Sometimes comedians can get a laugh just by telling the truth. George Carlin was good at that. One of his most famous quotes is: “That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Sigmund Freud famously analyzed dreams as wish-fulfillment fantasies. In that kind of dream, the dreamer attempts to satisfy a desire that has been frustrated in waking life. The American dream was a bit like that. We had a huge, relatively empty continent with abundant resources. And we had a new political philosophy, liberal secular-materialist progressivism, the basis of our democratic republic. This philosophy held that everything would keep getting better: If we worked hard we would succeed and get rich, and then our children would get even richer, and their richer still. Meanwhile, we would keep fine-tuning our political system and social mores so that the individual “pursuit of happiness”—which is what the Declaration of Independence holds up as the ultimate purpose of life—would grow ever-more successful. People would just get happier and happier.

This wish-fulfillment fantasy was obviously not true. Though there was certainly incremental material progress—living standards in the USA continued to improve at least through the 1960s—it did not make people noticeably happier. Nor were they living in a genuine liberal democracy. That was just window-dressing covering up the political reality, oligarchy.

The American dream started dying a long time ago. It succumbed to a series of assaults by the most vicious oligarchy in all of human history. September 11 was just the final blow. Then in the 1960s, the decade during which the common man in America achieved what should have been his highest-ever level of security and prosperity, things started to unravel. A new sword of Damocles, nuclear terror, cast its shadow over the land and killed all philosophies of optimism. The invention of the birth control pill, coupled with a propaganda onslaught from the Rockefeller Foundation and other oligarchical forces, normalized “recreational” sex and injected a slow-acting poison into the traditional family. Simultaneously, the symbolic national father figure—the president—was ritually murdered on November 22nd, 1963 by elements of the National Security State in collaboration with Israel and its organized crime assets. Most Americans felt their comfortable sleep vaguely disturbed by the live broadcast of mobster Jack Rubenstein, whose boss was Israel’s number one fundraiser Mickey Cohen, murdering JFK’s alleged lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the middle of a crowd of policemen. 

After the 1960s the traditional family came under ever-more-furious assault. The “patriarchy”—that is, families with fathers—came under attack by Rockefeller Foundation propagandists, Zionist-dominated media, and cultural Marxist academia. As the percentage of American children born out of wedlock and/or raised in single-parent or broken homes grew from a small minority to a large majority, the oligarchs grabbed more and more of the national wealth, causing ordinary people’s living standards to stagnate. Poverty, broken homes, welfare dependency, crime, drug abuse, suicide, venereal diseases, and other negative social indicators increased dramatically. Simultaneously, the oligarchs pumped foundation money into identity politics in order to distract the left from economic issues.

By September 11, 2001, the stage had long since been set. The American republic had been abolished, replaced by a covert oligarchy, with the founding of the so-called Federal Reserve in 1913. That oligarchy had emerged from the shadows on November 22, 1963. It had then begun destroying the traditional family and hollowing out the middle class. 

September 11, 2001, represented the coup de grace, the final death blow, for the American democratic republic and the American dream. They blew up the World Trade Center on live television. Even though the vast majority of journalists correctly reported what they saw with their own eyes—the buildings had been destroyed by explosions—the oligarchs terrorized the media into changing the story and telling the world that the buildings had somehow fallen down due to minor office fires fueled by a negligible amount of kerosene (jet fuel).

Even more than the live footage of Jack Rubenstein murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the live footage of the explosive demolition of the World Trade Center, followed by a tidal wave of ridiculous official lies, forcibly imposed a state of extreme cognitive dissonance on the American people. Since then they have been living in the shadow of a wall of fear. The truth is on the other side of the wall, but they are afraid to look. A new era of rule by fear, rather than hope, has prevailed. The made-in-a-lab coronavirus coup, which has transferred trillions of dollars from ordinary people to billionaires, is simply the latest oligarchical assault designed to terrorize Americans into submission.

The American dream started dying a long time ago. It succumbed to a series of assaults by the most vicious oligarchy in all of human history. September 11 was just the final blow. 

Will Americans ever wake up from their ever-more-nightmarish dream? Will they identify and overthrow the oligarchs who have dispossessed them? Allahu ‘alim. (Only God knows.)

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America's best-known critics of the 9/11 and the War on Terror.