February 23, 2023
A Great Awakening Decades in the Making
By J.B. Shurk
Over at The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has again managed to generate a treasure trove of anecdotal history, evidence, and analysis from those who visit his site.
Last month, he asked readers: if "[y]ou did not take the COVID-19 shot, why not?" The thousands of personal responses were illuminating and created a kind of timeline showing how irreconcilable conflicts pitting available scientific knowledge and common sense against the government's own actions, orders, statements, and censorship heightened public distrust of COVID mandates and "vaccines," until various tipping points spilled over into outright rejection of political, medical, and media authorities.
This month, Sundance asks a more foundational question: "When did you start really paying attention?" In other words, when did you "recognize that things around you, things you perhaps didn't pay attention to before, were not what you thought they were"? What was the moment when "your political awakening began"?
The thousands of responses to this simple question are a cornucopia of rich history, personal reflection, and insightful analysis. Just as last month's COVID question created a powerful timeline documenting the last three years of COVID-1984 insanity, this month's more general question has generated nothing less than a near-century's worth of details and stories tracking people's "aha moments" as they discovered that the promises of American self-government are often but an ornamental fabrication plastered upon the stratagems of ruthless government actors pushing propaganda, accumulating power, and sacrificing American lives. Interestingly, they come from people traversing back and forth across the political spectrum. From a research point of view, the collected information is staggeringly comprehensive, impressive, and invaluable. From a personal point of view, the selfless entries and recorded memories are emotional, poignant, cathartic, and often deeply revealing. I encourage you not only to read through some of the many responses, but also to continue the conversation here at American Thinker, whose commenters, like those at The Treehouse, are well known for their crisp intellectual engagement.
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.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/a_great_awakening_decades_in_the_making.html
