Corbett Report - Episode 408 – 9/11 Truth: Lessons Learned.?
Published: September 18, 2021
Today, there’s an entire generation who have grown up in the shadow of the towers. Who have never known a world that was not haunted by the hobgoblin of terrorism. Who have never thought twice about giving up the freedoms they barely knew they had in the name of fighting the “invisible enemy.” How can we blame them for not understanding the gravity of this moment, today, giving up those few freedoms that remain in the name of fighting the new phantom menace?
TRANSCRIPT
20 years.
Two decades.
Half my life have I spent in the smoldering ruins of those exploded towers.
Picked my way through the eight-mile-long debris field in Shanksville.
Huddled in the blast hole of the Army’s accounting offices in the E-ring of the Pentagon.
“Take off your shoes and belt, suspect! Single file! Digital fingerprints and photograph, please. Don’t worry. We’re just looking for the terrorists.”
“Speak up, prisoner! The NSA is recording this conversation for posterity. Machines of loving grace are scanning your emails and monitoring your social media posts. All in the name of Homeland Security, you understand.”
“How much cash do you want to withdraw? What for? Why don’t you just use a card, like everybody else? We’re going to have to run a background check on you for this. After all, you might be one of them.”
And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. At least I got to live half my life in the old world. The “see your friend off at their airport gate” world. The “the government wouldn’t spy on us” world. The “‘papers, please’ is a sign of tyranny!” world. That world, too, was a lie. But at the least they needed to tell that lie to the public because people still believed in it.
Now? Now there’s an entire generation who have grown up in the shadow of those towers. Who have never known a world that was not haunted by the hobgoblin of terrorism. Who have never thought twice about giving up the freedoms they barely knew they had in the name of fighting the “invisible enemy.”
How can we blame them for not understanding the gravity of this moment, here, today, giving up those few freedoms that remain in the name of fighting the new phantom menace?
Me? I came to the party five years late. The rallies. The C-SPAN broadcasts. The street activism.
“Investigate 9/11!”
“Impeach Cheney first!”
“Remember Building 7!”
How innocent that all seems today, twenty years later. How naive.
But why not? We had the t-shirts, we had the slogans, we had the spindles of DVDs and we had the momentum on our side. By the sixth anniversary it was undeniable: a majority of Americans wanted an investigation of Bush and Cheney’s actions on 9/11. A full 32% wanted an immediate impeachment. 67% believed that the 9/11 Commission had failed by not investigating the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7.
So, what happened?
Well, Hope and Change happened, of course. Never underestimate the sedative effect that a pure, unadulterated hit of hopium spiked directly into the veins of the body politic can have in quelling public dissent. It works every time.
But it was more than that. 9/11 Truth was not derailed by the Obamessiah; at least, not completely. No. 9/11 Truth was derailed by 9/11 Truth.
You see, the truth about 9/11 is as remarkably simple as it is incredibly powerful. We were lied to about 9/11. Period. End of debate. No one who knows anything about 9/11 could possibly deny that. I’d like to see them try.
That is the basis for a movement. With that one truth we could demolish an entire edifice of lies. They lied about 9/11. They didn’t just cover up the truth, they actively suppressed it. Everyone—everyone—who is guilty of keeping the truth about 9/11 from the public is thereby an accessory to those crimes.
Every one of the actions that followed on from those lies—the PATRIOT ACT, the war of terror, the deaths of millions of Afghans and Iraqis and Libyans and Syrians, the construction of the police state, even the blowing of the post-9/11 housing bubble that led to the Global Financial Crisis—are as criminal as the events of 9/11 themselves. And those who have justified their criminal actions by recourse to the lies of 9/11 are thereby guilty of terrorism.
Those who committed their signatures to the PATRIOT ACT are the terrorists.
Those who invoked the doctrine of “pre-emptive self-defense” to justify their wars of aggression around the world are the terrorists.
Those who paraded on the corpses at Ground Zero in order to justify their own political agenda are by definition the terrorists.
This isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even controlled demolition science. It’s just plain, simple truth.
But somewhere along the way that plain truth about 9/11 got complicated. As the years turned into decades, the movement lost sight of that simple truth. Speculations became hypotheses. Hypotheses became theories. Theories became doctrines. Doctrines became dogma.
Soon, there was no movement. There were only egos proffering their own totalizing explanation of 9/11 right down to the minutia of operational details that they could not possibly have access to . . . unless they were in on the plot, that is. As if the very intelligence agencies they were accusing of perpetrating the attacks didn’t have (documentably!) a half-century of experience derailing citizen investigations of deep state operations with false leads and cookie crumb trails that lead to nowhere.
Now, there are no rallies, no C-SPAN broadcasts, no street activism. Just the remaining 9/11 Truthers in the shrinking 9/11 Truth tent denouncing each other as loudly as possible for deviating from the catechism of their preferred dogma.
“The planes were drones!”
“The planes were missiles!”
“What, you believe there were planes?”
Such is the cacophony of the rancorous dogmatists that they can barely hear Cass Sunstein cackling in the background.
Mission accomplished.
But, in retrospect, perhaps it was inevitable. After all, a movement that focuses on the events of a single day is destined to lose sight of the forest of the 20-year conspiracy that brought those events about for the trees of the events themselves. And a movement that focuses on one day in the increasingly distant past will find it increasingly difficult to stay relevant to the political present.
The 9/11 liars have human psychology on their side. The lies are seared into the public consciousness. The retractions and debunkings of those lies pass largely unnoticed. And in the end the pyrotechnics of 9/11 have had their intended effect: they have traumatized much of the public and hypnotized those who know they are being lied to. Blinded by the fireworks, 9/11 Truth could never turn away from the explosions and take the movement to the next level.
9/11 is not a series of dusty facts about demolition physics and airplane turning radiuses. As the 9/11 liars know all too well, it is a talisman that can be wielded to scare the public into submission.
But, like all talismans, this one, too, has begun to lose its power. Whereas once the very invocation of terrorism was enough to justify an entire political platform, now not even the specter of Al Qaeda (the bad Al Qaeda, not the good Al Qaeda in Syria) or ISIS (ISIS-K, that is, the new, scarier version of ISIS) is enough to catch the public’s attention. No. The terrorists needed a new talisman. A new 9/11.
And here it is, right on schedule! A new terror has been unleashed upon the world to traumatize the public once again. But this time the phantom menace is not a bearded Muslim boogeyman. No. It’s a virus.
At least in the good ol’ Homeland Security state erected to “keep us safe from the terrorists” you could protest, “But I’m not a terrorist.” It might not have saved you, but at least you could raise the point.
But in the new biosecurity state, your cries of innocence will not be permitted.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but the test says you’re an asymptomatic spreader. We’re going to have to quarantine you. It’s for your own good.”
There is resistance, of course, just as there was resistance to the 9/11 lies. But is it a movement? Already it’s devolving into egos and dogma and bickering.
“Ivermectin is our only hope.”
“What are you talking about? The vaccine is the bioweapon.”
“What? You believe viruses exist?”
. . . Wait. What’s that? I swear I can hear Cass Sunstein laughing in the background.
Of course the terrorists are laughing. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got us scrutinizing the trees again while they’re busy encircling the forest.
This isn’t about COVID-19. This has nothing to do with a virus. This is about finishing the job that the terrorists started on 9/11—the job of locking down the planet.
Oh, sure. Examine the details. Put the pieces together on the health passports and the digital ID. The mandatory injections and government permission to leave your home. The central bank digital currencies and the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We do need to know these things.
But don’t get stuck marveling at the pyrotechnics. Don’t get stuck fighting your allies because they won’t subscribe to your dogma. Don’t get stuck focusing on what happened in 2019 so hard that you miss what’s happening in 2021. Or, some 20-year-old who’s just joining the party today will blink and he’ll find himself in 2039 wondering how he spent half his life in the shadow of a scamdemic.
The terrorists know all of this, of course. It’s how they stay in power. We don’t have to speculate about this, we just have to take them at face value when they tell it to us.
Like when Karl Rove admonished Ron Suskind for being part of the “reality-based community” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. But,” he insisted, “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.”
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
And here we are. “History’s actors” have created “other new realities,” and the same 9/11 Truth movement that spent the last 20 years judiciously studying the last set of lies will spend the next 20 years judiciously studying these ones . . . assuming we have 20 years left to spend in idle study, that is.
Or we could become history’s actors. Stop waiting for events to happen so we can judiciously study them and start creating events, structures, institutions of our own.
Can you imagine if the 9/11 Truth movement had devoted 1/10th of the time and energy and resources that it spent arguing over pyroclastic dust clouds and measuring entry and exit holes to something actually productive?
Creating self-sustaining, intentional communities.
Growing the free market and expanding the use of alternative currenciesl.
Creating our own businesses and institutions and building out alternative communication infrastructure and building up our own media.
I don’t have “the” answer. No one person does. But I can tell you this: We cannot afford to spend the next two decades judiciously studying the way our most basic rights—the right to refuse medical experimentation, the right to interact and transact with our friends and neighbours as we see fit, the right to leave our own home—are being stripped from us, one by one.
If we don’t resist the biosecurity state with all our might—refuse to comply with its dictates, refuse to shut ourselves in and lay down when the government tells us to—then we are the terrorists, terrorizing our own children and grandchildren and consigning those generations yet unborn to the maws of a technocratic tyranny beyond any sci-fi dystopia.
In the meantime, we look back yet again at that September day 20 years ago, not as a single day when “the world changed forever,” but as a signpost along the path. Yet another in a chain of events and decisions and choices made by history’s actors: us.
I may never quite escape the shadow of those towers. But in that shadow, we can build towers of our own.
The choice is ours . . . for now.
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: https://www.corbettreport.com/lessonslearned/
