Truth Jihad Radio

Radhia Gleis discusses her award-winning new book “THE FOLLOWERS: ‘Holy Hell’ and the Disciples of Narcissistic Leaders: How My Years in a Notorious Cult Parallel Today’s Cultural Mania.” The autobiographical volume describes the author’s 25 years in the BuddhaField cult led by Jaime “Michel” Gomez, an apparent narcissistic sociopath and homosexual predator-cum-hypnotherapist with a flair for plagiarizing spiritual books and trying out their tricks on unsuspecting seekers. (And as the Firesign Theaterreminds us, there’s a seeker born every minute!)

Taking up where Will Allen’s documentary Holy Hell left off, Gleis systematically compares Jaime Gomez’s BuddhaField with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement…and discovers a long list of similarities. Though her core argument is convincing—yes, Trump is a narcissistic sociopath and de facto cult leader who manipulates rubes in many of the same ways that Jaime Gomez, Jim Jones, Rev. Moon, and other such con artists have—she drinks way too much Democratic Party kool-aid along the way. And though she ignorantly slanders the Qur’an, her post-BuddhaField spiritual/religious views are beautifully-expressed and uncommonly insightful.  So though I don’t expect this interview to be as contentious as the Mona Shaikh meltdown, there will definitely be some differences of opinion on display.

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

Watch Part 1 above

Part 2 (link corrected)

David Musa Pidcock, founder of the Islamic Party of Britain, passed away last week. May Allah bless, forgive, and reward him and admit him to Paradise. His funeral will be held tomorrow, Friday, December 10, near Sheffield (UK). Those who wish to attend can email me (truthjihad/at/gmail/dot/com) for the location. -KB

From Moeen Yaseen of Global Vision 2000:

INNA LILLAHI WA INNA ILAYHI RAJIUN. GLOBAL VISION 2000 IS SORRY TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING AWAY OF DAUD MUSA PIDCOCK MAY ALLAH REST HIS SOUL  IN PEACE. WE WERE PLEASED TO COLLABORATE WITH HIM  IN SEVERAL HOUSE OF LORDS MONETARY, BANKING AND POLITICAL ECONOMY EVENTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF PARLIAMENT SINCE 2004. OVER THE LAST 5 YEARS HE CONTRIBUTED TO GLOBAL VISION 2000'S ESCHATOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY EVENTS IN LONDON. THIS ASPECT OF HIS WORK IS PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT AS IT IS VERY RELEVANT TO ALL OF HUMANTY AS A NEW ERA OF  DARKNESS SPREADS ITS WINGS ACROSS THE WORLD. DAUD PIDCOCK WAS A LEADING BRITISH MUSLIM CAMPAIGNER AND COMMENTATOR AT LEAST SINCE 1989 WITH THE RUSHDIE AFFAIR. MANY  IN THE BRITISH MUSLIM COMMUNITY WILL NOT EVEN KNOW OF HIM AS THEY WERE NOT EVEN BORN IN THE 80’S. A VIDEO IS POSTED ON OUR HOME PAGE DURING A HOUSE OF LORDS SEMINAR FEATURING HIM. OUR NOTE HERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES  BUT THAT IS ANOTHER STORY.  A FORMER ROMAN CATHOLIC, DAVID MUSA PIDCOCK HAS PASSED AWAY THIS MORNING. A SHEFFIELD MAN, HE WAS BORN IN 1942 AND BECAME A MUSLIM IN 1975 WHEN WORKING AS AN ENGINEER IN SAUDI ARABIA. HE WAS THE FOUNDER AND THE LEADER OF THE ISLAMIC PARTY OF BRITAIN, WHICH WAS LAUNCHED IN SEPTEMBER 1989 IN THE MIDST OF  THE BRITISH MUSLIM MOBILISATIONS AGAINST SALMAN RUSHDIE'S NOVEL, THE SATANIC VERSES. THE IPB WAS MOST ACTIVE IN THE 1992 GENERAL ELECTION WHEN IT UNSUCCESSFULLY CONTESTED 3 SEATS. ITS PURPOSE WAS TO PROVIDE AN ISLAMIC ALTERNATIVE AT ELECTION TIME AND TO ENGAGE THE BRITISH PUBLIC FOR PROSELYTISING PURPOSES. IT WAS DISSOLVED IN 2006. DAUD MUSA PIDCOCK WAS ALSO AN HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ECONOMIC RESEARCH COUNCIL AND A DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR RATIONAL ECONOMICS. HE CO-FOUNDED THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR VICTIMS OF FRAUD AND BANKING MALPRACTICE. HE CONTRIBUTED TO A NUMBER OF PUBLICATIONS FOR EXAMPLE HIS REBUTTAL "SATANIC VERSES: ANCIENT AND MODERN " AND WROTE REGULARLY FOR IPB's QUARTERLY COMMON SENSE. DAUD IS SURVIVED BY HIS WIFE AND HIS TWO CHILDFREN. MARY AND JAKE, MAY ALLAH HAVE MERCY ON DAUD's SOUL.

"Signs of the 'End Times' Are All Around Us!"

David Pidcock interviewed by Kevin Barrett, June 17 2020

Kevin Barrett: Hi, I'm Kevin Barrett of Truth Jihad Radio. Have you noticed that the world isn't getting any less crazy? In fact, it's getting so crazy that more and more people are beginning to wonder whether we may be living in the end times, the akhir-uz-zamman. Sheikh Imran Hussein is the world's most interesting eschatologist, that is, student of the end times. Today, we're bringing on another very interesting and accomplished student of the end times, David Musa Pidcock. He's the co-founder of the Islamic Party of Britain, and his views are way outside the mainstream box.

David is a Muslim leader from the UK who has done all kinds of interesting work on a wide array of issues. And today we're going to talk about one that he's especially well versed in, which is the question of end times scenarios. And in Islam, we call that akhir-uz-zaman. Are we living in the end times? If we're going to apply any template to the crazy events going on in today's world to try to make sense of it and tell an overall story about it—some might call it a myth, others might call it an accurate story—this akhir-uz-zaman or end times template strikes me as rather uncannily appropriate in many ways. So let's hear what David thinks. Welcome! As-salaamu alaikum.

David Pidcock: Wa alaikum as-salaam. This is a particularly interesting subject and one that I've concentrated on for quite some time. We've put out a book in response to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. It’s called Satanic Voices, Ancient and Modern. And in it I came across some very interesting material, particularly on the issue of the British Embassy in Constantinople (and a hadith about the end times). Now this is very interesting for our times from the beginning of the 20th century till today.

Now, the British Embassy had written a letter basically notifying the British government of what had just happened on July the 8th 1908 in Constantinople. A coup d'etat had taken place on July the 8th, and the whole of the Ottoman Empire basically was then taken over by 70,000 Masonic Jews from Salonika. And he gives a whole background to what's going on and what would happen.

Kevin Barrett: This was the so-called Young Turks, right?

David Pidcock: Oh yes, the young Turks, up to their old tricks, I suppose you could say. But what's interesting is that they (the Salonika Jews) had congregated in the Ottoman Empire. After the the Spanish Inquisition, the sultan opened Salonika and allowed them to congregate in Salonika, which of course, then became the most Jewish town in Europe.

Kevin Barrett: And these weren't all normal Jews, were they? Some of them were crypto-Jews who had falsely converted to Islam following Sabbatai Zevi, the the rather satanic heretical Jewish Zionist (whose career peaked in 1666). He was the first real Zionist, wasn't he?

David Pidcock: Absolutely. You've hit exactly on the point. Interesting things happened in 1666. There was the Great Fire of London, which was set on purpose by the bankers so they could pass the Coinage Act. We had the Great Plague in a village not far from where I'm sitting now. And, of course, there was Sabbatai Zevi, who had come to "liberate" Al-Quds/Jerusalem. Now, when he got to Constantinople, the sultan ordered him to stop, go back, lose his head or convert. Now being a devout coward, he converted. He was then basically ordered to to remove himself. And he ended up in Salonika. What's particularly nasty about this particular individual is that he had a madhhab (religious law school)—his Ten Commandments consisted of the reverse of the Mosaic Law. But "Thou shalt commit adultery" was the first.

Kevin Barrett: That was his personal favorite.

David Pidcock: Oh, of course. And (the favorite of) those who followed him, obviously. There was one day in the year when they had a festival of wife swapping. And so nobody knew who their real father was. And of course this applied to Mustafa Kemal, and to all of them who ruled and continued to rule almost until today. And they still have a massive influence. When you see Mustafa Kamal's picture behind Erdogan, you wonder why, why would he be there, when you know the history?

Kevin Barrett: I know a little bit about that because I did a speaking tour of Turkey with a group of people brought over from the U.S. about 10 years ago. The people who brought me over were part of a Muslim group called Yeni Asya, and they're part of the Islamic revival in Turkey that looks to Bediuzzaman Said Nursi as an inspiration. He was the great Muslim reformer who helped preserve Islam in Turkey. And anyway, these people, I don't want to name too many names or anything and get them in trouble. But essentially what they said is "we all know that Mustafa Kemal was a pedophile, a monster, a degenerate, a Satanist coming out of this crypto-Jewish movement of Sabbatai Zevi. We know this but we can't say it because of the brainwashing that's been imposed on Turkey—that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk saved Turkey and so on and so forth. “He's the father of the nation.” If you come out and tell the truth openly and directly about that in today's Turkey, you'll basically be beheaded. They'll crucify you. And so I think that's the reason that somebody like Erdogan who probably knows full well the truth about these matters, is still playing the game and having that picture of of Ataturk behind him in his office.

David Pidcock: I was invited by Necmettin Erbakan when we formed the Islamic Party.

Kevin Barrett: He was better than Erdogan.

David Pidcock: Oh, absolutely superb. He was an engineer. They invited us to go to Basel, where the first Zionist Conference was held in 1897. And what happened? We came out of the building at lunchtime and it was right next to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS, nerve center of New World Order financial power). And we looked up and we saw a very large Alpine vulture starting to circle around the top of the building. Then a second one joined it and a third one in a triangle.

These three vultures (appropriately, vulture capitalism) were rotating around the top of the Bank for International Settlements. I got the photographs, but somebody purloined them at some point. Anyway, the issue being that we went there, and I was able to pick up a lot of information from Erbakan. He was certainly very smart, and he wanted to wake up Moslems.

But Mustafa Kemal...When I was in Turkey, I gave a talk. And unfortunately, I made the mistake of calling him Ataturk. And of course that upset a few people. But anyway, from that, we started to build a good relationship. And Ataturk and the whole system that basically took over from July the 8th 1908... Now in the Sahih Muslim and Bukhari and the Mishkat al-Masabih, the Hadith said that Yawm al-Qiyyama (Judgment Day, the Day of Ressurection) will not occur until seventy thousand sons of Isaac (Ishaq) will attack Constantinople. But when they arrive, when they land, they will not fight with swords or shower projectiles. They will simply say, la ilaha il Allah and one of its defenses will be opened. They'll recite it for a second time: la ilaha il Allah — and the second of its defenses will open. And they will enter it. Because it is on three defense levels, Constantinople or Istanbul. Then they will recite it for a third time: la ilaha il Allah. And they will enter it and start gathering the spoils of war. Now, he says, from this day count six years to Jihad Akbar. Now, the (Sabbatean) sign, by the way, was the Masonic core sign, because they didn't say Muhammad rasul Allah, they just said la ilaha il Allah. And from that day, they pretty well took control of everything. But then Rasul Allah said count six years. So from July the 8th 1908, we come to July 1914. And they say exactly in that month, after Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated a month previously, then the Great War, Jihad Akbar, begins. Abdul Hamid the Caliph has already been deposed and is under house arrest, but he declares Jihad Akbar in favor of Germany because Germany built the Baghdad to Berlin Railway.

And so that's how it happened. So Jihad Akbar (World War I) begins exactly in the sixth year, in the month when the Jihad Akbar was supposed to begin. Now there's an additional piece to this: He says from this day-count miss one year. So we miss 1915. Now, the book that I completed, the Times History of the War, said in this year there was no open revolt in the Hejaz. There was nothing there. So skip one year. So we come to 1916. He says, “and then look for the emergence of Dajjal, Antichrist, and revolution entering every Arab house by mutual hatred and hostility between the Arabs.” Now, Lawrence, of course, arrives in June of that year. And he said it was unfortunate but necessary because they wanted to make sure that they got a cheap and speedy victory over Iraq and the Mesopotamian oil. So it was all about destroying the Ottoman Empire, getting the oil and controlling the Middle East.

Kevin Barrett: I was wondering if this is related to what Sheikh Imran Hussain says when he speaks of the ahadith that cite this great war, the Malhama, being fought over a mountain of gold that will be uncovered in Mesopotamia. And Sheikh Imran thinks that mountain of gold is the oil-based petrodollar, which is black gold. And that sounds like it would be in line with what you're saying.

David Pidcock: People like to interpret literally, but I think it's true. Whatever gold is there, one would have thought that Saddam would have dug it up by now. But they've been digging up the oil. And of course it is a source of massive revenue.

But that was the agenda. And I met a former American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he told me quite a lot — I'll come back to that in a second — but just to stick with this hadith because it is so precise and accurate. But then people are saying, But who is the Dajjal? Now, if we look at the British Empire, what it stands for, what it stood for and then became the Anglo-American Empire, it's the same firm, the Masonic cult, and they're a pretty nasty bunch. So that's that's where it takes us to.

Kevin Barrett: But do you think there is an individual (Dajjal/Antichrist) or just this group?

David Pidcock: Well, according to the hadith, there are at least 30 dajjals. So these are people who will come like Sabbatai Zevi and others, and they will claim to be the Messiah. But I think it is definite, because the Prophet describes him doing tours around the Kaaba, describes his personage: wavy hair, one eyed, and (unintelligible). So I think it is certainly an individual…

because Jesus will kill him with his lance on the way to Lid (?) which is the airport. He's obviously heading there. So it is an individual, whether there are 30...and the first one is identified by Jesus in the Gospel of Barnabas: they called Paul "Daggala," a liar or deceiver. So Paul is the first one. Because we know he's altered the scripture, falsified everything. But he gave one secret bit of information...in Galatians 4:20. Now I've done a lot of research on biblical history. I've been to the places of Noah's Ark with Ron Wyatt and others. Paul went to Arabia on his way to Damascus. And he said that in Galatians 4 he talks about Hagar being the mother of Ishmael and basically the covenant was announced at Mount Sinai in Arabia. Now Sinai is in Arabia, is not in Egypt. And I've been—

Kevin Barrett: I did a radio show about that a few years ago.

David Pidcock: Yeah, it's fabulous. Because when you actually now know about Noah's Ark, when you go and retrieve the information, you go to the Red Sea crossing and you find that on the seabed between Nuweiba and Arabia, the chariots of Pharaoh are still on the seabed. And we've received some. And the Pharaoh of the Exodus that the Quran tells us about—“We will preserve you in your body”—is in the Cairo museum, and is still there. This issue will recur when the army tries to pursue al-Mahdi. And it will sink in the desert like Pharaoh in the Red Sea.

Kevin Barrett: So what do you think about Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog)? It has occurred to me that what you've described is sort of leading up to that key period from 1908 through the outbreak of the Great War—that period when the Federal Reserve was established in the United States, when this Dajjal/Antichrist banking cabal took over the United States and largely set the stage to take over the world... At that moment in history, these two forces that might equate to Gog and Magog appeared, and those two forces are basically communism and Zionism. Both of them are Jewish heresies. They're millenarian messianic Jewish heresies. They both say, "we're going to establish a paradise here on Earth. We're not going to wait for God, we're going to do it ourselves." The communists say "we're going to do it by killing all the capitalists and creating paradise by eliminating capitalism, and then 'to each according to his needs'" and so on and so forth. And the Zionists say, "We're going to do it by going and killing or expelling all the Palestinians and having a perfect Jewish state where we will rule in our Holy Land and rebuild the blood sacrifice temple and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and put our messiah on the throne." So the Zionists and the communists are both coming out of Jewish millenarian messianic heresy — one might even say satanic heresy. And both are kind of splitting off of the same community of post-Jews — that is, people who are no longer following the Jewish faith, but still are driven by this messianic impulse. And all this (communism and Zionism) exploded into the world at the same time.

David Pidcock: I think it's very interesting that from the sons of Noah, alayhis salaam, Shem and Japheth... The white race has come from Japheth. Now from the second of the grandchildren of Noah from that tribe, Yajuj and Majuj, Gog and Magog, are descendants. So the white race is descended from there. Now, if we go to the Guildhall in London, we find in the Great Hall is Gog and Magog, the two figures on either side of the gigantic stage. So the people here (in London) already know who we are. And I think this hadith where he tells that he arrives on an island after sailing west from where he was in the Middle East, that he arrived on this island... Now, from the Thames, you can climb up the hill and the first church is actually there. It's called Temple Hill Temple Mount Church. And the people who were with him see a figure on the beach who has long hair. You can't see his face or her face. And he says, Go to this church. And they go. Then they find this gigantic, muscular figure in chains. And they say, Who are you? And he basically admits that he is the Antichrist who would come later. And he said, "Are the palm trees still growing fruit and has the prophet arrived?" He said, "Well, it won't be long before I'm there." So London is the epicenter for finance. Washington is the military. And the Vatican, of course, is the so-called spiritual center. So those are the three centers.

Kevin Barrett: And it's interesting to ponder to what extent this contemporary, bizarre so-called Western civilization that seems to be manifesting this end-time scenario is, on the one hand, a continuation of the Roman Empire; while in another way, it's a continuation of messianic Jewish heretical, satanic millenarianism. We've heard famous people like Leo Strauss say that our civilization is basically a melding of Athens and Jerusalem. But in a sense, it seems like it's more Rome and Jerusalem. And it's kind of the dark side of both of those traditions. Right?

David Pidcock: Well, just look at the Washington skyline. It is totally pagan. Isis is on the top of the dome. Then there's the obelisk. All of these are satanic symbols. Everything about Washington is designed by kabbalists — you know, the alignment. And there is one point in the year where the sun rises exactly above the top of the obelisk...I've got a book here on the bookshelf by Alex Horne, who was a 33 degree Mason or 32 degree Mason. And they said the whole agenda is not to rebuild the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, but to rebuild the Tower of Babel. That is the agenda. So then you start to see what you're really dealing with. It is totally and utterly satanic. And go to Donald Trump's apartment! I haven't been there, but look on the ceiling. Everything is Masonic. Everything has to do with a cult. And I think he bought with his 666 Fifth Avenue for one point eighty five billion.

Kevin Barrett: That was actually Kushner.

David Pidcock: Yes, it was, but I think Trump had a hand in it. He had 666 written all the way through, and he made his penthouse at that height by leaving out a few floors. So all of them are in on it, and they're all satanic, demonic people, unfortunately. And that is what what we find, the more you dig. But you don't have to dig too far because it's right in your face now.

Kevin Barrett: Right. And that does lead to the question of how do we deal with this? Sheikh Imran Hussein has advocated that people should form what he calls Islamic villages or Muslim villages, which of course would not be closed off to people of other faiths. He urges Muslims to unite with Christians and other people of goodwill and purity of heart to form these villages in rural areas to survive the coming Malhama or Great War. He sees this satanic project of rebuilding the Tower of Babel or the Temple or whatever it is, as leading to this prophesied war, which will be the final version of it — maybe it's been going on for a century already — but the culmination will be a war that kills most of the planet's population, which Sheikh Imran thinks will be a nuclear war.

I actually was in Tehran with Sheikh Imran when he had that dream. In fact, I met him the morning after he had the dream. He woke up from his dream of the Malhama and came downstairs and sat down at the conference table, and I came and sat next to him. This was the first day of the conference. I had never met him before in person, and so I just happened to sit randomly at the conference table, look to my left, and there was Sheikh Imran Hussain. And the first thing he said to me was, "Kevin, good to meet you. I just had this incredible dream of the Malhama." And he's been talking about that dream ever since. And so he thinks we should be going to rural areas to get out of the cities and try to live in an honest, sustainable way, living off the land and getting ready to have to survive in the absence of so-called civilization.

David Pidcock: Right. I think this is right. We should already be thinking like that. I was working in in Dubai for a while with Almajd Television, which is a Saudi thing with Manar Zadan. His brother Sammy Zadan is with Al Jazeera now. Both of them are excellent people. They found somebody in Egypt who had found a collection of Hadith that had been lost for a long time, collated in 300 Hijri. It's entitled al-Mahdi at the Threshold. They translated it. And I got a copy to proofread. And it went on the market in Dubai, Sharjah. Within 24 hours it had vanished. All the publications. Now this is a book found in  the library at Medina Al-Munawara. It is dated from 300 Hijri, and it's a rare handwritten manuscript. In the hadith, after the (one referencing) 1908 with the Great War, Jihad Akbar, there are no ahadith until almost today. They were hidden as soon as Ataturk got in there. All the things that were of value were hidden. Now it was recovered by somebody. I think I may have already sent you the collection, but if not, I'll send it. Now this is the next hadith that is in that sequence from 1908. "And a few more tens of years shall pass. And a man will appear as a scourge on the Romans, who will come from the land called German. His name is like hir. He will fight all in the land of ice and bounty (Russia). And then the wrath of Allah will reach him after years of fire.” He is then killed by the secret forces of the Russians, KGB, etc. The London Observer, October 6 2002 (featured) Elanor Esquivia, who was one of the team who was in Berlin, one of the team in Berlin who killed Hitler.

Now they say Hitler had about 20 lookalikes. But the prophet says he will be killed by the secret forces of the Russians. Now this Elanor Esquivia also took Hitler's jaw. You can fake other things but you can't fake his dental records and everything they have now. He took the skull and gave it to Stalin, who put it in his desk drawer. After the death of Stalin, she said, she told General Zhukov what had happened because Stalin maliciously chided him. Anyway, what's phenomenal is that only this lady and the group of maybe six people knew about it.

Kevin Barrett: "Russian interpreter tells how she hid Hitler's jaw for Stalin." What a headline.

David Pidcock: Now after the hijri of 1300 (ah) 1882 (ce) count 50 or 60 years to 1932 to 1942, and a man will rule Egypt called Nasser. Nasser came to prominence in 1942 and ruled Egypt from 1956 to 1970. The hadith says the Arabs will call him their hero, and Allah will humiliate him in two wars, and he shall not achieve a victory.

Now I had the very good fortune to meet (CIA veteran Miles Copeland) on the eve of the first Gulf War in Central Television in Birmingham. I had just got his book called The Game Player. I was going to London because I had an office in London...

Kevin Barrett: The CIA guy?

David Pidcock: Yeah, that's him. Miles Copeland.

Kevin Barrett: His son is a famous punk rock producer.

David Pidcock: Yeah, he was in the music business as well.

Kevin Barrett: I think his son produced the Dead Kennedys.

David Pidcock:  So anyway, this is really critical because these hadith are...the details are so precise. Now Miles Copeland's book is called The Game Player. (The cover is) a chess board.

Kevin Barrett: So he's another person using the grand chessboard metaphor, like Brzezinski. He's playing CIA games and seeing it all as a big chess game.

David Pidcock: Yeah. Copeland was a riverboat gambler, too, and a good jazz pianist. So we'd heard of him long before as being in the jazz music business. I was always interested in that. Anyway, we end up meeting and I'm reading his book on the train from Sheffield to London. And I got to the point when Copeland writes, “and now I must make an even more interesting admission. While the streets(?) in Washington were increasingly displeased with the anti-American content of Nasser's public utterances and the anti-American propaganda that poured out of Radio Cairo, the Middle East's most far-reaching medium, can you guess who was writing a goodly portion of the material? We were. We understood, as Nasser did at the time, that the new regime's hold on the country depended on it being consistently and convincingly anti-American, and that Nasser couldn't even risk an indication of reasonableness towards our various Middle East policies. So we took pains to make it subtly counterproductive, of course. And we included a lot of patent nonsense, but we kept virtue in control of its production.”

So I'd read that on the train. I get a phone call on one of those big bricks which we used to have years ago. “Can you get to Birmingham by six o'clock?" So I get off the one train and I get on the other train to head back to Birmingham. I arrive at Birmingham central television. There's a warmer-room, the usual, you know, the green room type thing. And I go in and of course, facing me as I went into the studio warming-up room, is Miles Copeland. I recognized him. On my right is Lord Whatshisname…he's an idiot...and on my left is General Sir John Hackett. (Lord Whatshisname) is to my right. And so Copeland says, "Hi, Dave, what are you going to say?"

I've been studying this stuff and so I say: "Well, the pretext for America entering World War I was the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The pretext for America entering World War II was the sinking of the fleet at Pearl Harbor. And the pretext for America occupying the oil fields of the Middle East and Iraq in particular was the sinking of the USS Kuwait." He said "Christ, we're going to have problems with you, but you're absolutely right." Now, Lord Whathisface spits his drink all over General Sir John Hackett. And there's an uproar. So of course they wouldn't let me get anywhere near on camera or on the mic, but later...

Kevin Barrett: You shouldn't have told them what you were going to say in advance.

David Pidcock: Well, yes. But, what happened was… I sussed out that this Lord Whats-his-face was pro-war and (Hazatar Moriam?) was a Kurd. And of course then it was clear. But then there was an unintended consequence: Copeland then after the show came and said "give me the book." And in it he wrote, "David, you must study this in depth. Best wishes, Miles." He also gave me his Oxford telephone number: 0844540493. And we communicated quite a lot. His wife, when I rang up, said, "Who is it?" I said, “David Pidcock, leader of the Islamic Party of Britain.” "Oh," she said, "Oh gosh."

Kevin Barrett: When you mentioned Copeland saying that he had been involved in helping write some of Nasser's material, that actually recalls the bizarre stuff I've heard from my friend at Veterans Today, Gordon Duff, the Senior Editor there, who claims that he too was likewise involved in helping Gadhafi. And Gadhafi, of course, was an ardent admirer of Nasser. And he liked Nasser. He had a reputation as a hard core Arab nationalist. But he did have interesting, odd relations with certain CIA people that have been documented. So when Gordon tells me that he was basically Gadhafi's banker for a few years, that might be one of the many bizarre things that Gordon says that are actually true.

David Pidcock: Well, this is also very interesting because the other arch Arab nationalist was Yasser Arafat. Now Sheikh Zairam, who was from al-Azhar, was the imam in Sheffield for 14 years, and then he went on to be the chief imam of the Regent's Park Mosque. He told me: "What you're unaware of, all of you, is that Arafat's mother was Jewish, Qaddafi's mother was Jewish, and so was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s.” So that might explain a few things.

Now, when I was in Sudan, we were invited and I was asked to talk about riba (usury) and debt, and Arafat was there. And he came over and basically, I told them to suggest off the record strictly (that Arafat was of Jewish heritage). But it's true. It would explain all the other things, and why I didn't like him very much. Because they were all double faced, like with Mustafa Kemal. All of them work clandestinely under an Islamic tarbush, as they say.

Kevin Barrett: So this raises questions about ideologies and to what extent they really mean anything. We often hear today from people in our alternative media community that, for instance, Hamas was created by Israel. And they say it was to counter the Palestinian Authority, because the Israelis were having problems with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They needed some kind of counterweight, and here was Sheikh Yassin and Hamas that was forming. And so the Israelis gave them some financial help and help them build up. And then, of course, as I understand it, Hamas quickly got largely out of Israeli control. But in any case, it seems that the imperial and Zionist forces will be happy to use any group against any other group.

David Pidcock: I'm just finishing off another piece. Trotsky was living in New York with a chauffeur-driven limousine. And he was given an American passport and $10,000. And he was put on a ship with two hundred and sixty five Jews from the Lower East Side who formed the first Bolshevik government. There were only 16 Russians in the first Bolshevik government.

Kevin Barrett: What's the best source for that? Because there's, of course, a lively controversy about it.

David Pidcock: There is a committee that was set up and I've got all the members of it who were there. It's in Satanic Voices, Ancient and Modern. But now you've got Ilan Pappe and others. And you've got Gilad Atzmon and people of that quality, and they all know what the game is. But I've got that and it's well documented and...

Kevin Barrett: That would fit in with communism and Zionism being Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog).

David Pidcock: It's sort of “heads I win tails you lose.” It's demonic. It's devoid of anything...There are no redeeming features. And you just look at what they do to people, what they did in Russia.

I've now got information from an Israeli Y-net News in Israel and Channel 13, which I don't know if you've seen. But of course they admit that they are racist and that "the Arabs need and want to be under our control." I mean, this is fantastic stuff. But they “need somebody like you with your (unintelligible) to help us get it out.” But certainly the Hizb-ush-Shaytan (party of Satan) wears many hats.

Ben-Gurion in 1962 makes a prediction in Look magazine and Life magazine. I've got the originals. "The image of the world is traced in my imagination," said Ben-Gurion. "The Cold War, by 1987, will be a thing of the past.  America will then become a welfare state with a planned economy." And that is what you're now witnessing. It is happening in America today. And who is the main architect? Rahm Emanuel. His father was the main murderer of people in Deir Yassin. But he is also the head of Common Purpose in America. Common Purpose is a group that we also have in England. They are super infiltrators, controllers of government, et cetera. And he is now mayor of Chicago.

Kevin Barrett: Rahm Emanuel, of course, was IDF. He didn't serve in the U.S. military. He went and served in the IDF. They gave him a cover job. He was actually trained as a high level Mossad person. He came back to America and he was appointed as Obama's chief of staff. After Obama was elected, Rahm Emanuel's job was essentially to control the Obama administration and make sure Obama didn't do anything stupid, such as carrying through with his campaign promises to close Guantanamo and to go after the war criminals who had blown up the Twin Towers on 9/11 and launched the wars that have killed 27 million Muslims, according to Gideon Polya. Obama probably was never a huge threat to do too much of that. But he was planning to close Guantanamo and he should have prosecuted the war criminals. Had he done that, the U.S. would be in a better position today. But Rahm Emanuel was appointed as Chief of Staff, the so-called second most powerful position in the world, to make sure Obama didn't do that.

David Pidcock: Correct. Well, he's in the pole position then to just snooker anything. So then, to go back to David Ben-Gurion in Look magazine in 1962..

Kevin Barrett: Ben-Gurion would resign before the Kennedy assassination. And he probably masterminded or played a large part in it.

David Pidcock: And here I have the American House Banking Committee report done in 1964. I wrote about all the American presidents who foresaw the dangers. Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and Lincoln, and of course, Woodrow Wilson, who gave Trotsky his passport. He said, “I’m a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country, a great nation, an industrialized nation. “

Kevin Barrett: He shouldn't have listened to Colonel House.

David Pidcock: Now this is interesting because I reprinted this. Ken Palmerton, who died yesterday...when I went to China I took several books. I took the book Propaganda in the Next War by Sidney Rogerson. Sidney Rogerson was the chief propagandist for the (unintelligible) petrochemical industries. Then he became chief publicist for the War Office. Now, this book was published in 1938, by which time they were already planning to get Japan to attack America. Because we'd sold machine tools to Japan, they were then competing with us in our traditional markets. And so we had to take them down a peg or two. Now it's all written here in detail what we will do, how we will do it, etc. And in Congress in 1939, Gerald Nye of North Dakota quotes from the book: “How the British are going to do this.” It's a fabulous thing... So when I got to China, I was invited to address the group that set up the stock exchange there. (Unintelligible) is apparently the richest man in Asia…

Kevin Barrett: When was your trip to China?

David Pidcock: It was in 2004. And I was able to tell them because of a book I have here by the former labor home secretary David Blunkett. It includes a very interesting report that in 2004, four years before the crash, Tony Blair had called a special cabinet meeting. Gordon Brown announced that there would be a major downturn in the economy towards the end of 2008, and “we would all have to join our horns and make preparations for it.” Now Blunkett was a Labour councillor in Sheffield. So anyway, Blunkett then said “I couldn't resist putting my hand on Gordon's shoulder and saying, ‘Gordon, I'm astonished. I'm surprised you would wish to remain chancellor with such a devastating scenario looming.’” It says "there was deathly silence, jaws were dropping, and then people started to laugh. But later on Tony Blair said 'Only you could have got away with that.' But I wondered if I had." So they could have done something in the intervening four years to stop it from happening (had they wanted to). But it was all planned like 1929. Go back all the way through history. The crashes are planned.

Kevin Barrett: Right. The crashes allow the big players to buy up all of the small players' market share at pennies on the dollar. Natural disasters, wars, depressions. And that leads us to another topic. I really have to get talking about it with you before you go, because we only have about seven minutes left.

So how about this corona crisis and lockdown? The global lockdown, the first ever experiment in global house arrest, which has torpedoed the global economy? "Let's put all the small businesses pretty much permanently out of business here in the United States." And it is probably going to get much worse before too long. To me, this looks like more of the same-old-same-old. It looks to me like the same forces of Dajjal who did the World Wars, who've done the great depressions, and the crash of 2008, and 9/11. I would say those people are essentially the prime suspects in manufacturing this virus and unleashing it to achieve precisely the effects that they've achieved. Now, of course, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory to many people. But to me, it's just kind of realistic.

David Pidcock: Well, as Roosevelt said: "Nothing happens by accident." Now we have a book here, I'm just finishing off the translation done by a friend of mine who was at Sheffield University.

Kevin Barrett: Sorry, is this your book?

David Pidcock: No, it is a compilation of very sound hadith. And the grand muhaddith Ibn Al Sidiqi Ph.D. compiled it. And my friend Sheikh Imam Ahmed Darwish translated it. Now, Syed Mustaqim, who is the general secretary of the Islamic Party, rang me up and he said, "Look, this is far too important." He said, "now this is one event that will happen after we've gone through the sequence of events" which we haven't touched on yet, and we'll probably be able to do another program. Ibn Masood said "when commerce and roads are blocked, and the trials are increased, seven knowledgeable people will come from different directions without previous appointment. Each one will receive the allegiance of the other." So never before have all commerce and all roads been blocked. And does that not sound suspiciously like COVID?

Kevin Barrett: It certainly does. Commerce and roads have been blocked, even the roads through the sky.

David Pidcock: Even the Hajj. Even Mecca.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, and what about the hadith about the Hajj being closed? Because it looks like that's going to happen.

David Pidcock: Well, it seems it's already been announced. Yesterday the Financial Times front page announced that it had been closed.

Kevin Barrett: It's a sign of the times.

David Pidcock: You've done a brilliant job of opening up this particular subject. And we've got so much phenomenal confirmation.

Now just to go back to the thing about Miles Copeland and Sidney Rogerson. When Copeland said, "How did you know about that?" I said, "Well, I learned from Senator Nye of North Dakota's book." But here is what had happened 12 days before Pearl Harbor: Sidney Rogerson, the Secretary of State for War: "So then General Marshall and I went to the White House where we stayed till nearly half past one, and the president brought up the likelihood that we would be attacked as soon as next Monday. The Japanese are notorious for making attacks without warning. And the question was how we would maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

Now his boss went to see Admiral Sydney Stout, who was then the new head of the CIA. (Unintelligible) said "for the founding of the CIA there will never be another Pearl Harbor." To which the 33 degree Mason Truman said, "Obviously, you've not read your secret briefing. Otherwise you would know the president got the intelligence, but allowed the attack to go ahead as a way of arousing an otherwise apathetic populace." The Saturday and Sunday editions of the Hawaiian Echo and others' front pages announced: "Japan likely to attack on Monday." So come on!

Kevin Barrett: That was even more obvious than all of the millions of forewarnings of 9/11, such as when Bush turned to his briefer, who says "Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States," and Bush snarls, "You've covered your ass now.” There is a long list of these previsions of 9/11, but nothing quite that extreme. You know, "bin Laden to attack on Tuesday." We didn't see that, right?

Well, David, I think we've hit the end of the hour. But why don't we go ahead and record a second hour right now? So what we're going to do is make this show part one of a two part series. And so we're going to sign off for the moment. This is the end of part one, and we will resume soon with part two of this interview with David Mussa Pidcock of the Islamic Party of Britain. So thank you, David.

David Pidcock: Thank you very much.

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

Scientist Josh Mitteldorf, author (with Dorion Sagan) of Cracking the Aging Code, believes human lifespans can potentially be greatly extended, and suspects we may be on the verge of a breakthrough in anti-aging science. But he almost didn’t get to live long enough to find out. Last July 21 Josh was on the bike end of a bicycle-truck head-on collision; his survival with no brain or spine damage seems almost miraculous.

After recounting his harrowing experience, Josh goes on to briefly describe a prospective anti-aging breakthrough, and offer an extended appreciation of JFK Jr.’s bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci:

“There are so many things covered in this book, and so many ways in which (Robert) Kennedy has been a hero. He’s the best we’ve got in getting the truth out to the public. He’s absolutely fearless, despite the fact that the CIA murdered his father and his uncle and probably his cousin John Kennedy Jr. He’s completely audacious, and yet very aware of how easy it is to discredit him. And he meticulously documents everything he says.

“So even I, who had no faith in Fauci…my mouth dropped open when I realized that the AIDS crisis in the 1990s was a rehearsal in which Fauci used all of the techniques that he is now using to enslave the world (?)…or (at least) to push the vaccine agenda above all other agendas, modify all of our lifestyles, become a celebrity, become more powerful…”

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

First 30 minutes: Zafar Bangash discusses his new article “Saudi Regime’s Arbitrary Restrictions on Hajj and Umrah“: “(The Saudis’) latest assault on pilgrims’ right to perform Umrah was announced by the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah Pilgrims last month. It set an arbitrary age limit of 18 – 50 years for Umrah pilgrims. The pandemic has become its standard excuse for such decisions…Earlier this year, the Hajj numbers were also restricted to 60,000 (it was an improvement on last year’s limit of 1,000) but only people residing in the kingdom could perform Hajj. Muslims from the rest of the world were barred entry.”

Meanwhile the Saudis are holding gigantic pop music festivals attracting crowds of 200,000+, inviting in Israeli tourists, and building Las Vegas style “gambling meccas” on the Red Sea shore. Is it time for Muslims to divest these corrupt, decadent billionaire bandits of control over the Islamic holy places?

Final 30 minutes: Eric Walberg‘s new article “Afghan Emirate’s challenge to the world” offers plenty of trenchant but taboo observations:

“The hysteria about girls schooling ignores the well-documented but little known fact that almost all the schools (80%) that were supposedly educating girls throughout the country were nonfunctioning or even nonexistent. And those teachers who were actually being paid were just pocketing the money (much of it first taken by local officials, who in turn funneled a portion to warlords).

“In fact, all schooling was mostly nonexistent, even for boys, so Afghanistan is actually less literate now, thanks to the US invasion, than it was 20 years ago, and even less literate than in 1978, the last year of peace…”

And:

“The US has a standard operating procedure: bomb the enemy to smithereens. If that doesn’t work, bomb some more. Then find some civilians who have been riddled with your bullets, fly them to Bagram air base for (the best) emergency treatment, try and fit the body pieces together, and presto! a human interest story highlighting how noble you are, how scientific. If that still doesn’t work and you’re getting flak at home, then cut your losses, pull out, and move on to the next enemy…”

During the broadcast Eric recommends the work of Tahir Mahmoud, a journalist who has written on Afghanistan and other regional issues.

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

Dr. Alan Sabrosky USMC, “most censored man in America,” former head of Strategic Studies, US Army War College, announced his retirement from public speaking on my radio show October 8th. Fortunately he is coming out of retirement tonight. He recently posted on his Facebook page:

“SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, before my most recent 3-day (FB) ban (!), I told my friend Kevin Barrett & posted here that I was going to take the occasion of my 80th birthday (10/10/2021) to put an end to public speaking and such. I seemed to be reacting slower than before – still retained the information and a good grasp of details, but simply wasn’t as quick to retrieve those things when needed.I got lots of feedback from a couple of hundred (or more) people, and after reading everything (since I couldn’t post anything for a month!) and thinking about the input I got, I decided to modify my position. So what I will do for as long as possible is:1. Do interviews or programs with friendly people & on friendly forums, but abstain from debates or hostile interviewers & programs.2. Write one article a month.3. Post on FB & Gab as possible, but not try to read & (as appropriate) respond to all comments.4. Start a weekly podcast in January 2022 (still thinking about format etc., suggestions are most welcome).I think that will be more than enough. I’d be happy to hear what y’all think, and any thoughts you might have on this agenda.Many thanks, Alan Sabrosky”

In this interview Alan Sabrosky develops some of the arguments he first made last year in “On the Cusp of the Blue Terror.”

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

Scientist and author Dean Radin, who has published many books on psi-related topics, discusses his new book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. First question: How can we “trust the science” when it simultaneously tells us that “magic works” (i.e. psi is real) and denigrates its own findings? Below is a rough transcript of the interview.

Kevin Barrett: Hi, I'm Kevin Barrett of Truth Jihad Radio saying that you don't need to be a psychic to know that the commercial messages being beamed into your brain by advertising are extremely annoying. That's why the advertising model for internet radio sucks. There's got to be a better way. Well, there is. It's called the subscription model. Please go to TruthJihad.com and subscribe by way of the "Subscribe at Substack" button.

Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio, the radio show that has no respect for the taboos that prevent us from trying to figure out the truth about all sorts of very important issues that aren't being properly covered in the mainstream. I'm Kevin Barrett. We talk about politics a fair bit on this show, social issues a little bit, and occasionally even science. And we are now in a strange phase of cultural development in which we are being browbeaten to "trust the science." Well, I trust the scientific process to a certain extent. It's a good method for trying to figure out certain kinds of empirical things. But there are a lot of problems in the scientific community, and one of them is the reluctance to acknowledge the results of a very rich history of psi experimentation. I discovered this in high school by reading the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on ESP. I did some research and I was shocked that so many people know that things like telepathy and precognition exist, and yet the larger scientific community tends to deny it to a certain extent—even though science itself has proven it seven ways from Sunday.

And one of the world's leading experts on all of this is Dean Radin. He's the author of a long list of great books, including Super Nature and The Conscious Universe, which is a really good primer on these topics. He has a new book out called Real Magic, which I haven't read yet, but I'm intending to. He's been doing entangled photon experiments, among other things, and offering great commentary on his Twitter feed and website. So, hey, welcome Dean Radin. It's great to have you back.

Dean Radin: Glad to be here, Kevin and my last name is pronounced "Raiden."

Kevin Barrett: I'm sorry. I'm thinking of Paul Radin, the French anthropologist, and I guess I got the pronunciations confused. Are you of French ancestry?

Dean Radin: No, we're probably a different family tree. I think my last name used to be Radinsky when my grandparents or one set of grandparents emigrated from Russia way back when.

Kevin Barrett: Oh, very interesting. Ok, well, I'll try to keep that pronunciation straight. So Dean Radin...Here we are in a very strange cultural moment with a pandemic raging around us or maybe raging a little less than some pandemics in history have. The cultural issues around it are certainly raging. And the leitmotif "trust the science" is everywhere. Well, Dean, you do science, you're a scientist. And yet you've noticed that the scientific community, when it gets into sort of a groupthink bubble, is often wrong. So we could start by hearing your thoughts about that.

Dean Radin: Well, science has an aspiration for the same as we see in the academic world for academic freedom. That means that you can apply the the tools and methods of science and scholarship to study anything that you want. But as we all know, the aspirations sometimes are not actually realized. And it's just as true in science as it is in any other enterprise that involves more than two people, which is basically everything. So science has its own sets of taboos about what you're allowed to talk about. It is definitely influenced by politics, and strongly influenced as well by business interests. And so I think one of the reasons why a lot of people today, in considering the pandemic, they're suspicious about science because there's also an assumption that not only are there external influences which determine what the mainstream believes—and by the way, there is no one mainstream, there are dozens of them—but also there's an assumption that when the scientists, especially within medical science, make a pronouncement, then that's the way it is. But that's never the way it is. Experimental science is always provisional and theories are always provisional. The reason why I think it's useful to pay attention to what science actually says is because it means, that phrase means: "Is there evidence to support the conclusion?" Well, evidence, too is uncertain. It's only at the stage when something turns into technology that we have extremely high confidence that our theories are correct. But all of the really interesting questions out there are still very much in the theoretical phase, or there's experimental data which is not yet clear. So I understand why people who are not scientists are reluctant to pay attention to it, because after a while, they don't know who to pay attention to any more. So I have great sympathy for that.

Kevin Barrett: Yes, I do, too, and I share some of the confusion. I've been a humanities scholar; I taught humanities for a while at a community college in the Bay Area and had to deal with conflicts between science and the human centered disciplines. And there's no really clear, simple way of interpreting and mediating all these disputes. But you mentioned that when science turns into technology, that's when we get a high confidence in that particular area. And why hasn't psi turned into technology?

One paranoid conspiracy theory, which, like many others might be true, is we could imagine that if a particular group ever managed to turn psi into a reliable technology, they would want to monopolize it. And part of their strategy for monopolizing it might include pooh poohing it and making sure that the serious people in the culture didn't believe in it, so nobody would ever replicate their technology. That's one possibility, of course. And there are others as well. So why has psi, which is so well proven scientifically, not yet turned into technology that we've heard about?

Dean Radin: Well, it's as you say, that there are a number of answers to that, and they all conspire in such a way to put us in the middle of a paradox. The paradox is that when you do surveys of people in terms of their experiences— we did a survey where we had 25 different kinds of experiences that people report, but we didn't use any of thoe psychic terms. We didn't use terms like telepathy or precognition. We simply described the way that the experience could happen to somebody. And then we asked the general population and a subset of scientists and engineers how many of these 25 different kinds of experiences have you personally had? And so among the general population, ninety four percent of people said they had at least one of the 25 and an average of about seven of the 25 different experiences that they personally had. And this is why when you ask people about their beliefs and telepathy or precognition, the majority of the population believes because they've had that experience themself or they know somebody that they trust who reports such experiences. So our surprise was when asking the same question to scientists and engineers, again, 93 percent and on average, actually more than the general population—on average eight of the 25 experiences, scientists and engineers have had personally. So this is supported by what we see in the laboratory, because oftentimes when we do an experiment on one or another kind of psychic phenomenon, sometimes we select people based on maybe they're a meditator or maybe they report these experiences, but oftentimes they're unselected. They're basically the person off the street who we recruit to do an experiment. And they can show results, too, usually not as good as somebody who's selected, but nevertheless, it seems like this is a natural ability that most people have, whether they realize it or not.

So the paradox, then, is the very commonly reported and scientifically confirmed experiences that are not part of the academic dialogue. And so then the question is, well, why not? It is certainly part of our entertainment business. It saturates our books, it saturates television and movies. It's as though we're in the emperor's new clothes, that everybody can see what's happening, but people aren't willing to talk about it. So why is it not in the academic world? Well, the academic world today is the result of the Enlightenment, and part of the Enlightenment was development of the philosophy of materialism as a way to understand the nature of reality. And from a materialistic perspective, it's very, very difficult to understand how something like telepathy could exist or how something like precognition could exist. And as a result, you do find leading spokespeople today within the scientific world who echo this idea that as far as they can tell, by their understanding of the physical world—(this is) even said by physicists who should know better—they say that the world, as we understand it, does not allow for these phenomena. Therefore, anyone who reports it is either lying about it or they're mistaking coincidence or they don't understand probabilities or one of another dozen kinds of explanations. And then you have to put in religious pressure against looking at these kinds of phenomena, and you put in governmental pressure, because they don't want secrets to be spilled. Lots and lots of reasons conspire to maintain the taboo in the academic world.

Kevin Barrett: Do you think philosophy has a role to play in changing this situation? I recently read Bernardo Kastrup's book Materialism is Baloney, and it's a very good, concise refutation of materialism and basically follows the same lines of thought that I've been following for decades. But he says it far better than I ever have. So do you think that a serious consideration of the philosophical issues could change this kind of strange form of dogmatic, materialistic scientism that we're experiencing today?

Dean Radin: Absolutely, it could. And the thing is that when you ask people who are trained as engineers and scientists, how many courses on the philosophy of science or the sociology of science have they had? And the answer typically is done. And some scientists even go beyond that and say, we don't need philosophy. Philosophy has been doing this for 3000 years and hasn't gotten anywhere. So who needs philosophy? Well, that's a problem, because as all fledgling scientists know, when they go through their academic career, they're never told that what they're studying is resting upon large sets of assumptions. And assumptions are just that. They're ideas that we accept because they seem to be useful at the time. So as a student, you don't know you're being trained in materialism. And even worse is that even our concepts of what we mean by material have radically changed over the past century. So if you don't have at least within your own discipline, a really solid background in the history of the change of assumptions in your own discipline over time, then you won't understand why there would be so much resistance to changing the idea. After all, materialism is extremely successful. We're not going to drop it no matter what. What we probably will do, I think, is recognize, as we have done in every other discipline in the academic world, that our set of assumptions today is probably a special case. Just like classical physics is a special case of a more comprehensive way of thinking about reality. Well, the same is true about materialism. In general, it works really well, but only in certain circumstances. And as we begin to expand our concept of what we're going to study, including things like consciousness and subjectivity, we need to expand our assumptions about how reality works. And you can actually see that today, even in physics, where there's a growing number of physicists working at the edge who are trying to define what do we actually mean by reality? And so the old idea that maybe our mind or consciousness is wound into physical reality in some inexorable way is now no longer a taboo topic to talk about. So that's that is showing actually there is a slow change in terms of redefining what we will accept in terms of our assumptions.

Kevin Barrett: It does seem that a lot of relatively mainstream people admit that the hard problem of consciousness is real and that any solution to it may require a bit of a paradigm shift. So maybe that's a sign that we're getting closer.

Your new book, Real Magic, sounds like it does touch on the topic of people who have sort of instrumentalized these psychic phenomena in a way that would be sort of like what would happen if we technologized it and made it therefore scientifically real. It occurs to me that maybe such developments would have a downside as well. Part of the reason that so many people are resistant to this is: who wants to think you're living in a world where people can read your mind, especially really gifted people, and you're not one of those really gifted people? So there's somebody out there who can read your mind and you can't read his mind. That's bad news. And push it one step further and we're in Philip K. Dick's World, where— I don't know if you've read Philip K. Dick's science fiction novels, but in quite a few of them, we have essentially corporate capitalism has gotten even worse in the future, exploiting other planets, in some cases in hideous, nightmarish ways, very similar to the way our current culture is exploiting so many things.

And in these novels, there are precog bureaus where wealthy people can hire a precog to tell them which way the future is going to go. And they're using this for the same reasons that corporate executives today might, say, hire a mafia hit man or something, you know, it's purely self-interested, purely in search of money and power. And so allowing these abilities into the culture and getting them instrumentalized and turned into technology or real magic, as your book title suggests, might have that kind of downside. And one wonders whether there could even be benevolent entities or, you know, a law—even in my Muslim paradigm—that would be dictating that progress towards this is somewhat slow—that people's egos have to be set aside. The Sufis say you need the annihilation of the ego to get into the state where you're seeing these other levels of reality. And so maybe there's a built-in limit to it. What have you speculated on the various ways that this development towards technologizing psychic powers might not be such a good thing, and on the possibility that even relatively benevolent forces as well as malevolent ones could be suppressing them?

Dean Radin: Well, it's already being used. Estimates of how much money the quote psychic industry makes—it's in the billions of dollars a year now. Most of those are psychic readers who may or may not have any talent. Some of them do. But within the corporate world and in government, there are plenty of consultants who do work for people who are wealthy. And in governments that's already happening. It's just it's flying below the radar.

Kevin Barrett: So the Genie's out of the bottle and the cat's out of the bag. Deal with it.

Dean Radin: It's quite clear there are some people who are very talented in these kinds of things, and so they're being used. They probably always have been. So what you're talking about are other pressures, like why, well, why isn't this common knowledge? Well, it kind of is common knowledge. I mean, it doesn't take much Googling to find out that this is true. The question is, why don't we have departments in universities that are talking about these things? So some of it you already touched upon where our government and business industries and law would not work if there were no secrets. And so if this became widely known, and the methods for enhancing telepathy, for example, became common through technology or psychedelics or something, that would be a very serious problem, because you can't sustain government or modern civilization in any form if everybody knows what's actually going on. So you have the status quo saying, "Oh no you don't, we don't talk about these things, it's too dangerous." And a lot of pressure can be brought to bear...Anybody who is in a position of authority to talk about what's real is either declared to be demonic, you're not allowed to touch it, or the academic equivalent of demonic, which is a taboo which says this doesn't exist.

So lots of pressure from many different angles would make it very difficult to allow this kind of effect to go mainstream, at least in terms of the general population believing that it's being used in some way, even though privately they are using it; more evidence of this strange paradox that we find ourselves in, where basically everybody has had these experiences, most people believe in it, it's being used to the tune of a billion dollars a year. And yet officially—and by officially, of course, what we're talking about are major scientific journals, science, popular science journals, large newspapers and so on—there's a very common spin that is provided in all of those sources, including Wikipedia. So the average person wants to know: I had a weird experience last night. What does that mean? Well, they search all the usual places. They're going to come back with saying it's just an illusion, it wasn't a real thing, after all. But that's simply wrong. So, yeah, the status quo doesn't like these kinds of ideas and it pushes back hard.

A case can be made by the way, that during the Cold War, when the U.S. government had Stargate, which was psychic espionage, and other programs going on, it was working really well. And it continued to work really well for two reasons. One, it was top secret, so very few people knew of its existence. But at the same time, if you have a secret weapon, so-called, it is to everyone's benefit for everyone else to either not know that you have a secret weapon, or they are told that the secret weapon actually doesn't work at all. So it's difficult to prove that there was pressure or influence from the government to support skeptical societies that made it their business to constantly say that none of this stuff is real. But I would not be surprised if historically we find out at some point that there were links from our own government to create a public narrative, just as it did with UFOs, that there's nothing to look at here. Just keep going about your business. None of this is real. Because on the inside, they knew that it is real and actually quite important. So it's like a classic deflection maneuver.

Kevin Barrett: And a book that could be seen as a deflection maneuver or as this kind of limited hangout, or even in some ways, a revelation, is Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats. And that, of course, does raise the same kinds of questions as I did when I brought up Philip K. Dick, about pretty malevolent power seeking psychopathic people at high levels of our power pyramid trying to get their hands on this sort of technology. And of course, Jon Ronson uses this as fodder for humor. It's kind of amusing that a bunch of special forces killers would all line up and stare at a goat and try to kill the goat with their brainwaves or their psychic ability. So he milks that for humor. You finish that book, though, and one impression you could get would be he's dismissed the whole topic because we're all laughing at it. It's so ridiculous. But (considering) the actual material in the book, especially the stuff at the end about some of the CIA's horrific experiments that have been proven to have actually happened, we realize that he's exploring an area that actually could be quite important. So I think humor is one element that's been used to sort of defang the topic. And that could be both positive and negative, I suppose. Did you see Ronson's book and the movie they made out of it?

Dean Radin: I did, yes. And in both cases, the book and the movie present a humorous side to all of this because it is kind of silly. On the other hand, both the book and the movie are revolving around issues that actually did happen. And both of them leave the reader or the viewer with the sense that, oh, this isn't just a hallucination, it's not just an illusion. There actually was real stuff happening. So it's interesting. Then, from a point of view of a writer, how do you tell a narrative that will capture the audience and maintain their interest? Well, he did a pretty good job in that way, right? I mean, how many novels, whether they're based on fact or fiction, get turned into movies? Not too many. This one had elements in it where you can almost see that he was writing a movie script. And that's indeed what it turned into. So, yeah, it's one way to to spin a tale.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And I like Ronson's work. I know some folks in the alternative knowledge community find him to be with the nefarious forces of coverup. But I think if you read him carefully, it's not quite that simple. Most of the time, there are some exceptions where he's been unfair to various people. But yeah, The Men Who Stare at Goats was a powerful book. And I think it is designed so that an average educated reader might not take the subject quite as seriously as they should when they're done, especially if they're a careless reader.

Well, let's get to this new book you have out: Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. I'm interested in that connection between ancient wisdom and modern science...cultures have often managed to create means of preserving social stability in a world where these psychic powers not only exist, but everybody knows they exist. I did my PhD research in Morocco on Sufi miracle stories, and I did collect stories of people who had had extraordinary psychic experiences in recent times. And I think that in general, essentially everybody in Morocco—well, there might be one or two brainwashed university professors somewhere who haven't figured it out yet or who have been reprogrammed—but virtually the entire culture accepts that these abilities are quite real and going on around us all the time. And that culture has built in some safety mechanisms. People who use psychic abilities for selfish ends of any kind are looked down on a little bit. If you have to go to the market to buy some special herbs and some weasel brain—it's actually hyena brain, but my Moroccan wife mistranslated it as weasel brain, which is used by abused wives to totally control their husbands, to essentially turn the husband's brain to mush and take him over as if he were a zombie—you know, people doing that sort of thing are looked down on and considered sort of socially marginalized and so on. And of course there are people doing really nefarious stuff as well, and they're even more marginalized and looked down upon. Whereas the shaykh, that is, the religious scholar, who has this ability of clairvoyance and the television station reports on this and follows him around asking him questions about what's going on in this place, in that place where they have cameras and he's telling them exactly what's going on there because he can see it through clairvoyance—that this sort of thing is OK. If the religious ideals and the religious discourse approve of it and it's not selfish at all, it's all fi sabil illah, for the sake of God, then it's basically fine, it's good, it's benevolent. And the Sufi saints, who are often religious scholars, are honored for this. But the people who instrumentalize it in a selfish way, especially in a very selfish way, are marginalized and looked down upon. And I'm wondering if you think Western and modern culture has any possibilities of developing some sort of safeguard system in the event that this stuff breaks out more than it has?

Dean Radin: It's a very good question. The same social acceptance you find in South American countries, and India, basically all throughout Asia as well. And I've talked to scientists and scholars in those countries about these things. And what's interesting is that if there's large social acceptance, then there doesn't seem to be as much need or interest in having scientific verification and understanding. I found this most dramatically in India. I'm not entirely sure why that's the case. But in the Western world, the U.S. and U.K., Australia and so on, there, the need for scientific verification of something that seems spooky seems to be much higher, even though there's so much higher skepticism as well—although even the skepticism is only in a small minority of people. As I said, over 90 percent, basically everyone, including scientists and engineers, have had these experiences. So there's some natural skepticism. I guess it's built in to our Western worldview, and that's why we turn to science and say, is any is this real, what happened in this case? But now I've diverged from your question. So if you remind me what the question was—

Kevin Barrett: I was asking about possible safeguards, because we don't really have a religious discourse that's survived in this culture. Our religion, secular, progressive materialism, basically (holds that) an individual should grab as much power and pleasure as possible in their own way. And as long as they're quote unquote, not hurting anybody, they should do any darn thing they want. And so that philosophy may work OK at a certain level. But if, like in Morocco, everybody knew that these psi techniques are available and are extremely powerful, that there are specialists who are really good at them, (so) if you want to get something done, go to the specialist. Well, today, if the powerful people want to get something done, they go to specialists and they do very nefarious, selfish things regularly. And rather than being relegated to the social margins and considered taboo and like bad people that nobody would want to deal with, these people rule the culture. So how do we get some safeguards so that we don't end up with all the rich psychopaths using this stuff and making the world worse?

Dean Radin: Well, they probably already are. That's one of the sad things about all this in the classified environment. They asked once if we were very successful and we created some amazing new technology or something, what would happen to it? And the answer immediately was it would disappear down a black hole and you'd never be able to talk about it again or even work on it. And you could never even admit that it existed. So I thought, Well, that's not good. If you look at the many grimoires that you can buy out there, books of spells, that's all about gratifying the ego. Half of the spells are love spells and the other half are money spells and power spells. All of that is about manipulating the world around you. And what is not typically said in the grimoires is that probably 90 percent of the spells would be considered black magic. Because if black magic is defined as overcoming the free will of another person, that would be black magic. And do you think then about how most people would want to use these capabilities? It does fall into the category of black magic. You're trying to influence others' behaviors, others' beliefs, others' perceptions, all of that to your benefit, to your sole benefit. Well, fortunately, it's not the only way you can use these things.

There are also a lot of spells for healing. And presumably healing is good, except that healing can be reversed as well. And of course, one of the fears is that maybe you could harm somebody at a distance. That's probably true. So how do we protect ourselves? Well, you can already go to a religious artifacts stores and buy all kinds of little statues of saints. A lot of people do that. You can buy amulets, you can buy all kinds of things. Maybe it'll increase the stock in tinfoil so you can line all of your clothes and hats with tinfoil. (laughter) The problem is that as far as the scientific research goes, we don't know of any way to definitively block any of these capabilities, whether they're perceptual capabilities or psychokinetic. Nothing seems to block it or to stop it. If you read books on psychic self-defense, mostly it's about how you psychically protect yourself: You surround yourself with white light or with a mirrored shield or things of that sort. Well, some people can do that, and other people are not very good at doing those kinds of things, in which case, unfortunately for many people, they actually will not be able to protect themselves.

Kevin Barrett: Muslims believe, and that would include me actually in my own way, that the final two short suras of the Quran, the Mu'awwidhatayn, provide powerful protection against this sort of thing. And along these lines, there is a very interesting case of a professor named (Ioan) Couliano, who I think he was Romanian, who wrote a book called Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which looks into the simultaneous birth of science and a certain kind of magic in Western culture. And both the science and the magic may have been tending towards black magic and mass psychic manipulation and so on, which eventually created the world that we're in today. Anyway, he was mysteriously murdered in a University of Chicago restroom a couple of decades ago, I think. And they never solved it. Do you have any comments on that book or case or have you heard of it?

Dean Radin: I'm not familiar with that case, no. Maybe it's due to suppression in my own case, because you don't need to be accosted by too many paranoid schizophrenic who think that you're controlling their mind to want to stay out of the public restrooms. (laughter)

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, yeah. Well, Couliano was involved in some sort of political stuff as well. It's still a huge mystery what happened to him. But he was one of the leading scholars in humanities who was essentially taking for granted that these kinds of psychic abilities exist, though he wasn't putting it in the same sort of scientific language that you do. But he did take it for granted and was exploring a certain school of of practice of these things that emerged in the Renaissance. And then he had that strange death. And so a lot of folks were wondering what in the world happened to him and whether that's a bad sign for people in the academy who who study this sort of thing.

Dean Radin: So, yeah, as we've already discussed, it certainly raises concerns in a lot of people's minds about these things. They will begin to identify an individual who simply has an interest in the topic as suddenly being a dark magician or something like that. And if you look at the number of people who are mentally ill, who in one way or another think that they're also psychic, it's a pretty large percentage of schizophrenics, for example, who think that they're enormously psychic. And if they have a paranoid streak, they will flip out and they'll attack anybody who they think is involved in what they perceive as being psychic attacks on them. I mean, it's reasonable from inside their head, it's reasonable to try to get somebody to stop. And it certainly is not helped by the way that these kinds of phenomena are portrayed in entertainment. If you took any random sampling of 100 movies, for example, or television shows, that have a psychic component, almost all of them will devolve into horror films, and then that becomes part of the public way of thinking about these things. (The public) will think it in dark terms. And that's unfortunate, that those kinds of stories attract attention. I'm writing a TV series with a writing partner which has a very different spin on these kinds of effects, a much more positive way of thinking about these as simply natural human capacities, and most of the time, we just suppress them or we're frightened of them. And there's no reason to be frightened of them.

Kevin Barrett: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. It seems that the same cultural forces that in the past marginalized these things through a religious discourse that claimed that this was all from the realm of the demonic, today are doing the same thing, just sort of disguising it a little bit. But the Hollywood narrative isn't that different from of some of the church narratives from the old days. I can certainly imagine a lot of ways of flipping that narrative, based on my own experience, for example, when I actually had the most intense set of these kinds of experiences that I've ever had. I've had occasional precognitive dreams and telepathic experiences like anybody else, you know, the phone rings and you know who calls, that happens every now and then. But I had a real, intense, maybe six months of that when I was in high school after I had visited Stephen Gaskin's Farm spin off in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Stephen Gaskin was a hippie spiritual teacher from San Francisco who led a couple hundred followers across the country in old school buses and settled on a farm in Tennessee. And then they had a spin off in Wisconsin. So when I was 16, I hitchhiked up there and spent a few days with those people. I think they'd been using psychedelics as well as mystical techniques. And they'd been systematically trying to create a community in which people sort of blow off their egos and experience loving telepathy and loving psychic experiences as just a normal part of life. And that group mind was so powerful that it kind of worked on me. So then when I went back home, I could still access that to a certain extent, and it was good. You know, the part of your ego that you're setting aside when you do these things is really kind of a prison. And it's a bunch of sort of mechanisms that force you to behave selfishly. And of course, maybe our ancestors needed mechanisms to force them to behave selfishly to survive. And that's why it's there. But freeing yourself to some extent from those mechanisms, stepping out into a space where you feel love and compassion for everything and resonate telepathically with other people, resonate with various kinds of of perceptions beyond the normal sensory perceptions, is actually a very positive thing. It feels good, and it feels like the sort of things that I've studied when I've studied the saints, the Sufi saints and other saints. So there seems to be a very powerful, positive side to all of this that really gets lost in the popular culture. How are you planning to to bring it back?

Dean Radin: Well, as I said through narrative, you can create different kinds of narratives to show that this actually is interesting from a scientific perspective and probably important if for no other reason than helping to augment the methods that we use in medicine, for example. We've done studies on energy medicine, which is by no means mainstream, except that slowly insurance companies are beginning to say, well, OK, it looks like therapeutic touch or Reiki actually does have some evidence for it. In which case if you get a Reiki treatment, maybe your insurance will cover that. So that's a major step in the direction of what amounts to a new and at the same time very old method of healing. We still don't really understand what energy medicine is, but it does seem to work and it's not placebo because you can do controlled studies too. So at some point, when we learn much more about what's going on in those kinds of methods of healing—some of which are psychic because it also works at a distance—well, that has the capacity for great good. And in many ways, everything psychic is just another kind of knowledge. Power could be used for good or bad. That depends more on how we want to use it rather than the power itself.

The same could be said for nuclear power or any other kind of power. It can be used for good or bad. It's up to us to decide. My long term view is that if if our species lasts long enough, we'll figure out ways of actually using these kinds of things in the same way we figured out nuclear energy and electrical power and so on. The downside might be that this is a kind of power that may not be suitable for an adolescent species like us; we're adolescent in the sense that we haven't been around that long, we still clearly have all kinds of things to work out before we can live peacefully together. And in that kind of culture, it's like giving bombs to babies. Well, they'll play with it, and they'll probably end up blowing themselves up at some point because they don't understand the power. And so that's kind of how I think where we are. The reason why I use the tools of science to try to understand it better is simply that the more we know about what we're dealing with, the better we will be able to handle this particular bomb and hopefully not blow ourselves up.

Kevin Barrett: Well, you mentioned healing being one of the obvious positive uses for this sort of thing. And today we're at a very strange moment where a certain scientific discourse is insisting that we solve the Covid-19 problem through one means primarily, and that is, everybody gets vaccinated. Of course, there are other scientists who question whether this is a sound strategy. And frankly, based on what I've seen so far, I would tend to side with those dissidents. But in any case, it looks like there's now a war on these pluralistic conceptions of healing. You can't put up a YouTube that discusses COVID or various other issues in a way that's perhaps not precisely in line with the W.H.O. or CDC without risking having your YouTube channel taken down for so-called medical misinformation. And even social media is now relentlessly patrolled for so-called medical misinformation. I can imagine that anybody promoting any kind of alternative healing involving psychic abilities is really going to be silenced as a purveyor of so-called medical misinformation. So maybe it seems that this slow progress towards accepting these paranormal healing techniques as real, which I've seen in my own brother, who is an MD-PhD who's gotten a whole lot of grants, has been basically surviving on grant money, studying things like this. And so he knows this research, and he knows that, for instance, prayer actually works in healing. Double blind, placebo controlled studies prove that. He knows that, and he's also a die hard materialist, and he kind of just sort of accepts it and shrugs his shoulders and so on. So there's been a lot of that kind of progress. But now with COVID and the demonization of what they're calling medical misinformation, how far back are we going to slip?

Dean Radin: Well, it's a very good question. What we all want is someone who knows all the answers. And of course we don't have that at this point. So we're kind of in a pickle. I think that's the technical term. Yes, we're in a pickle. The pickle is sour and crunchy and appealing. At the same time, some people like the pickle. I don't know that there's any—

Kevin Barrett: I like pickles. Yeah. You know, just earlier today, I was proofreading my wife's spiritual cookbook. And one of the last headlines I read before I came to do this interview was something like, "Everybody Likes Pickles."

Dean Radin: So there you go. See? So there is a certain degree of joy in the debate. And what you're describing and what we're certainly seeing now in terms of the debate in Congress, even on social media, including YouTube, is is a pickle debate about who's going to be the spokesperson for a truth that we all have to follow. And it's a very complicated topic because there are multiple truths, especially in medical science. We don't always—in fact rarely, except for fairly simple things at this point, do we understand what's going on. So I like to point out that in the domain of psychic research worldwide, total funding might be maybe $5 million through nonprofits and grants and every other source. So that's $5 million as compared to probably one hundred billion dollars being spent on something like cancer research. Well, there have been some important strides made in cancer research, but most of it's still a pretty big mystery. So the dollars turn into the number of people who are working in those fields. So if you have a field that has $5 million supporting people, you don't have very many and progress is going to be pretty slow. If you have $100 billion or more, that may be an underestimate, you have thousands, tens of thousands of people who are devoting their efforts to try to understand a very difficult problem. And if you look worldwide, then, at how much money is being spent on all kinds of interesting things in medicine and physics and whatever, we're talking probably well over a trillion dollars a year to supporting millions of scientists, all of whom are striving hard to push the boundaries of knowledge. And in the meantime, almost nothing is being spent on understanding what we're actually capable of. Because I think you're right that what we currently think of as medicine is a combination of surgery and drugs. And most of the money probably is in the drug business. At some point, I don't think we're going to need either of them. If we really understood how psychic phenomena work, I think the entire medical model will change. So having said that, now think of all of the money that's being made in the status quo in medicine and how hard it would push back on ever figuring out another way. So this is just the same old problem that we see in the academic world. It pushed back for people who made their careers based on a certain ideology. Well, along comes something that says some of that ideology is probably wrong, and there's going to be a lot of pushback. Indeed, that's OK. Having worked in this field for a long time and watching the sociology of science, anybody who gets involved in a controversial topic of any type has to expect that this is simply par for the course. So just do your work and publish it and keep going.

Kevin Barrett: Have you noticed that the politics of these topics have shifted in a very bizarre way fairly recently? It used to be that most of the people interested in, let's say, alternative healing and open to psychic phenomena and talking about them tended to be more from the political left. People on the right have tended to be a little more hidebound and often traditionally religious in a kind of obscurantist way. Today, though, we're seeing a kind of hysteria from people who think of themselves as being on the liberal or left side of the political spectrum, who are insisting on following a certain kind of authoritarian discourse with the "trust the science" motto as the centerpiece. I just interviewed a hardcore progressive comedian who spent the entire hour screaming at me to get vaccinated with enough four-Letter words to sound like she was suffering from Tourette's syndrome. So if that's the progressive left, which is what's shutting down all the debate and all of the free discussion, and suddenly it's the conservative obscurantist and to some extent Trump loving right that is where the free speech and open inquiry is, we're living in a kind of a different world from the one that I remember from just a decade or two ago. Do you have any comments on that?

Dean Radin: Historically, the the governments that supported at least the secret research in psychic phenomena were mostly Republican. The problem is that Republicans today are not Republicans anymore, at least not historically anything like what Republicans used to be. So we're in some other crazy kind of condition now where the name Republican is being used. But this is not what most people would have said was Republican even 10 years ago. So we're in a very strange place as far as the the political left or right. I think a lot of the angst comes about from doing what's good for the public, like releasing what you think is important for you and doing something for others. That's where a lot of the anger comes from. And I have to say, I agree with that. Well, an mRNA vaccine may not be the best thing in the world. It does seem to work pretty well. And each of us then has to make a decision whether we're going to stop at the red light or not. Do I want my personal freedom to do literally anything they want without regard to anybody else? Well, I would say no. I say we live in a social society. We have to consider other people as well. And so for people who don't want to get vaxxed, there's lots of reasons why people may hold that position, and that's perfectly fine, except then are they being socially responsible or not?

Kevin Barrett: Well, I would actually tend to agree with you if I thought that the data was telling us what most people think it's telling them. However, I'm not at all convinced that these vaccines slow transmission enough to make a serious difference. And there's all sorts of evidence behind that, but we won't sit here and debate that because we only have five minutes left. If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you some sources. And if not, that's fine too. And I thank you for being a lot more reasonable about the way you stated that than my interviewee Mona was, So last—we're getting close to the end—I'm really curious about how you got a blurb from John Cleese, the brilliant British comic from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and so on. He's been one of my favourite entertainment figures, actually, since I was a kid. How did he end up blurbing your brand new book Real Magic?

Dean Radin: Well, I met John a couple of times at seminars at the Esalen Institute, and the seminars were about survival of consciousness and psychic phenomena. And John turned out to have a lifelong interest in consciousness and what it can do. So I actually found this among many creative people, because creative people tend to be more open to these kinds of experiences and actually have them. So he's one of a batch of celebrities I've met, and business people as well, who are very, very interested in these kinds of topics. And while they're not scientists or necessarily scholars about it, they're very well read. They're very interested in these issues, like most people are, and because of their status, they have the capacity to go to conferences and private meetings and that sort of thing. And that's where I met John.

Kevin Barrett: And he says that if you're skeptical of psi phenomena, start with pages 95 and 96. Well, what's on page 95 and 96 that John Cleese finds so mind-blowing? Or do we have to buy the book to find out?

Dean Radin: Well, I could be shamelessly self-promoting and say you have to have to buy the book to find out. But but what I'll say, though, is that the core of the book is: What does science have to say about the practices that we call magic? We only call them magic, things like precognition and psycho-kinetic stuff, because we don't have a better name for it yet. But these are ancient esoteric practices that have been studied in the laboratory under different names, and we find that they work. And so the core of the book is actually covering the science so that we can say with some confidence that the main practices of magic, the different categories of what's called magic, have been studied in the laboratory and they work. So this is what the the theme of my book Real Magic is all about. We are talking here about very ancient, esoteric traditions. Every culture has them. And up until when I started writing the book, if somebody had asked me, Why are you writing a book about magic? I would say, I'm not writing a book about magic. I'm writing about how science has studied some esoteric practices. But as I kept writing and doing the background research, it became very clear to me that what we call magic, of course not quite as embellished as we see in TV shows or movies, but that kind of magic actually has been examined in some detail, and we have pretty high confidence that that stuff is real. Again, not as you see in the movies, but something like that actually does exist.

Kevin Barrett: And that slogan trust the science, may or may not pertain in the field that they're deploying it for. But I think it would be a good slogan for the science of the study of psi, because if you have even probably 30 percent of the trust in that branch of scientific inquiry that you have in any other branch, you're going to be totally convinced. For some reason, there's a very strange and irrational mistrust of science in this field, as you have demonstrated throughout your work.

Dean Radin: But only by some. A lot of people do resonate with the science, especially when you describe what does it mean to trust the science, right? People use it as a slogan. It doesn't mean anything, because if you don't know how to evaluate data, then the average person who is not a scientist will look through medical journals and they can pick and choose anything they want and maybe not even understand what they're looking at.

Kevin Barrett: Mm hmm. So trust maybe isn't exactly the right word. But we should look at all scientific data as reasonably as possible and put it all on the same level, on the same playing field. We shouldn't just dismiss whole areas of inquiry because they conflict with our prejudices. So rather than saying trust the science, we should maybe say, don't mistrust the science too much. Like if I'm predisposed at this point to be skeptical about COVID vaccines, I should not just dismiss every study that seems to tell me the opposite, and vice versa.

Dean Radin: Yeah, and it's not easy, right? In order to really know what's going on with MRNA types of treatments, you'd need to know something about genetics and about how statistics are collected and what clinical trials are about, you know, the whole domain in order to actually understand what is being said.

Kevin Barrett: Mm hmm. Indeed. Ok,I think we've we've hit the end of the hour, so thank you so much. Dean Radin, author of Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. I've read two of your other books and find them very, very useful, and this one looks great as well. I'm very much looking forward to it. Thank you. Looking forward to another conversation down the line.

Very good. Okay, great. Bye.

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

Scientist and author Dean Radin, who has published many books on psi-related topics, discusses his new book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. First question: How can we “trust the science” when it simultaneously tells us that “magic works” (i.e. psi is real) and denigrates its own findings? Below is a rough transcript of the interview.

Kevin Barrett: Hi, I'm Kevin Barrett of Truth Jihad Radio saying that you don't need to be a psychic to know that the commercial messages being beamed into your brain by advertising are extremely annoying. That's why the advertising model for internet radio sucks. There's got to be a better way. Well, there is. It's called the subscription model. Please go to TruthJihad.com and subscribe by way of the "Subscribe at Substack" button.

Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio, the radio show that has no respect for the taboos that prevent us from trying to figure out the truth about all sorts of very important issues that aren't being properly covered in the mainstream. I'm Kevin Barrett. We talk about politics a fair bit on this show, social issues a little bit, and occasionally even science. And we are now in a strange phase of cultural development in which we are being browbeaten to "trust the science." Well, I trust the scientific process to a certain extent. It's a good method for trying to figure out certain kinds of empirical things. But there are a lot of problems in the scientific community, and one of them is the reluctance to acknowledge the results of a very rich history of psi experimentation. I discovered this in high school by reading the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on ESP. I did some research and I was shocked that so many people know that things like telepathy and precognition exist, and yet the larger scientific community tends to deny it to a certain extent—even though science itself has proven it seven ways from Sunday.

And one of the world's leading experts on all of this is Dean Radin. He's the author of a long list of great books, including Super Nature and The Conscious Universe, which is a really good primer on these topics. He has a new book out called Real Magic, which I haven't read yet, but I'm intending to. He's been doing entangled photon experiments, among other things, and offering great commentary on his Twitter feed and website. So, hey, welcome Dean Radin. It's great to have you back.

Dean Radin: Glad to be here, Kevin and my last name is pronounced "Raiden."

Kevin Barrett: I'm sorry. I'm thinking of Paul Radin, the French anthropologist, and I guess I got the pronunciations confused. Are you of French ancestry?

Dean Radin: No, we're probably a different family tree. I think my last name used to be Radinsky when my grandparents or one set of grandparents emigrated from Russia way back when.

Kevin Barrett: Oh, very interesting. Ok, well, I'll try to keep that pronunciation straight. So Dean Radin...Here we are in a very strange cultural moment with a pandemic raging around us or maybe raging a little less than some pandemics in history have. The cultural issues around it are certainly raging. And the leitmotif "trust the science" is everywhere. Well, Dean, you do science, you're a scientist. And yet you've noticed that the scientific community, when it gets into sort of a groupthink bubble, is often wrong. So we could start by hearing your thoughts about that.

Dean Radin: Well, science has an aspiration for the same as we see in the academic world for academic freedom. That means that you can apply the the tools and methods of science and scholarship to study anything that you want. But as we all know, the aspirations sometimes are not actually realized. And it's just as true in science as it is in any other enterprise that involves more than two people, which is basically everything. So science has its own sets of taboos about what you're allowed to talk about. It is definitely influenced by politics, and strongly influenced as well by business interests. And so I think one of the reasons why a lot of people today, in considering the pandemic, they're suspicious about science because there's also an assumption that not only are there external influences which determine what the mainstream believes—and by the way, there is no one mainstream, there are dozens of them—but also there's an assumption that when the scientists, especially within medical science, make a pronouncement, then that's the way it is. But that's never the way it is. Experimental science is always provisional and theories are always provisional. The reason why I think it's useful to pay attention to what science actually says is because it means, that phrase means: "Is there evidence to support the conclusion?" Well, evidence, too is uncertain. It's only at the stage when something turns into technology that we have extremely high confidence that our theories are correct. But all of the really interesting questions out there are still very much in the theoretical phase, or there's experimental data which is not yet clear. So I understand why people who are not scientists are reluctant to pay attention to it, because after a while, they don't know who to pay attention to any more. So I have great sympathy for that.

Kevin Barrett: Yes, I do, too, and I share some of the confusion. I've been a humanities scholar; I taught humanities for a while at a community college in the Bay Area and had to deal with conflicts between science and the human centered disciplines. And there's no really clear, simple way of interpreting and mediating all these disputes. But you mentioned that when science turns into technology, that's when we get a high confidence in that particular area. And why hasn't psi turned into technology?

One paranoid conspiracy theory, which, like many others might be true, is we could imagine that if a particular group ever managed to turn psi into a reliable technology, they would want to monopolize it. And part of their strategy for monopolizing it might include pooh poohing it and making sure that the serious people in the culture didn't believe in it, so nobody would ever replicate their technology. That's one possibility, of course. And there are others as well. So why has psi, which is so well proven scientifically, not yet turned into technology that we've heard about?

Dean Radin: Well, it's as you say, that there are a number of answers to that, and they all conspire in such a way to put us in the middle of a paradox. The paradox is that when you do surveys of people in terms of their experiences— we did a survey where we had 25 different kinds of experiences that people report, but we didn't use any of thoe psychic terms. We didn't use terms like telepathy or precognition. We simply described the way that the experience could happen to somebody. And then we asked the general population and a subset of scientists and engineers how many of these 25 different kinds of experiences have you personally had? And so among the general population, ninety four percent of people said they had at least one of the 25 and an average of about seven of the 25 different experiences that they personally had. And this is why when you ask people about their beliefs and telepathy or precognition, the majority of the population believes because they've had that experience themself or they know somebody that they trust who reports such experiences. So our surprise was when asking the same question to scientists and engineers, again, 93 percent and on average, actually more than the general population—on average eight of the 25 experiences, scientists and engineers have had personally. So this is supported by what we see in the laboratory, because oftentimes when we do an experiment on one or another kind of psychic phenomenon, sometimes we select people based on maybe they're a meditator or maybe they report these experiences, but oftentimes they're unselected. They're basically the person off the street who we recruit to do an experiment. And they can show results, too, usually not as good as somebody who's selected, but nevertheless, it seems like this is a natural ability that most people have, whether they realize it or not.

So the paradox, then, is the very commonly reported and scientifically confirmed experiences that are not part of the academic dialogue. And so then the question is, well, why not? It is certainly part of our entertainment business. It saturates our books, it saturates television and movies. It's as though we're in the emperor's new clothes, that everybody can see what's happening, but people aren't willing to talk about it. So why is it not in the academic world? Well, the academic world today is the result of the Enlightenment, and part of the Enlightenment was development of the philosophy of materialism as a way to understand the nature of reality. And from a materialistic perspective, it's very, very difficult to understand how something like telepathy could exist or how something like precognition could exist. And as a result, you do find leading spokespeople today within the scientific world who echo this idea that as far as they can tell, by their understanding of the physical world—(this is) even said by physicists who should know better—they say that the world, as we understand it, does not allow for these phenomena. Therefore, anyone who reports it is either lying about it or they're mistaking coincidence or they don't understand probabilities or one of another dozen kinds of explanations. And then you have to put in religious pressure against looking at these kinds of phenomena, and you put in governmental pressure, because they don't want secrets to be spilled. Lots and lots of reasons conspire to maintain the taboo in the academic world.

Kevin Barrett: Do you think philosophy has a role to play in changing this situation? I recently read Bernardo Kastrup's book Materialism is Baloney, and it's a very good, concise refutation of materialism and basically follows the same lines of thought that I've been following for decades. But he says it far better than I ever have. So do you think that a serious consideration of the philosophical issues could change this kind of strange form of dogmatic, materialistic scientism that we're experiencing today?

Dean Radin: Absolutely, it could. And the thing is that when you ask people who are trained as engineers and scientists, how many courses on the philosophy of science or the sociology of science have they had? And the answer typically is done. And some scientists even go beyond that and say, we don't need philosophy. Philosophy has been doing this for 3000 years and hasn't gotten anywhere. So who needs philosophy? Well, that's a problem, because as all fledgling scientists know, when they go through their academic career, they're never told that what they're studying is resting upon large sets of assumptions. And assumptions are just that. They're ideas that we accept because they seem to be useful at the time. So as a student, you don't know you're being trained in materialism. And even worse is that even our concepts of what we mean by material have radically changed over the past century. So if you don't have at least within your own discipline, a really solid background in the history of the change of assumptions in your own discipline over time, then you won't understand why there would be so much resistance to changing the idea. After all, materialism is extremely successful. We're not going to drop it no matter what. What we probably will do, I think, is recognize, as we have done in every other discipline in the academic world, that our set of assumptions today is probably a special case. Just like classical physics is a special case of a more comprehensive way of thinking about reality. Well, the same is true about materialism. In general, it works really well, but only in certain circumstances. And as we begin to expand our concept of what we're going to study, including things like consciousness and subjectivity, we need to expand our assumptions about how reality works. And you can actually see that today, even in physics, where there's a growing number of physicists working at the edge who are trying to define what do we actually mean by reality? And so the old idea that maybe our mind or consciousness is wound into physical reality in some inexorable way is now no longer a taboo topic to talk about. So that's that is showing actually there is a slow change in terms of redefining what we will accept in terms of our assumptions.

Kevin Barrett: It does seem that a lot of relatively mainstream people admit that the hard problem of consciousness is real and that any solution to it may require a bit of a paradigm shift. So maybe that's a sign that we're getting closer.

Your new book, Real Magic, sounds like it does touch on the topic of people who have sort of instrumentalized these psychic phenomena in a way that would be sort of like what would happen if we technologized it and made it therefore scientifically real. It occurs to me that maybe such developments would have a downside as well. Part of the reason that so many people are resistant to this is: who wants to think you're living in a world where people can read your mind, especially really gifted people, and you're not one of those really gifted people? So there's somebody out there who can read your mind and you can't read his mind. That's bad news. And push it one step further and we're in Philip K. Dick's World, where— I don't know if you've read Philip K. Dick's science fiction novels, but in quite a few of them, we have essentially corporate capitalism has gotten even worse in the future, exploiting other planets, in some cases in hideous, nightmarish ways, very similar to the way our current culture is exploiting so many things.

And in these novels, there are precog bureaus where wealthy people can hire a precog to tell them which way the future is going to go. And they're using this for the same reasons that corporate executives today might, say, hire a mafia hit man or something, you know, it's purely self-interested, purely in search of money and power. And so allowing these abilities into the culture and getting them instrumentalized and turned into technology or real magic, as your book title suggests, might have that kind of downside. And one wonders whether there could even be benevolent entities or, you know, a law—even in my Muslim paradigm—that would be dictating that progress towards this is somewhat slow—that people's egos have to be set aside. The Sufis say you need the annihilation of the ego to get into the state where you're seeing these other levels of reality. And so maybe there's a built-in limit to it. What have you speculated on the various ways that this development towards technologizing psychic powers might not be such a good thing, and on the possibility that even relatively benevolent forces as well as malevolent ones could be suppressing them?

Dean Radin: Well, it's already being used. Estimates of how much money the quote psychic industry makes—it's in the billions of dollars a year now. Most of those are psychic readers who may or may not have any talent. Some of them do. But within the corporate world and in government, there are plenty of consultants who do work for people who are wealthy. And in governments that's already happening. It's just it's flying below the radar.

Kevin Barrett: So the Genie's out of the bottle and the cat's out of the bag. Deal with it.

Dean Radin: It's quite clear there are some people who are very talented in these kinds of things, and so they're being used. They probably always have been. So what you're talking about are other pressures, like why, well, why isn't this common knowledge? Well, it kind of is common knowledge. I mean, it doesn't take much Googling to find out that this is true. The question is, why don't we have departments in universities that are talking about these things? So some of it you already touched upon where our government and business industries and law would not work if there were no secrets. And so if this became widely known, and the methods for enhancing telepathy, for example, became common through technology or psychedelics or something, that would be a very serious problem, because you can't sustain government or modern civilization in any form if everybody knows what's actually going on. So you have the status quo saying, "Oh no you don't, we don't talk about these things, it's too dangerous." And a lot of pressure can be brought to bear...Anybody who is in a position of authority to talk about what's real is either declared to be demonic, you're not allowed to touch it, or the academic equivalent of demonic, which is a taboo which says this doesn't exist.

So lots of pressure from many different angles would make it very difficult to allow this kind of effect to go mainstream, at least in terms of the general population believing that it's being used in some way, even though privately they are using it; more evidence of this strange paradox that we find ourselves in, where basically everybody has had these experiences, most people believe in it, it's being used to the tune of a billion dollars a year. And yet officially—and by officially, of course, what we're talking about are major scientific journals, science, popular science journals, large newspapers and so on—there's a very common spin that is provided in all of those sources, including Wikipedia. So the average person wants to know: I had a weird experience last night. What does that mean? Well, they search all the usual places. They're going to come back with saying it's just an illusion, it wasn't a real thing, after all. But that's simply wrong. So, yeah, the status quo doesn't like these kinds of ideas and it pushes back hard.

A case can be made by the way, that during the Cold War, when the U.S. government had Stargate, which was psychic espionage, and other programs going on, it was working really well. And it continued to work really well for two reasons. One, it was top secret, so very few people knew of its existence. But at the same time, if you have a secret weapon, so-called, it is to everyone's benefit for everyone else to either not know that you have a secret weapon, or they are told that the secret weapon actually doesn't work at all. So it's difficult to prove that there was pressure or influence from the government to support skeptical societies that made it their business to constantly say that none of this stuff is real. But I would not be surprised if historically we find out at some point that there were links from our own government to create a public narrative, just as it did with UFOs, that there's nothing to look at here. Just keep going about your business. None of this is real. Because on the inside, they knew that it is real and actually quite important. So it's like a classic deflection maneuver.

Kevin Barrett: And a book that could be seen as a deflection maneuver or as this kind of limited hangout, or even in some ways, a revelation, is Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats. And that, of course, does raise the same kinds of questions as I did when I brought up Philip K. Dick, about pretty malevolent power seeking psychopathic people at high levels of our power pyramid trying to get their hands on this sort of technology. And of course, Jon Ronson uses this as fodder for humor. It's kind of amusing that a bunch of special forces killers would all line up and stare at a goat and try to kill the goat with their brainwaves or their psychic ability. So he milks that for humor. You finish that book, though, and one impression you could get would be he's dismissed the whole topic because we're all laughing at it. It's so ridiculous. But (considering) the actual material in the book, especially the stuff at the end about some of the CIA's horrific experiments that have been proven to have actually happened, we realize that he's exploring an area that actually could be quite important. So I think humor is one element that's been used to sort of defang the topic. And that could be both positive and negative, I suppose. Did you see Ronson's book and the movie they made out of it?

Dean Radin: I did, yes. And in both cases, the book and the movie present a humorous side to all of this because it is kind of silly. On the other hand, both the book and the movie are revolving around issues that actually did happen. And both of them leave the reader or the viewer with the sense that, oh, this isn't just a hallucination, it's not just an illusion. There actually was real stuff happening. So it's interesting. Then, from a point of view of a writer, how do you tell a narrative that will capture the audience and maintain their interest? Well, he did a pretty good job in that way, right? I mean, how many novels, whether they're based on fact or fiction, get turned into movies? Not too many. This one had elements in it where you can almost see that he was writing a movie script. And that's indeed what it turned into. So, yeah, it's one way to to spin a tale.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And I like Ronson's work. I know some folks in the alternative knowledge community find him to be with the nefarious forces of coverup. But I think if you read him carefully, it's not quite that simple. Most of the time, there are some exceptions where he's been unfair to various people. But yeah, The Men Who Stare at Goats was a powerful book. And I think it is designed so that an average educated reader might not take the subject quite as seriously as they should when they're done, especially if they're a careless reader.

Well, let's get to this new book you have out: Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. I'm interested in that connection between ancient wisdom and modern science...cultures have often managed to create means of preserving social stability in a world where these psychic powers not only exist, but everybody knows they exist. I did my PhD research in Morocco on Sufi miracle stories, and I did collect stories of people who had had extraordinary psychic experiences in recent times. And I think that in general, essentially everybody in Morocco—well, there might be one or two brainwashed university professors somewhere who haven't figured it out yet or who have been reprogrammed—but virtually the entire culture accepts that these abilities are quite real and going on around us all the time. And that culture has built in some safety mechanisms. People who use psychic abilities for selfish ends of any kind are looked down on a little bit. If you have to go to the market to buy some special herbs and some weasel brain—it's actually hyena brain, but my Moroccan wife mistranslated it as weasel brain, which is used by abused wives to totally control their husbands, to essentially turn the husband's brain to mush and take him over as if he were a zombie—you know, people doing that sort of thing are looked down on and considered sort of socially marginalized and so on. And of course there are people doing really nefarious stuff as well, and they're even more marginalized and looked down upon. Whereas the shaykh, that is, the religious scholar, who has this ability of clairvoyance and the television station reports on this and follows him around asking him questions about what's going on in this place, in that place where they have cameras and he's telling them exactly what's going on there because he can see it through clairvoyance—that this sort of thing is OK. If the religious ideals and the religious discourse approve of it and it's not selfish at all, it's all fi sabil illah, for the sake of God, then it's basically fine, it's good, it's benevolent. And the Sufi saints, who are often religious scholars, are honored for this. But the people who instrumentalize it in a selfish way, especially in a very selfish way, are marginalized and looked down upon. And I'm wondering if you think Western and modern culture has any possibilities of developing some sort of safeguard system in the event that this stuff breaks out more than it has?

Dean Radin: It's a very good question. The same social acceptance you find in South American countries, and India, basically all throughout Asia as well. And I've talked to scientists and scholars in those countries about these things. And what's interesting is that if there's large social acceptance, then there doesn't seem to be as much need or interest in having scientific verification and understanding. I found this most dramatically in India. I'm not entirely sure why that's the case. But in the Western world, the U.S. and U.K., Australia and so on, there, the need for scientific verification of something that seems spooky seems to be much higher, even though there's so much higher skepticism as well—although even the skepticism is only in a small minority of people. As I said, over 90 percent, basically everyone, including scientists and engineers, have had these experiences. So there's some natural skepticism. I guess it's built in to our Western worldview, and that's why we turn to science and say, is any is this real, what happened in this case? But now I've diverged from your question. So if you remind me what the question was—

Kevin Barrett: I was asking about possible safeguards, because we don't really have a religious discourse that's survived in this culture. Our religion, secular, progressive materialism, basically (holds that) an individual should grab as much power and pleasure as possible in their own way. And as long as they're quote unquote, not hurting anybody, they should do any darn thing they want. And so that philosophy may work OK at a certain level. But if, like in Morocco, everybody knew that these psi techniques are available and are extremely powerful, that there are specialists who are really good at them, (so) if you want to get something done, go to the specialist. Well, today, if the powerful people want to get something done, they go to specialists and they do very nefarious, selfish things regularly. And rather than being relegated to the social margins and considered taboo and like bad people that nobody would want to deal with, these people rule the culture. So how do we get some safeguards so that we don't end up with all the rich psychopaths using this stuff and making the world worse?

Dean Radin: Well, they probably already are. That's one of the sad things about all this in the classified environment. They asked once if we were very successful and we created some amazing new technology or something, what would happen to it? And the answer immediately was it would disappear down a black hole and you'd never be able to talk about it again or even work on it. And you could never even admit that it existed. So I thought, Well, that's not good. If you look at the many grimoires that you can buy out there, books of spells, that's all about gratifying the ego. Half of the spells are love spells and the other half are money spells and power spells. All of that is about manipulating the world around you. And what is not typically said in the grimoires is that probably 90 percent of the spells would be considered black magic. Because if black magic is defined as overcoming the free will of another person, that would be black magic. And do you think then about how most people would want to use these capabilities? It does fall into the category of black magic. You're trying to influence others' behaviors, others' beliefs, others' perceptions, all of that to your benefit, to your sole benefit. Well, fortunately, it's not the only way you can use these things.

There are also a lot of spells for healing. And presumably healing is good, except that healing can be reversed as well. And of course, one of the fears is that maybe you could harm somebody at a distance. That's probably true. So how do we protect ourselves? Well, you can already go to a religious artifacts stores and buy all kinds of little statues of saints. A lot of people do that. You can buy amulets, you can buy all kinds of things. Maybe it'll increase the stock in tinfoil so you can line all of your clothes and hats with tinfoil. (laughter) The problem is that as far as the scientific research goes, we don't know of any way to definitively block any of these capabilities, whether they're perceptual capabilities or psychokinetic. Nothing seems to block it or to stop it. If you read books on psychic self-defense, mostly it's about how you psychically protect yourself: You surround yourself with white light or with a mirrored shield or things of that sort. Well, some people can do that, and other people are not very good at doing those kinds of things, in which case, unfortunately for many people, they actually will not be able to protect themselves.

Kevin Barrett: Muslims believe, and that would include me actually in my own way, that the final two short suras of the Quran, the Mu'awwidhatayn, provide powerful protection against this sort of thing. And along these lines, there is a very interesting case of a professor named (Ioan) Couliano, who I think he was Romanian, who wrote a book called Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which looks into the simultaneous birth of science and a certain kind of magic in Western culture. And both the science and the magic may have been tending towards black magic and mass psychic manipulation and so on, which eventually created the world that we're in today. Anyway, he was mysteriously murdered in a University of Chicago restroom a couple of decades ago, I think. And they never solved it. Do you have any comments on that book or case or have you heard of it?

Dean Radin: I'm not familiar with that case, no. Maybe it's due to suppression in my own case, because you don't need to be accosted by too many paranoid schizophrenic who think that you're controlling their mind to want to stay out of the public restrooms. (laughter)

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, yeah. Well, Couliano was involved in some sort of political stuff as well. It's still a huge mystery what happened to him. But he was one of the leading scholars in humanities who was essentially taking for granted that these kinds of psychic abilities exist, though he wasn't putting it in the same sort of scientific language that you do. But he did take it for granted and was exploring a certain school of of practice of these things that emerged in the Renaissance. And then he had that strange death. And so a lot of folks were wondering what in the world happened to him and whether that's a bad sign for people in the academy who who study this sort of thing.

Dean Radin: So, yeah, as we've already discussed, it certainly raises concerns in a lot of people's minds about these things. They will begin to identify an individual who simply has an interest in the topic as suddenly being a dark magician or something like that. And if you look at the number of people who are mentally ill, who in one way or another think that they're also psychic, it's a pretty large percentage of schizophrenics, for example, who think that they're enormously psychic. And if they have a paranoid streak, they will flip out and they'll attack anybody who they think is involved in what they perceive as being psychic attacks on them. I mean, it's reasonable from inside their head, it's reasonable to try to get somebody to stop. And it certainly is not helped by the way that these kinds of phenomena are portrayed in entertainment. If you took any random sampling of 100 movies, for example, or television shows, that have a psychic component, almost all of them will devolve into horror films, and then that becomes part of the public way of thinking about these things. (The public) will think it in dark terms. And that's unfortunate, that those kinds of stories attract attention. I'm writing a TV series with a writing partner which has a very different spin on these kinds of effects, a much more positive way of thinking about these as simply natural human capacities, and most of the time, we just suppress them or we're frightened of them. And there's no reason to be frightened of them.

Kevin Barrett: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. It seems that the same cultural forces that in the past marginalized these things through a religious discourse that claimed that this was all from the realm of the demonic, today are doing the same thing, just sort of disguising it a little bit. But the Hollywood narrative isn't that different from of some of the church narratives from the old days. I can certainly imagine a lot of ways of flipping that narrative, based on my own experience, for example, when I actually had the most intense set of these kinds of experiences that I've ever had. I've had occasional precognitive dreams and telepathic experiences like anybody else, you know, the phone rings and you know who calls, that happens every now and then. But I had a real, intense, maybe six months of that when I was in high school after I had visited Stephen Gaskin's Farm spin off in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Stephen Gaskin was a hippie spiritual teacher from San Francisco who led a couple hundred followers across the country in old school buses and settled on a farm in Tennessee. And then they had a spin off in Wisconsin. So when I was 16, I hitchhiked up there and spent a few days with those people. I think they'd been using psychedelics as well as mystical techniques. And they'd been systematically trying to create a community in which people sort of blow off their egos and experience loving telepathy and loving psychic experiences as just a normal part of life. And that group mind was so powerful that it kind of worked on me. So then when I went back home, I could still access that to a certain extent, and it was good. You know, the part of your ego that you're setting aside when you do these things is really kind of a prison. And it's a bunch of sort of mechanisms that force you to behave selfishly. And of course, maybe our ancestors needed mechanisms to force them to behave selfishly to survive. And that's why it's there. But freeing yourself to some extent from those mechanisms, stepping out into a space where you feel love and compassion for everything and resonate telepathically with other people, resonate with various kinds of of perceptions beyond the normal sensory perceptions, is actually a very positive thing. It feels good, and it feels like the sort of things that I've studied when I've studied the saints, the Sufi saints and other saints. So there seems to be a very powerful, positive side to all of this that really gets lost in the popular culture. How are you planning to to bring it back?

Dean Radin: Well, as I said through narrative, you can create different kinds of narratives to show that this actually is interesting from a scientific perspective and probably important if for no other reason than helping to augment the methods that we use in medicine, for example. We've done studies on energy medicine, which is by no means mainstream, except that slowly insurance companies are beginning to say, well, OK, it looks like therapeutic touch or Reiki actually does have some evidence for it. In which case if you get a Reiki treatment, maybe your insurance will cover that. So that's a major step in the direction of what amounts to a new and at the same time very old method of healing. We still don't really understand what energy medicine is, but it does seem to work and it's not placebo because you can do controlled studies too. So at some point, when we learn much more about what's going on in those kinds of methods of healing—some of which are psychic because it also works at a distance—well, that has the capacity for great good. And in many ways, everything psychic is just another kind of knowledge. Power could be used for good or bad. That depends more on how we want to use it rather than the power itself.

The same could be said for nuclear power or any other kind of power. It can be used for good or bad. It's up to us to decide. My long term view is that if if our species lasts long enough, we'll figure out ways of actually using these kinds of things in the same way we figured out nuclear energy and electrical power and so on. The downside might be that this is a kind of power that may not be suitable for an adolescent species like us; we're adolescent in the sense that we haven't been around that long, we still clearly have all kinds of things to work out before we can live peacefully together. And in that kind of culture, it's like giving bombs to babies. Well, they'll play with it, and they'll probably end up blowing themselves up at some point because they don't understand the power. And so that's kind of how I think where we are. The reason why I use the tools of science to try to understand it better is simply that the more we know about what we're dealing with, the better we will be able to handle this particular bomb and hopefully not blow ourselves up.

Kevin Barrett: Well, you mentioned healing being one of the obvious positive uses for this sort of thing. And today we're at a very strange moment where a certain scientific discourse is insisting that we solve the Covid-19 problem through one means primarily, and that is, everybody gets vaccinated. Of course, there are other scientists who question whether this is a sound strategy. And frankly, based on what I've seen so far, I would tend to side with those dissidents. But in any case, it looks like there's now a war on these pluralistic conceptions of healing. You can't put up a YouTube that discusses COVID or various other issues in a way that's perhaps not precisely in line with the W.H.O. or CDC without risking having your YouTube channel taken down for so-called medical misinformation. And even social media is now relentlessly patrolled for so-called medical misinformation. I can imagine that anybody promoting any kind of alternative healing involving psychic abilities is really going to be silenced as a purveyor of so-called medical misinformation. So maybe it seems that this slow progress towards accepting these paranormal healing techniques as real, which I've seen in my own brother, who is an MD-PhD who's gotten a whole lot of grants, has been basically surviving on grant money, studying things like this. And so he knows this research, and he knows that, for instance, prayer actually works in healing. Double blind, placebo controlled studies prove that. He knows that, and he's also a die hard materialist, and he kind of just sort of accepts it and shrugs his shoulders and so on. So there's been a lot of that kind of progress. But now with COVID and the demonization of what they're calling medical misinformation, how far back are we going to slip?

Dean Radin: Well, it's a very good question. What we all want is someone who knows all the answers. And of course we don't have that at this point. So we're kind of in a pickle. I think that's the technical term. Yes, we're in a pickle. The pickle is sour and crunchy and appealing. At the same time, some people like the pickle. I don't know that there's any—

Kevin Barrett: I like pickles. Yeah. You know, just earlier today, I was proofreading my wife's spiritual cookbook. And one of the last headlines I read before I came to do this interview was something like, "Everybody Likes Pickles."

Dean Radin: So there you go. See? So there is a certain degree of joy in the debate. And what you're describing and what we're certainly seeing now in terms of the debate in Congress, even on social media, including YouTube, is is a pickle debate about who's going to be the spokesperson for a truth that we all have to follow. And it's a very complicated topic because there are multiple truths, especially in medical science. We don't always—in fact rarely, except for fairly simple things at this point, do we understand what's going on. So I like to point out that in the domain of psychic research worldwide, total funding might be maybe $5 million through nonprofits and grants and every other source. So that's $5 million as compared to probably one hundred billion dollars being spent on something like cancer research. Well, there have been some important strides made in cancer research, but most of it's still a pretty big mystery. So the dollars turn into the number of people who are working in those fields. So if you have a field that has $5 million supporting people, you don't have very many and progress is going to be pretty slow. If you have $100 billion or more, that may be an underestimate, you have thousands, tens of thousands of people who are devoting their efforts to try to understand a very difficult problem. And if you look worldwide, then, at how much money is being spent on all kinds of interesting things in medicine and physics and whatever, we're talking probably well over a trillion dollars a year to supporting millions of scientists, all of whom are striving hard to push the boundaries of knowledge. And in the meantime, almost nothing is being spent on understanding what we're actually capable of. Because I think you're right that what we currently think of as medicine is a combination of surgery and drugs. And most of the money probably is in the drug business. At some point, I don't think we're going to need either of them. If we really understood how psychic phenomena work, I think the entire medical model will change. So having said that, now think of all of the money that's being made in the status quo in medicine and how hard it would push back on ever figuring out another way. So this is just the same old problem that we see in the academic world. It pushed back for people who made their careers based on a certain ideology. Well, along comes something that says some of that ideology is probably wrong, and there's going to be a lot of pushback. Indeed, that's OK. Having worked in this field for a long time and watching the sociology of science, anybody who gets involved in a controversial topic of any type has to expect that this is simply par for the course. So just do your work and publish it and keep going.

Kevin Barrett: Have you noticed that the politics of these topics have shifted in a very bizarre way fairly recently? It used to be that most of the people interested in, let's say, alternative healing and open to psychic phenomena and talking about them tended to be more from the political left. People on the right have tended to be a little more hidebound and often traditionally religious in a kind of obscurantist way. Today, though, we're seeing a kind of hysteria from people who think of themselves as being on the liberal or left side of the political spectrum, who are insisting on following a certain kind of authoritarian discourse with the "trust the science" motto as the centerpiece. I just interviewed a hardcore progressive comedian who spent the entire hour screaming at me to get vaccinated with enough four-Letter words to sound like she was suffering from Tourette's syndrome. So if that's the progressive left, which is what's shutting down all the debate and all of the free discussion, and suddenly it's the conservative obscurantist and to some extent Trump loving right that is where the free speech and open inquiry is, we're living in a kind of a different world from the one that I remember from just a decade or two ago. Do you have any comments on that?

Dean Radin: Historically, the the governments that supported at least the secret research in psychic phenomena were mostly Republican. The problem is that Republicans today are not Republicans anymore, at least not historically anything like what Republicans used to be. So we're in some other crazy kind of condition now where the name Republican is being used. But this is not what most people would have said was Republican even 10 years ago. So we're in a very strange place as far as the the political left or right. I think a lot of the angst comes about from doing what's good for the public, like releasing what you think is important for you and doing something for others. That's where a lot of the anger comes from. And I have to say, I agree with that. Well, an mRNA vaccine may not be the best thing in the world. It does seem to work pretty well. And each of us then has to make a decision whether we're going to stop at the red light or not. Do I want my personal freedom to do literally anything they want without regard to anybody else? Well, I would say no. I say we live in a social society. We have to consider other people as well. And so for people who don't want to get vaxxed, there's lots of reasons why people may hold that position, and that's perfectly fine, except then are they being socially responsible or not?

Kevin Barrett: Well, I would actually tend to agree with you if I thought that the data was telling us what most people think it's telling them. However, I'm not at all convinced that these vaccines slow transmission enough to make a serious difference. And there's all sorts of evidence behind that, but we won't sit here and debate that because we only have five minutes left. If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you some sources. And if not, that's fine too. And I thank you for being a lot more reasonable about the way you stated that than my interviewee Mona was, So last—we're getting close to the end—I'm really curious about how you got a blurb from John Cleese, the brilliant British comic from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and so on. He's been one of my favourite entertainment figures, actually, since I was a kid. How did he end up blurbing your brand new book Real Magic?

Dean Radin: Well, I met John a couple of times at seminars at the Esalen Institute, and the seminars were about survival of consciousness and psychic phenomena. And John turned out to have a lifelong interest in consciousness and what it can do. So I actually found this among many creative people, because creative people tend to be more open to these kinds of experiences and actually have them. So he's one of a batch of celebrities I've met, and business people as well, who are very, very interested in these kinds of topics. And while they're not scientists or necessarily scholars about it, they're very well read. They're very interested in these issues, like most people are, and because of their status, they have the capacity to go to conferences and private meetings and that sort of thing. And that's where I met John.

Kevin Barrett: And he says that if you're skeptical of psi phenomena, start with pages 95 and 96. Well, what's on page 95 and 96 that John Cleese finds so mind-blowing? Or do we have to buy the book to find out?

Dean Radin: Well, I could be shamelessly self-promoting and say you have to have to buy the book to find out. But but what I'll say, though, is that the core of the book is: What does science have to say about the practices that we call magic? We only call them magic, things like precognition and psycho-kinetic stuff, because we don't have a better name for it yet. But these are ancient esoteric practices that have been studied in the laboratory under different names, and we find that they work. And so the core of the book is actually covering the science so that we can say with some confidence that the main practices of magic, the different categories of what's called magic, have been studied in the laboratory and they work. So this is what the the theme of my book Real Magic is all about. We are talking here about very ancient, esoteric traditions. Every culture has them. And up until when I started writing the book, if somebody had asked me, Why are you writing a book about magic? I would say, I'm not writing a book about magic. I'm writing about how science has studied some esoteric practices. But as I kept writing and doing the background research, it became very clear to me that what we call magic, of course not quite as embellished as we see in TV shows or movies, but that kind of magic actually has been examined in some detail, and we have pretty high confidence that that stuff is real. Again, not as you see in the movies, but something like that actually does exist.

Kevin Barrett: And that slogan trust the science, may or may not pertain in the field that they're deploying it for. But I think it would be a good slogan for the science of the study of psi, because if you have even probably 30 percent of the trust in that branch of scientific inquiry that you have in any other branch, you're going to be totally convinced. For some reason, there's a very strange and irrational mistrust of science in this field, as you have demonstrated throughout your work.

Dean Radin: But only by some. A lot of people do resonate with the science, especially when you describe what does it mean to trust the science, right? People use it as a slogan. It doesn't mean anything, because if you don't know how to evaluate data, then the average person who is not a scientist will look through medical journals and they can pick and choose anything they want and maybe not even understand what they're looking at.

Kevin Barrett: Mm hmm. So trust maybe isn't exactly the right word. But we should look at all scientific data as reasonably as possible and put it all on the same level, on the same playing field. We shouldn't just dismiss whole areas of inquiry because they conflict with our prejudices. So rather than saying trust the science, we should maybe say, don't mistrust the science too much. Like if I'm predisposed at this point to be skeptical about COVID vaccines, I should not just dismiss every study that seems to tell me the opposite, and vice versa.

Dean Radin: Yeah, and it's not easy, right? In order to really know what's going on with MRNA types of treatments, you'd need to know something about genetics and about how statistics are collected and what clinical trials are about, you know, the whole domain in order to actually understand what is being said.

Kevin Barrett: Mm hmm. Indeed. Ok,I think we've we've hit the end of the hour, so thank you so much. Dean Radin, author of Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. I've read two of your other books and find them very, very useful, and this one looks great as well. I'm very much looking forward to it. Thank you. Looking forward to another conversation down the line.

Very good. Okay, great. Bye.

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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

Mathematics and science professor and Sufism-oriented Muslim A.K. Dewdney ponders:

“I am increasingly sceptical these days when I read reports from otherwise (seemingly) reliable activists that ‘The Deep State Is In a Panic,’ or ‘This is a game-changer’ or ‘Deep state retreats’ or ‘VAX plan failing’ and on and on and on. Such assessments may give comfort to some, but they serve no one’s real interest on our side of the curtain. This might make an interesting topic especially in the context of a Progress Report. i.e. ‘How are we doing, really?’ Is there a systematic way we can make such assessments?”

And what does Dewdney think of Alan Sabrosky’s claim that the truth movement failed? Tune in and see!

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Pastor and human rights activist Dr. Randy Short discusses the Rittenhouse/Arbery shootings and verdicts; the COVID-19 pandemic and associated injections; the Waukesha SUV attack; and his new books (co-authored with Roger Stone) Slavery’s Mastery: The Impact of Religious Slavery Revealed and Spartacus: The Real Corey Booker Story.

Randy Short is not just a co-author, but also a spiritual advisor to newly religious Roger Stone, who has been subpoenaed to testify to the House committee investigating January 6th. MSM coverage has been hysterical in both senses of the word: “The select panel on Monday subpoenaed known conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones as well as Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of former President Trump…’They’ve clearly demonstrated a willingness if not a propensity to lie. Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress — and testifying before Congress is the exact thing they’d be asking him to do — and of course Alex Jones is a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist and 9/11 denier’…said Barbara McQuade, who served as a U.S. attorney during the Obama administration.”

Throwing around ad hominems like “known conspiracist” and “9/11 denier” is par for the course in the MSM these days. That’s why you’re listening to this show!

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Meow! Surely you’re joking, Mona!

I invited Mona Shaykh, a leading “woke” comedian and self-professed “naughty Muslim,” for what I thought would be a friendly conversation. After all, we’re both American Muslims, we both have an offbeat sense of humor (check out my satire), we both sympathize with underdogs and oppressed folks, and we’re both committed to telling in-your-face truth exactly the way we see it, social niceties be *#@*ed.

My wife warned me: “What kind of Muslim is this? She’s flashing her body around, spewing her potty mouth, exploiting her background for cheap laughs, selling tasteless woke NWO crap. Don’t dignify her with an interview.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure Mona and I have different takes on a long list of issues. But I love interviewing people who see things differently from me. We can discuss our areas of disagreement reasonably, so the listeners can gain a better idea of what’s at stake and make up their own minds.”

I should have listened to my wife.

Six minutes in, the interview started going off the rails. Shaikh told me two of her brothers had contracted polio from expired vaccinations, and the trauma destroyed her family. I asked whether that bad vaccine experience made her wary of COVID vaccines, mentioning the previous guest, Tom Breidenbach’s, long, well-documented list of reasons not to trust the “vax everybody” party line. Her response: “I’m sorry, are you an anti-vaxer?” From what happened after that, it might as well have been Julius Streicher asking “I’m sorry, are you a Jew?” (Except that Streicher probably couldn’t keep up with Mona’s profanity.)

Unfortunately, Mona’s wish that COVID provide a final solution to the anti-vaxxer problem (starting around the 23 minute mark) might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Nobel Laureate virologist Luc Montagnier agrees with vaccine expert Geert Vanden Bossche (among many others) that mass “leaky” vaccinations in the midst of a viral pandemic are sheer madness, just as mass “leaky” antibiotics would be during a bacterial pandemic, for roughly the same reasons: they put selective pressure on the pathogen to breed more virulent variants. Though it is unclear whether the vaccinated or unvaccinated would suffer the most under a worst case scenario, the closest real-world precedent is the case of Marek’s disease in chickens. What happened, briefly, was that mass leaky vaccinations of chickens bred ever-more-virulent variants that ever-more-disproportionately targeted the unvaccinated chickens. Eventually, the selective pressure produced a virus that was mostly non-lethal in vaccinated chickens, but killed all unvaccinated chickens.

Personally, I wouldn’t wish a Marek’s disease scenario on a chicken, much less a human being, much less hundreds of millions of human beings.

But at least it would be a final solution to the anti-vaxxer problem. Right, Mona?

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