The video opens with a shot of an American flag flying upside down, an official signal of distress.
The camera cuts to a man in a living room with yellow pine–paneled walls and flat tan carpeting. He sits on a brown plaid couch. His face is covered by a black balaclava. His eyes are blue. He is dressed in work boots, jeans, and an ivory-colored T-shirt. His arms are muscled and tan.
The front of the T-shirt portrays a black, bare-branched tree with red roots. It reads THE TREE OF LIBERTY MUST BE REFRESHED FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS.—THOMAS JEFFERSON.
The man speaks.
America, it’s time to wake up. And we’re your alarm clock.
Until today, you’ve been like babies distracted by shiny toys. You believe what the TV tells you, that you won’t be happy until you have new cars and hot french fries and better drugs and bigger TVs. That you won’t have a good Christmas unless you buy more stuff that will just fall apart the minute it’s unwrapped. And if you don’t have the money, you buy it on credit.
As a result, millions of Americans are living a twisted enslavement, while others waste away in prisons, are forced to fight in foreign countries, or exist on the street like animals. So many of us wake in the night worrying we’ll lose our homes.
You think you pay for your possessions with money, but you don’t. You pay for them with blood. And today we’ve made that clear.
The world is falling down around you while our public officials—bought and paid for by corporations—act with impunity. Aided by the government you supposedly elect, these corporations have been selling you lies. And you’ve been buying them. You have let politicians and corporations take your dignity. You’ve let them grow rich and fat at your expense. But know this: To those who really run this country, you’re no more than blades of grass under their feet. They depend on the services of an army of people who are nearly invisible to them. People who pump their gas, take away their garbage, ring up their purchases, install their cable. But if they lost their electricity, their Internet, their access to stores, you’d see how dependent they really are!
We need to return to simpler times, where a man could support his family, where we could trust politicians not to betray us, where we could speak the truth without being ostracized, where companies didn’t poison our air and water, where jobs didn’t disappear overnight, where people who fought for this country returned home heroes.
Instead, we pamper illegal aliens who take our jobs while our veterans sleep on cardboard in doorways. We let the puppet government dictate every aspect of our lives.
We, the people, don’t declare war and we don’t make the peace, but we’re the ones who fight the battles, the ones who shed our blood and die on foreign soil. And for what? Wars don’t help people. They help corporations by keeping the oil flowing. But you’ve let your young men be sent to war, and then turned away when they come back broken. Well, you can’t turn away any longer.
We’ve shown you what war is truly like. It’s death. It’s destruction. It’s random and cruel. It’s broken bodies, broken minds, broken hearts.
It’s true that today some will have lost loved ones because of what we’ve done. But you won’t be the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or granddaughter. And at least these deaths will have meaning. People will look back and say today was a turning point.
We have been forced to shed blood to make you wake up. To show you that the current system can’t be reformed. It can only be blown up.
People of America, rise up. You can start with small acts of defiance, like no longer amassing piles of crap. Or you can go out and sow some destruction of your own. You can help open more eyes. The only way to truly reform the current system is to shed blood.
It’s up to you. Will you be free men? Or socialist wannabe slaves?
And while we’ve killed, we’ve also been merciful. There are many more who still live because of our generosity. And if you want them to continue to live, you’ll meet our demands.
First, all American troops must be withdrawn from the Middle East.
Second, all veterans must be provided with jobs and housing and financial assistance.
Third, the political system must be reformed so that politicians may no longer accept more than fifty dollars from any individual or corporation.
We know it will take time to accomplish these goals.
As an interim step, you need to do the following.
The message needs to be broadcast nationally. In addition, our friends Eric Piercy, Isaac Mayakovsky, and Joshua Pritchard have to be released from Sheridan federal prison and taken to the Aurora airfield. And you need to provide us with a bus, so that we can take the hostages to the airfield. Once we’re there, you will give us a plane and a pilot, at which point we will give you half the hostages. And then when the plane lands, we will release the remaining hostages from the plane.
And know this. We will not release a single hostage until our demands are met. And we will kill ten hostages for any of us who is killed.