Do you remember the 1966 film The Sand Pebbles? In the closing scene, sailor Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is killed by two rifle shots fired by soldiers during the Chinese Nationalist Northern Expedition. The two shots are a few seconds apart. After receiving the shock of the first bullet, the disoriented and moribund Holman mutters, “What happened?” Then, realizing his life is rapidly ebbing away, he shouts to the universe, “What the hell happened?!” With these words comes the crack of the second shot.

Many of us are asking that same question as the full panoply of woke hoaxes comes more and more to dominate our life.

What happened? In a single word, the answer to the question “What happened” is “Hijacked.” The government we inherited from the American Founders has been hijacked and turned against us.

George Washington characterized America as “an experiment in ordered liberty.” The experiment promotes liberty, but liberty requires order. Every society has a criminal element. Supplying the order sufficient to suppress this criminal element calls forth the police power of the state. To fulfill its purpose, this police power must be considerable. Washington accurately described this power when he stated, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

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Mindful of this reality, the American Founders created a governmental form that they believed would yield the maximum political liberty consistent with sufficient order to render a free state sustainable.

This further illuminates the meaning John Adams intended in his well-known “morals” dictum; to wit, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In contemplating this dictum, bear in mind that, for the American state, the “people” are the governors as well as the governed. It is “people” who administer the government. People are policy.

Hence the police power of the state must not be allowed to fall into the hands of people who are enemies of the republic. However, that is exactly what has happened to the USA today. The state, along with its police power, has been hijacked by enemies of the republic.

Today we have an enormous cloud of enemies of the republic, including the US Federal Government, about half of the state governments, major corporations (Disney, Target, Budweiser, Ben & Jerry, Hollywood, Maybelline, etc., etc.), public education, the United Nations, and the WEF, inter alia, all pushing onto the U.S. population the full delusion of the woke hoaxes, from global warming to transgenderism.

This cloud of enemies of the republic employs the police power of the state to repress the political liberty of the citizens rather than to protect the citizens from the criminals.

What has hastened this situation is that the church is no longer a bulwark for liberty. Indeed, often it operates as an enemy of the republic.

Joseph Farah has remarked, “More and more, it’s a lawless time in America. It’s as if people never heard of God’s Ten Commandments.” Writing at American Thinker, Richard Chiero pointed out that churches themselves have turned away from Judeo-Christian values and principles.

How right they are! Consider how, week after week, we hear from the pulpit that Christians are not under law and that salvation is a function of mere belief, not moral conduct, notwithstanding the express revelation in Psalm 15 that salvation requires holiness.

Consequently, as one of the George Bushes so eloquently put it: “We are in deep do-do!” What was initially only surreal has become real. Virtually all institutions of our society have become woke. No one is riding to our rescue. We are on our own. If anyone is going to rescue us, it must be us. Per the line of the 1985 film Goonies, “This is our time.”

In the American understanding, revolution is not illegal. To the contrary, revolution may be obligatory. Consult the sentence in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which reads, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” (Emphasis added).

It is important to understand here that the term “revolution” need not denote violence or lawlessness. The term denotes a change in the locus of political power. A rebellion is a breach of the law, but a revolution is not per se a rebellion. Acting to restore the Republic to law is not a rebellion.

Here are a few examples of non-violent revolutionary actions that citizens can effectively take in pursuit of the restoration of law:

1. Extract children from public schools and either home-school them or send them to non-leftist private schools.

2. Teach children the truth about God, God’s moral law, and sin.

3. Teach children the truth about sex and the requirement of righteous sexuality for civilization.

4. Teach children about the value of family.

5. Start each day praying with the children to thank God for ELLP: Existence, Life, Liberty, Property.

6. Hire math and English tutors for the children.

In accordance with this line of thinking, you can establish your own legal, non-violent revolutionary acts.

Going forward from here, it might be instructive to note how swiftly wokism took over. As a metric of this rapidity, consider that Washington state, a screaming blue state today, became such only recently.

A mere thirty-six years ago, in 1977, the Washington Supreme Court upheld the Tacoma School District’s 1972 decision to fire a teacher for “immorality” because the teacher was a homosexual. In reaching its decision, the court cited the Catholic Encyclopedia in support of the court’s conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. The court rejected the teacher’s defense that Washington State had decriminalized homosexuality in 1976. The court ruled that, although homosexuality was no longer a crime in Washington state, it was nevertheless still immoral.

Fast forward 36 years and two public schools in Seattle are offering students dangerous hormones to alter their secondary sexual characteristics and doing so without parental consent.

As Rev. MLK once remarked, paraphrasing C.S. Lewis, sometimes, to move forward, we have to go back.