By Kevin Barrett, for Unz Review
The bad news is that two of the most powerful institutions in America have anointed me a “COVID super-spreader.” The good news is that I stand accused of super-spreading “COVID conspiracy theories,” not the actual disease. But the worse news is that the way things are going, “conspiracy spreaders” may soon be quarantined in COVID camps as threats to public health. Dissidents, it seems, are the new terrorists.
The Associated Press and the Atlantic Council simultaneously published a coordinated attack on me and others accused of propagating alternative analyses of the origin of COVID-19. Though AP writer David Klepper’s journalistic ethics need a tune-up, and though the Atlantic Council libeled me, I am honored to be recognized, however mendaciously and unethically, for my efforts to uncover and spread the obvious but unspeakable truth that COVID-19 is almost certainly a US-NATO bioweapon, most likely deliberately unleashed. If the perpetrators are eventually prosecuted for war crimes, the global bioweapons complex shuttered, and humanity saved, I will be glad to accept some of the credit. And in the more likely event that impunity prevails, and vastly worse plagues follow, I will at least be able to say I tried.
Klepper’s AP article accurately quotes me as writing that the early outbreak in Iran “suggests that the Americans and/or their partners the Israelis… may have deliberately attacked Iran.” Then Klepper quotes me out of context: “It seemed fairly obvious to me that the first hypothesis one would look at when something as extraordinary as this COVID pandemic hits, is that it would be a US bio-war strike.” That statement, shorn of context, sounds nutty. Klepper deliberately left out my prior statements laying out the historical and geostrategic context.
Historical context: US military-intelligence services and their allies have repeatedly waged biological warfare on many nations, including Korea, Cuba, Russia, Zimbabwe, and (almost certainly) China; attacked their own Congress, as well as journalists, with anthrax; and then used their own anthrax attack on America to massively boost the germ warfare budget, spending billions on such items as “gain of function” research on extremely dangerous bat coronaviruses, among other pathogens. COVID-19 wouldn’t be the first US military plague: The “discoverer” of Lyme disease, Willie Burgdorfer, tearfully confessed on video that he had in fact manufactured Lyme for the US biowar complex. For evidence supporting the above assertions, see the links and sources in my pre-COVID article “US Biological Warfare: A toxic cocktail of germ warfare and big lies.”
Geostrategic context: The current #1 world military power, the US, is desperately seeking to thwart the economic rise of the emerging #2 power, China. As Graham Allison has observed in The Thucydides Trap, “when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result…” And that war is almost always launched by the #1 power in hopes of pre-empting #2’s rise. So according to historical precedent, we should expect the US to use military means to try to stop the rise of China. Since China’s rise is driven by its extraordinary and sustained economic growth, we would expect the US to target China’s economy. An obvious way of doing that is through biological warfare.
Such efforts have probably been ongoing for at least a decade. Chinese sources have alleged that bird flu and swine flu were deliberately spread throughout China by US military agents in order to deprive China of its main sources of meat. COVID-19, which mysteriously showed up in Wuhan (the transit hub for all China) on the biggest travel date, Chinese New Year, in the wake of a visit by a very dicey American Military Games team, looks like yet another US bio-attack aimed at harming China’s economy and smearing it as the source of the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan flu.” That analysis seems even more likely in the light of the next target, the Iranian-government-linked clerics at the center of the subsequent outbreak in Qom.
The analysis I have just outlined is admirably developed in Ron Unz’s article “American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?” The strongest evidence I raised, cited by Klepper, was stressed by Ron Unz in his presentation at the COVID Biowar webinar as well as his article: “It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.”
If the AP and behind it the Atlantic Council were looking for influential individuals responsible for spreading the hypothesis that COVID-19 is a US bioweapon, they should have called Ron Unz, as I strongly urged David Klepper to do. So why didn’t Ron make the list? Perhaps Klepper and his Mockingbird masters didn’t want to direct attention to Ron’s terrific essay. Indeed, the usual suspects seem terrified by that article. Shortly after it was published, the Unz Review was suddenly hit with massive, seemingly coordinated censorship by Google and Facebook.
Would David Klepper deliberately steer readers away from Ron Unz and “American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?” Would he knowingly and intentionally use an out-of-context quote to try to make me look irrational? Quite possibly. After all, he violated journalistic ethics and basic human decency when he broke his promise to share his recording of his interview with me. As I wrote to Ron Unz today:
Hi Ron,
Odd how you and your article were ignored, while I got all the credit for your ideas (with which I happen to agree, but still…)
I did an interview with the author, David Klepper, a few months ago, cited your “blowback” article, and urged him to contact you. Did he?
When he recorded the interview on Zoom he said I could record it, then pretended to be confused and unable to change the setting to allow me to do so. I said I wouldn’t do the interview unless he promised to share his recording with me. He agreed, then later reneged and lied about what happened. See below.
Best
Kevin
Ron Unz responded:
Thanks, Kevin, and the silence is a bit irritating but hardly unexpected. And I certainly never heard from him.
I’m pretty sure that the ADL and similar organizations have for fairly obvious reasons issued some sort of edict prohibiting MSM from mentioning my name or my publication. In fact, I published a column about the situation last year:
https://www.unz.com/runz/ideological-purges-and-the-lord-voldemort-effect/
As one example, there was a huge Internet controversy last year that actually got into the NYT, WashPost, and various other MSM outlets. I read the story in my morning NYT and wondered what it was all about, only later discovering that it was actually regarding my own website.
Similarly, an SPLC investigator published a huge hit-piece against Stephen Miller, probably the most hated Trump official, trying to force him to resign by associating with all sort of “controversial” writers. One of the main pieces was originally published on my website, surely providing him with “associations” sufficiently inflammatory to sink Miller, but they scrupulously avoided mentioning us, thereby saving him. Apparently, maintaining the blackout about our publication was more important than taking Miller’s scalp.
Even a year or two ago, an NYT journalist interviewed me for an hour or so about the Harvard admissions lawsuit, then later sent me a note apologizing that she’d only been able to use a couple of my quotes in her article. But when the piece actually ran, the quotes had all disappeared.
Best,
Ron
If David Klepper were an honest journalist, he certainly would have contacted Ron Unz, the author of the best article outlining the “biowarfare blowback” hypothesis I articulated. And he wouldn’t have allowed his superiors to erase Ron Unz and the Unz Review from his article, or from the media in general.
Likewise, if Klepper were honest, he would have kept his promise to share his recording of our interview. I could have posted that recording here, and you could have listened and heard me laying out the historical and geostrategic context explaining why the “first hypothesis” about COVID should be a US biowar strike. Without the recording, it is my word against his: I clearly remember laying out the context, while he can pretend I didn’t, or more likely, just ignore me.
I always insist on the right to a complete and unedited recording of all interviews I do with anyone, including the FBI. If you let someone else record you, they can cherry pick your words, rip them out of context, and use them to misrepresent you. The complete, original recording of the entire interview is your only defense.
Klepper violated elementary journalistic ethics by breaking his promise to share the interview recording with me, and then deliberately taking a quote out of context to make me look irrational. But his partners in crime at the Atlantic Council actually libeled me:
“Press TV and other Iranian outlets also amplified claims made by E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars Magazine – also cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-Semitic– and Kevin Barret, a US Holocaust denier who has also claimed that the September 11 attacks were an ‘inside job’ by the George W. Bush Administration.”
Besides spelling my name wrong, the Atlanticists not only falsely accused me of “Holocaust denial” but made that my primary identity, with only a secondary interest in 9/11 truth! In fact my career as a public figure was launched entirely through my participation in the 9/11 truth movement. I have published several books and thousands of articles on 9/11 and related subjects, and appeared all over the mainstream media, including the New York Times (here and here), NPR, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere, as a 9/11 scholar and activist.
In stark contrast, I have devoted less time to researching and discussing the Holocaust than to dozens if not hundreds of other issues. I do see the Holocaust as a free speech issue, and for that reason, I occasionally discuss it on my broadcasts, which are devoted to free speech on controversial topics, just as I discuss hundreds of other hot-button issues.
On the Holocaust, as on COVID as biowar blowback, I must defer to Ron Unz, who has written a terrific article on “Holocaust Denial.” Ron comes down hard on the side of the revisionists being right. I don’t come down quite that hard. But after doing cursory research, I can’t help noticing that the revisionists like Thomas Dalton and Germar Rudolf and Nick Kollerstrom make a better case, arguing from logic and (forensic) evidence, than their most prominent opponents. Deborah Lipstadt, for example, is a hysterical nitwit who wouldn’t know a rational-empirical argument from an Israeli flag; while the other leading anti-revisionist volume, co-authored by Shermer and Grobman, is less ludicrous but almost equally unconvincing. Still, after a handful of books and a few dozen hours of conversations and films, I’m not well-informed enough to “deny” anything.
So how did I get libeled with false accusations of “holocaust denial”? They were invented out of whole cloth in 2006, after I became well known for my 9/11 work, but before I had thought or read much of anything on the Holocaust debate. Libelous assertions linking me to three “holocaust deniers,” two of whom I had never heard of and the third of whom I had never read, cropped up on my Wikipedia page and were kept there for several years by Wikipedia management, despite dozens of attempts to remove them by many different people.
After weathering years of my complaints, Wikipedia finally removed my entire page. But I am still being libeled as a “Holocaust denier”—on Ron Unz’s page! What evidence does the august “people’s encyclopedia” cite? An obviously facetious article, published on April Fool’s Day, with am unmistakably ironic title:
34 Barrett, Kevin (April 1, 2011). “I Am a Holocaust Denier”. Retrieved March 11, 2020.
Irony, of course, is a figure of speech in which the real meaning is the opposite of the surface meaning. My article is a darkly ironic April Fool’s joke. It is obviously not a serious statement that I am a Holocaust denier in the sense that Wikipedia’s lying and libelous editors are construing it, or pretending to.
Why are anonymous Wikipedia “editors” allowed to libel people with impunity? Why are those libelous lies spread mindlessly by media and think tanks? Why are professional journalists like David Klepper allowed to lie and break their promises to interviewees? Why do people like Klepper take quotes out of context in service to character assassination?
No wonder more and more people hate the media. No wonder an angry mob smashed the media’s equipment outside the Capitol on January 6th.
Once the American people figure out how badly they have been lied to by their rulers, not least of all concerning US-biowar COVID-19, the Capitol “insurrection” may turn out to be a relatively tame and mild precursor of bigger and more consequential things to come.