1990s Come Again
History, I’m told, is cyclical. It follows patterns, circles back around, comes back into fashion. As a friend recently remarked to me, the 2010s aesthetic borrowed heavily from 80s nostalgia; we can presume, therefore, that the 2020s will be delivering the subsequent decade full-bore. And when we remember the 1990s, that metaphor might be a bit more literal than we’d prefer.
The 90s, broadly speaking, was a decade of optimism. The Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union following a successful coup in Moscow. The fact that Russia was subsequently pillaged by international oligarchs for a decade afterward, and that the sole stabilizing counterforce has been turned into a neo-Soviet-Czarist caricature by the international press, is best left unsaid. The Russian pivot toward the middle east in the 1980s, particularly focusing on Iran and Afghanistan, was mirrored by the United States’ zeroing in on these areas under Bush Sr. and Clinton; the latter’s adventures in the Balkans also indicated an attempt to stabilize a post-Soviet Europe. To some degree, the American diplomatic efforts of the 90s focused on cleaning up the mess that had been made during the 80s, though you could probably argue that this effectively defines most decades.
With the Soviet threat gone, there were some worries about nuclear proliferation and banditry, but nothing on the scale of the 1980s’ ever-present dread of oblivion. A worst-case nuclear scenario involved, realistically speaking, a terrorist detonating a dirty bomb and irradiating a major financial hub—a horrifying thought, of course, but it fell well short of the mutually-assured destruction scenarios predicted by endless numbers of Cold War simulations. For Americans, the removal of the hammer and sickle and its replacement with the horizontal tricolor meant not just victory, but relief, a return to a form of presumed normalcy that none of them had ever before lived under.
History was over, the dialectic had found its synthesis: the American Citizen was the Last Man. As Fukuyama himself proclaimed, the democratization of the world was inevitable: “there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies—in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.”1 We really believed this back then, and for about ten years, it was very easy to believe.
Fukuyama has spent about twenty of the last thirty years being rhetorically flogged for his book, and perhaps rightfully so. But thirty years does a lot for retrospection. The collapse of the Soviet regime meant not only triumph over a defeated foe, but a positive ideological assertion of the American system itself. Reagan had attached a vocal expression to the Cold War that most Americans had felt for decades: that it was in some sense a holy war, a war loaded with moral ramifications, and one in which the Americans were the unequivocal good guys battling the famously monikered Evil Empire. We can’t blame Reagan for such hyperbole, really, when the threat of nuclear oblivion put everyone on edge. But such a belief had consequences for when the war finally ended. The American system would be declared superior not just over the Soviet alternative, but over any alternative.
Perhaps it was distinctly American hubris that suggested so, or merely the hubris of a sole remaining global hegemon; whatever the reason, the fact that it was America’s destroyers that patrolled the shipping lanes and America’s aircraft carriers that could be parked in any gulf within a day’s notice seemed like providence. We more or less took it in stride that we won because we were the good guys, not merely the better guys. Lest we forget, by the start of the 90s, San Francisco and Philadelphia—among others—were still reeling from the AIDS “crisis” that had resulted from rampant sodomitical promiscuity. Women were getting abortions at about double the rates they are now. And worse, these were presented as unfortunate side-effects of supposedly good things, morally righteous behaviors. Liberalism, the core set of religious values at the heart of America’s crusade against Soviet tyranny, was nothing without sexual license.
Lest we forget, abortion was pitched to Americans in the early 90s as safe, legal, and rare, a maddening and yet perplexingly necessary side-effect of sexual liberty. AIDS, likewise, was an apparently unfortunate side-effect of the fundamental right to unrestricted sexual gratification. The groups that foisted this ideology knew they were lying; most of them knew that these unfortunate side effects would be the positive selling points within a few short decades. “Safe, legal, and rare” became “shout your abortion”. The “AIDS epidemic” became immune deficiency positivity. Sex ed became drag queen story hour. In the early 90s, you could have guessed that this was the direction the American Empire was going to go, but you’d have been called—like Pat Buchanan—a crank. It’s hard to tell whether it was a certain sense of American decency that prohibited believing in such a slippery slope, or if instead it head been decades of successful social engineering. The results speak for themselves.
And this is not intended to pitch the tired counter-take that we heard from academia for so many decades (perhaps we’re the real monsters); left unsaid is the fact that the Soviets fared more or less just as well as the West, except with the added weight of an oppressive, unpredictable, and counter-intuitive regime breathing down their necks. Alexander Boot’s description of youth under Khrushchev and Brezhnev leaves the startling impression that there could be no escape from the sexual revolution. Although ostensibly a Western phenomenon, it was an altogether modern one, and any country that embraced modernity naturally embraced sexual liberation as well.
Pardon the digression. The point here is that the dialectic was over. The psyops were finished. The war was won. Americanism triumphed. That should have meant that the intelligence agencies could sit back and hit cruise control for a while. Maybe they got stir-crazy. Maybe their budgets were too bloated. Maybe they wanted to test the American public. Instead of downsizing and trying to return to normal, the men in black decided to go after domestic enemies where they couldn’t simply invent foreign ones. Civilian militia groups were infiltrated and busted. Ideological partisan groups were subverted into commonplace gangs of thugs. Religious homesteaders were slandered as violent extremists, and then suddenly butchered—kids and all—by government forces.
There is a coincidence of events that is hard to ignore. We can see how the “Satanic panic” that finished out the 80s tapped into the same fears that the Q-anon cult preyed on. The conspiracy between finance, government, and a burgeoning tech industry that set the stage for the dot com bubble matches a similar harmonics in today’s tech-dominated economy. Racial tensions are again, as with the Rodney King riots, at untenable levels. We just sat through a racially inflammatory court case that had been turned into a national spectacle before the jury had even been picked. Ruby Ridge? Waco? Oklahoma City? I don’t think anyone paying attention doubts that the events of January 6th will go so lightly punished. People in the media used national platforms to suggest drone striking people, and the hosts at MSNBC barely batted their eyes.
History is cyclical. So I’m told. But cycles don’t look like shot-for-shot remakes. The rehashed version of the 90s that we’ve entered now has two notable differences. The first is that everything that was being pioneered in the 90s, from the surveillance technology to the rhetoric surrounding sexual identity, are all finished with their experimental and beta-testing phases. The trail periods are over. The means by which the government could gin up detailed dossiers on private citizens by using consumer, credit, and financial indexes—and now internet browsing habits, to say nothing of the data willingly shared by users—have all been perfected. And not just perfected, but shared if not developed by the so-called private sector; not only can Uncle Sam track you down when he needs you, but so can Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg, and so can anyone they decide to sell that information to. There were eyes in the sky in the 90s, but nothing on this scale.
The second difference is that many of the movers and shakers today were around in the 90s, and they were up to their tricks even back then. Consider the people who run the larger NGOs, or the administration that currently claims ownership of the US Government. Consider the head of the Treasury, or the IMF, or the Federal Reserve. Consider who staffs the top universities.
They’ve been through this before. The pieces they’re playing with have been thoroughly tested and proven, and they’ve already played the game. They know the rules and they know how to change them. The false-flags, the psyops, the cover-ups, the mass-scale social conditioning—it was all there by the close of the 90s. To their credit, the cranks at the time who raved about the New World Order and black helicopters were right, they were just off by a decade or so.
So what happened? Why didn’t our system collapse back then? Why didn’t we see the sort of blatant reality-defying lies of the media foisted on us in 1999 like we did in 2020? Sure, some of us complained about a stolen election in 2000—only to find, on closer inspection, that it was just a media circus. And sure, it seemed as though the mainstream media had lost most of its credibility on how it handled both the OJ Simpson trail and the Clinton impeachment. But these things only mattered to people who paid attention, and most Americans, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t pay attention. To some degree, that can still be said today. But thanks to the proliferation of technology and the normalization of social media, the way that they don’t pay attention has changed. Before, you needed to be around a television set or a newspaper headline in order to absorb, through the aether as it were, the general media narrative consensus; even for the urban class, it was fairly easy not to be exposed to it. Now, you just need a smartphone; they beam the headlines to you completely unsolicited and most of us can’t be bothered to figure out how to opt out.
But something more obvious changed, too. The media was given a shot in the arm to keep it going, and it came in the form of two Boeing 767s crashing into New York City. By no means is this intended to trivialize a national tragedy, but the media—perhaps understandably—pounced on the attack and never let go of what they gained. We got the 24-hour news cycle out of it, after all, along with the headline ticker, and surely, that’s had nothing but a positive impact on the media’s relationship with the American people.
In any case, 9/11 happened. One of our greatest allies decided they needed some buffer troops in the Middle East—or, if we’re willing to think a little more conspiratorially, some financial capital types decided to start knocking names off of a list of countries that lacked central banks. Maybe these two things aren’t unrelated. Whatever the reason, agency-fueled war against American citizenry ended up getting a decade-long reprieve in the form of the overseas Forever War. It came back under Obama’s watch, but the valiant efforts to stabilize the sandier parts of the world with guided rocketry and flying drones, bombing weddings and American citizens alike, weren’t finished yet. America still had working class to destroy, and the Regime would accomplish this by either deploying them to Baghdad or by maintaining the Afghani farmland for the Sackler family.
The 90s opened with mobs descending on the Berlin Wall to dismantle it with sledge and pick, and a couple years later, the sound of cannon fire in the streets of Moscow that signified the end of Soviet Russia. And it closed there on Manhattan island, suffocated under how many tons of pulverized concrete and ash, molten-twisted metal, and three thousand American bodies. A crash course in global hegemony precipitated twenty years of occupational warfare overseas while they fine-tuned informational warfare at home.
I had said, somewhere, that a potential Biden administration would mean a return to form—a return to the continuity of US foreign and domestic policies that were broken in 2017. The Forever Wars might be coming to an end, but this is happening at the same time that the Regime is culling the armed services of both its fighting stock and its experience, replacing them with women and the mentally ill. Meanwhile, they boldly counter-signal China and flirt with hostilities in the orient. And there’s no guarantee, either, that the proclaimed retreat from Afghanistan is actually going to occur this year, despite the administration’s words.
And at the same time, the practice of apologizing for being American, something that defined the Obama years, is back in full force—and so is watching your back as a conservative. In 2015, you risked getting fired for publicly disagreeing with the Obergefell decision; now, if you attended a political rally in DC at an inopportune date, owned a red hat, and made a comment about libtards on Facebook, you’re on a federal no-fly list, have had your accounts frozen, and are under investigation by the FBI. While your conservative pundits flaccidly complain about whether or not private corporations can suspend the First Amendment, you’re treated like a domestic terrorist. Sure, tensions are still high, but the National Guard isn’t at the Capitol anymore. The fence still is. They’re telling you to get used to it.
The people who ran the 90s are back in power. Some of them never really left, while others—like Bill Gates—have expanded their reach. On one hand, their oligarchical solidarity is starting to fracture, since the clock keeps ticking and none of them are getting any younger. If there is to be an end to the Regime, it will take this sort of form: watching and leveraging, wherever possible, the internal fractures that such organizations are prone to. Until that becomes possible, expect the sort of insanity we saw in the 90s to play out in bigger, bolder, and weirder form over the next decade. Will it be survivable? Yes, for most of us, but certain definitions of America, certain understandings of its government and its people, and most of all, our preoccupation with a journalistic class of thought police will all change. Here’s to hoping we can help it all change for the better.
1 Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, 2nd ed 2006), 48.
