Around early 2008, The Disinformation Company put out a call for submissions for a follow-up anthology to You Are Being Lied To appropriately called You Are Still Being Lied To. I was contemplating sending in a submission, and was curious as to who the editor might be, so I sent Disinfo an email. Company president Gary Baddeley responded to let me know that the edition would have Russ Kick's name on it, but it would be edited in-house.

After that brief conversation, I had forgotten all about the anthology. I was still knee deep in Key 64 and working on an essay for Taylor Ellwood's Pop Culture Grimoire. My friendship with Taylor meant working with him was higher up on my priority list than any other anthology that might be out there.

Not long before the deadline hit, I received an email from Baddeley asking if I still wanted to contribute to the anthology. It seems he wanted to get a couple of the regular contributors to the Disinformation web site into the book. I informed him that I had something, but would need a little extra time. He accepted, and a few weeks later I sent off an article entitled "Truth and Lies about Terrorism on the Home Front" that examined the current establishment's view on terrorism - specifically Islamic extremism. Gary gave me a few suggestions that I then incorporated into the piece and returned to him. A couple of weeks later, Gary again emailed me to ask for my mailing address in order to send me the contract.

About a month later - still with no contract - I sent Gary an email asking if he ever mailed that contract out. Gary responded to inform me that Russ Kick was now "officially" doing the editing for the edition and was personally reviewing the submissions.

Silence ensued for several months. My assumption was that my essay was left out of the anthology, but I wanted to make sure before posting it elsewhere. I emailed Gary to verify that the essay was, indeed, left out. No response.

As I look back on the essay, it makes sense for them to have left it out. Much of the essay speaks of how the conservatives use fear of terrorism as a way to get their policies in place. And although terrorism is still of concern in America politics, with Obama as president, the conservatives' use of fear-mongering about terrorism to manipulate the American system has been replaced by the liberals' use of fear-mongering about the economy. When the economy took a nose dive, I said right away that Democrats were going to use the economy and "evil" corporate executives in the same way that Bush and the Republicans used terrorism and "evil" Muslim extremists. This is in spite of the fact that many Democrats (politicians of all parties actually) were responsible for the economic mess in the same way that Republicans and the Reagan administration were largely responsible for the rise of the Taliban.

No, with the new Obama administration, I very much hope that my essay is vastly outdated in its thoughts. But I will post the essay for archive purposes - and for anyone who wants to read it - here on my blog later in the week.