Today marks the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, still the worst terrorist attack the United States has ever experienced. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Islamic militants hijacked four commercial passenger jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, murdering 2,977 people. I remember seeing, as many of you remember seeing, those symbols of America’s economic might burning with thick black smoke. I remember the people jumping out. I remember the South Tower collapsing, then the North Tower.

The American people watched, cried, contemplated, connected with family, and cried out to God. Church attendance surged, while some evangelical Christians predicted a Fourth Great Awakening.

But this awakening never happened. In fact, future historians may mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American empire. We thought it would bring the nation together. Instead, it was the beginning of everything falling apart.

The Federalist states:

The government response to 9/11 birthed the constitutional abomination that is the modern warrantless surveillance state. The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people.

[President George W.] Bush’s failed foreign policy led directly to [Barack] Obama’s presidency, and indirectly to [Joe] Biden’s, both of which are responsible for diminishing the U.S. at home and abroad, militarily and economically. After two failed forever wars that wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, our government is now desperately trying to foment a potentially nuclear forever war against Russia.

Meanwhile, all the massive surveillance powers claimed by the U.S. after 9/11 are being ruthlessly deployed against American political enemies of the regime via the most insidious censorship-industrial complex the world has ever seen.

And then there’s the crippling legacy of debt enabled by America’s response to 9/11. Not content to spend trillions on poorly thought-out invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, our leaders spent as thoughtlessly at home, creating insane amounts of new entitlements, while doing nothing to put the country on a sound financial footing.”

This is a powerful summary! Security analysts have noted how Obama created the most intrusive spy state in the world, but they often forget that he was only able to do this by building on what Bush instituted after the 9/11 attacks. American leaders didn’t strike the head of the terrorist snake, Iran. They sent troops into quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq; and at home, Americans agreed to surrender freedom for security.

This same fearful behavior has now allowed the “deep state” to usurp so much power that Americans cannot even rest assured that their basic privacy is respected or even that their votes, their only means of controlling the government, are accurately or honestly counted. The war on terror was the excuse the intelligence community needed to seize control of the levers of government. The constitutional republic that elected George W. Bush in 2000 has now morphed into a technocracy controlled by Barack Obama.

Ruling through his puppet, Joe Biden, Obama is using Bush-era provisions like the Patriot Act to amass power at home while harkening back to Bush-era failures in Iraq to weaken America abroad. This seems contradictory, but it’s all about the death of the American empire. And none of this likely would have happened if it were not for the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks.

I highly recommend reading Sean Davis’s excellent editorial, “Was 9/11 the Beginning of the End of the American Empire?” As good as this editorial is, Davis was not the first person to talk about 9/11 marking the beginning of America’s last hour. My father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, delivered a sermon not long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks announcing that human civilization had entered into its “last hour” (1 John 2:18; Revised Standard Version). As he notes in his booklet published later, The Last Hour, the 9/11 terrorist attacks confirmed this point.

“God began to reveal this truth about the last hour to the Philadelphia Church of God on May 5, 2001,” he writes. “Approximately four months later came the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. I believe God allowed us to receive this physical sign that we had entered the last hour. The worst terrorist attack ever on American soil powerfully reinforced our new revelation about the last hour. … 1 John 2:18 puts time up on stage as the star.”

The years that have elapsed since he wrote those words have only proved them more correct. My father did not know anything about Barack Obama being an end-time type of Antiochus Epiphanes back in 2001. In fact, he did not start writing about this until 2013. Yet as Sean Davis noted, “Bush’s failed foreign policy led directly to Obama’s presidency, and indirectly to Biden’s, both of which are responsible for diminishing the U.S. at home and abroad, militarily and economically.”

The 9/11 attacks marked the moment when everything started to fall apart, and it was this chaos that led to Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Russiagate, January 6, and the political chaos that threatens to tear America apart. Now Biden has surrendered both Afghanistan and Iraq back to the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center while his administration focuses on fighting Russia and preparing for civil war at home. The problems are getting worse and worse and will continue to do so until people realize there is no hope in man.

As my father further notes in The Last Hour, God allowed 9/11 to signal to America and the rest of the world that we are near the prophesied return of Jesus Christ and the establishment of God’s government on this Earth! Despite the efforts of the Make America Great Again movement, things will never return to the way they were before 2001. President Trump’s return to the White House might make things a little better than they are now, but we need to understand that we are living in the last hour before Christ’s return!

Request your free copy of The Last Hour, by Gerald Flurry.