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Watch the first-ever False Flag Weekly News roundtable above, featuring several of our favorite FFWN fans…plus long-time cohost Cat McGuire and her sister Colleen. (Cat and Colleen open the show discussing Cat’s health condition that led to her stepping down as regular first-cohost-of-the-month.)

I have dreamed of finding myself in a strange country where I can’t communicate with anyone. Since I am a native speaker of English, that won’t happen in real life the way it happened to my Moroccan in-laws who visited Turkey and found their Moroccan Arabic, French, and bare smattering of English didn’t work.

But I am experiencing something along those lines here in Milan, Italy. I arrived from Barcelona Saturday and have been trying to speak Italian with people. But it keeps coming out as Spanish with an Italian accent. People chuckle and answer me in English.

I studied Italian informally for less than a year back in 1989, and have barely used it since. I can read Italian newspapers, thanks to the many cognates with French and Spanish, but have forgotten how to say hello and order coffee.

Since I moved to Morocco in 2023 I have been spending a lot of time and effort upgrading my Arabic. Besides the radically different “high” and “low” varieties of Arabic, Morocco also features plenty of French, Spanish, and Amazigh (Berber). There are actually four to six types of low Arabic (darija) and three types of Amazigh. And high Arabic has two very different registers, Modern Standard Arabic and Classical. So you could say that there are thirteen native languages used in Morocco, a nation a little over half again as large as California.

I predicted to my students thirty years ago that communications barriers would fall within their lifetimes: English would become even more of a de facto global language, and translation technology would make most spoken and written information available to everybody. Fewer people would bother to learn foreign languages, because they wouldn’t have to. At some point they might not even have to learn English, since they could just speak into their phones and have it come out in whatever language they choose. Those in technical professions would find technical terminology available in their native languages thanks to machine translation. In short, it won’t be long before everybody can easily talk to everybody!

That AI-powered Tower of Babel is already half-built. If it ever reaches the heavens, humanity will seamlessly communicate as one. Then again, it might stall and fall, like the original Tower of Babel did. If that happens, it won’t be because humanity has been suddenly shattered into tribes with thousands of different languages, but because people aren’t satisfied with life as atomized individuals. They want families, neighborhoods, community.

The False Flag Weekly News Community

In 2014—a decade after jumping headlong into the 9/11 truth movement, and eight years after being defenestrated from academia—I created False Flag Weekly News along with Jim Fetzer and the late Allan Rees. Our idea was to critique the media by way of an hour-long weekly news roundup. We would try to cover the most significant stories of the week, debunking mainstream propaganda along the way.

I wanted the show to be snappy, fast-moving, heavy on terse but clever soundbites, with lots of back-and-forth repartee including occasional disagreements between hosts. Above all, I wanted to inject some humor. The horrible truths of history and current events are painfully indigestible without the spice of laughter.

We started out posting on several YouTube channels and growing a respectable audience, before shadowbanning and later deplatforming kicked in. After YouTube had banned all of the channels featuring the show, it moved to Rumble and Bitchute in 2021.

Along the way, FFWN has attracted an intellectually high-end audience, including some enthusiastic supporters who comment on the episodes and/or contribute to the Fundrazrs that keep the show going. (Preparing each week’s episode is labor-intensive, as the co-hosts who occasionally stand in for me can testify.)

Thinking “anyone who likes FFWN is probably a pretty cool person, I wouldn’t mind meeting some of them” I set up this week’s show as a roundtable discussion and emailed invitations. Watch the result and drop a comment letting me know what you think: Should I do this again?

Part of the fun was chatting with people before we started recording the show. If I do another episode like this, I’ll make sure to reserve a block of time before the actual show for informal discussion. I’ll also need to figure out how to moderate the discussion with greater dexterity, especially if the number of participants grows.

The highlight of the evening turned out to be Cat and Colleen McGuire’s surprise appearance. Cat McGuire, with often-unsung backing from her twin sister Colleen, has been an activism dynamo for at least a decade, and was the first FFWN co-host every month for years until brain cancer slowed her down last summer.

Virtual vs. Real Community

Cat McGuire is a real-life friend. I’ve visited her in New York, she has stayed in our guest room in Saidia, Morocco, and we’ve hung out in other places. She’s one of those people who, though neither family nor neighbor, I genuinely care about. I really miss connecting with her every month. I’m sad that she is so seriously ill, praying for her recovery, and appreciating the courage and wisdom she’s showing as she deals with her illness by taking her dedication to ihsaan (making things better) to the spiritual plane.

I doubt I’d feel that close to her if I only knew her through the internet. We humans are wired for hanging out with friends and family and neighbors in real life (or “meat space” as the autist cyberpunks used to call it). But the digitally-mediated world is giving us ever-less of that. Lonely people stare at their phones all day, addicted to reels and shorts and porn and social media outrage, manipulated by governments and corporations and their hired propagandists.

I’m one of the lucky ones who has escaped the worst digital traps and cesspools and instead met an unusually high-quality bunch of people thanks to the internet. I like all the people I’ve gotten to know through the False Flag Weekly News community, including those I’ve never met in real life. And being in Morocco, I’m lucky to be able to hop around Europe on $20 Ryan Air flights meeting some of them in person. (I once even randomly ran into a FFWN fan in Tamraght, Morocco, also about a twenty-buck flight from Oujda.)

My weird existence as a rootless red-pilled cosmopolitan (tendance sois-disant antisémite) with a virtual community spread across the world is probably not what human nature intends. Celia Farber, another real-life friend I met through Cat, tells me she craves settling down in a place she can call home, but isn’t quite sure where that would be. Since she has friends in Sweden, she’s thinking of heading there.

Assuming the jet fuel doesn’t run out, I expect to be back home in Saidia, Morocco by early June. I’m loosely affiliated with a soon-to-open café-bookstore there, Café Shakespeare, where people will be encouraged to hang out and have interesting conversations in real life. Maybe a False Flag Weekly News fan or two will eventually find their way to Saidia.

Meanwhile, the show must go on. Stay tuned to False Flag Weekly News, and feel free to drop by the next roundtable.

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