I was eighteen years old when commuter jets slammed into the World Trade Center.
I remember watching it on live television that morning. It was like I'd been jolted out of a long slumber. The 90's were a period of seemingly endless prosperity. September 11th, 2001 appeared to be the beginning of a long hangover.
We were swept into darkness that day. I became politically active in that moment.
Growing up I was fascinated by twentieth century history, but it always felt like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Nazi Germany and other dictatorial societies were relics of a bygone era. When I read about them I was peering through a window into a dead world; experiments in tyranny that failed dramatically and reinforced the ethical foundations of western democracies. We learned valuable lessons in humanity through the horrific consequences of bad ideas. The American president was receiving blowjobs under his desk, but that was the extent of our problems- otherwise, the road ahead was bright and promising. The internet had arrived and with it a cornucopia of potential. You could feel static electricity crackling everywhere you went. The future was radiant.
Bush, Cheney and their gang of neoconservative marauders dashed that potential. I was one of millions who were angry to see our neon highway diverted into dreary wilderness. September 11th was utilized as a pretext to a series of wars that would become the largest money laundering operation in known history- until the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020.
I was driven to the left by the excesses of corporatism and the Military Industrial-Complex. I became a borderline socialist in response to the unrestrained pilfering of the working class.
Obama was supposed to be the antidote to the Cheney poison, but within months of his election I knew he was a trojan horse. The same neoconservative machine behind the Iraq War was operating his government, and it was evident in the bank bailouts, expansions of war in the Middle East, and volatility toward anyone from inside the machine who exposed what was actually happening.
I broke from the left at this time. I tried to warn those who were still captured by the deception of Obama era liberalism that what they were blindly following wasn't liberalism at all, but they were entranced by it. The racial symbology of a black president enveloped everything and cloaked the mechanisms at work beneath it. Simply pointing to what was developing in front of us was met with accusations of hate and racism from the left. They couldn't see who he really was, and what was operating in the shadows, because they didn't want to. They wanted to believe Obama was an instrument for hope and change despite all evidence proving the contrary.
Neoconservatism became neoliberalism. The fascist elements remained at the top in the form of corporatism, and cultural Marxism was imported to create the illusion of equity at the bottom. Neoliberalism was more dangerous in that it invoked a religious devotion amongst the disciples of the Obama era. The left was no longer in opposition to the propaganda tactics employed by the intelligence community and neoconservative elements behind their own government- instead they became pious followers of corporatist idolatry disguised as revolutionary acts.
Trump pledged to drain the swamp, but he was unsuccessful because his administration was constructed around the same neoliberal scaffolding embedded within the American political apparatus since John F. Kennedy took his fateful ride in Dallas. It was the neoliberal elements who colluded with the deep state to take Trump's presidency down from the inside, and ultimately made a villain out of perhaps the first candidly honest- albeit hopelessly flawed and perilously naive- American president since Ronald Reagan.
The election of Joe Biden was significant in that he was the first president who was a complete puppet for the intelligence community and neoliberal interests. Biden is as much the leader of the greatest economic and military power in the history of the world as an ailing grandfather is the head of his family; he may be considered a familial patriarch, but nobody entrusts him with any responsibilities beyond putting on his own pants in the morning or watering the lawn.
The truth about what we're up against is we can't simply vote it out of office- it's a tumor that has grown and metastasized over decades, and now it controls the vital organs of our systems. We've landed in a place where it has now spread through every western nation and seeks to unify its power globally through non-elected bodies like the World Economic Forum, World Health Organization and the United Nations. Figures like Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and others are merely tentacles of a monster that has remained unseen and undisturbed until recently.
What we're witnessing is the final sprint toward the finish line. The names and political affiliations may change, but unless we attack the monster itself, nothing will stop the process.
Do get Francis Christian's Substack? Yesterday, he wrote this: "A remarkable disappearing act has taken place in the last thirty odd years since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through a coordinated propaganda campaign by think tanks, legacy media, the internet and governments, the mass genocides, murders, terrors, tortures, incarcerations, disappearances, show trials, famines and multiplied miseries of Communism have been all but completely hidden from the masses.
You would think that a system that systematically and ruthlessly killed many more millions than the Nazis did and lasted for many more decades than the short, murderous rule of the third Reich would be the subject of numerous scholarly studies, retrospective news articles, actual narratives and case studies and dedicated academic departments. Clearly, this has not been the case - and there is instead a desire by the ruling classes to induce a sense of mass amnesia about the horrors of Communism. Why is this? ...
The answer is actually quite simple. The ideological descendants of the same people behind the murderous Bolshevik Communist regime that brought unspeakable suffering to millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans (before engulfing China and SE Asia in a similar convulsion), are in charge of our Western Governments and institutions today. The same players, the same playbook, the same international goals. They don’t want you to know of the connection of course - because if you do, the similarities are so stark that you will take notice and be enraged. The Bolsheviks/Communists of today are just as determined, just as ruthless, just as efficient and likely much more powerful than their Soviet ancestors. We ignore them at our peril.
To the well known aphorism, “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” I would like to add another phrase of my own, that perhaps more accurately describes the present - those who sleep through the past are sleepwalking into disaster."
There is more here and the entire piece is well worth reading: https://francischristian.substack.com/p/know-your-enemy
Excellent encapsulation of the last 25 years. I think that modern media has made being a wolf in sheep's clothing easier than it has ever been but I think that with covid enough people got a glimpse behind the curtain and once seen it cannot be unseen. As they try to consolidate and bring all those elements together that they are finding that taking over the world is harder than they anticipated. The more balls they have to juggle the more they will fumble and stumble and hopefully fail.