Checkmate: Iran Wins! (FFWN roundtable featuring Cat & Colleen McGuire)

Rumble link Bitchute link False Flag Weekly News linkWatch 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 CommunityIn 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