Did you feel that too?  Prior to the Snowden revelations, libertarians educated themselves and others on the crimes of the State in the normal humdrum fashion. The surveillance state, the banking system, the immoral wars; all of these assaults on liberty happening all around us. Yawwwwn. Some people would listen, some might even visit Mises.org and read an article or two, but for the most part, libertarians continued to have difficulty waking up the distracted, apathetic public. Despite our jumping up and down and pointing out the gun in the room,  the Empire seemed to be marching us merrily down the road to you know what..Then BOOM! We burst through some kind of propaganda membrane into another dimension of awareness. And this is only the 'tip of the iceberg.' Snowden's initial information dump has confirmed the fears of surveillance state critics and knocked the mainstream media down to the mat. Predictably, the media whores for the consolidated corporate-state power are demonizing Edward Snowden, scrambling to reassure the public that the NSA spying on everyone in the world is for their safety, and bracing for impact, because the 30 year old intelligence analyst isn't done yet.What effects have we seen from Snowden's selfless act of bravery?  As Paul Craig Roberts puts it:

The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets.

America's "sanctimonious mask" has been removed, and nations like China, Russia, and Ecuador aren't cooperating with the 'hypocrite of the century' President Barack Obama.Has Washington D.C. lost all credibility? Let us hope so. The predictable smear campaign against Snowden, Greenwald, and anyone else who questions this massive invasion of privacy around the world has outed mainstream pundits and "journalists" as boot-licking regime defenders.Has the mainstream media lost all credibility? Only 23% of mainstream propaganda news viewers trust the dinosaur media. Let us hope that their demonization of Snowden & Co. will continue to discredit them.What we are experiencing here is something I would call a Paradigm Shattering Event, or 'PSE'. To be sure, most of us had a hunch that our digital communications were being intercepted by the modern-day Gestapo. Freedom isn't free, after all, so we need a fascistic central plan to monitor all of our phone calls, texts, emails, and other online activities to keep us safe...right?Thanks to Edward Snowden, even the most hardened defenders of state interventions and those in denial have to wake up and smell the authoritarianism. Previous PSEs like Lincoln's War to Prevent Southern Secession, 9/11, and the predictable crisis of 2008 all had negative effects on the country to say the least.The Constitution was trashed by the mercantilist dictator when he invaded his own country. Levying war upon the states - the ONLY definition of treason - over protectionist tariffs gave birth to the all-powerful Leviathan state we have today. Whatever was left of the Constitution was ceremoniously burned after 9/11 by the Bush administration. And the 2008 financial crisis tossed free market principles in the trash for the benefit of the banking oligarchs, which will ultimately lead to another PSE: an 'unforeseen' economic crisis and the death of the dollar.But what of Snowden?In the long run, the information he has shared and the information he has yet to disseminate will be all to the good. If he wanted to hurt the US government, he could have easily done so. His privileged access as a System Administrator made him privy to information that could endanger intelligence agents around the world if he chose to share it with the US government's enemies.With this Paradigm Shattering Event, Edward Snowden has given defenders of liberty a much needed glimmer of hope and delivered a mighty blow to the establishment. Trust in government and its lapdog media is at all time lows. Interest in encrypted communications, including Bitcoin, will continue to grow. Dissent is brewing. What happens if and when Snowden reveals even more crimes of the State? Only time will tell.Christmas came early this year thanks to a dissatisfied Obama voter turned Ron Paulian and a real journalist by the name of Glenn Greenwald. People will be looking for answers and explanations now that their worldview has been tweaked a bit. The void is there, and the message of liberty is waiting to fill it.Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!