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Speaking Out in the Aftermath of Wednesday
Sun., Jan. 10. 2021 7:51pm EST
J. Jackson from ApologetiX here again.
People keep asking me to talk about what happened in Washington DC last Wednesday, January 6, since I was there along with my wife, Lisa, and ApX guitarist Tom Milnes and his wife, Barb.
Tom felt God was leading him to release a brief video message in which he relates his experiences and observations. You can watch that at:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOVSEpKa0mmfWlyQgAJqMaYBN4GpWZSXj9UupbfbC34Q57aHO9nrHfcn9lpdaVWHA?key=SU5EQ2F6dTJWMFQzQ0U2eXJMQTBpdlBwX0syZkNn
Tom has also urged me to tell my story. Frankly, I was not eager to do so, because I am so heartbroken over Wednesday's experience, and I know that I'll get flak from people who've already heard the mainstream news' narrative.
But I feel it would be a cowardly act on my part to not say anything, so here I am. I did send an email about my experience to some close friends and band members, and ApX alumni keyboardist Chris VonBartheld texted me the following in response:
"I was praying on it, and you have to share your testimony/experience from the rally. Your respected voice is making a difference in your circle. It doesn't matter the cost or the fight, some fights need to be fought."
I know he's right. As if I needed any more confirmation, I've watched in the past few days as Twitter not only banned President Trump permanently (despite his 88.5 million followers on Twitter) but has been systematically suspending the accounts of most conservative voices on Twitter. It's absolutely shocking.
It reminds me of a quote uttered by Thomas Jefferson to James Madison about Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton: "I know ya hate him, but let's hear what he has to say." It also reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. Speaking of Orwell, here's a quote from him: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Many of us have been expecting this day would come eventually, and so a lot of conservatives had already begun migrating to Parler, a free-speech-alternative site. However, there are movements afoot in big tech companies like Apple and Amazon to ban Parler from their platforms unless Parler complies with similar censorship policies.
YouTube, which already had begun systematically eliminating anything that mentioned allegations of voter fraud, has grown increasingly worse and a couple days ago banned The War Room: Pandemic with Stephen K. Bannon. Many other conservatives are expecting to be banned.
Folks, if all this doesn't scare you, it should. In the next article, I'll tell you what I saw and heard while I was in DC on Wednesday, but first let me say this:
I have heard a number of people compare what happened Wednesday to the infamous Reichstag fire in 1933. I'm familiar with it, because I read about it several years ago in the famous book The Rise and Fall of Third Reich, published by William L. Shirer in 1960. I don't always trust Wikipedia these days, but they did an OK job summing it up here:
"The Reichstag fire (German: Reichstagsbrand) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit, and it attributed the fire to communist agitators. A German court decided later that year that Van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he had claimed. The day after the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany."
If I recall correctly from Shirer's book, a number of people believe the Nazis were actually the ones responsible or at least the ones who instigated and/or encouraged it.
History repeats itself. Let's pray that God will stop it from repeating any further.
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