I just got the sad news from our mutual friend Bonnie Faulkner that Allan Rees, founder of No Lies Radio, passed away yesterday. With his low-key demeanor, wealth of knowledge on esoteric topics, and quirky sense of humor, Allan was fun to spend time with. He was one of the reasons I traveled regularly to the Bay Area for the annual 9/11 Truth Film Festival.

Allan was a stubbornly eccentric visionary idealist who was uncommonly easy to work with—a very rare combination. Unlike many 9/11 truth figures, Allan had his ego under control. Though he could be a bit obsessive about some of his areas of interest, his focus was always on the issue, not himself. He didn’t crave the spotlight and was always happy to do behind-the-scenes work for which better-known folks took public credit.

Thanks to his lack of ego investment, Allan was an easy guy to get along with even if you disagreed with him. His worldview combined utopian leftism with a keen interest in the spiritual world and afterlife. It wasn’t my worldview, but I liked it anyway, for the most part. And I don’t think he’s entirely wrong about the afterlife. Right now I have a strong feeling that he’s hanging around what we Muslims call the barzakh, the isthmus between this world and the next, and able to see what’s going on down here in the dunya. Allan used to regularly communicate with his dead wife, or so he said, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he figures out a way to send us a cosmic postcard or chat message or whatever they send from up there.

Like his spiritualism, Allan’s leftist utopianism wasn’t entirely wrong. Unlike the envious leftists aptly described by Ted Kaczynski, Allan was motivated by hope not spite. He felt that the blindly ambitious egotistical self-interest of movers and shakers led to all sorts of avoidable bad consequences. If we would all just stop competing and cooperate instead, Allan thought, we could easily have a much better world. What kind of idiot even wants wealth and power, anyway? Why don’t we just behave reasonably and help each other out and stop playing zero sum games and just relax and have fun doing things right, together?

It always made a certain amount of sense to me, and maybe still does. My wife says that’s because Allan and I are both Aquariuses, meaning quixotically unworldly.

The downside of Allan’s collectivist idealism, as I see it, was most obvious in his reaction to COVID. Like me, he leaned toward Ron Unz’s interpretation that COVID originated with a neocon-driven US bio-attack on China and Iran. So far so good. But since COVID was a bioweapon, Allan thought, it must be pretty bad, especially for a guy his age (70-ish) who wasn’t in all that great physical shape.

So for somewhat understandable reasons, Allan genuinely feared COVID. That fear led him to advocate that the entire world wear N95 masks until such time as the virus went away. If we all just did that, he claimed, we could beat COVID. When I showed him data casting doubt on the efficacy of N95 masks, he said “That’s because people don’t wear them properly.” But Allan, I said, how are you going to get the whole world to wear them properly? Even in institutional settings with medical personnel trained in how to wear them and forced to shave their beards, the darned things still don’t seem to work against respiratory viruses! Do you really think the world’s almost 8 billion people are going to do better b ecause you tell them to?! His answer was that because it should work, theoretically, therefore it would work, if everyone would just listen to him and do it. That’s the kind of mistake a lot of leftists have made, sometimes with disastrous results.

Allan’s fear of COVID also led him to get vaxxed. Coincidentally or not, his health went downhill after that. He insisted that it wasn’t the vax. I didn’t argue with him, because I didn’t want to encourage negative thoughts. But now that he is gone, I can’t help but wonder whether the vax contributed to his death.

Allan thought the vax would work because the same biowar researchers who built the virus also built the vax as the antidote. (You don’t make a bioweapon without making an antidote.) I agreed, but added that I don’t trust those people or their antidote. As I see it, the US economic bio-attack on China was a success, but the mRNA antidote project was not.

If I ever learn how to converse with dead people, like Allan and Ibn al-Arabi did, I’ll talk to Allan about that and we’ll figure it out. And if that doesn’t work, I hope (insha’allah) to hash it out with him over a glass or two of paradise wine. Meanwhile, back in the dunya, I hope Allan left some kind of plan to keep the No Lies Radio archives online. It was his life’s work, after all, and there is a lot of important, historic stuff in there that shouldn’t just disappear.