It is said, may you live in interesting times and those alive in 2026, are living in the motherload of interesting times.
Like my fellow baby boomers, we have witnessed hundreds of major events during our lifetime. But not all events have had an equal impact on our collective psyches and how we view the world. But then there are events that rise to the level of paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift change can be defined as an event that changes or influences future societal norms, patterns, and events.
In hindsight, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the first paradigm shift of the 20th century other than World War I and World War II. But for the baby boomer generation, in a single day the murder of JFK caused the world to spin off its axis, and everything changed forever. JFK while a flawed human being was a decisive and principled president with an unclouded vision of where he saw the future direction of the country heading. The policies of the Kennedy administration ran counter to the status quo of the deeply entrenched Washington establishment, but Kennedy was willing to take the establishment on. JFK and his brother Bobby had the courage and temerity to challenge the security apparatus, in particular, the FBI and CIA. The CIA in those days operated outside of the parameters of the executive branch. The CIA was immensely powerful, unchecked, and a renegade organization conducting covert operations that often. strained, and sometimes directly opposed, the policies of the White House. The relationship between JFK and the CIA was antagonistic, marked by mistrust following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, leading Kennedy to contemplate breaking the agency into “a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” When Kennedy made it known that he was considering pulling the troops out of Vietnam, he was aware of the potential repercussions.
The Warren Commission, the official report on the Kennedy assassination, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, and this was initially accepted by the American public. But slowly that narrative changed in no small part due to Abraham Zapruder, a Russian born American clothing manufacturer who filmed the murder of President John F. Kennedy on a 26-second, 8mm home movie camera at the perfect time and at the perfect place. His footage, later to be known as the Zapruder film, is still to this day universally known as the most complete, detailed visual record of the assassination.
Fast forward ten years later. I am a twenty-year-old college student taking a course on history and politics. One day, with half the class asleep and the other half checked out, Terry Ripmaster, our professor and later my mentor, walks into the classroom, jumps onto a desk in the first row with amazing dexterity and poses a simple question; “How many of you think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman that assassinated JFK? Instantaneously, most of the class raised their hands. With a smirk but not surprising look on his face, the professor proceeded to turn on the projector and show us the Zapruder film.
When the film ended you could have heard a pin drop. It was that day for the first time that a vague thought entered the vacuous recesses of my mind that things might not always seem to be as they appeared. Until that day, it never occurred to me that the Warren Commission had gotten it wrong. After that day, I became obsessed with reading and watching documentaries on anything I could get my hands on about that fateful day. Eventually I joined the 65% of Americans who today believe that Oswald was not the lone gunman who killed JFK.
One of the universally believed theories why Kennedy was assassinated is that he saw the folly of the Vietnam War and was contemplating a gradual withdrawal of troops. Had this happened, Americans would not have spent the latter part of the 1960’s eating their dinners to the drone of Walter Cronkite reporting the daily death toll of American soldiers in a place on the other side of the world.
But it was not to be and the turbulent 1960’s escalated with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and the murder of four students killed protesting the Viet Nam War on the campus of Kent State.
The Kennedy assassination changed American society forever. Unmistakingly the playing field shifted with that single act. JFK was the last president with the courage to go up against, for lack of a better phrase, the deep state. A new paradigm was created, and it was all based on a widely held conspiracy theory that people initially scoffed at but today is widely accepted as true.
The second paradigm to occur in the past sixty plus years is far more insidious with far more reaching implications. It occurred on a beautiful Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001, and its arteries to this day spread to every aspect of the American way of life. Unlike the Kennedy assassination, however, that event was not filmed by a single person with a hand-held camera but was witnessed in real time by millions which makes the official narrative universally accepted, even more unsettling.
For the most part, not only has the official version of the events of that day been universally accepted by 85% of all Americans not to mention 99% of the mainstream media, but 9/11 has been held up as the gold standard against which all other conspiracies are measured against. Most Americans accept without giving it a second thought that the ‘official’ version that nineteen Saudi’s hijacked three planes, bringing down three buildings and the Pentagon as well as a plane full of passengers into a field in Shanksville Pennsylvania as sacrosanct. The official narrative is simply accepted as fact.
Most Americans tend to accept as truth information disseminated by our government. We want to believe and trust our government and this trust is conveniently used against us and as such, many American citizens accept what our government tells us as truth. This is especially true regarding the events of September 11th, in fact more so because to consider the alternative is too horrible to even allow the mind to contemplate.
But anybody with just a cursory peek behind the curtain of the events of 9/11 sees troubling questions, numerous inconsistencies; the implications so profound and its effect so far reaching that it is almost impossible to wrap one’s head around its tentacles, the implications so far reaching to affect foreign and domestic policies for the past two decades.
My journey down the 9/11 rabbit hole happened by accident. It was a beautiful fall afternoon in 2004. I was raking leaves and got into a conversation with my neighbor. I do not remember how 9/11 came up but I was shocked when he matter-of-factly told me that the 9/11 Commission Report was a “fairy tale.” I met his thoughts with a great deal of skepticism and a healthy dose of anger because of the implications of what he was telling me were the cognitive dissonance of all cognitive dissonances.
My neighbor was a kind and mild-mannered man and listened to me thoughtfully. He then patiently explained to me that it was impossible for the buildings to come down in the manner that they did. He asked me how two planes could bring down three buildings in classic demolition fashion? I said to him; “What do you mean three buildings?” He just chuckled and told me I needed to do some reading. So, three years after the single worst event on American soil, I was not aware that a 52-story building that had not been hit by a plane also fell along with the twin towers on that day.
Normally, I would have dismissed the conversation as the rantings of an elderly cognitive challenged neighbor. Except this neighbor was the Chair of the Physics Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He had cache and I took him seriously embarking on a two-decade journey to learn the ‘truth.’ I read numerous books and watched countless videos and lectures on the subject. This includes the opinions of structural engineers, architects, airline pilots, demolition experts, NYFD as well as hundreds of eyewitness testimonies. My conclusion like between 15 and 30% of all Americas is that the science and math simply do not add up.
The World Trade Center campus remains the largest unsolved crime in the history of the United States. If the events of that day were subject to the rigorous jurisprudence of a trial in an international court, would the official narrative survive the scrutiny of independent investigation and analysis?
There are two historical events, paradigm shifts if you will, based on lies, incomplete and faulty information that have and continue to cause incalculable effects on American domestic and foreign policy. Everything is cause and effect, so we must ask ourselves some important questions. If JFK had lived, would we have stayed in Vietnan until 1973? What would the CIA look like today if JFK had not been assassinated?
Regarding the events of September 11, 2001, would we have gone into Iraq? Afghanistan? More importantly, if 9/11 had not happened, would there be a Department of Homeland Security today? Would our policies in the Middle East over the past two decades be different? What would our immigration policies look like today? Would we be able to keep our shoes on passing through airline security and not worry about how many ounces of shampoo to bring on our carry-ons? Finally, would Donald Trump have ever sniffed the President of the United States of America, not once, but twice?
The effects of 9/11 changed the world forever so at a minimum it deserves the serious scrutiny that it has never received. One must ask the question why does not a single mainstream media network touch the subject? The question Americans should be asking is why?
