“We live in Biblical times” said messianic rabbi Jonathon Cahn on the Eric Metaxas Show. Literally, he says, we’re replaying parts of the book of Kings with biblical figures or "types" foreshadowing Trump, Pence, and Hillary. No matter the validity of that, there are sure a lot of poets and prophets seeing through the glass dimly but seeing nevertheless that this is unsustainable, the center will not hold. Only the Spock-like rationalists fail to scent the spiritual and potentially kinetic warfare.
But I think of how different this Cahn fellow is from a local pastor named John, who avoids political issues like the plague and praises the ordinary, saying how we don’t recognize the preciousness of the ordinary.
One can see the truth in these very disparate points of view. They both feel prophetic, to be honest. One sees our time as extraordinary and one of crisis. The other sees our time as one where shiny objects consume us to the detriment of realizing what’s really important.
Who is right?
Perhaps both in that crisis itself IS ordinary. Elites oppress, it’s what they do. This was brought home rather well - and mirrors my own recent evolution - by Spencer Klavan:
[This man] had no power, no advocate, just pain. Somehow, this astonished me. ‘My God, I thought, this guy is getting crushed and the people doing it don’t care. How can this be?’
But of course it has been, over and over. It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Hear the words of the Prophet Micah, Chapter 3: “You leaders of Jacob, you rulers of Israel...you hate good and love evil; you tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones; you eat my people’s flesh, strip off their skin, and break their bones in pieces, chop them up like meat for the pan, like flesh for the pot.” It is a governing theme of Hebrew Scripture, verging on an obsession: the heart of man will glut itself on evil if given half the chance.
Long before Micah and Isaiah, when the Israelites asked for a king to rule over them, God told them how it would go: “He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.... He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.” That is what it would mean to “become like other nations,” to be ruled by men instead of God. That is the kind of king that men make.
These are ancient truths. People like me, people who read the great old books, are supposed to know them. But I suppose I had not internalized them, not really. I lived so much of my life under the comfortable illusion that power in this country is safely restrained by civic virtue. A lot of us did. We do not realize yet that this is just what people in power do if you let them.
They will continue to be this way, these kings and princes of our nation. They will do their best to spin the “Delta Variant” canard into more lockdowns. They will dare you to notice the irregularities in the New York City mayoral election. Eventually, they will call you a terrorist for doing so. I am not saying they will win all of these fights. But I am saying this is who they are.
The corrupt leaders, the heedless bureaucrats, the sneering media apparatchiks: they are your enemies. They are the oldest enemy any people ever had, and they are not going to be changed or made to see reason. They are going to lie, and cheat, and steal, and eat the flesh of the poor. That is what they are philosophically dedicated to doing. They are not interested in anything else.
And so they must simply be voted out, defied, and exposed. Do not trust them. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt. We are long past that. Now we have to defeat them and everything they stand for, in every state and locality where we can. And, God willing, we have to win.
In other words, the evil of our elites only seems extraordinary to me because I was under a similar “comfortable illusion.”
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To me, the reaction to Trump was worse than Trump himself. 2016 was not a Flight 93 election, but the reaction to that result - an attempted coup hatched by the our elites, the death of journalism, and a likely fraudulent election - has reluctantly delivered us Flight 93.
More shocking than whether there could be electronic machine fraud is that the subject - one literally raised by millions of Americans - was forbidden and closed off by almost all elites. That’s an incredible thing in itself. As is said often, if there’s no fraud then why is it verboten to talk about potential vulnerabilities of the voting system? To me the reaction to even the suggestion of fraud is in itself a trigger of great civil unrest.
I’m certainly not the least ways surprised by how malicious and injurious our spy agencies are. Nor am I surprised by a “justice” system run by and for the benefit of lawyers*.
But I am genuinely surprised by the remarkable diminution of patriotism outside a portion of the Right and how voting systems like Dominion and ES&S have became a protected class more crucial to a democracy than the people themselves.
Would that there was an alternative to electronic voting. Especially since voting systems tend toward increasing complexity and require exponentially increasing software updates while people get dumber and/or more negligent. That's a bad combination. I guess paper ballots are like the Latin Mass…widely used for ages and then suddenly discredited and banned.
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* - “They don’t send the lawyers to jail because we run the country. We are still members of a privileged class in this country. We make the laws, and when we do so we make them advantageous to the lawyers.” - from here.