Every so often there seems to be a test of the public’s will to check its obedience. As children in once meaningful classes in public school (when I was a kid), we were always taught how the Chinese, for example, could change collective policy overnight because the population did as it was told. That’s why it accepted the "one-child-per-family" rule almost overnight and by edict. This despite the fact that the Chinese people love children to an extreme. This is the sort of fealty you can expect from a vassal state. And it works. The Chinese people do as they are told.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul Schimpf has mostly followed Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment and avoided speaking ill of his Republican opponents. Until now. When a relative unknown named Jesse Sullivan jumped into the race earlier this month with a nearly $11 million out-of-state-funded campaign war-chest, state Senator Darren Bailey and businessperson Gary Rabine both called him a member of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley “élite” because that’s where his business was located and where much of his campaign money came from.

We have a real innovator, fearless journalist, and talented filmmaker now living and producing content right here in the Quad Cities. His documentary films have been watched by tens of millions of people worldwide. He has over one hundred thousand followers on multiple social-media and content platforms. He's been interviewed by the New York Times, Vanity Fair and Esquire magazines. I'm talking about Jason Bermas, who is featured on the cover of this September edition. In light of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 travesty and the subsequent accelerated plunge America took into a police state, we would be remiss if we did not re-visit one of the creators of Loose Change and Fabled Enemies, the 9/11 documentary films first released from 2005 through 2009.

Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.” Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. For trying to give the public information which will help them form a truth-based worldview so that they can make intelligent informed decisions about where they want to collectively steer society together.