I'm about 15 years older than you. 9/11 was definitely "the end" of the USA as I knew it growing up. It all fucking changed after that ... it's like they shifted out of first gear on 9/11 and have been accelerating ever since.

There are plenty of times throughout the 20th century where the left made inroads to "fundamentally change" the USA. You had socialists getting shit passed in the early 20th century (direct election of Senators vs. gubernatorial appointment, capping the House at 435, etc). You had FDR's expansion of government in the 1930s that crippled an already damaged US economy. You had Johnson's "War on Poverty" (any time you hear "War on ..." coming from the mouth of a DC scumbag, expect it to be a never ending war).

You had Nixon legitimizing China. You had Carter making a disaster of things in the Middle East and HW Bush going on a rampage to eliminate some "problems" they created there. You had Clinton pushing for giving China "most favored nation" status. All of these events worked to damage the fundamentals of the USA, but, again, nothing like what we've experienced the past 20 years. 9/11 seemed to be the "key" event for the left, their RINO buddies, and scumbag communists all over the world to put the pedal to the metal for a single, communist world government.

You got a taste of what was in store in the early 1990s ... when Clinton won, the Rats had the House, Senate, and White House. Cunty Clinton tried to shove her fucking Hillarycare garbage down people's throats. The media said that this was OK since Bill won in a landslide (I think Clinton is the only POTUS to ever win twice without having the majority of voters in either Presidential election ... that isn't a landslide and it would have been a lot closer had Perot dropped out). After the 1994 midterms, Clinton had to put an end to the sharp turn to the left his Cunt wife was selling. That 'hard left' shit didn't start again until W Bush slithered into office for a second term.

The dot com implosion in 2000 was a side effect of the times. The internet caught fire in the mid-1990s. That combined with Y2K fearmongering propped up tech stocks. There was a LOT of innovation going on in the tech industry. However, the media constantly reminded us that this was due to Bill Clinton. The media was trying to sell bullshit like "Clinton balanced the budget and created a surplus" (fucking lies ... it was a 'projected' surplus years out (long term projections are worthless in a dynamic world; balanced budgets are mostly due to the House too) and "The business cycle as we knew it is over ... it is going to be prosperous from here on out." Also, energy prices in the late 1990s were LOW. I remember paying as little as $0.89/gal of gasoline in my area ... it was a bit lower than that in the midwest and south. It was a perfect storm for record economic growth ... some of it "real", some of it "manufactured". NONE of it was due to Clinton though ... he had NO economic policy outside of a tax hike he wanted back in 1993.

Of course, the only person that disagreed with the assessment of Bill Clinton being responsible for all of this in liberal circles was Algore ... he claimed that he was responsible for the legislation that brought the internet to life (i.e. he invented it ... and his claims were fucking ridiculous ... the internet was shaped long before that fucking balloonhead even knew what a computer was), but I digress.

Anyway, once people started to come back to reality after Y2K turned out to be nothing but liberal fearmongering to convince people and companies to buy new computers they didn't need, the internet craze started to die off and thousands of companies hyped up by idiots (pets.com always comes to mind) imploded since they basically worthless. Companies were projecting growth to continue well beyond 2000 and were carrying tons of excess goods that basically didn't move throughout all of 2000-2001. End result was the dot com crash and a stagnant economy.

Still, even with the dot com crash, you felt that things would recover eventually. Just as things started to look promising again, 9/11 happened. Outside of tech advancements in things they can use to monitor us (computers and smartphones), it almost seems like time has stood still since that day. Bit by bit our liberties have been stripped. The Patriot Act (nobody will admit to supporting it now, but millions on the right, even on the far right, supported it back then ... the left didn't support it until Obama weaseled his way into office) basically put an end to anything resembling privacy. Political Correctness went from being a funny thing you'd see on TV here and there to "you obey these social rules or else we will unperson you" in under a decade. Liberals shoved global warming down our throats daily while the Republican Party did very little to refute their insane claims. It almost seemed like 9/11 was the event that the DS wanted to start the destruction of the USA as we knew it.

The worst is the demoralization we've experienced since then. All news has been bad since 9/11. All of it. The idiots that run the media leave no margin for optimism. If terrorists won't kill us, global warming will. If you wonder why millenials by and large seem out of touch and lethargic, keep in mind that they have spent their entire lives being told that the human race is garbage, that we are all going to die soon, and that the only hope mankind has is to embrace socialist bullshit. Couple that with the bullshit our schools fed these people for the 20 years they were forced to sit in public schools then released to universities, it's no surprise that the generations beyond Gen-X seem out of phase with reality (not all millennials of course ... but it's certainly a majority ... I just wonder why they wanted the millennials to fight the "boomers" ... I thought they were shaping them to fight Gen-X, but they have them blaming the baby boomers for some reason).

Sorry for the rambling ... put me in the "9/11 is what kicked off Globohomo 2.0" camp :-).