Living in the Shadow of the Twin Towers

On this anniversary of “9/11,” I am mourning the loss of our American culture, of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

The state successfully exploited this horrific tragedy, amplifying its danger, and engendering fear that led Americans to abandon their healthy distrust of being ruled to give up their liberty in the name of safety.

This one event resulted in a complete turnaround of attitudes, as these surveys starkly demonstrate:

Edward Snowden notoriously tried to warn us. Three other lesser-known NSA whistleblowers told us bluntly:

The government unchained itself from the Constitution as a result of 9/11. And in the absolute darkest of secrecy, at the highest levels of the government, approved by the White House, NSA became the executive agent for a surveillance program that turned the United States of America effectively into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet electronic surveillance….

And we are seeing the initial outlines and contours of a very systemic, very broad, a Leviathan surveillance state and much of it is in violation of the fundamental basis for our own country — in fact, the very reason we even had our own American Revolution. And the Fourth Amendment for all intents and purposes was revoked after 9/11.

What should have been virtually a non-event over the past four years—a virus with a .5% fatality rate, essentially zero for the young and healthy—was exploited to further remake Americans into obedient, submissive “citizens:” obeying totalitarians telling us where we can go, with whom we can be, what we must wear and put in our bodies; lying, censoring, propagandizing.

Today and every day, government will capture every email, text, phone call, internet search, credit, debit and e-payment transaction, everywhere you go in your car, likely every step you take … in short, every single detail of your every day, stored forever in its vast database, to be mined at will should they wish to make you an enemy of the state, reviled by all.

Terrorists of an earlier era would have salivated at this rich store house:

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”—Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac

“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”—Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief.

We are distracted and divided by trivia: what is your race, sexual orientation, gender preference, what are your pronouns – rather than what is the content of your character, your values, by what principles and for what purpose do you live?

None of this will be reversed through elections. No politician or bureaucrat will willingly give up power once obtained: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Indeed.

But a culture remade can be remade again. We can emulate our Revolutionary forebears or do, non-violently, as the former captives of the Soviet bloc did: throw off the shackles of our would-be rulers, tear down the walls of the state’s power, and reclaim our status as a free and equal people, endowed with inalienable rights.

If not now, when?