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Marianne Williamson Is Right: We Need a Spiritual Awakening—and a Real Investigation of 9/11, by Kevin Barrett

5-8-2019 < UNZ 63 2268 words
 

Is the mainstream mind-control machine starting to worry about Marianne Williamson?


Boston Globe: “It’s a very good bet Williamson won’t win the nomination. But her growing prominence in the Democratic field gives her the biggest platform she’s ever had. And as we now know all too well, an entertaining fringe candidate can sometimes catch on.”


Washington Examiner headline: “’How can you even say that?’: Marianne Williamson rejects comparison to Scientologists.”


CNN headline: “Marianne Williamson draws criticism for depression stance.”


And then the clincher, from Alternet: “Marianne Williamson was interviewed by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist in 2012 — and seemed to think he was making sense.”


I was that “9/11 conspiracy theorist.”


Read the transcript of my interview with Marianne Williamson on Truth Jihad Radio


Although we strongly disagreed on a few key issues—she’s pro-Zionist and claims Islamic Iran is “fascist”—I must admit that, overall, both of us did indeed think the other was mostly making sense. It’s no secret that Marianne Williamson knows the official story of 9/11 is a lie. As she said in our interview: “I understand the theory of 9/11 being an artificially-created Pearl Harbor in order to justify an Iraq war…”


And then there is the longer quote that Alternet picked up:



Kevin Barrett: “I was chased out of the academy back in 2006 for talking about the questions surrounding what really happened on September 11th, 2001. I’ve lost two jobs, one tenure-track job, at the University of Wisconsin, and I’m unemployable in the American academy right now. So if saying we have a fascist country, if that means you can’t even come close to telling the truth about the most important event of the century, and still have a job as a professor – or at least you’re risking your job – then we’re pretty fascist.”


Marianne Williamson: “Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think…listen, to have questions about 9/11, to me, is no different than having questions about the Warren Commission. And I don’t believe in the single bullet theory of the Kennedy assassination either.”



Though you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream coverage, Williamson is saying similar things while campaigning. When Iowa activist Jack Bucklin recently asked Williamson about 9/11, the response was encouraging: “She said she knew AE911Truth and that she had even seen some of their videos. She added that she and her boyfriend had been very upset by the information contained in the videos, particularly about Building 7.”


So a 9/11 truther is becoming the most-talked-about, most-searched candidate in the wake of the early Democratic debates. No wonder the mainstream maestros of mass-mind-management are worried.


Some dismiss Williamson’s message as pop-culture psychobabble. She has been compared to Trump: Aren’t they both telegenic, politically-inexperienced airheads whose presidential campaigns are primarily designed to promote their lucrative personal brands? And aren’t they both selling emotions, not reason?


Not really. Unlike Trump, Williamson is not an airhead. Compare their shocking (to the mainstream) statements about 9/11. During the 2016 campaign Trump did say at least one sensible thing about 9/11: “The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe.” Mainstream commentators waxed apoplectic over Trump’s damnable heresy. Many understood Trump to be subtly indicating that he knew the Bush Administration was complicit in 9/11.


Trump also said people in New Jersey cheered and celebrated the 9/11 attacks. The dumbed-down Republican TV audience thought he was talking about Muslims. But those in the know suspected Trump was subtly referencing the Dancing Israelis, five Mossad agents who set up to film the plane strike on the Towers before it happened, then wildly celebrated and high-fived, taking trophy photos of themselves flicking lighters in front of the burning and then exploding Towers.


Trump even went so far as to say “elect me and you’ll find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center,” indicating that it was the Saudis. That may have been a half-truth, or less, but a half-truth is better than none.


But if Trump knows that neocon Republicans, Likkudnik Israelis, and their Saudi puppets did 9/11, and wants to expose and prosecute the perps, his actions since taking office are paradoxical to say the least. Trump’s administration is the most neocon, Likudnik, and pro-Saudi in history. He is doing exactly what the 9/11 coup criminals wanted: demonize Islam, hand Jerusalem to the Zionists, and prepare for war on Iran.


Trump’s doublespeak on 9/11 was all about scoring political points. Trump blamed George W. Bush not because Trump cares about the truth, but to damage the candidacy of his main rival at the time, Jeb Bush. He lied about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11—not to expose the Dancing Israelis, but to pander to the ignorant Islamophobes who watch Fox News and vote in Republican primaries. And his loose talk about Saudis behind 9/11 may have been designed to pressure Bin Salman to make business deals with Trump…and to bail out Jared Kushner’s catastrophic investment in 666 5th Avenue.


Marianne Williamson’s references to The New Pearl Harbor, WTC-7, and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth invoke reason and the dispassionate search for empirical truth. They are not designed for political advantage or self-aggrandizement. Her approach is the exact opposite of Trump’s.


The claim that Williamson is an airhead—easily refuted by the transcript of her Truth Jihad Radio interview, or indeed any fair-minded consideration of her words—rests on the notion that her spirituality amounts to New Age psychobabble. It’s guilt by association. We all know that there are New Age psychobabblers out there. (Way out there.) So anyone peddling a recent and trendy form of spirituality must be just as dumb as they are.


The guilt-by-association smear works on those unfamiliar with comparative religion and spirituality—especially hardcore materialists who dismiss it all as woo-woo. It also works on some folks who embrace a particular religious tradition as the only legitimate approach to spirituality. But open-minded people conversant with Religious Studies will note that Williamson’s bible, A Course in Miracles, is actually a pretty decent restatement of what some Traditionalists call the Perennial Philosophy: the core truth of religious spirituality expressed in different discourses, symbols, and rituals across the panoply of revealed religions.


I submit that Williamson is doing well because many Americans sense that she is right about one very important thing: Only a mass spiritual awakening could truly “make America great again.” The widespread sense that the USA is on the wrong track, and that things are getting worse, led to the election of nostalgia-monger Donald Trump. But the real reason America is getting worse is not so much insecure borders, the demographic decline of white people, and a stagnant economy especially for working-class whites. The deeper source of our malaise is the decline of private and public morality. Trump, far from offering a solution to that problem, is actually its most prominent symptom.


Williamson is right that spirituality—which is normally, but not always, rooted in revealed religion—is the only sure source of moral guidance. If we embrace a secular materialist worldview, there is ultimately no reason why behaving morally is any better than behaving immorally. In fact, we will probably do better by behaving immorally whenever we can get away with it. Leo Strauss’s satanic misinterpretation of Plato, which holds that the happy man is the one who is good on the outside but evil on the inside, is forceful and convincing to any rigorously honest thinker who embraces secular materialism and rejects all forms of spirituality. That road leads through Machiavelli to the Marquis de Sade and his modern disciples, including Jeffrey Epstein and his wealthy and powerful clients. These are the people who are currently running America, and the world.


The materialist worldview, with its Darwinian approach to life, insists that the winner is the strongest and cleverest competitor, and that what fools call morality is just an impediment to winning. For Darwinian materialists, there is no such thing as morality. For them “morality” is just confusion, emotional nonsense that grows out of kin selection i.e. gene-based pseudo-altruism. Trump—an egomaniacal blithering idiot who has succeeded in amassing wealth and power not thanks to brains or skill, but due to his ruthless and obsessive win-at-all-costs approach to deal-making—is a prime example of how materialist social Darwinism leads to psychopathy. (Trump’s insistence on screwing his business partners’ wives, and then bragging about it in his book, may be psychopathic, not to mention obnoxious, but it does make good Darwinian sense…at least if the purpose of existence is to infest the universe with little Trumps.)


According to Wikipedia, A Course in Miracles “states that everything involving time, space, and perception is illusory. It presents a monism which states that God is the only truth and reality: perfect, unchanging, unchangeable, extending only love, though not in time and space, which cannot really be comprehended from a dualistic perspective.” All of the great religions and wisdom teachers brought a similar message. This is most obviously true of the ethical monotheisms at the core of the American and Western-Islamic heritage. Those traditions—including Monotheism 1.0 (Judaism), Monotheism 2.0 (Christianity), and Monotheism 3.0 (Islam)—insist that human moral behavior actually matters to God. A detailed discussion of the various reasons they offer to support this not-entirely-obvious notion is beyond the scope of this essay; so let us merely note in passing that “God rewards good and punishes evil with perfect justice” is a simpler version of “Truth/Reality is absolute Oneness, so whatever you do to the other you are doing to yourself.”


At some level we all know this. After all, “we come from God, and to God we return.” Or as William Wordsworth put it:



Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,


But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:



But we forget. We fall into the illusion of separation. Some fall faster, harder, and further than others. A few even lose their souls and become psychopaths. Relatively good people have to defend themselves against the relatively bad. That is the most basic truth of politics.


The Darwinian aspect of life in this illusory material space-time is a test. The psychopaths have an advantage in this world, where God says they will be allowed to enjoy themselves for a certain period of time before ultimately facing perfect justice. Those who strive for justice inevitably come into unequal conflict with the avatars of evil, who tend to rise to positions of wealth and power.


Iowa activist Bucklin says of Williamson: “Sometimes in her stump speech she talks about it being a fight between good and evil, and evil has got control of the United States. She doesn’t come out and say anything about 9/11, but she has a pretty good idea of what’s going on.”


Having “a pretty good idea of what’s going on” in the struggle against the evil that infests our upper echelons of power apparently doesn’t entail understanding the disproportionate role Zionism plays in that evil (as illustrated by its role in 9/11 and the Kennedy assassinations and Epstein-style pedophilic blackmail rings.) Williamson seems blind to the problem of Zionist power in America, and strongly supports the supremacist “Jewish state” occupying Palestine, saying that her problem is just with the current Israeli government. But there can be no “Jewish state” in Palestine without the genocide of the Palestinians. Perhaps aware of that logical impasse, she yearns for a miracle:


“So even though I do not, for the most part, agree with the government of Israel at all – and also as a Jew, because I am a Jew and committed to the existence of Israel – because your worldview would just obliterate something that I can’t…that I do not wish to see obliterated. So I think what’s clear is that we need a miracle in the Middle East.”


Maybe the miracle we need would involve Jews, and other Americans, following Williamson back to the worship of the one universal God, away from narcissistic tribalism and blind worship of mammon. The long voyage back to an America not entirely bereft of spiritually-based morality could begin with the shock effect of a public reckoning with 9/11 truth. So I will pray for such a miracle…and for Marianne Williamson.


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