American (death and) rebirth, part 2
The USA's Pluto Return: opening to truth and beauty after decades of demoralization
In part one of this piece, we looked at the nature of Pluto transits and why I believe the second Trump administration — elected on the promise of sweeping deregulation and radical downsizing of the federal government — is a projection of the will of the people for profound and sweeping change.
In this piece, I want to look at the USA’s Pluto Return in terms of what has been revealed to us about our national condition and what those revelations mean for us going forward.
2020-2025: What happened?!
The outer planets spend several months each year in apparent retrograde motion so when they make a transit to a natal planet, they tend to hit it three times: once direct, once retrograde, and then a final direct hit.
Pluto made three exact hits to the U.S. natal Pluto (27 Capricorn 33’) in 2022: on February 20, July 11 (retrograde), and December 28. Because Pluto has a 246-year orbital period, this is the first time since the founding of the country that Pluto has returned to its natal position in the U.S. birth chart.
Transiting planets have an “orb of influence” leading up to and following on from the exact aspect (in this case, conjunction to natal Pluto). This means we feel the effects of the transit building for several degrees before the exact hit and we can be dealing with the archetypal energies stirred up by the transit for a few degrees after the exact hit.
Based on years of experience mapping and observing transits in clients’ charts, my belief is that the build up to the perfection of an outer planet aspect tends to be much more intense and “heavier” than the period after the transit has perfected.
Interestingly, though, where Pluto is concerned, there is often a degree of blindness inherent in the build-up phase of the transit.1 Pluto is the Lord of the Underworld and Pluto transits always require us to embark on an Underworld Journey, a dive into the murky depths of the soul. Here we could envision the soul as the deep unconscious mind, a place where it is difficult to “see” with the conscious mind’s habitual frames of reference and modes of perception. Very often we must ‘feel’ our way through a Pluto transit; only after the transit has passed and we have ‘returned to the land of the living’ are we able to understand the meaning of the felt experience of the transit.
Many astrologers might give a wider orb to an astrological transit as momentous as Pluto conjunct natal Pluto. In his epic study of outer planet transits to one another, Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas used orbs of up to 15 degrees. The closer the transit is to exact, though, the more intense and obvious the effects will be. So for this piece I’m going to give Pluto a conservative five-degree orb on each side of its transit to 27 Capricorn 33’. This means the peak effects of the USA’s Pluto return would be felt from the time Pluto moved to 22 Capricorn 33’ (January 2020) until Pluto last crossed over 2 Aquarius 33’ (December 2025).
A note on outer planets: All of the outer planets — Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — can be characterized as transpersonal, transformational archetypes. I’ve often described the outer planets as transformational time bombs. When a natal planet gets hit by an outer planet transit, the purpose of the transit is to transform us. This is often a painful experience, but that’s only because we tend to get stuck in negative mental and psychological frameworks that block us from growing into our best selves. Fearing change, people often respond to outer planet transits by gripping onto the known and familiar and resisting the call to healing and wholeness. It is this resistance that causes us to suffer. Because outer planet transits are inviting us to see through our negative programming, let go of limiting beliefs, stuck emotions, and bad habits, and move into life more abundant.
The USA’s Pluto return, then, is going to usher Americans into an underworld journey in order to come face to face with our deepest fears and toxic shame patterns — the forces in the soul that keep us small and powerless and often are passed down from generation to generation — so that we can do the shadow work of bringing these hidden energies out into the open and move forward into the future with power, purpose and a renewed life of the soul.
And if we fail at the task Pluto has set for us? Well, as you can imagine, astrologers have been wondering and theorizing for years about what the USA’s Pluto Return would mean and how it would play out. Many astrologers figured it would bring a definitive end to the great American experiment of the last 250 years, perhaps even the dissolution of the United States of America. I figured at the very least the USA’s Pluto Return would spell the end of the U.S. as the world’s last remaining superpower as the rest of the ‘civilized world’ gave us our come-uppance and finally put us in our place.
Part of my reason for thinking that would be the outcome was that I was much more demoralized than I am now. But part of the reason was that the end of the United States of America was the plan all along. Maybe not the actual end of the corporation itself, but definitely the end of the USA as a global beacon of freedom, opportunity and prosperity. And yes, despite a decades-long campaign by the global elites to extinguish them, the lights of liberty and goodwill toward all still burn here. I believe this is because our country was — uniquely, as far as we know, in the history of the world up until 1776 — founded upon principles that align with Natural Law.
The Global Covid Psyop
How interesting that the Covid-19 psyop hit right at as Pluto moved into a five-degree orb of the U.S. natal Pluto.2 I could name so many psyops in this 2020-2025 period that align with the Plutonian themes of fear/toxic shame/powerlessness but Covid was the big one, the one that got the ball rolling.
Fueled by an unprecedented, historic global media fear crusade, the C19 psyop kick-started a four-year cycle of overt assault on American society and the American people, including:
The largest wealth transfer from the working class to the uber-rich in recorded human history. By the end of 2020, “the collective wealth of 651 billionaires in the U.S. rose by more than 36% ($1 trillion). The assets of these 651 billionaires is now nearly double that of the combined wealth of the least wealthy 165 million Americans.”
Attacks on and restrictions of freedom of speech at levels previously unthinkable in the U.S., including digital censorship and surveillance carried out by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and many other telecoms and online service providers in collusion with the U.S. Department of Justice and other government agencies.
Previously inconceivable restrictions on other individual liberties, including the freedom of assembly. Vaccine mandates, mask mandates, bans on church congregations meeting in persons, even going out alone in Nature areas like parks and beaches was forbidden.3
The mainstream media and big social media platforms going full Big Brother and pumping out the official narrative du jour (government gaslighting of the populace) like government airplanes spraying ‘persistent contrails’ of aluminum, barium, strontium and coal fly ash that fill the sky and block out the sun.
You might recall the moment the Covid hysteria suddenly stopped and was immediately replaced by a wave of white supremacy/anti-racism/white fragility narratives. Which just as suddenly morphed into the “I stand with Ukraine” phase. Soon, it wasn’t enough to fly the Ukraine flag in your social media bio; everyone had to have pronouns, too.
By 2024 we had definitely reached the time prophesied by former CIA Director William Casey in 1981: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
That all of this government gaslighting — and the resulting destruction wreaked on people’s health, happiness, and ability to keep a roof over our heads and feed our families — was so painfully obvious speaks to the ‘healing crisis’ brought on by the Pluto Return. Pluto is ruthless in confronting us with the soul-sickness that has been eating away at us, urging us to find the courage required to face the hidden fear and shame in the soul and thereby begin reclaiming our innate soul power.
And — the gaslighting, censorship, mob mentality, mind control, mass poisoning, and demoralization of the populace began long ago. The effect of the U.S. Pluto Return is to drag the hidden programs of money laundering, theft, fraud, and state-sponsored terrorism funded by your life energy and labor out into the light.
Demoralization of the nation
In a fascinating 1984 interview, Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB newsman who defected to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, talked about the campaign of ideological subversion being waged on the USA. “The United States is in the state of war — undeclared, total war — against the basic principles and the foundations of [the American] system.”
Bezmenov describes this campaign as “a great brainwashing process” designed to take place over a long period of time (2-3 generations). This process is divided into four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. If you haven’t seen it before, I encourage you to watch the 13-minute excerpt from the full interview posted above. Bezmenov predicted 40 years ago so much of what we have seen highlighted during the first four years of the U.S. Pluto Return period.
Bezmenov describes the goal of the ideological subversion campaign as being: “To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.”
Wow. Does that sound familiar?
Bezmenov takes pains to underline that the power behind this ideological subversion campaign that has been going on in America since at least the 1960s is not Soviet Russia but “the world communist system or world communist conspiracy" — i.e. the world ruling class whose front operations are no longer the USSR but globalist organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the shadowy networks of taxpayer-funded NGOs that the current administration is bringing to public attention and whose funding (we hope) is being stripped away.
Understanding the reality of this campaign of ideological subversion and the resultant demoralization of the populace helps us make sense of the absurd fealty to official lies and rejection of unpopular truths evidenced by so many of our compatriots since 2020. It can also help us find compassion for them, even as we turn back toward the eternal truths encoded in Natural Law and set about building the new world we desire. We have all been demoralized to some extent or another. We hope that our friends, families and colleagues will find their way out of their echo chambers. And we can see that so much of the fear and toxic shame that enabled the evils of the last four years is not authentic to the individual, but implanted or even inherited.
In 2005 I wrote a tiny book about healing the soul-sickness of America. It was called A New Dream. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on FEAR:
“Most of us are secretly, terribly afraid. We feel ashamed of being so frightened, so we don’t often admit it (not even to ourselves). But we don’t need to feel guilty or ashamed. The Fear is not ours. The Fear doesn’t belong to us. The Fear is part of the Dream of the Planet, this collective illusion passed down by our parents (who received it from their parents, etc.).
The Fear is just a thing that has been implanted into us and is now systematically nurtured by massive marketing campaigns that include TV, radio, print media, “the news” and public opinion (people parroting back to you beliefs and ideas received from the Fear-based marketing campaigns.)”
Yes, we have been complicit in filling our subconscious minds with fear. We are the ones who have been reading the news, watching TV, and scrolling on Facebook and Instagram. But we have just been behaving as we were programmed to behave. There is hope here for the future, I believe. Our national Pluto Return has showed us the monsters hiding in the collective psyche and many of us have used the resulting shock and horror to turn away from official lies and to find a way to remoralize ourselves. While it appears that a substantial chunk of the population is too far gone to return to truth, it doesn’t take everyone in the world to get it. It only requires a small percentage of living souls to stand up and be counted.
In conclusion
It will be interesting to see what comes in the last nine months of 2025, as we move past the most intense period of the USA’s first-ever Pluto return. A majority of Americans are clearly sick of the status quo. We are tired of being poisoned, tired of our money being taken from us and sent to other countries, tired of having to choose between buying good quality groceries or getting new shoes or fixing the car. We are tired of being told to “trust the science” when we can see with our own eyes that “the science” is killing and maiming our loved ones. We are tired of being told that we have to hate and fear people with different color skin than ours. We are tired of being labeled “Putin apologists” because we don’t want to help the corrupt Ukraine government installed by the U.S. State Department in 2014 to bring about World War III.
We are tired of being gaslit as “climate deniers” because we point out that the same people who are destroying the climate are profiting from the climate change narrative. We are tired of watching government-sponsored weather warfare destroy communities in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina while our government sends billions more dollars to Ukraine and puts illegal immigrants up in five-star hotels in New York City. We’re tired of living under grotesque chemtrail skies and we’re tired of being microwaved by the NEXRAD and 5G towers. We’re tired of being told we can’t say what we see and derided as conspiracy theorists who will be demonetized, deplatformed, and shamed and bullied into silence if we keep refusing to accept the official misinformation as the truth.
I don’t know if RFK, Jr. will keep his promises to bring real science back to the nation’s health agencies. I don’t trust RFK. He’s way too into vaccines for my taste. And he’s a freaking Kennedy. But at least we’ve got someone heading up public health who acknowledges the leviathan in the room. We have a famous politician who says he wants to return our public health departments to a gold standard of science, e.g. actually forcing new medications and “vaccines” to undergo the years-long safety trials and studies that are needed to determine what adverse effects they might have on people down the road. We have an HHS director who actually seems to care about our children and their well-being. Who wants to get glyphosate out of our fields and cancer-causing additives out of our food and who has promised to end the chemtrail programs that are poisoning our skies, our land, and our plant and animal friends.
I don’t trust Trump or Elon Musk, either. But for the first time in my life, I see people in major power positions in the U.S. government who are saying the right things, who are honoring the vision of our founding fathers, and who are actually following through on the promises they made on the campaign trail.
How can you not be heartened by that?
Hoping in a better future is not enough, of course. The power of change must come from us as individuals and as a collective.
The USA’s Pluto Return showed us how demoralized we have become. It showed us how close we were to descending into a living hell of total control, total surveillance, and total slavery. And it also spurred millions of us to question the official narratives and inform ourselves about not only how we got to that precipice but how can we go about reclaiming our power and creating a world of peace, beauty and abundance.
Do we desire this new dream enough to make it so?
It’s axiomatic in astrology that the further out from the Sun a planet’s orbit takes it, the less human or (more transpersonal) is the planet’s archetypal signature. We can personify Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. Even Saturn retains some personified attributes — the old man, the judge, the hard boss. But Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are sensed more as energies than human-like figures. And as the farthest of the traditional modern planets from the Sun, Pluto is perhaps the most transpersonal and inscrutable of all.
Never forget that the controllers/dark occultists know way more about astrology than most of the rest of us. Their destructive interventions into human affairs are always timed to the astrology they believe will be most favorable to achieving their objectives.
Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly being two of the safeguards of the republic and of the people that the founding fathers unanimously agreed must be protected.