I'm an older person who's been awake for decades, and have known few people like me IRW

Same. Ruby Ridge and Waco were enough to wake me out of my youthful slumber.

To my friends at university, I was the crazy conspiracy theorist who believed the government was pushing Y2K fear hoping to trigger some crazies so they'd have an excuse to take away our constitutional rights.

I'm probably one of the few Americans who read Joe Biden's Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 and sounded the alarm. This legislation narrowly failed but the Patriot Act is mostly a carbon copy.

With 9/11, they finally had the excuse to push it on an unsuspecting public.