self-Reliance”—although with his hyperbole, maybe he confused some people. But I think that stark difference between the higher self and the lower self is one of those things that you should (intuitively) know, right? You should know within yourself that the bestial lusts after all kinds of ego gratification, sensual gratification and so on, the part of you that wants to stuff your face when there's some junk food that's superficially tasty, the same kind of thing in sex and all kinds of other physical pleasures—that's not what he's talking about, obviously.

But as you say, it can lead there. So you're right to some extent, Mike, that Emerson's rebellion against the hypocrisy around him, which was tied into the institutional form of religion in a very materialistic society, had something dangerous about it. Just like the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism—and perhaps, though I know you wouldn't agree with this, the Catholic rebellion against original Christianity which may have been best preserved in Orthodoxy. Each time Christianity goes west it gets worse, from Orthodoxy to Catholicism to Protestantism to secular atheist materialism.

In that context, Emerson is rejecting the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of the people around him in that situation (of puritanism giving way to materialism). And that hypocrisy has been integrated into the institutional church. So Emerson is rebelling to some extent against the institutional church. And that institutional church is necessary and it can't be completely thrown away. You can't just live for yourself.

Well, that's the problem. He had an institutional church that had no right to be the institutional church because it was conceived in rebellion against the church that Christ founded. I'm talking about the Puritans. That is not a church. That's a sect that the English thought it was so crazy that they basically drove them out and hanged Cromwell's body because it was so repugnant in so many different ways. But when it came over to America, it was the only game in town.

But I think there's something to this about this journey westward, certainly in America, because at this point you've got, what do you have? You have a bunch of Englishmen showing up in a world that they had never seen before and they're trying to make sense of it. How do you do this? The only thing they had was the Bible. And so one minister said, we are on an errand into the wilderness. And the wilderness he was talking about was John the Baptist. It was a gloss on John the Baptist.

Well, the desert on the other side of the Jordan has nothing to do with Massachusetts, the forest, but that's all they had. And what happened is as this settlement moved west, you had the essence is Calvinism coming into relationship with existence. Which is the woods. And it had to be modified. They had to modify it because it didn't work. They had no legitimacy. The Protestants had no legitimacy as a church, but they were the only game in town in New England. They tried to come up with a Puritan explanation of their legitimacy. They failed completely. By the time of Solomon Stoddard, who created the halfway covenant, they knew it.

Wait a minute. Is election, which is a requirement for the church—can you pass that on to your children? Well, nobody could figure that one out. And so by the time of Jonathan Edwards, it collapsed. But what didn't collapse was this constant movement westward of all these people who had to survive. So they had to come into some type of alignment with reality or existence, and that's what formed the American character. And I'm saying the classic example of this is Daniel Boone, who started off life as a Quaker. How are you going to move into Indian territory as a Quaker? So what happened is that he had to modify this ridiculous—He had to change his hat.

He had to make a different hat, a coonskin hat instead of a Quaker hat.

He had to pick up a gun. That's what he had to do. He had to pick up a musket. So he's a Quaker carrying a musket.

He had to eat wild game instead of instant oatmeal Quaker oats.

I think that this is what Emerson is trying to do. He's trying to come to some type of understanding of what is happening. I think Paul Johnson called him the first American. He's the first American because he's understanding the mutation that had to take place in the identity of Americans, because they had a foundationless sect

Yeah, I think you're right. That's why he's the real thinker of the American Renaissance. But getting back to that issue of institutionalized religion that gets woven into a social fabric full of hypocrisy, and then authentically religious people and especially mystics seek genuine religious experience by purifying their souls…Let me quickly mention that Laurent Guyenot last night on my show said that I should ask you about the beginning of Protestantism, with Luther standing against the selling of indulgences, those “get-out-of-jail-free cards” absolving sins. Laurent said “E. Michael Jones would have been on the side of Luther.” Is that true?

No, absolutely not. And secondly, if you think indulgences caused the Reformation, you're a superficial thinker. And if you think that Yahweh is the devil, you're a blasphemer. And that's the problem with Guyanaud's analysis. He's crippled by Marcionism, okay? We have to make a distinction between people who are hypocrites and religions which are intrinsically hypocritical. Quakerism is by definition a hypocritical religion. Ben Franklin discovered this. There's a passage in the autobiography. They're sailing to Philadelphia and suddenly a ship appears on the horizon and the captain says, “women and children below board, all able-bodied men take up a gun.” And one of the guys was a Quaker. And he picks up a gun because they had to defend themselves. And William Penn was one of the Quakers who goes down below board with the women and children. It turns out that it wasn’t a pirate ship. So afterwards, William Penn upbraids the Quaker for taking up a gun. And the Quaker said “thou didst not complain when thou thought was a pirate ship.”

This is complete hypocrisy baked into their religion, because they wanted to retain their property but they would not defend it when it was threatened. And that's the hypocrisy that is institutional, that had to go before America could… And that's what Daniel Boone learned. And there's a difference there.

And to talk about the Reformation either in England or in Germany without talking about the avarice of the lower aristocracy who simply wanted to steal church property and then cook up a theological justification after the fact is not to be in contact with reality. There was hypocrisy on both sides. Or maybe more of it on the Protestant side. Look, hypocrisy is not—there's always hypocrisy, okay? It's the tribute that vice pays to virtue. So it's always going to be here.

That is not the driving force behind the Reformation at all.

Okay, and then just in half defense of Marcionism, it does seem to me that some of the ultraviolence around the American conquest of the Americas by the Puritans and all their various successors is very beautifully captured in one of the greatest-ever American novels, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is kind of hard to read. It's so bloody. Some people can't go to movies because they're too violent. Well, this is a book that's hard to read. Maybe one of the very few books that I've ever read that's that hard to read. But it echoes with Old Testament thunder and brimstone as it describes massacres.

You're absolutely right. The Puritans were Judaizers. That means that they went to the Old Testament for the models that allowed them to understand the world, and one of them they took away was Amalek. The Jews are still talking this way about Palestinians. It is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, like Marcionism is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, but it is one that the Puritans had, and it characterized, it epitomized, and it directed their whole attitude toward the Indians and the conquest of the Indians that was not shared by Catholic France and by Catholic Spain.

This is a purely English phenomenon. When the English showed up in Nova Scotia the Presbyterians said, we're bringing Christ to you people. And at that point, the French had already intermarried with the Mi'kmaq for centuries. And they said, no, we're Catholic. Well, at that point, they said, no, you're not, because Catholics are an abomination. And if you don't go along with this, there will be consequences. And then they put bounties for scalping the French Micmac. And when that didn't work, they shipped them off to Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns. This is the historical difference between the Protestant attitude toward the Indians and the Catholic attitude toward the Indians. And if you don't understand it, you don't understand history of the United States of America.

Well, the Protestants refused to intermarry with the Indians because they viewed them as goyim or a lesser race due to their Old Testament focus, etc. And they were somewhat more genocidal, maybe due to the Old Testament's genocidal aspects: Amalek, for example, to quote Bibi Netanyahu. But ultimately, the main difference was the intermarriage, right? The Catholics, especially the Spanish, enslaved and massacred and looted the Native Americans every bit as much as the Protestants did.

Are you talking about Cortez? This is a paradigmatic example of the conquest of Mexico. It's one of the greatest stories ever told. And the fact of the matter was that the Aztecs had established this genocidal hegemony over every other Indian tribe in Mexico at the time, and they would march them up the pyramids and cut their hearts out. A regime like that is not going to go quietly. It had to be brought down by military force.

But long after that, Indians, because they were available to be captured as slaves, were rounded up, made slaves, put to work in the mines of Potosi and other places, worked to death under horrific conditions. Overall, as I understand it, the atrocities committed by Catholics in the Americas were probably at least as great as those committed by Protestants.

I disagree. And even if you're talking about individual acts of injustice, you're talking about what happened to the Mexican people. The Mexican people are the cosmic race because of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a fact of history. It's not some pious Catholic myth. Her tilma is in Mexico, you can look at it if you want, at which point she appeared as a mestiza, which meant the intermarriage of the Spaniards and the indigenous people.

I'm saying this is fundamentally different than the attitude that English Puritans had toward the indigenous people. The Catholic Church in Mexico did not view Indians as Amalek. There's a fundamental difference there.

I think the Old Testament thumping Puritans did indeed share some of that mentality with Bibi Netanyahu and his friends over in Occupied Palestine. Anyway, my pro-Emerson side—I don't have any foolish consistency about being totally pro-Emerson—I admit that you're right about some of these things, especially his place in overall intellectual history and what egotism, which people could draw from this essay, Self-Reliance, has led to. So, yeah, I'm still split, just like our image here suggests, without any foolish consistency at all.

Any last thoughts on Emerson and Cherchez le Juif?

Yeah, I think we're at a crisis because we don't know what it means to be an American. It's important for you and me to understand what it means to be an American, because we obviously come from different traditions, whether it's the Emersonian Protestant or the Islamic tradition. And we have to have some type of lingua franca that allows us to talk together as Americans. And I think the only way that we have to hammer out this issue right now is the Jewish control of our culture. This is the issue that has to be resolved. It has to be resolved by Americans, for Americans, even if they differ in terms of fundamental issues.

That is the essence of what America was. The essence, we have to have a moral consensus, which is what John Adams said. And which means we cannot tolerate either abortion or Zionism. These are beyond the pale. This should be beyond political difference. We should have a unanimity. We have to come back to this unanimity in support of the moral law, because otherwise we're going to end up very badly. We're already in bad shape and the future looks even gloomier.

Yeah, I agree with that. And as far as the Emanuel Todd's claim that Protestant American culture has collapsed, I think that's true. And to me, one of the better sides of that Protestant American culture is represented by Emerson. Maybe it's a personal thing for me, because my grandmother, who was a bit of a nature mystic—she was the only person with any religious sense in my family—was a Unitarian and a follower of Emerson and Thoreau. But whether it's due to that kind of partisanship that I inherited or my reading, I have found the Emerson side of American Protestantism had a lot of positive aspects compared to the Jewish-dominated culture that we've had since World War II and especially since the coup d'etats that overthrew John F. Kennedy and then the coup d'etat on 9/11, which were supreme expressions of the Jewish takeover of the United States from the Protestants.

So maybe we need to use that African proverb, “if you're lost, go back to where you were before you were lost,” and say we need to go back to the very best of pre-World War II Protestant-led America. I don't know where else we're going to go. Maybe what we need to do is go back there and then get on a camel. In other words, start praying five times a day, start looking to the Quran for guidance, and submitting to God in islam, surrendering to God.

So if Emerson would just get off that high camel and surrender to God: “Get off that camel, Emerson, spread out your carpet, and perform sujood with your forehead on the earth!”

Self-reliance and Islam are completely incompatible. They're the complete opposites. But you seem to have brought them together in some miraculous way.

What I'm saying is that America needs to get back to its Emersonian virtues, and then “get off that high camel and put your forehead on the floor.”

That's where we're going to have to leave it. So thank you so much, Michael Jones. Always enjoy communicating with you across this vast gulf of cultures and religions that's actually probably not even as far as Wisconsin to Indiana was, back when I was in Wisconsin. Looking forward to a lot more conversation in the not too distant future, inshallah.

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

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

Historian Laurent Guyénot discusses his new article “Fear of the Jews and the Jewish God of Terror.” It begins: ““It’s time for Jews to be feared!” declared Rabbi Shmuley recently. Jews having failed to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved, respected or admired, must now make themselves feared. This is the new watchword. The problem is, if Jews want to be feared, then they must also accept being hated.”

Laurent Guyénot is the author of From Yahweh to Zion and many other books and articles. He is well-known for his revisionist interpretations of the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11.

EXCERPT:

Schmuley isn't the first person who's made this point that it's better to be feared than loved. Neocon (Michael Ledeen) made a big deal of Jews all being Machiavellians.

Yeah, actually Rabbi Shmuley in this small video that he made of himself saying it's time for Jews to be feared, quoted Machiavelli, and he explained Machiavelli said it's good to be loved but it's better to be feared. Machiavelli was talking to the princes, to people who had power. So, you know, if you want to be feared, you better have power. Anyway, you have to have power because otherwise nobody will fear you. So the very fact that he says this means that he considers that his community is now powerful enough to be feared. They did enough trying to be loved. They didn't succeed. They didn't do it very well.

Right, but of course when you try to make everyone fear you by mistreating them, you run the risk of angering them, and their anger might outweigh their fear to the point that they might stand up to you, which certainly is what the Palestinians have done.

Yeah, actually the paradox is that he says we've tried to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved. So now we're going to try to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be feared.

Good luck with that.

How do you do that? you have to think what's going on in his mind. How can he think that he will overcome anti-Semitism by being feared? As I explained in the first paragraph of my article, fear of the Jews translates literally as Judeophobia. Phobos means to fear in Greek. If Jews want to be feared, they will just create more Judeophobia, which is basically what they (wrongly) call anti-Semitism.

Shmuley and others who've said this, quoted Machiavelli and so on, they're not really talking about changing anything that much because the hardcore tribalist element of world Jewry has been working overtime to be feared rather than loved for quite some time. Look at the way the ADL terrorizes people who get out of line on online platforms. Anybody who questions the official Jewish version of the Holocaust (TM) is going to be terrorized and they're going to lose their jobs and so on. And then they have the JDL, the Jewish Defense League, to bomb people and kill people…

It was Gilad Atzman who said “Jewish power is the power to prevent people from talking about Jewish power.” So that's the power of fear. People are so afraid they will not even say what they are afraid of. It's really getting insane.

I would be interested to have your viewpoint about RFK Jr. In my article I end up mentioning that Rabbi Shmuley is an advisor to Robert Kennedy Jr. Some people even thought he would pick him up as the vice president candidate. There is a strange video in which Rabbi Shmuley introduces Robert Kennedy Jr. and talks about his father having been murdered by a Palestinian who hated Israel. And then Robert Kennedy Jr., his son, who has studied the case and knows very well his father was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan—and certainly not because he supported Israel—just sits there and listens. And this creates a very strange feeling, because he's being insulted about the memory of his own father in front of his face and he doesn't say anything. He let Rabbi Shmuley tell this huge lie about his own father. The only conclusion I can come up with is that Robert Kennedy Jr. is afraid of Rabbi Shmuley. There is fear that comes up in this video, I feel. There is no other explanation.

You know, as a caricature of a Jew, he is pretty scary because you feel he's really a crazy guy. He's insane. Just listen to him and you get this feeling that he's completely insane. He's possessed by the devil or by Yahweh, I think, you know, which in my mind is basically the same thing.

Yeah, he does have a weird vibe. And that brings us to the observation that Ron Unz has made, and I'm sure others probably have too, but Ron's done it in a kind of a memorable way, in saying that the Jewish community has this minority of kamikazes who are willing to go crazy to try to terrorize anybody that is perceived as threatening Jewish power.

Yeah, but I have never seen a Jewish extremist going on a suicidal mission, have they? There was Baruch Goldstein, a guy who murdered 29 people in Hebron.

That's Ben Gavir's hero. It's interesting that Baruch Goldstein is a hero for the whole Israeli right wing, including Ben-Gvir. They have posters of him on their walls and so on. And so those people all have that mentality. They are crazy, and they greatly admire and identify with this Goldstein guy who went on a suicide mission to kill a bunch of people who were praying.

Actually, he was not even on a suicide mission because he had a machine gun and he was in a mosque where nobody was armed. He probably hoped to escape.

Right. And I suppose if he had ended up in Israeli custody nothing terribly bad would have happened to him.

He would have been jailed for a few years, and then become a deputy.

First they would have said that his bullets came from Palestinian terrorists. Then they would later then they would say, “well no actually we we admit that it came from Goldstein's gun, but we think it was an accident.” And then eventually after the whole thing had died down then they might admit that he did it. “He lost his mind for a few minutes, he's better now.”

There is a pattern of crazy tribalist Jews doing insane things. A lot of that is geared towards trying to terrorize their perceived enemies.

Yeah, and they are not called terrorists. As you said, they become martyrs. The tomb of Baruch Goldstein has become a pilgrimage site. And it was said that Yigal Amir, who once was the minister in the government of Israel had his poster on top of his desk. This is crazy. This is really incredible. That means this mindset is maybe not completely dominant, but actually very, very strong in Israel. So we're dealing with a country, you know, which is really insane. That's why, you know, a long time ago, I started to realize the key to understand Israel is to understand psychopathy. Israel is a psychopathic nation. This is what we are dealing with.

What's happening today shows that they can behave like a psychopath and their big bully, the United States, is completely under their spell, so it protects them from being punished by anybody else.

It's amazing that a modern, important nation state can have in its cabinet somebody who had a poster of Baruch Goldstein on their wall and who kind of worships Baruch Goldstein, and that a country can have a substantial segment of its population worshipping Baruch Goldstein. He came into a mosque and killed 29 people, shooting them in the back while they were praying.

Can you imagine if there was somebody in Joe Biden's cabinet who was a huge fan of Robert Bowers, the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, who was convicted of killing 11 people in 2018 when he went into a synagogue and shot it up? Basically, Robert Bowers is one third of Goldstein. They both did the same thing. They went into a house of worship and just shot people. Here in the United States, if you were one of the people who has a high opinion of Robert Bowers for doing that, you probably wouldn't want to advertise it too much. It's just not imaginable that anybody who was a huge fan of Robert Bowers, the synagogue shooter, would end up in the cabinet of the President of the United States.

But Israel is a country where a huge segment of the population thinks that way. And even to the point of having somebody in the cabinet—it's really mind boggling.

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Historian Laurent Guyénot discusses his new article “Fear of the Jews and the Jewish God of Terror.” It begins: ““It’s time for Jews to be feared!” declared Rabbi Shmuley recently. Jews having failed to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved, respected or admired, must now make themselves feared. This is the new watchword. The problem is, if Jews want to be feared, then they must also accept being hated.”

Laurent Guyénot is the author of From Yahweh to Zion and many other books and articles. He is well-known for his revisionist interpretations of the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11.

EXCERPT:

Schmuley isn't the first person who's made this point that it's better to be feared than loved. Neocon (Michael Ledeen) made a big deal of Jews all being Machiavellians.

Yeah, actually Rabbi Shmuley in this small video that he made of himself saying it's time for Jews to be feared, quoted Machiavelli, and he explained Machiavelli said it's good to be loved but it's better to be feared. Machiavelli was talking to the princes, to people who had power. So, you know, if you want to be feared, you better have power. Anyway, you have to have power because otherwise nobody will fear you. So the very fact that he says this means that he considers that his community is now powerful enough to be feared. They did enough trying to be loved. They didn't succeed. They didn't do it very well.

Right, but of course when you try to make everyone fear you by mistreating them, you run the risk of angering them, and their anger might outweigh their fear to the point that they might stand up to you, which certainly is what the Palestinians have done.

Yeah, actually the paradox is that he says we've tried to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved. So now we're going to try to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be feared.

Good luck with that.

How do you do that? you have to think what's going on in his mind. How can he think that he will overcome anti-Semitism by being feared? As I explained in the first paragraph of my article, fear of the Jews translates literally as Judeophobia. Phobos means to fear in Greek. If Jews want to be feared, they will just create more Judeophobia, which is basically what they (wrongly) call anti-Semitism.

Shmuley and others who've said this, quoted Machiavelli and so on, they're not really talking about changing anything that much because the hardcore tribalist element of world Jewry has been working overtime to be feared rather than loved for quite some time. Look at the way the ADL terrorizes people who get out of line on online platforms. Anybody who questions the official Jewish version of the Holocaust (TM) is going to be terrorized and they're going to lose their jobs and so on. And then they have the JDL, the Jewish Defense League, to bomb people and kill people…

It was Gilad Atzman who said “Jewish power is the power to prevent people from talking about Jewish power.” So that's the power of fear. People are so afraid they will not even say what they are afraid of. It's really getting insane.

I would be interested to have your viewpoint about RFK Jr. In my article I end up mentioning that Rabbi Shmuley is an advisor to Robert Kennedy Jr. Some people even thought he would pick him up as the vice president candidate. There is a strange video in which Rabbi Shmuley introduces Robert Kennedy Jr. and talks about his father having been murdered by a Palestinian who hated Israel. And then Robert Kennedy Jr., his son, who has studied the case and knows very well his father was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan—and certainly not because he supported Israel—just sits there and listens. And this creates a very strange feeling, because he's being insulted about the memory of his own father in front of his face and he doesn't say anything. He let Rabbi Shmuley tell this huge lie about his own father. The only conclusion I can come up with is that Robert Kennedy Jr. is afraid of Rabbi Shmuley. There is fear that comes up in this video, I feel. There is no other explanation.

You know, as a caricature of a Jew, he is pretty scary because you feel he's really a crazy guy. He's insane. Just listen to him and you get this feeling that he's completely insane. He's possessed by the devil or by Yahweh, I think, you know, which in my mind is basically the same thing.

Yeah, he does have a weird vibe. And that brings us to the observation that Ron Unz has made, and I'm sure others probably have too, but Ron's done it in a kind of a memorable way, in saying that the Jewish community has this minority of kamikazes who are willing to go crazy to try to terrorize anybody that is perceived as threatening Jewish power.

Yeah, but I have never seen a Jewish extremist going on a suicidal mission, have they? There was Baruch Goldstein, a guy who murdered 29 people in Hebron.

That's Ben Gavir's hero. It's interesting that Baruch Goldstein is a hero for the whole Israeli right wing, including Ben-Gvir. They have posters of him on their walls and so on. And so those people all have that mentality. They are crazy, and they greatly admire and identify with this Goldstein guy who went on a suicide mission to kill a bunch of people who were praying.

Actually, he was not even on a suicide mission because he had a machine gun and he was in a mosque where nobody was armed. He probably hoped to escape.

Right. And I suppose if he had ended up in Israeli custody nothing terribly bad would have happened to him.

He would have been jailed for a few years, and then become a deputy.

First they would have said that his bullets came from Palestinian terrorists. Then they would later then they would say, “well no actually we we admit that it came from Goldstein's gun, but we think it was an accident.” And then eventually after the whole thing had died down then they might admit that he did it. “He lost his mind for a few minutes, he's better now.”

There is a pattern of crazy tribalist Jews doing insane things. A lot of that is geared towards trying to terrorize their perceived enemies.

Yeah, and they are not called terrorists. As you said, they become martyrs. The tomb of Baruch Goldstein has become a pilgrimage site. And it was said that Yigal Amir, who once was the minister in the government of Israel had his poster on top of his desk. This is crazy. This is really incredible. That means this mindset is maybe not completely dominant, but actually very, very strong in Israel. So we're dealing with a country, you know, which is really insane. That's why, you know, a long time ago, I started to realize the key to understand Israel is to understand psychopathy. Israel is a psychopathic nation. This is what we are dealing with.

What's happening today shows that they can behave like a psychopath and their big bully, the United States, is completely under their spell, so it protects them from being punished by anybody else.

It's amazing that a modern, important nation state can have in its cabinet somebody who had a poster of Baruch Goldstein on their wall and who kind of worships Baruch Goldstein, and that a country can have a substantial segment of its population worshipping Baruch Goldstein. He came into a mosque and killed 29 people, shooting them in the back while they were praying.

Can you imagine if there was somebody in Joe Biden's cabinet who was a huge fan of Robert Bowers, the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, who was convicted of killing 11 people in 2018 when he went into a synagogue and shot it up? Basically, Robert Bowers is one third of Goldstein. They both did the same thing. They went into a house of worship and just shot people. Here in the United States, if you were one of the people who has a high opinion of Robert Bowers for doing that, you probably wouldn't want to advertise it too much. It's just not imaginable that anybody who was a huge fan of Robert Bowers, the synagogue shooter, would end up in the cabinet of the President of the United States.

But Israel is a country where a huge segment of the population thinks that way. And even to the point of having somebody in the cabinet—it's really mind boggling.

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

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

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is one of the few American academic experts courageous enough to challenge US and Zionist war propaganda. His article “Crocus Hall in Context: America is Behind This 100% (Ritter)” raises  good questions including: “Did Victoria Nuland have any role in the Crocus Hall acts of terrorism?” His latest article “The Morality and Hypocrisy of Proxy War in a Nuclear Age” opines:

In so many different ways, there is a danger of escalation of the conflict to nuclear status. John Mearsheimer, in interview yesterday with Napolitano, seems to think this is only a small risk. But because the danger of nuclear war may only be “small,” its consequences are unimaginably awful, and the “smallness” of risk (and of course there is plenty of scope for disagreement with Mearsheimer’s assessment) is hardly a good reason for engaging in behavior that breathes continuing life into that small risk.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is an emeritus professor of Bowling Green State University, Ohio and of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (California). He continues to teach at the California State University, Camarillo and undertakes occasional lecturing for the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He co-edited  Russiagate Revisited: Aftermath of a Hoax and has authored or edited many other books.

Excerpt:

I really admire your substack. It's crisp, succinct, very detailed. You are keeping abreast of the best alternative media sources as well as the mainstream sources and coming to very sensible conclusions. I guess my first question is, why aren't there more people doing this? There are a lot of smart people in the academy in the West. And most of them are just going along with the outrageous lies and the completely insane and immoral as well as non-strategic foreign policy that the empire is pursuing. So why are you one of a minority?

Well, I think there are two or three different answers to that question, Kevin. First of all, as you can hear, I don't come originally from America. I was born in Ireland. I am an Irish citizen as well as a US citizen. Because of my Irish connections, I am steeped in the history of anti-imperial resistance, in this case the empire being the British Empire. And that's a very useful background for developing a critical consciousness about any form of imperialistic activity. So that's one part of it, at least so far as explaining my own dissidence is concerned.

We're probably cousins, Oliver, since my grandfather was an Irish Barrett.

Indeed, and thank you for mentioning that. Barrett is a very Irish surname and particularly I believe in County Cork where I still have some relatives.

We actually went to County Cork in search of lost relations. Didn't really find any, but maybe I'll go back.

They got out while they could before Ireland was taken over by the neoliberal cabal. But I think, going back to your first question, why is it that there is so little dissidence? I think two factors principally come to mind. First off is the absorption of our mainstream media within the power establishment. Mainstream media have nearly always been mere cogs in much larger corporate machines whose wealth puts them at the very heart of US capitalism. And they have very little interest in upsetting the apple cart against their own business interests in order to be able to stay in the business of running mainstream media enterprises today. You have to be at peace with political authority or you cannot survive. This is true of almost any country, by the way. You cannot survive as a mainstream medium today if you have set yourself in hostile relationship to those who have the hands on political and economic power. So that's always been true. I think it works in cycles. I think borrowing from the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, there are periods when there is so much rivalry, there is so much conflict within elites, that a certain space is opened out for critical thought and critical discourse. And there are periods when that space almost disappears and I think we are at such a moment now. And the reason why the space, the window, so to speak, for dissent in the mainstream media is now so narrow is because the Western world is so threatened. It is a long time since the collective West has felt so threatened—in this instance by the emergence of a multipolar world led first and foremost by China.

So I think the fact that the mainstream media are now so tight with the other centers of power in our society means that even intelligent people who have never been exposed to media studies or never thought very much about the quality of their information infrastructure, their media infrastructure, they're far, far too accepting of the narratives that are spun day by day by organs such as the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times or the Times of London or the Guardian. That is truer now than ever before. They (big media) are arms of the state where matters of the existential survival of the collective West are concerned.

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