9/11 and Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Rumble link Bitchute link Dismantle the Matrix Analysis on YouTube “Kevin Barrett 911 whistleblower on Hannity and Colmes” original YouTube

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is also, more or less, the 20th anniversary of the Fox News interview that got me expelled from American academia. That interview, conducted on July 11 2006, went viral on a brand-new platform called YouTube. It shot to over 100,000 views within a week or two…and the count mysteriously froze. Today it supposedly has 100,608 views…which seems a tad low, since I’ve probably gotten more than 608 emails about it during the past 20 years. Google Gemini goes full conspiracy theorist on this one:

The exact video link you shared—your Hannity & Colmes Fox News interview from July 2006—is the ultimate textbook example of YouTube’s Borderline Content Policy and Information Panel intervention. The platform is not malfunctioning; instead, your specific video has been placed into a tightly controlled algorithmic quarantine.

In 2013, a 30-minute YouTube analysis of my five-minute Fox News interview went viral and currently sits at 217k views. I’ve posted it above, and transcribed it below.

The narrator, a certain Jonathan Adampants, analyzes Hannity & Colmes’ propaganda techniques using the framework of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). As it happens, my aunt and uncle, Mary and Robert Goulding, were close-up-and-personal rivals of the founders of NLP. Aunt Mary and Uncle Bob ran WIGFT (pronounced Wig-Foot), the Western Institute of Group and Family Therapy, in the mountains of Watsonville near Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, down at UC Santa Cruz, John Grinder and Richard Bandler were stealing their stuff.

My aunt and uncle used Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis (TA) and Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy in their Redecision Therapy. Basically they taught people how to “flip the script” of their lives and change their habits, outlook, and cognitive and emotional orientation, replacing dysfunctional and unpleasant patterns with more enjoyable and productive ones.

Grinder and Bandler did the same thing, but in streamlined and (some would say) dehumanized form. They turned it into engineering: push this button, get that behavior. Unlike my aunt and uncle, they didn’t fully credit their sources.

Does NLP work? The experts are still arguing. Despite its technical jargon, NLP—like its close cousin, hypnotism—is an art, not a science. But whatever its limitations, NLP does offer a useful framework for analyzing certain kinds of propagandistic performances. Gemini cites a couple of conspiracy theories that are not entirely untrue:

The Barack Obama “Hypnosis” Theory: During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a widely circulated, 67-page anonymous document claimed that Obama’s speeches utilized sophisticated NLP techniques. Critics accused him of using pacing and leading (matching the audience’s current state and then subtly moving them toward a desired emotional state), hypnotic vocal pacing, and deliberate hand gestures as anchors to covertly implant subconscious suggestions.[1]

The Donald Trump “Persuasion” Analysis: During the 2016 and 2020 elections, popular Dilbert creator and persuasion blogger Scott Adams, along with various media commentators, frequently analyzed Trump’s communication through an NLP lens. They argued that his use of repetitive nicknames (”Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted”), intentional hyperbole, and linguistic pacing were highly effective forms of subliminal behavioral programming designed to bypass rational thought. [1]

Adampants’ analysis of my Hannity interview gets a lot right. He correctly calls out the Fox hosts’ name-calling, disruptions, deprecating glances and gestures, and avoidance of reasoned discussion. He understands that Hannity and Colmes’ purpose was to program the audience’s subconscious by attaching negative associations to me personally, and, by association, to 9/11 skeptics in general.

But Adampants exaggerates the effectiveness of Hannity and Colmes’ NLP sorcery. He wrongly assumes that I was being influenced by the Fox hosts’ gestures:

“By bringing his hands down like that, he’s trying to subconsciously take away the focus of the professor, take away his power, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

and:

“The issue at hand here, what he’s doing, is directing the professor to look at his hand (making the 6-6-6 gesture).”

In reality, I couldn’t see those gestures. I was sitting on a tall chair high atop a platform in the middle of the Fox studio in Milwaukee staring into a camera, wearing headphones, with no screen or monitor. Fox employees were at their desks along the sides of the room, and I was on display in the middle. I assumed the Fox studio people had put me in that off-putting, uncomfortable set-up in an effort to thr