My Talk at David Ray Griffin’s Memorial

Rumble link Bitchute linkApproaching the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve been asked to participate in a panel on the early days of the 9/11 truth movement. It’s part of the Turning the Tide conference in New York City that begins this Thursday, September 10. Hope to see you there! Meanwhile, here is my account of how David Ray Griffin played a major role in my transformation from employable academician to truth jihadi. You can watch the whole memorial at the Claremont United Church of Christ YouTube channel.TranscriptBismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. I’m Kevin Barrett and I have an article published out on the internet called “How David Ray Griffin Changed My Life.” There’s the long version and the printed version (in American Free Press). Now I’ll give you a brief spoken version. When I was in graduate school in the late 1980s and 1990s, I discovered that amongst the vast wasteland of structuralism and post-structuralism and this, that, and the other, all reactions to the scientism that was dominating the academy, there were basically three schools of thought that I could find that actually had anything worthwhile to say. The first was Bakhtinian dialogism. The second was the traditionalism of René Guenon, and I followed those people into Islam. And then finally, of course, there was the process thought of John Cobb and David Ray Griffin. And of all of these stunning discoveries, perhaps the most stunning and craziest of all was that the best single guide to empirical reality across a wide range of disciplines was this theologian, a Christian theologian, David Ray Griffin. I was shocked and surprised to find that! And so I read a bunch of David’s work and cited him in my dissertation on Sufism in Morocco. And then, after 9/11 happened, I was the only Muslim in Madison, Wisconsin, who didn’t immediately just know that 9/11 was some sort of inside job. I said, “let’s wait and see the evidence, guys.” And everybody else said, “come on!” So I was suspicious from the get-go, but I figured that, well, it’s probably one of these things that we’ll never really know. And I was finishing my dissertation, very busy, trying to learn Arabic, get my Arabic up to speed. And it wasn’t until late 2003 when I heard that David was working on The New Pearl Harbor and that he was going to be asserting that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives—it didn’t just fall down from plane crashes and fires—and that whatever happened to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t hit by an airliner piloted by a guy who was incapable of flying a Cessna training