I think it was sometime in 1995 I was walking my boss’ German Shepherd around the block, as he asked me to do once a week or so. As we strolled through that poor neighborhood in Long Beach, CA, I bumped into one of our neighbors. I didn’t know him well, but was always happy to talk with anyone who was friendly to me. After a few minutes he said he’d be right back, he ran into his little run-down house, and came back with a VHS video tape. He told me if I made him a copy of it, I could copy it for myself as well; a poor-man’s quid pro quo (he knew that one of my many jobs at the electronics store I worked at was to duplicate tapes for a fee, but said he couldn’t afford the $25). He said the tape was massively important, concerning the liberty of anyone who would take the time to watch it. With my curiosity piqued I readily agreed, and told him I’d drop off his original and a copy a few days later.
Money Masters
I took it home and started watching it that night; after a few hours I was forced to turn it off to get some sleep, then I watched another few hours the following night. The first program on the tape was the excellent Money Masters documentary by Bill Still (I can’t remember what the 2nd video on the tape was); that first video shook me to the core, changing my life forever and branding me permanently as a liberal, a conspiracy theorist, and as a freedom fighter (or, more succinctly, as a proponent of positive social change).
The video looks like nothing special at first glance: shot on a shoestring budget using run-of the-mill consumer video gear, and consisting mostly of an every-man voice (Bill Still) narrating for 3 ½ hours over hum-drum B-roll shots and textual quotes from bygone days, it comes across as something which could be hobbled together by anyone for a few hundred bucks.
But the content was – to me, at least – revolutionary, eye-popping, and socially explosive, outlining what was purported by the producer/narrator to be a top-secret plot by powerful men over more than a century, to take over the entire world using financial means. It features myriad quotes by some of the greatest political and economic minds of the 19th and 20th Centuries – quotes which left me hanging my jaw open in absolute awe.
Anyone who’s interested can watch the video for free here.
A Crisis of Faith
Still’s video was catalytic for me, causing me to question all that I’d been taught in school, by my parents, by the government, and in life. I began seeing July 4th as a sham; not only was it no longer ‘Independence Day’ for me (how can slaves collectively celebrate their independence from their masters!), it was – in my mind – part and parcel of the propaganda machine which surrounds us all on a daily basis, popping up at every turn in a different guise but singing a very similar tune.
I had immediately started telling my friends and family about the content of the Money Masters video. I also immediately noticed that nobody I spoke with about it was interested in the least bit about it. I was so enthralled, but nobody around me seemed to care. They all saw it as nothing more than a conspiracy theory; and since it was ‘unproven’, it wasn’t worth a 2nd thought.
Over the years I’ve learned about many other aspects of that singular global conspiracy (which I have known since the 90s to be absolutely true); and although people’s eyes always glass over when I begin waxing conspiratorial, I still spread the word as broadly as I can, knowing that there are too few people who know the truth, and that I am therefore duty-bound to tell it.
The Millennium Turns
Then everything changed, and after that fateful day on November 11th 2001 there were many more people who started learning about the conspiracy. But those people were still too few in number, representing only a tiny fraction of our huge society.
In 2010 I stumbled across James Corbett of corbettreport.com. With a biting wit, a nose for the truth, and tons of free content, Corbett proved to me very quickly to be the genuine artifact. His content was packed not only with facts that I had already researched and found to be true many years earlier, but with far more facts and myriad threads that I could pull on.
Then, in 2016 the world changed again with the first ‘election’ of Trump (I use quotes because I firmly believe that all U.S. elections are rigged, and have been for decades). And although I believe every single U.S. president for the last 50+ years to have been wolves in sheeps’ clothing, Trump is quite a different kettle of fish. The reason for this is simple: he’s the first president in the history of the U.S. who doesn’t pretend to be a nice guy. He’s an a-hole, and he takes no pains whatsoever to hide that fact.
Under Trump’s evil first-reign, he guided the U.S. back into a nightmare of racism via white-supremacy (something which, until then, had been on the decline since the late 1960s).
Apropos to this post, we saw that liberty itself was on the decline – that of all citizens of the Republic (black and white alike, since most people are in the lower to middle classes regardless of their color, and since Trump’s war is one of both color and class).
The Age of BioSecurity Begins
Then, as if the evil men at the top were inaugurating a new decade of decadence (I do believe that to be true), 2020 saw the very sudden beginning of COVID, along with the mad-race toward global fascism via masking the globe, and locking them down all in the name of ‘security’ (aka FEAR). The new Commander-in-Chief was no better than his predecessor – although a better actor at least (pretending to be a good-ol-boy, like most U.S. Presidents, all-the-while approving orders in secret that curtail the liberties of as many Americans as possible without arousing too much suspicion).
And now, as of this writing on July 4th 2025, we now apparently have another four years of MAGA (Make America Gasp/Gross/Gimped Again!) – and possibly more if the fascist-in-chief has his way.
Thirty Years On
It’s been thirty years since I watched that life-changing video Money Masters. Many more people have awakened since that time, with a new swath of thinkers suddenly switching on their minds each time something crazy happens on the global scene.
But even though more and more people are waking up, its still not enough. I still hear almost nobody talking about the important issues (everyone talks about bipartisanism, hating Trump mostly because he’s on the opposite side of the political fence, while failing to understand that the uniparty has existed for over 100 years and is only part of the global problem which appears to me as the entire world collapsing in slow-motion, over a period of decades, but now really getting crazier than ever.
Freedom is Not Ringing!!
My message today is this: Americans are not free! We have far fewer liberties than we had in the 1980s, and those liberties are getting stripped away more and more each year by politicians, mutli-billion-dollar corporations, lobbyists, technocrats and nihilists.
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that I am now being forced to propose that we stop celebrating July 4th altogether, and turn this day into an annual call-to-duty. What is that duty? To stand against the tyranny of modern politics; to opt-out of the two-party electoral system; to pull out of the corporate ladder of forever climbing and clinging (and start our own morally-conscious businesses); to speak out against anyone and everyone who’s selling snake oil (whether in the White House or on Main Street); to educate our friends, neighbors and youth about any better way of doing things and of thinking about things.
I urge every single person out there to watch Money Masters, which is one of the greatest educations in the economic arena that you can get in a few hours (and for free!). I also urge you to watch Zeitgeist (the whole three-part series), as well as all of the free documentaries by James Corbett. I urge you to peruse Dane Wigington’s excellent website geoengineeringwatch.org, and learn about the global-poisoning campaign that’s been perpetrated for well over a decade (by the same singular group of elites who have been controlling the American banking system since 1913, and the European banking system since 1812).
I also urge you each to visit losthorizons.com, and to read basically all Pete Hendrickson has to say (he’s a literal genius, with an IQ well over 140). I took the title of this post from Pete (his 4th of July blog can be read here).
Yes, I know this is all a downer. Yes, I hate all this exactly as much as you do. Yes, I want more for my children, family, friends and neighbors. And yes, I’m willing to do what it takes to enact some positive change in the world. A little bit by each of us equals a heck of a lot collectively.
And as a musician/composer I’d like to end this post thusly: Let’s make some sweet music together, by acting in concert!!