Sundance asks, JB Shurk answers.

A Great Awakening Decades in the Making
What you will find is a compendium stretching all the way from before the Second World War to the present day, in which ordinary people describe jarring, face-to-face experiences with institutional corruption, malice, cover-ups, cognitively dissonant government propaganda, intimidation, sanctioned lies, and public betrayals. Some of those experiences are well known events: the perplexing details surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of President Kennedy, followed directly by Jack Ruby’s unbelievable live on-air assassination of Oswald; the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War; the FBI’s massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco; the mysterious disappearance of the FBI’s John Doe No. 2 after the Oklahoma City bombing; the explosion of TWA Flight 800; the FBI’s and CIA’s failures leading to 9/11; the use of predominantly Saudi hijackers to justify wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq; the PATRIOT Act; Obama and Holder’s redirection of the PATRIOT Act into a political weapon for targeting American civilians; the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack; IRS, DOJ, and FBI harassment of conservatives; the conspiracy among Obama’s FBI, Hillary’s presidential campaign, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a morally corrupt media to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy; statistically inexplicable vote totals after the introduction of security-free and fraud-prone mail-in-ballot elections; COVID-1984; the persecution of J6 prisoners; and dozens of events in between. These high-profile matters prompted people to question government “narratives” with much more scrutiny.

Alongside such historical nodes are numerous personal experiences in which normal Americans observed members of the U.S. government engaging in unethical, immoral, and at times criminal activities that shocked the formerly oblivious from their states of relative complacency. Some were military brats stationed all over the world who saw events as they were and not as they were reported. Many witnessed firsthand how news media distorted events right outside their doors. Others watched as federal authorities got away with outrageous lies. Most encountered some form of government corruption that was unmistakable yet covered up to this day.

Truly, this has always been the most disheartening aspect of our current reality — that Americans who have given their all to their nation and would do so yet again are the very people targeted today as “extremists,” “terrorists,” spreaders of “disinformation,” and purveyors of “hate.”  Well, they are none of those things. They are truth-tellers, honest historians, keepers of liberty’s flame, righteous warriors, and the generational glue still somehow preventing society from breaking in two. When a nation not only turns its back on those most critical for its survival but also denigrates their service, commitment, opinions, and personal loss as somehow contemptible and undeserving of respect, that nation will not endure many more days. Read the responses to Sundance’s question, and you get a prophetically penetrating glimpse into any future answer should the depressing question one day be asked: why did America fall? Should America disappear from the map, it will be because decades of government corruption and abuse were never addressed until it was simply too late.

In fact, this growing collection of personal accounts from ordinary Americans, in which they take to task not only the inherent failings of any system of government, but also the specific train of abuses and usurpations choking too many Americans under the yoke of petty despotism, should be regarded as one of two things: a stark warning that decades of government lies and betrayals must rapidly come to an end, or as an autopsy report preserved in time capsule form for future generations to one day study and comprehend. Either more and more Americans will use forums such as these to stomp out the cancer before it finally takes the host, or the blessings of liberty will skip over several generations, until a time when those of principle and resolve rise to clear a space of Earth free from the evils of State tyranny once again.

Do not let the stories of so many thousands of passionate, patriotic Americans be this country’s swan song, when they can just as easily be the accelerant spread across the land waiting for a divine spark. Do not assume that evil and pain presage more of the same, when they can just as effectively open up minds and hearts to the coming of a better age. People who find the courage to exercise “free will” will free themselves.

It is crystal-clear that more and more Americans (and Westerners generally) are awakening to the dispiriting reality that successive self-serving governments have turned our most cherished rights and freedoms on their head. This process, far from taking place overnight, has been many decades in the making. After so many generations have endured harms at the behest of Constitution-betraying bureaucrats and self-loving proto-tyrants, we are on the precipice of real change. It is a choice. It belongs to you. Do not be misled. Seize the day.

Indeed. As long as life remains, hope remains also. So howzabout another wild and rude punk-rock anthem from my misspent youth, you say? Why, I thought you’d never ask, sez I.

Okay, two of ’em then. No need to thank me, always happy to help my readers out like that.

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