Five years ago today, I launched this website with an essay on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Back then, I was a software developer, and I planned on using this site as a platform for discussing technology. (The word “terminal” in the name of the site originally referred the old “green screen” computer terminals, and is not an effort on my part to imply that I’m terminally brain dead, as a number of critics have kindly suggested.)

Less than three weeks after my first post, an event happened that changed the course of many lives. The attacks of September 11th ripped families apart and blasted a still-unfilled hole in lower Manhattan. The attacks also made it impossible to ignore radical Islam, a phenomenon that has been growing and threatening Western society since the 1970s.

Watching the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building re-connected me with my long-held passion for politics and world affairs, and the experience gave me a new purpose for this site.

About a year and a half later, I posted my first of a dozen short videos, and thanks to my run-in with Michael Moore, I stumbled into a career as a documentary filmmaker.

And now, this fall, my first feature-length documentary Indoctrinate U will be released.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Thanks to everyone who’s shared it with me, and to all of you who’ve written in with words of encouragement over the years.