Back to the Wilderness

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back - Bob Dylan

The latest on Michael Ruppert is that he's left Venezuela after four months which saw "sudden drops in blood pressure, blood sugar crashes, dizziness, weakness, paresthesis of lips and fingers, small kidney stones, heavy calcification of the urinary tract and prostate, cloudy urine and chronic fatigue." (Too much information? That's to forget the "seizure-like violent tremors.") He has relocated to the Toronto area, where he is "receiving medical care and rest thanks to dedicated Peak Oil activists," and declares he is "through forever with investigative journalism and public lecturing."

See, now I feel bad about that "too much information" quip. It was snarky, and I seek to be snarky only in a professional capacity, and Ruppert's made himself a too-easy target. But there's also real tragedy here, beyond the tragicomedy of his character flaws, because what he created, and what has collapsed about him, was a significant primer for deep politics at the turn of the century.

From the Wilderness was my first 9/11 looking glass. The writings of Ruppert and associates such as Peter Dale Scott and Daniel Hopsicker before they fell out (there seemed to be much falling out around Ruppert) helped contextualize the terror for me within the ongoing criminal enterprise of the National Security State, in which the Bush regime was not an aberration but its apotheosis.

But that was then. These days in the 9/11 Truth demimonde, early and clear-eyed researchers like Scott, Paul Thompson and Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed are rarely heard over the likes of Morgan Reynolds and the thermate/"mini-nukes" debate, and rather than contributions such as the discovery of 9/11's concurrent war games we have "scholars for 9/11 Truth" tearing one another new impact holes over speculation on space-based beam weaponry. If you think that indicates progress, and that we're closer to 9/11 justice than we were three years ago, I don't know what more to tell you.

So what happened to Ruppert and From the Wilderness, besides his own imperfect self? That Peak Oil idée fixe of his, for one. While I'm not of the It's all a Hoax! school, I do believe the issue is subject to grave manipulation, and may even have been solved, though not for us nor our children's benefit. There is also a peculiar fascist tug to some Peak Oilers propositions, which Ruppert either hasn't noticed or hasn't been overly concerned by.

Many have questioned Ruppert's motives, but I think that largely comes by providing a subscriber-based service. Investigative journalism, and keeping your client-base happy and thinking they're getting their money's worth, may not be concomitant after all. Such lines of inquiry are perhaps best pursued open source.

It was Ruppert's bizarre eulogy for Gary Webb, in which he patted his own back with Webb's dead hand by boasting "there would be no FTW with its 21,000 subscribers in 40 countries" without him, and said "God took the gun from my mouth and placed it to Gary’s head," that made me think this man was on the clock. Seeing a braggart and a bully brought low by his own demons is one thing, but seeing the ruin of an investigative community that broke stories which could have broken governments is something else.