On this day 22 years ago, I spent the morning with my mom. We took her Volkswagen Eurovan to the appliance store to get a new washing machine. Despite being four years old, my memories from that morning are still crystal clear. I remember the rattling of a quarter in the backseat speaker of the van, as a somber-sounding radio news anchor recounted the breaking news that an airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers.
Once we entered the appliance store, my mom was facing the checkout counter, while I was facing the opposite direction, watching the dozens of televisions where a cartoon was playing. Suddenly in unison, they all flashed to a close-up of the South Tower just as it was hit by a plane, and a resulting fireball plumed out of the side of the building. I tried shaking my mom to get her to look. At first, she was unaware and stayed facing forward. After a while, she realized something was off and turned around. We both watched in differing states of confusion as the world we knew and the one she brought me into changed forever.
The American public, blinded by fear and rage, fell hook, line, and sinker for then-President George W. Bush's vow to avenge those who lost their lives by going after terrorists in the Middle East. Curiously, among the white ash that remained of thousands of fully furnished offices, the passports of the alleged hijackers were found. Before the dust had even settled, a narrative emerged that pinned blame for the attacks on Al Queda, led by the boogeyman Osama Bin Laden. Reporting was not done on Bin Laden's past as a member of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, and his family's direct ties to George H. W. Bush.
The war on terror had begun, and with it, all rational thought was lost. Less than two months after 9/11, Congress passed the Patriot Act under the direction of G.W. Bush, a sweeping "emergency" law that would greatly extend the jurisdiction of the intelligence community for purposes of finding possible terrorists.
We now know from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden that these extraordinary surveillance powers were and still are used for mass data collection and profiling of American citizens, suspected of a crime or not. It is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and was quietly renewed by Congress every five years by both parties. The Act technically expired in March of 2020, however the surveillance infrastructure that it created still exists today, and federal law enforcement agencies still retain most of the authority it gave to them (Electronic Privacy Information Center).
In addition to this wildly unconstitutional piece of legislation, 9/11 also directly led America into the Iraq War in 2003. It is now common knowledge that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and indeed that Osama Bin Laden had no connection to Iraq at all. For G.W. Bush, getting rid of Saddam was more about finishing what his father had started with the Gulf War in the early 1990s.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1775
The war in Iraq claimed more than 7,000 American lives and close to 200,000 Iraqi civilian lives. The war, which the government claimed was about stopping terrorism and Saddam's genocide against his own people, was motivated by anything but. In October of 2000, Saddam Hussein decided to move away from using U.S. dollars as the currency for oil exports and converted Iraq's $10 billion reserve fund from US dollars to Euros (Economic Times, 2008). 9/11 arrived at an opportune time to drum up domestic support in the U.S. for an unprovoked war. In August of 2001, President George W. Bush's approval rating hovered around 51%, widely considered a dangerous figure for an incumbent president. Immediately following September 11, 2001, his approval rating shot up to 90%.
9/11 was merely another stop along the way toward centralized government control of the lives of everyday Americans. When viewed in the context of other notable false flag attacks, it followed a playbook that is easy to spot. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel introduced a way of understanding world events through a dialectic that separates their thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Put another way, the thesis is the problem, the antithesis is the reaction, and the synthesis is the solution. The Hegelian dialectic makes it possible to see the bigger picture surrounding major world events such as 9/11, and how they are anything but random. In the case of 9/11, the problem was the terrorist attack itself, the reaction was fear and rage, and the solution was the Patriot Act and a ten-plus-year War on Terror.
Other notable false flag events that follow the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution are Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK. Those orchestrating such events cannot lose, because they are causing the problem and prepared with the predetermined solution before the event even takes place. The only chance that we the people have at combating these events is to resist giving into fear and anger (the desired and expected reaction) and to opt for a level-headed approach to what happened before jumping into radical solutions.
It has long been known in psychology that rational thinking is suspended when a person is under the influence of fear, and the sole desire of the afflicted person is to make the fear go away. Conveniently, government always has a remedy for that problem, and it without fail involves sacrificing our liberty to do it.
Even today, most Americans are in the dark about what really happened on 9/11, and are content enough with posting a tribute picture to social media honoring those who died with the caption "never forget." 9/11 has become a rallying point for national pride rather than a shadowy event that was rushed on our society and completely upended our way of life.
Unfortunately for most people, admitting that they were fooled is simply not in their nature, and they will latch onto the story they were sold and fell for to the very end. When a person is fooled once and has his/her behavior manipulated by fear under false pretenses, the door is open for the perpetrator to successfully do it again. That is why we continue to find ourselves at the mercy of false flag events, most notably the recent COVID-19 pandemic, whose dialectic was: problem - the virus, reaction - fear, and solution - lockdowns, masking, vaccines.
"It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled."
-Author Unknown
I personally knew many people who could tell that something was off but were unwilling to admit it to themselves, since doing so would present them with the moral dilemma of either knowingly complying with lies or standing on their own for truth, no matter the costs. Our attachment to careers, education, social standing, and belief that we live in a free society were exploited to the fullest. The same was true for 9/11. For Americans of the day to accept that their government was either directly involved with the event or intentionally allowed it to happen would completely shatter their illusion of living as free people with a government that always has their best interests at heart. Yet at the same time, not coming to terms with a deception of such magnitude only increases the likelihood, if not assures, that another such hoax will be advanced in the future.
We increasingly live in a country of people who are concerned only with the goings on of their own immediate lives. Whether they are too busy to pay attention to current events or to study their society's history, or simply seduced by the comfort of their lives, one thing is certain: sustained apathy is dangerous to free societies. If as a people we are unconcerned with maintaining our freedoms, we will without a doubt lose them.
President Ronald Reagan said it best in his 1967 inaugural address, "Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again."
9/11 was the seminal moment of the generation we are currently living in, and certainly set the stage for the world I grew up in. Over the past 22 years, false flag events have only increased in frequency and intensity. As each one moves the needle further away from freedom and closer toward tyranny, our window of opportunity to right the ship closes a little more. Convention of States has been on the front lines of this effort to restore liberty in our time and has made great strides over the past ten years. We must acknowledge the importance of the time we are currently in and what our actions today will mean for the next 200 years of our country, assuming it lasts that long.
At the core of our mission is to arrest government overreach, which 9/11 and other fear-evoking events always inevitably lead to. It is true that we must never forget. Never forget the lies we were told, what was taken from us, and the tools our Founding Fathers left us to take it back.
