Restore

American Dreams in the Desert

Jon Herold, Kate Buckley, Chris Paul, Just Human and Burning Bright speak in Chandler, Arizona

The Great American Restoration Tour.

I’ll admit it: when I first read/heard the name for the first ever Badlands Media conference, I was mildly confused. For starters, I had thought it would have ‘Badlands’ branding in the title. Secondly, the entire Badlands team had been tossing prospective names back and forth for weeks before Jon Herold and Kate Buckley came out with the final reveal.

While I liked the name, something about it didn’t quite click with me right away, and I saw some of that reflected in the audience of our shows, commentary and writing, both within the Badlands Media network and on each of our individual platforms outside of that growing and increasingly-unified collective of anti-collectivists.

Of course, I saw almost zero negativity from this audience, from this community—hell, from what’s earnestly, unironically turning into a family—but there were some subconscious psychological tells to me that the branding of the ‘Great American Restoration’ wasn’t quite clicking with folks, many of whom—most of whom—were continuously referring to what will ostensibly become a nationwide tour using ‘Badlands’ terminology. On the one hand, this was evidence to me that Badlands is and has quickly become something that is far greater than the sum of its constituent parts. On the other hand, I wondered if there had been a missed opportunity to give our first event a more congruent, parallel psychological and emotional imprint that the audience—and that we—could map between the parent network and the coming slate of events.

This branding grew on me as the event neared, and as my nerves at speaking in front of an in-person audience as Burning Bright, and not under my birth name, closed in around me like a wall of anxious spears.

That said, I’ll admit that I chalked that growing confidence in the ‘Restoration’ terminology up to increasing familiarity and repetition, both as we promoted the event on the various shows and podcasts on Badlands Media to you folks, and as we referenced our plans for it and our goals for the experience behind the scenes.

Long preamble short, after returning home from the desert to the foggy, mist-laden coasts of New England, and now having had a full week to marinate on what was in Chandler, Arizona, and on what could be in the future, I will say with full confidence and pride that the ‘Great American Restoration Tour’ was, is and will be exactly what the name implies.

Of course, looking at such a lofty claim, one might think that us folks at Badlands are setting out to put the problems of the world on our shoulders, to save the country, and to save all of you. Not only is such a reading or projection representative of the height of arrogance, but it also misrepresents the many turnings of the word, ‘Restoration,’ which is the inspiration for this retrospective today.

What is this war about?

It’s one with many names. From the Information War to the Mind War, the Strange War to the Forever War, and even to the Last War—one of my favorite recent interpretations of the ongoing conflict between the forces of collectivist globalism and sovereignty the world over—it can not only be confusing and disorienting for writers, readers and thinkers in this community to pick one of the myriad kaleidoscopic, chaotic battlefields on which to fight in recent years, but it can also be demoralizing and defeating when considering the sheer scope, scale and end goal of both our side and [theirs] on the Game Theory Game Board.

In short—and I don’t mean this to be reductive or dramatic in any way—what we are trying to do in this community through the constant attempt to expose enemy propaganda and water awakening minds with the seeds of truth-seeking, is to save the world. To save our world. And what the enemy wants is to keep us enslaved, to stamp out all opposition to their subversive, creation-eschewing and humanity-dominating ideology.

That is what we’re up against, and that is the charge each of us in this community has taken on, whether we’ve been consciously aware of it or not.

Thus, the Great American Restoration Tour is not the answer to a question. We’re not going to save the nation because we’re renting out venues and speaking in front of you folks, interacting with you and passing ideas and encouragement back and forth. The Great American Restoration Tour isn’t an answer—it’s a question. An open-ended one and a necessary one. One whose answer might lie in the question itself.

How do we restore this land to the image—to the dream—our forebears had for this God-blessed and granted Constitutional Republic? We do so by reminding ourselves, and by reminding each other what this land once was, what it could be, and what the powers that would be have attempted to turn it into in its stead.

You see, when we first landed in Chandler, I was nervous. So nervous, in fact that my wife, the glowing and more beautiful with each passing day Mrs. Bright (see how I build up brownie points in the Bright household?) got a real kick out of it. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think she actually enjoyed seeing a man usually brimming with (over)confidence in his ideas, presentation and overall demeanor overcome with nerves, self doubt and even a bit of social anxiety.

While I was sometimes annoyed at the amusement Mrs. Bright displayed at my nervous, twitchy countenance heading into my first-ever public speaking event, that amusement covered an underlying ocean of confidence she had—has—in me to deliver something to this audience that even I am not entirely sure I can or will every time I sit down to pen new thoughts, to give form to the swirling, chaotic and sometimes-overwhelming ether of half-formed ideas, concepts and projections warring like a storm within a mind I have difficulty quieting for any significant length of time.

As for what it is that I provide to this audience reading these words, and to the smaller, but more corporeal audience I met in Chandler, Arizona, it would probably be distilled better by each of you. But from where I’m sitting, I seem to project—knowingly or not—hope, reasoned and resolute.

That’s what I took out of meeting so many of you wonderful patriots in the desert. While it was strange for me—even disconcerting, at first—to be approached for photos, a few autographs and most commonly and importantly, stimulating conversation, when I reframed this attention as being indicative of a shared building, a shared psychological and even spiritual formation this community is building together, I left the desert not feeling like I was MORE important than I had been before going, but rather that I was LESS … in the best way possible.

While that may seem strange, I think that a feedback loop began to develop between the Badlands speakers and the audience who attended the event live. Whether they were watching us riff back and forth on stage covering topics ranging from a Blackpill Antidote to Sports in American Culture, or whether they caught us at the hotel bar in the wee hours of the morning—admittedly, this happened on more than one occasion, which is probably a small part of why I’m still tired seven days later—exchanges that first took on the air of attendees meeting folks they considered somehow ‘greater’ than them or at least more important when it comes to the ongoing war we’re fighting against the powers that would be, these exchanges got more familiar and more familial as the weekend went on, forming a scintillating, calming and reinforcing feedback loop between us and them—us and you.

This feedback loop helped to solidify a paradigm and a foundation—that we’re all in this fight together, and that, while some of us might be more geared, wired or served in writing, speaking and pushing the public Overton Window in the direction of truth, transparency and deliverance from the scourge that has blanketed these lands in a suffocating darkness for far too long, EACH and EVERY one of us plays a pivotal role in spreading the Great Awakening, and in spreading the Great American Restoration, in our own families, our own communities and our own constellations of hopeful humanity.

What the Great American Restoration Tour—the first of many, I believe—did for me was to both humble me and encourage me, to bring me down in the most healthy way possible while simultaneously lifting me up, and giving me the confidence to keep pushing, to keep writing, to keep speaking on the things I feel called to push, write and speak about, because the act of doing so, even when I’m not entirely sure of the direction my thoughts might take, is making a difference. A difference to one of you. A difference to all of you.

And all of you are making a difference to me.

This was rendered more clear to me than it has been in all the months before when a chance encounter with an attendee in Chandler resonated with me long after. Mrs. Bright and I had been on our way to our next engagement—our next responsibility—at this event, when a conversation with a sweet married couple concerning The Lord of the Rings (of course,) delayed us and redirected us. We spoke for a little while, a bit longer than we had intended, perhaps, and decided to circumvent the main hallway to get to our next rendezvous.

This brought us outside, through a low-trafficked parking lot, and as we were passing through the archway and heading back toward the doors that would lead us into the hall outside of the event room, where another group of Badlands Speakers were holding a panel, a man almost collided with us as he rushed from the doors and toward the parking lot.

What could have been left to a brief nod—a good morning—and perhaps a note of familiarity, given that I had seen him the day before, stretched into a slightly longer moment in time, as the man paused behind us. I turned, and saw that he had tears in his eyes, and I asked him what was wrong. He told me that he was going through a brutal divorce, and that the current panel—one in which Herold and Buckley were discussing the origins of a relationship we’ve seen blossom before our eyes, itself having spun out of both the hope and the trauma of the Great Awakening—had struck him deeply, and caused him to lose control of his emotions, as he had been overcome with the fresh pain of his own personal journey, and the dissolution of his marriage. And so, he was going to leave.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this man whose name I do not know did leave, but not before we were able to connect. I asked him if he’d be returning for the rest of the panels once he’d collected himself, and he said, ‘No.’ I told him it was a pleasure meeting him, even if I had forgotten his name, and he told me that I was his favorite Badlander, and that he was glad to have met me. I approached him and embraced him, briefly, and said I hoped to see him again, and said goodbye, as he smiled through tears.

This exchange lasted for less than a minute, but Mrs. Bright brought it up later on, using it as an example of both the pain so many of us have felt as our worlds have been rearranged, as we have been made to feel alone, helpless, even crazy, and sometimes by those purporting to love us the most. But she also used it to seed a bit of hope, and wondered aloud if that chance meeting—that delay that led to it—had perhaps planted a bit of hope within that man. Of course, I liked to think it had, but he had been overcome with pain, and so, it was difficult to imagine it had much of an effect on him. After all, I’m just some guy in my own mind.

And then, on Wednesday night’s edition of the Power Hour, a Rumble Rant came through addressed to me, specifically. The message was sent by an account called, ekimnavillus, and it said “BB … just wanted to let you know you really helped a friend of mine at GART. He’s going through a divorce and you guys made his weekend with your kind words (and bro hugs.)”

The commenter then proceeded to insult me by calling me gay … which I’ll forgive, since it was pretty funny, and since the message was getting a bit sappy for a live show with a lot of energy, but this comment closed a perfect feedback loop from one small moment at this event, and one that I will cherish as I move forward through the many doubts and their supplanting hopes as this war continues.

In the end, all each of us can do is to attempt to make a difference. All each of us can do is light a torch of our own minds and souls in the encroaching darkness, to be a ward against that all-encompassing night, and to strike fresh tinder to light those torches around us, until the few become the many, and the many become a contradictory and cooperative one. Sovereign hearts and sovereign minds pushing individually with all of their might in the same direction. Not collectivists, but humanists. Not heroes of the new sun. But soldiers of the light each of us was born with, that each of us must rediscover, and that each of us must carry over the gray horizon to light the sun we’ll find—that we’ll ignite—on the other side.

I am tired. I am exhausted. I am tired and exhausted of writing that I’m tired and exhausted.

And yet, the many contradictions and ironies that have spun out of my experiences in the desert with you bright and shining minds—and more than a few members of the Bright Army—have infused me not just with an energy I will need to keep pushing forward, but the very hope that I have apparently instilled in many of them to do so with purpose in mind, and not just with the dream of victory, but the expectation of its inevitability. Its destiny, self-defined and self-fulfilling.

I have Information Anxiety. I have a racing mind. I feel pulled in many directions at once, caught between a full-time day job I still commit to due to the stability it provides to me and my family, and the growth and emergence of another life—another me—here at Burning Bright, whose trails seem to have only just begun in whatever new world we’re all building together.

Unplugging from the information cycle last week was both terrifying and exhilarating for me. Terrifying because I believed I might lose my way—that, in wandering off of the path I had been charting, even for just a week, I might lose it in the forests of the Mind War.

And yet, even if that is the case, I now know that I can always discover new paths in this war. And that, excepting that, I can cut new ones into the brush, secure in the knowledge that, wherever my ranging—intellectual, psychological, philosophical and spiritual—may lead me, I am charting a path someone else will stumble onto in the future. Someone lost and afraid in these dark woods. Someone reeling and spiraling, grasping for orientation, having lost the light and the navigation of the eternal stars overhead. And I can do so confident in the knowledge that there are other folks in the woods around me. Other minds with sharpened blades to cut back the creepers, other firm, callused hands and determined eyes who throw back the light of the torches they hold, warding off the beasts of our own minds—our fears made real in the far reaches of the night.

As a consequence of what we do in this community, a blend of looking backward to project the path ahead—of rediscovering the histories that have been hidden and suppressed from us so that we might learn from the mistakes of the past and forge a new future—we forget the present, and I am as guilty—more guilty—of this than most.

But we are in the present time. In the present moment. We exist in an endless now that has been informed by the ghosts of the memories that made us—even if they are false—and pulled by the fears, the hopes, the dreams and the nightmares of the future that compels the paths we chart, and the directions we take.

But the now is what we can control. The choice. The moment. Cutting the next vine. Fording the next stream. Climbing the gnarled roots over the next embankment. Accepting the challenge of the next beast brave enough—perhaps foolish enough—to challenge us in our sojourn.

During my favorite panel at the Great American Restoration Tour, Chris Paul, a growing influence on me—for better or worse—distilled my feelings on this age in American Awakening we’ve embarked on, knowingly or not, when he said in response to questions of what we might do if we ‘lose’ 2024 just like we ‘lost’ 2020, “We move forward. We keep moving forward.”

It was a simple statement, direct and blunt, and delivered with all the conviction Chris Paul’s statements tend to be delivered with.

And yet, it was one that struck me profoundly, and one that even an infamous, five-minute Burning Bright rant would not have been able to distill in that moment.

We are in an endless moment. An endless war. An endless struggle.

Whether that moment constitutes victory or defeat is up to each of us and all of us.

What happens if we win? We keep going.

What happens if we lose? We. Keep. Going.

Read those two statements—those two paradigms—back again, and you’ll understand why and how the latter folds in on and ultimately helps to define the former.

Winning is a process. Winning is a mindset. And it’s one we’d better get comfortable with, because the American Restoration is only just beginning, and the best is yet to come.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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