Listen live Fridays noon to 2pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at https://kevinbarrett.substack.com
Truth Jihad Radio’s live show returns to the Revolution.Radio airwaves in a new seven-hours-earlier slot. I’m now broadcasting live from Morocco! And thanks to the new time zone (GMT +1) I can easily interview guests based in Europe…like Jimmy Walter (Vienna) and John Waters (Dublin).
First hour: Philanthropist Jimmy Walter fled the USA in January, 2005 after a series of threats and vandalism attacks related to his 9/11 truth activism—which included funding full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post, distributing more than 300,000 copies of his Confronting the Evidence DVD, and sponsoring several conferences and speaking events. Jimmy recently emailed me to recommend Matt Taibbi’s article “Campaign 2024, Officially Chaos“—which, like Ron Unz’s “Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO: The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck,” takes a dim view of the current state of American politics in general, and the 2024 elections in particular.
Jimmy writes: “They cannot convict Biden of anything since the statute of limitations has lapsed. (They could change it, like they did to enable Jean Carroll v Trump! -KB) The DOJ will very probably not indict him at all. The House might impeach him, but the Senate won’t convict. Moreover, legally, you can only be impeached for crimes in office and all of this is before. Judge Napolitano went over all of this and added that the testimony presented probably only showed intent to deceive, that there was only the inference of influence that got the Ukrainians to pay his son. Lying about not knowing, etc, not under oath, is not a crime. The swing voters will have to evaluate since the diehards on both sides care not for the facts or logic.”
Second hour: Irish journalist John Waters discusses his new article “‘Trust the Experts’ Is the Virus.” In it he cites comedian Jimmy Dore’s bit on COVID-era mass formation psychosis, which in retrospect was hilarious as well as terrifying. But what’s so funny about mass hysteria?
Waters: “We come back to the hypothesis of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In his book, Laughter — An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in which he proposes that humour derives fundamentally from rigidity in human behaviours and affairs. We find funny, he says, anything that breaks away from the natural patterns of human life, by becoming mechanistic and predictable. Hence, what makes people laugh is the absence of alertness and elasticity in the object of ridicule, i.e. forms of sclerosis arising from the culture of the group, things that deviate from the law of life, which abjures rigidity and mechanisation. But, here, the rigidities are not simply those of sclerotic authority, or bureaucracy, or power, but of our friends and neighbours, our brothers and sisters, our parents and children, the man behind the cash desk in the supermarket who used to be so friendly and, well, funny — all these and many more, who for a full two years at least, became the attack dogs from the Valley of the Squinting Windows where the Stasi live.”