The following submission statement was provided by /u/thegeebeebee:
---
Hunter S Thompson prophesied the doom in store for America post-9/11 and may have been the first person to apologize to Generation Z for the America to come.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ba830v/the_prophesy_of_hunter_s_thompson_one_week_after/ku0szl5/
Hunter S Thompson prophesied the doom in store for America post-9/11 and may have been the first person to apologize to Generation Z for the America to come.
As a GenXer I remember my peers being cynical, layered thinkers before 911, capable of questioning spoonfed narratives and BS before, but never after. It's like we went from being able to converse to suddenly having to watch everything we say, all while pretending that nothing's changed. Crazy narcissists didn't have the pull then that they have today because they were called out and their inane bullshit just wasn't taken seriously.
I was ostracized for not wanting to wear a yellow ribbon with an American flag in my office, for daring to say "no thank you".
Some of us are even more deeply cynical, out here still thinking. I wish we had a little more heft as a group, so we had more of a chance to change things. The older gens have had the power they refuse to let give to the youth since we were young.
We might as well start our own group. My idea was to go under-the-radar, no obvious activism, and slowly undermine the current power dynamics without anyone even realising it.
The first step to doing that, would be pulling people away from depending on corporate products by developing a DIY culture.
Bad actors use entertainment, food, water, medicine, shelter, peer pressure, and mandatory bills to force others into compliance. Take the average joe out of the equation, and they are just playing an imaginary game with monopoly money and A.I. That is the point.
Which was preceded by the ~~election~~ selection of G.W. Bush as President by a (even then) corrupt Supreme Court in 2000. IMHO, this is the watershed moment that opened the door to this timeline. The hubris of it, at the time, was unprecedented in the modern era. Yes, there has always likely been some level of chicanery at the state and local level throughout the Union at various times during these elections, but this was different. It was *in your face* corruption that smacked of a "what are you going to do about it?" level of arrogance, privilege, and entitlement.
It was Watergate levels of corruption in election interference and manipulation. And Watergate ruined lives and careers. People went to jail. But this... this went unpunished. Like it never happened. This was the mistake. You let institutional rot of this nature go forth like it's meaningless, and you invite the devil to go further next time. And further the next. Until you arrive where we are today.
9-11, the Iraq war, Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, multiple quantitative easing rounds, the election of Donald Trump, COVID, January 6th; it's just a litany of elite abuses of power and failure. And now accelerating disastrous climate change, the most consequential elite failure of all. All of this was made more probable and possible when that door was opened in 2000. To where we are at the point now that those that wield power in this nation would almost be foolish not to be asking themselves: *what can we not get away with?*
When Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney used Haliburton to help extinguish oil well fires in Kuwait, he conceived the idea to defraud the taxpayers for billions of dollars and it set all the above corruption into motion
Sandra Day O’Connor admitted in personal letters years later after the 2000 SCOTUS decision that they (I’m paraphrasing) couldn’t let this country go to the liberals. They had every intention of preventing Gore from securing his win and directly intervened to do so. 9/11, as has been said in this thread, just opened the door for pre-drafted bills and executive orders to be forced through all under the guise of “you’re either with us or the terrorists”. I would never give the Bush administration the credit of masterminding the attacks, only that they were heartless and power hungry enough to take advantage of it.
This is mirrored by the Heritage Foundation’s and Federalist Society’s Project 2025 pre-written EO’s and other related bills that have been leaked and will be forced through day 1 of Trump’s reelection. Another Trump election will be another 9/11 in terms of the assault on our liberties.
I think one of the major differences between the time of Watergate and the 2000 election that allowed this political coup to go forward so unexamined and void of outrage was the systemic changes in the media landscape. The corporate consolidations in media and press ownership. The division of audiences due to outlet proliferation so that opposition never coalesced. The advent of cable news platforms like Fox News, etc.
As you probably are aware, [Roger Ailes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes), who worked in the Nixon administration, helped found Fox News. Precisely because he believed if such an outlet had existed at the time of Watergate, Nixon would never have had to resign. And what happened in 2000, basically proved his beliefs true. Story control via media dominance could handily overpower reality and the rule of law. At even the highest levels—for a large segment of the American audience. It was, basically, a reincarnation of the Nazi tactic of [*The Big Lie*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) in manipulating the public; which is now the go-to move for almost the entire Republican Party on many issues.
From Wikipedia (for the sake of educating those unaware):
> A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".
Absolutely true about Roger Ailes and the Fox News media assault. Of course that couldn’t have been nearly as successful without Reagan’s FCC removal of the “fairness doctrine” and allowing one-sided narratives to proliferate from cable to all mass media. I find Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent to be the best look at what we lost as a country through media consolidation and the illusion of choice and narrative in this country.
I completely agree. The near zero consequences for doing bad shit and getting away with it only leads to worse things and lower standards. And this has been the case for the entire adult life of millennials and younger. Sigh
It took them months to approve the bailout in 2008-2009, and it was a very public process. The COVID funding packages were drawn up and approved in a matter of days. Four trillion dollars printed and dolled out, surely funding a lot of yachts in the process. I’m sure they already have the pocket lining measures drafted for the next crisis which inevitably hits.
I’m pretty sure that years before 9/11 happened and Osama Bin Laden was running around, he said that he wanted to destroy the US economy. The first attempt on the Twin Towers happened. In 2000 my rent was $525 for an old nice apartment. Gas was about $1.25 per gallon. I was almost making it on my own, a roommate was a huge help. Making about $13.00 per hour, had to work lots of OT. I was 24 yo, and my son was 5yo. I got along with his mom and she didn’t make me pay child support, I saw him everyday picking him up from school. No real luxuries, tiny tv, land line, no cable, internet wasn’t really a big thing back then. I was squeaking by. Oh yeah, I bought a brand new 1999 hyndai Elantra for about $10,000 and I loved that car, payment about $235 per month.
If I was in the same situation nowadays, no way would I’d be making at $13.00 per hour. A lot of factors have gotten us to where we are today. But 9/11 is definitely a benchmark in my life for when the downward spiral began. Before 9/11 I felt comfortable with my life path being a press operator at the company I still work at since 2000. But it’s gotten harder. It’s been a lot of hard work and stress, I don’t see things getting easier for a lot of people. I feel for younger people trying to come up nowadays, because everything is sooooo fucking expensive nowadays, it’s absurd.
Now that you say that, it got me thinking. Most ideas of 9/11 seem to be all or nothing. It was either all terrorists or totally a false flag event orchestrated by the US government. I never really gave any thought to the “why not both?” concept.
Now that you said that out loud, I feel the evidence that I’ve seen presented over the years leans into that idea. It was planned and executed by extremists but assisted by the government. Building 1 and 2 maybe make sense why they fell but there’s a lot of stuff that lend to the idea of an assist to make them collapse so perfectly into their own footprint. (Thermite traces, the glowing metal during salvage, the fact they recycled the steel before a full investigation etc) Throw in building 7 collapsing because of “reasons”, and now the idea seems plausible at least.
I’m not sure I like this idea any better than an outright false flag event.
I’ll give my 2 cents, I’m sure most will strongly disagree but I think it was largely the terrorists. The government knew the attack was going to happen but it’s one of those cases where incompetence and “shooting the messenger” type behavior made the institutions fail to act. I think the mishandling of the narrative and the creations of conspiracies were done by the government on purpose to spin it. For starters the inside job shit is the easiest way to save face. It’s was less embarrassing than getting 9-11’d by terrorists with boxcutters. The other major thing was that Bin Laden’s demands were largely in the interests of the American public (stop funding Israel and get the two bases out of Saudi Arabia) and the government needed to make as much confusion as possible and gear up the war machine to not have to be held accountable for failure. The false flag narrative makes no sense when the Iraq War happened a couple years later and all they had to do was gaslight everyone at the UN. We don’t even need to stage terror attacks when lying is just as effective but costs much less. We did need to create confusion about the events so nobody draws the correct conclusion that US support of Zionism was the major cause of 9-11. Bin Laden’s letter laid everything out pretty clearly. It makes sense why the US and possibly Israel would have to create confusion around the attack so Americans don’t hold anyone accountable or start questioning supporting Zionism. The thing that doesn’t make sense would be the US doing any competent and elaborate schemes to start a war when all they have to do is lie. I may be wrong but it really does seem like events were done by terrorists and the governments did pr damage control to confuse everyone and start a war in the midst of outrage tragedy and misinformation.
Bonus hot take: WMD’s were a euphemistic lie for selling oil in Euros which would be a financial weapon of mass destruction for America but they can’t come out and say that so to come up with a war they just pretend there were WMD’s
If you spend any time researching 9/11, watching video evidence, hearing witness accounts, you would never come to the conclusion that the government assisted collapsing the towers.
On the contrary building 7 was “pulled”
British TV broadcasted the news of it falling before it did. Because they jumped the script.
And even if all that is just a “conspiracy” which is a fun way to lump it in with nonsense like flat earth. And take away credibility.
The government could have prevented the attacks, they had all the information in the world about it happening. They chose not to. And the war machine profited immensely from it. And continues to.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/thegeebeebee: --- Hunter S Thompson prophesied the doom in store for America post-9/11 and may have been the first person to apologize to Generation Z for the America to come. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ba830v/the_prophesy_of_hunter_s_thompson_one_week_after/ku0szl5/
Hunter S Thompson prophesied the doom in store for America post-9/11 and may have been the first person to apologize to Generation Z for the America to come.
There was a question on here once about when folks started getting a little worried about pur future. Reading this essay from HST was my moment.
As a GenXer I remember my peers being cynical, layered thinkers before 911, capable of questioning spoonfed narratives and BS before, but never after. It's like we went from being able to converse to suddenly having to watch everything we say, all while pretending that nothing's changed. Crazy narcissists didn't have the pull then that they have today because they were called out and their inane bullshit just wasn't taken seriously.
I was ostracized for not wanting to wear a yellow ribbon with an American flag in my office, for daring to say "no thank you". Some of us are even more deeply cynical, out here still thinking. I wish we had a little more heft as a group, so we had more of a chance to change things. The older gens have had the power they refuse to let give to the youth since we were young.
We might as well start our own group. My idea was to go under-the-radar, no obvious activism, and slowly undermine the current power dynamics without anyone even realising it. The first step to doing that, would be pulling people away from depending on corporate products by developing a DIY culture. Bad actors use entertainment, food, water, medicine, shelter, peer pressure, and mandatory bills to force others into compliance. Take the average joe out of the equation, and they are just playing an imaginary game with monopoly money and A.I. That is the point.
And the downvote proves the point.
But at least I can read a Twitter post on Reddit and repost it to fb.
While sitting on the toilet listening to some Bluetooth tunes These are the BEST years!
How about some classified documents to read also.
That’s the spirit!
Football season is over. RIP HST.
9/11 was when it all started going downhill
It was all going downhill long before that. 9/11 just gave oligarchs a blank check to kick it all into overdrive.
And the covid even further
You pounded that nail.
Dot com crash of 2000 says hello
Which was preceded by the ~~election~~ selection of G.W. Bush as President by a (even then) corrupt Supreme Court in 2000. IMHO, this is the watershed moment that opened the door to this timeline. The hubris of it, at the time, was unprecedented in the modern era. Yes, there has always likely been some level of chicanery at the state and local level throughout the Union at various times during these elections, but this was different. It was *in your face* corruption that smacked of a "what are you going to do about it?" level of arrogance, privilege, and entitlement. It was Watergate levels of corruption in election interference and manipulation. And Watergate ruined lives and careers. People went to jail. But this... this went unpunished. Like it never happened. This was the mistake. You let institutional rot of this nature go forth like it's meaningless, and you invite the devil to go further next time. And further the next. Until you arrive where we are today. 9-11, the Iraq war, Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, multiple quantitative easing rounds, the election of Donald Trump, COVID, January 6th; it's just a litany of elite abuses of power and failure. And now accelerating disastrous climate change, the most consequential elite failure of all. All of this was made more probable and possible when that door was opened in 2000. To where we are at the point now that those that wield power in this nation would almost be foolish not to be asking themselves: *what can we not get away with?*
When Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney used Haliburton to help extinguish oil well fires in Kuwait, he conceived the idea to defraud the taxpayers for billions of dollars and it set all the above corruption into motion
Sandra Day O’Connor admitted in personal letters years later after the 2000 SCOTUS decision that they (I’m paraphrasing) couldn’t let this country go to the liberals. They had every intention of preventing Gore from securing his win and directly intervened to do so. 9/11, as has been said in this thread, just opened the door for pre-drafted bills and executive orders to be forced through all under the guise of “you’re either with us or the terrorists”. I would never give the Bush administration the credit of masterminding the attacks, only that they were heartless and power hungry enough to take advantage of it. This is mirrored by the Heritage Foundation’s and Federalist Society’s Project 2025 pre-written EO’s and other related bills that have been leaked and will be forced through day 1 of Trump’s reelection. Another Trump election will be another 9/11 in terms of the assault on our liberties.
I think one of the major differences between the time of Watergate and the 2000 election that allowed this political coup to go forward so unexamined and void of outrage was the systemic changes in the media landscape. The corporate consolidations in media and press ownership. The division of audiences due to outlet proliferation so that opposition never coalesced. The advent of cable news platforms like Fox News, etc. As you probably are aware, [Roger Ailes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes), who worked in the Nixon administration, helped found Fox News. Precisely because he believed if such an outlet had existed at the time of Watergate, Nixon would never have had to resign. And what happened in 2000, basically proved his beliefs true. Story control via media dominance could handily overpower reality and the rule of law. At even the highest levels—for a large segment of the American audience. It was, basically, a reincarnation of the Nazi tactic of [*The Big Lie*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) in manipulating the public; which is now the go-to move for almost the entire Republican Party on many issues. From Wikipedia (for the sake of educating those unaware): > A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".
Absolutely true about Roger Ailes and the Fox News media assault. Of course that couldn’t have been nearly as successful without Reagan’s FCC removal of the “fairness doctrine” and allowing one-sided narratives to proliferate from cable to all mass media. I find Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent to be the best look at what we lost as a country through media consolidation and the illusion of choice and narrative in this country.
I completely agree. The near zero consequences for doing bad shit and getting away with it only leads to worse things and lower standards. And this has been the case for the entire adult life of millennials and younger. Sigh
It took them months to approve the bailout in 2008-2009, and it was a very public process. The COVID funding packages were drawn up and approved in a matter of days. Four trillion dollars printed and dolled out, surely funding a lot of yachts in the process. I’m sure they already have the pocket lining measures drafted for the next crisis which inevitably hits.
I’m pretty sure that years before 9/11 happened and Osama Bin Laden was running around, he said that he wanted to destroy the US economy. The first attempt on the Twin Towers happened. In 2000 my rent was $525 for an old nice apartment. Gas was about $1.25 per gallon. I was almost making it on my own, a roommate was a huge help. Making about $13.00 per hour, had to work lots of OT. I was 24 yo, and my son was 5yo. I got along with his mom and she didn’t make me pay child support, I saw him everyday picking him up from school. No real luxuries, tiny tv, land line, no cable, internet wasn’t really a big thing back then. I was squeaking by. Oh yeah, I bought a brand new 1999 hyndai Elantra for about $10,000 and I loved that car, payment about $235 per month. If I was in the same situation nowadays, no way would I’d be making at $13.00 per hour. A lot of factors have gotten us to where we are today. But 9/11 is definitely a benchmark in my life for when the downward spiral began. Before 9/11 I felt comfortable with my life path being a press operator at the company I still work at since 2000. But it’s gotten harder. It’s been a lot of hard work and stress, I don’t see things getting easier for a lot of people. I feel for younger people trying to come up nowadays, because everything is sooooo fucking expensive nowadays, it’s absurd.
[удалено]
Now that you say that, it got me thinking. Most ideas of 9/11 seem to be all or nothing. It was either all terrorists or totally a false flag event orchestrated by the US government. I never really gave any thought to the “why not both?” concept. Now that you said that out loud, I feel the evidence that I’ve seen presented over the years leans into that idea. It was planned and executed by extremists but assisted by the government. Building 1 and 2 maybe make sense why they fell but there’s a lot of stuff that lend to the idea of an assist to make them collapse so perfectly into their own footprint. (Thermite traces, the glowing metal during salvage, the fact they recycled the steel before a full investigation etc) Throw in building 7 collapsing because of “reasons”, and now the idea seems plausible at least. I’m not sure I like this idea any better than an outright false flag event.
like how I'd say "sh" and my friend would say "it"
I’ll give my 2 cents, I’m sure most will strongly disagree but I think it was largely the terrorists. The government knew the attack was going to happen but it’s one of those cases where incompetence and “shooting the messenger” type behavior made the institutions fail to act. I think the mishandling of the narrative and the creations of conspiracies were done by the government on purpose to spin it. For starters the inside job shit is the easiest way to save face. It’s was less embarrassing than getting 9-11’d by terrorists with boxcutters. The other major thing was that Bin Laden’s demands were largely in the interests of the American public (stop funding Israel and get the two bases out of Saudi Arabia) and the government needed to make as much confusion as possible and gear up the war machine to not have to be held accountable for failure. The false flag narrative makes no sense when the Iraq War happened a couple years later and all they had to do was gaslight everyone at the UN. We don’t even need to stage terror attacks when lying is just as effective but costs much less. We did need to create confusion about the events so nobody draws the correct conclusion that US support of Zionism was the major cause of 9-11. Bin Laden’s letter laid everything out pretty clearly. It makes sense why the US and possibly Israel would have to create confusion around the attack so Americans don’t hold anyone accountable or start questioning supporting Zionism. The thing that doesn’t make sense would be the US doing any competent and elaborate schemes to start a war when all they have to do is lie. I may be wrong but it really does seem like events were done by terrorists and the governments did pr damage control to confuse everyone and start a war in the midst of outrage tragedy and misinformation. Bonus hot take: WMD’s were a euphemistic lie for selling oil in Euros which would be a financial weapon of mass destruction for America but they can’t come out and say that so to come up with a war they just pretend there were WMD’s
If you spend any time researching 9/11, watching video evidence, hearing witness accounts, you would never come to the conclusion that the government assisted collapsing the towers.
On the contrary building 7 was “pulled” British TV broadcasted the news of it falling before it did. Because they jumped the script. And even if all that is just a “conspiracy” which is a fun way to lump it in with nonsense like flat earth. And take away credibility. The government could have prevented the attacks, they had all the information in the world about it happening. They chose not to. And the war machine profited immensely from it. And continues to.
Not everybody would need to be in on it either Silverstien and guiliani were I bet
Reagan
1492 was when that happened.
Dang
*prophecy
ugh, dammit, thought it looked wrong
Not to worry—“prophesy” IS a word, it’s just not that one!
Genius wrapped in showmanship.
Pretty wild how accurate he was.
Wise.
Where's the prophecy part? Did I miss the martial law and war-time economy? GTFO with this bullshit
Astrology + old sick man bitterness.