The enabling tool of what we call “cancel culture” or “wokeness” is language.

People are put in categories to which names are assigned, and this supposedly captures who they are and what should be done with them politically.

Unfortunately, the whole business of racial identification and categorization is not about advancing the quality of the human condition and human dignity but about progressive politics.

The left puts people in racial categories as instruments toward their political agenda.

In 1977, the Federal Interagency Committee on Education produced a five-race classification for the American population: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White and Hispanic.

These categories, over time, continued to undergo changes and refinements.

The Hispanic category emerged in the 1970s, and the legislation described this group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” So, an American with roots in Spain and an American with roots in Peru wind up in the same category because their country of origin was Spanish-speaking.

Hispanic is neither race nor ethnicity. It is a category of political design, including individuals from 20-plus countries, with no commonality other than the language their grandparents spoke.

In the 2020 census, there are 19 different possibilities for self-categorization.

In both the white and Black categories, filers are now asked to respond to additional questions regarding their country of origin.

The strangest part of the emergence of this movement as a political force is that it constitutes everything that supposedly is undesirable that we want to eliminate. Racism.

Is it any less racism if I conclude who a person is and what they are about based on whether they are white or Black?

Yet, here we are with a good part of our nation mobilized, adopting the disease that we all thought we were trying to eliminate as its cure.

Last weekend, I came across a beautiful short video of the great Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, talking about knowledge.

Feynman began his legendary career working on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and finished as a member of the commission that investigated the cause of the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

The video starts with the headline “Names Don’t Constitute Knowledge.”

Feynman recalls walking through a park with his father and his father telling him the names of different birds in different languages. In the end, notes Feynman, you know what different people around the world call the same bird, but you know absolutely nothing about the bird.

Consider what Feynman tells us in his observation that “names don’t constitute knowledge.”

If we look in the Bible in the Book of Genesis, it says, “God had formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call each one; and whatever the man called each living creature, that remained its name. And the man assigned names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky.”

Man does not create reality. He just names it.

Politics is the opposite. Rather than naming a reality that precedes him, of which he is a part, the progressive political man pretends to create reality with his language and names.

America was founded to be a free nation under God. Our government was not designed to replace God, but to be subservient to God.

The so-called enlightened theory of wokeness will reduce America to a weak, balkanized country where everyone is at his neighbor’s throat, rather than unique individuals cooperating in unity to produce greatness.

Speech must be free — not politically canceled — and used in the pursuit of truth.

Star Parker

The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the next generation? Are they just fumbling along, trying to keep ahead of their wokist crazies? Or are they executing another of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans that will inevitably blow up in their faces?

Let’s look at Option One. The closest thing I have ever seen to a brilliant strategy is Bill Clinton’s 1992 “New Democrat” campaign: nobody here but us moderates. But HillaryCare proved that a lie, and so the voters gave us the first Republican Congress in 50 years. So “New Democrat” was just a tactic to win an election. Then there was the Emerging Democratic Majority from Judis and Teixeira in the early 2000s about the inevitable Democratic majority of the educated, the young, the women, and the minorities. How’s that coming along, dear Democrats, down on the border?

Of course, then there is Sundance’s Fourth Branch of Government theory, that ever since Obama, the U.S. has been ruled by the intelligence community that knows everything about us, and can send a Donald Trump to hell any time it wants. Maybe the lefties and the gumshoes think this is brilliant. I don’t. The whole point of politics is to have a safety valve to avoid civil war. So the whole place doesn’t blow up.

The Biden U-Turn on the COVID rent moratorium and the student loan relief extension and the continued unemployment bonuses suggest Option Two: trying to keep ahead of the peaceful protesters. If I were Mr. Big I would be saying to my aides that the longer these handouts continue the harder it will be to eliminate them. This is because the longer the checks go out the more people will adjust their lives around the monthly check and be really angry if it ever goes away.

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back to normal as soon as possible because I would be worried that all the handouts would distort the economy, and unleash inflation, asset bubbles, and recessions that would wreck my presidency. I would bark at my aides that despite the narrative, FDR really screwed the economy in the 1930s, and the Great Society programs set up the inflation of the 1970s, and the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was a prime reason why the voters have been turning to Republicans in recent years, and that the massive spending proposals of my administration were bound to cause economic and political trouble in the near future, certainly before 2024. That’s what I’d be thinking, for all that I’m no genius.

The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the next generation? Are they just fumbling along, trying to keep ahead of their wokist crazies? Or are they executing another of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans that will inevitably blow up in their faces?

Let’s look at Option One. The closest thing I have ever seen to a brilliant strategy is Bill Clinton’s 1992 “New Democrat” campaign: nobody here but us moderates. But HillaryCare proved that a lie, and so the voters gave us the first Republican Congress in 50 years. So “New Democrat” was just a tactic to win an election. Then there was the Emerging Democratic Majority from Judis and Teixeira in the early 2000s about the inevitable Democratic majority of the educated, the young, the women, and the minorities. How’s that coming along, dear Democrats, down on the border?

Of course, then there is Sundance’s Fourth Branch of Government theory, that ever since Obama, the U.S. has been ruled by the intelligence community that knows everything about us, and can send a Donald Trump to hell any time it wants. Maybe the lefties and the gumshoes think this is brilliant. I don’t. The whole point of politics is to have a safety valve to avoid civil war. So the whole place doesn’t blow up.

The Biden U-Turn on the COVID rent moratorium and the student loan relief extension and the continued unemployment bonuses suggest Option Two: trying to keep ahead of the peaceful protesters. If I were Mr. Big I would be saying to my aides that the longer these handouts continue the harder it will be to eliminate them. This is because the longer the checks go out the more people will adjust their lives around the monthly check and be really angry if it ever goes away.

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back to normal as soon as possible because I would be worried that all the handouts would distort the economy, and unleash inflation, asset bubbles, and recessions that would wreck my presidency. I would bark at my aides that despite the narrative, FDR really screwed the economy in the 1930s, and the Great Society programs set up the inflation of the 1970s, and the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was a prime reason why the voters have been turning to Republicans in recent years, and that the massive spending proposals of my administration were bound to cause economic and political trouble in the near future, certainly before 2024. That’s what I’d be thinking, for all that I’m no genius.

Then there is Option Three: Baldrick’s Cunning Plan that turns out to be not so cunning after all. How about this:

Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’”

Because if a lowly “magistrate” is doing this, then he is getting the word from on high. Imagine the outrage from high and low in our beloved ruling class if, back in the day, federal magistrate judges started sanctioning Democratic lawyers for pushing Hillary Clinton’s Russian Collusion fantasies. I mean, really! You guys want to go down that road, denying the courts to crazy Republicans? Surely, it would be much better to give them full rein to rummage around and come up with nothing and prove the regime narrative that there is nothing to see here.

And that is to say nothing of the Five Year Plan to get rid of Donald Trump. Earth to Ruling Class: Donald Trump was not an insult to the noblest ruling class that ever bent the arc of history towards justice. It was a message that you guys got trouble, right here in River City, if you keep trashing and humiliating and utterly ignoring the religious and cultural and political and economic needs of the ordinary middle class.

You guys would get the picture if you just thought for a moment about your sacred Ally narrative: that you are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. If you were real Critical Theorists you would at least try out a Critical Ally Theory: what if the Allies are really the most conceited and dumb-as-a-post ruling class in history; what if the Oppressed Peoples are just recent migrants to the city that haven’t yet built the skills to master life in the city, no thanks to the Allies; what if the White Oppressors are just the ordinary middle class that wants to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law? And how would you brilliant educated critical theorists know which witch is which?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

In The Great Fiction, author Hans-Hermann Hoppe starts where any discussion of government should begin, with the defining attributes of a state.

Why this approach?  Governments that populate the earth are all states, though there is no good reason they should be.

What are these attributes, exactly? The most salient feature of a state is its self-appointed monopoly powers.  If it declares it can’t be sued, it can’t be sued.  If it or its agents decide to tax its subjects, it will fleece them.  If it decides to go to war, it will unleash its war machine. If it decides to outlaw market-derived money, which has been gold and silver, and replace it with easily-inflatable fiat currency, everyone must begin accepting the state’s money in trade.  Any violation of these laws is subject to punishment, enforced by the state’s badge-carrying thugs.

Those who constitute the state apparatus are a minority in any society, and thus need to convince the rest of the population that their rule is necessary, just, and inevitable.  For this they engage intellectuals, who otherwise would be at the mercy of the market and would largely remain unemployed.  As Hoppe points out, not just some intellectuals but all of them.

Even intellectuals working in mathematics or the natural sciences, for instance, can obviously think for themselves and so become potentially dangerous. It is thus important that [the state secures] their loyalty.

Thus, during the 2020 presidential campaign we witnessed a major American popular science magazine, among others, endorsing the candidate for whom the state is foundational to his programs. 

In education as elsewhere, the state becomes a monopolist.  Importantly, education up to a certain level must be compulsory, to teach people to think as subjects of the state.

Have the intellectuals done their job?  Ask people if they think the institution of the state is necessary, and Hoppe believes 99% of them will say it is.  States have been around so long they seem part of nature, like trees and bees, or floods and earthquakes.  One of the great achievements of the statist intellectuals is never allowing the question of the necessity of the state “to come up for serious discussion.  The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.”

But if it is questioned, Hobbes and his “state of nature” argument apparently wins the day.  According to Thomas Hobbes, without a state life is permanent conflict.  As Hoppe writes,

Everyone claims a right to everything, and this will result in interminable war. There is no way out of this predicament by means of agreements; for who would enforce these agreements?

The only solution is the establishment of a third independent party, by agreement, to serve as “ultimate judge and enforcer,” what has been called a state.  But as Hoppe argues, there’s no way this arrangement can come about peacefully, because a prior state must exist to enforce it.

States are conquering parties that have imposed their will on its subjects.

If A and B now agree on something, their agreements are made binding by an external party [the state]. However, the state itself is not so bound by any outside enforcer. . .  The state is bound by nothing except its own self-accepted and enforced rules, i.e., the constraints that it imposes on itself. Vis-à-vis itself, so to speak, the state is still in a natural state of anarchy characterized by self-rule and enforcement, because there is no higher state, which could bind it.

State has the guns, market has the goods

As states grow their agents make deals with major market entities.  In today’s world it is quite easy for a state to purchase anything it wants.  With a monopoly money producer in its ranks, it can always borrow what it needs if there is insufficient tax loot available.  And as its debt grows no one cares, except a few Austrian economists.

Why would a nominally private firm deal with the state?  For legislative or other privileges, in addition to the revenue.  A firm that refuses to deal with the state runs the risk of penalties.  Under state rule, laws are made to be broken, and they’re broken every minute of the day.  As Jeff Thomas writes,

The level of governmental dominance now exists to such a degree that literally everyone is a criminal, whether they know it or not. It’s been estimated that the average American commits about three felonies per day, in addition to many lesser crimes. If, for any reason, the authorities wished to victimize you, they’d find their task quite simple.  (My emphasis)

A cozy and broadening relationship with formerly free-market entities develops, often under the heading of state capitalism.  The entrepreneurial spirit that created companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and others has been corrupted by state interference.

In our ongoing Covid environment, pharmaceutical firms, social platforms, and government agencies are working hand-in-hand.  How can a vaccine be granted an EUA if other safe and effective treatments are available?  If, for example, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are safe and effective, as well as cheap and plentiful, the vaccines get put on hold.  Therefore, not merely dis vaccine alternatives, but threaten and arrest those promoting their use.

Hoppe sums up his discussion of the state with a proposed riddle:

Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts between them. Someone then proposes, as a solution to this human problem, that he (or someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. Is this is a deal that you would accept? I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable. Yet this is precisely what all statists propose.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

 As we grow up, age and mature, we come to think that there are some that we can count on to call it straight.  We can count on umpires to be neutral arbitrators of the strike zone.  We thought we could rely on the Supreme Court to judge all laws, all ideas, all thoughts, all regulations, and all speech according to the U.S. Constitution.  We thought scientists would pursue the truth.

I don’t think we were being Pollyannaish, nor looking for rainbows, not ever acting as if we live in Mayberry.  But at a certain age, we came to expect and appreciate certain political bodies, certain government agencies, and specific non-profits to judge all and everything according to the Constitution and rule of law.  Even if we did not agree with them on a specific matter; we knew where they were coming from.  We thought they would always be pure in their motivation.  We thought they came at us straight and true.

But not anymore.  Over the last 5 years, and especially the last 18 months it has become clear that many of these people are just dirty political fronts.  They’re not noble, they’re not non-partisan, and they’re not nice… at all.  These groups that we had held in high esteem because we felt that they would always call it straight, regardless of the politics, have let America down.  They have destroyed Americans’ sense of fair play and neutrality. 

They are just as corrupt and bias as the politicians of whom we never trusted.  But we thought these guys would keep Washington, D.C on the straight road, out of the Mao ditch and Stalin embankment.  They failed, and thus our nation’s capital is now failing.  It is as if no one in DC goes by the U.S. Constitution anymore.  They openly ignore the written laws. They allow things they know are unconstitutional. Once they were held in high regard, maybe not revered, but they certainly had been grudgingly respected.  Not anymore.

The Military

The leadership of the United States military has become a huge disappointment, and are now probably acting outside the Constitution.  We had always been taught, and it always seemed, that the military leadership stayed out of politics.  They did not engage in partisan issues.  They remain under the Commander-In-Chief according to the Constitution.  But it has become very obvious from the first day President Trump was sworn in that  they worked behind the scenes to destroy him.  General Milley is much more interested in being “woke” to BLM and Antifa, than winning wars.  Milley himself apologized and said he was wrong when he condemned the BLM/Antifa attempted burning of the oldest church in Washington DC.

It appears leadership in the military would rather get the applause of the Washington Post and New York Times than the regard of their own men and women in uniform.  The military doesn’t guard our southern border from invasion, but then thinks it’s totally cool to allow themselves to be used to move illegal immigrants throughout the heartland in America General Milley, rather than reading books on 1619, might want to read books on the fall of the Roman Empire and maybe see if he thinks there’s a rational nexus of that time period to today.

ACLU

We had always thought the American Civil Liberties Union was liberal… but pure.  We had always believed they were on the Left side of the spectrum, but noble in their pursuits.  Not anymore.  It has become painfully clear that the ACLU is just another appendage of the Progressive Deep State.  All of the pure and noble values that the ACLU had pushed since 1945, after WW II, they are now ignoring.  The ACLU sits back quietly as books are banished; they do not speak up as publishers of conservative content are banned from social media and not a peep from them as journalists and members of the press are surveiled, spied on, and shadowed.  Charles Schultz (of Peanuts) is canceled, and the ACLU says nothing.  To Kill A Mockingbird is taken out of our schools, and the ACLU is mute.  Conservatives are shouted off of the stage in our universities and the ACLU looks away.  American citizens are being forced to take an experimental vaccine, and the ACLU is silent. 

Now the ACLU says the Second Amendment is… wait for this… racist.  The ACLU has not said one word as 1/6 trespassers are sitting in solitary confinement in DC jails for half a year.

Intelligence Agencies 

From the FBI, to the CIA, to the NSA, our intelligence agencies are no longer neutral.  They no longer adhere to the Constitution and federal law.  They are used by the Progressive Deep State to punish the political adversaries of the Deep State.  They operate outside the law and outside the Constitution.  From them spying on candidate Trump in 2015, to undermining President Trump for 4 years, our intelligence agencies are operating outside the Constitution.  Entrapment is illegal.  More and more the leadership looks like something out of 1930s Germany, 1950s Soviet Union, or China today.  They wiretap President Trump, they spy on Tucker Carlson, and the entrap General Flynn.  They send a dozen heavily armed men in the middle of the night to arrest Roger Stone.  FBI agents actually “took a knee” in allegiance to the BLM during last summer’s violent riots.  Today, our intelligence agencies make Joe McCarthy look like a civil libertarian.  They are dangerously corrupt, and this is extremely scary.

Supreme Court

Either the Supreme Court members are cowards, or they’re compromised or corrupt.  That is the only way to explain how the Supreme Court could have turned its back on election fraud and felonies before the November 2020 election, after the election, before the inauguration, and still today. They is no way of explaining what the Supreme Court is not doing, is not ruling, is not “being” the Supreme Court without using the words… cowards, corrupt, or compromised.  With all of the forensic audits going on in “Purple States’ that are showing election fraud did occur, and President Trump most likely won, the Supreme Court will eventually need to make “The Decision” regarding Election 2020.    The very real problem here is that about half of America no longer trusts and respects the Supreme Court.

CDC

Trust the Science.  Trust the Science.  Trust the Science.  No more, no more, no more.  It has become painfully clear that the CDC is no longer a purely medical institution, no longer above the fray, and no longer “just” scientists and doctors.  Apparently, some within the Center for Disease Control appear to either be woefully incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats that we can no longer trust,  no longer take at their words.  The corruption and/or incompetence of the CDC is on national display.  And now the CDC is “requesting” moms and dads who have been fully vaccinated, to now wear masks inside their own home around their own children!  Because of all of this, half of America is not listening anymore.  The CDC still refuses to say the China virus came from a military lab in Wuhan, China.  Why?

These 5 entities have shockingly let us down. We cannot give them a blank check of acquiescence anymore.   This is a pivotal and volatile time.  If we did not trust politicians, we thought we could trust them.  But no more, unfortunately. 

When cement columns and steel girders crumble; buildings go down.  When the Constitution is no longer followed by our leadership, the Democratic Republic goes down.  And now it begins to get dangerous and wobbly.  Citizens begin to take matters in their own hands.  Read your history books about other once-democratic countries; it happens again, and again, and again

It’s on these institutions to regain the trust of half of the American people.  It is on them.  And it needs to be very very soon

If you read about the fall of the Roman Empire, you find a lack of principle and a LOT of palace intrigue.

All the fighting about Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York illustrates that well.

The leftists know they have won the political war, and they’re winning the cultural war. America is being delivered not just to some horrific hybrid of National Socialist/fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Maoist as well as post-Maoist China; it is also changing as a culture, becoming a place where people wear masks and stand ready to do anything else the government or its media tell us to do. That includes even what to FEEL: when to be afraid, and when to be less afraid.

The people in control of our government and culture do not need Mario Cuomo. They know his policies will be implemented, forever, by whomever sits in his chair. But the media-sanctioned scandals over his evidently declining rule make for good theater. The media must have something to report. It still makes its money off companies whose allegiance now resides more with Communist-fascist China than with paying customers. It all makes perfect sense.

Once you understand that the Democratic Communists understand that it’s all over — that they have won — then you will be able to explain their behavior. Joe Biden acts as if there’s never going to be another challenge to any of his edicts. Obama didn’t quite act that way; but Joe Biden does. Obama enjoyed (inexplicably, to me) a personal popularity that Joe Biden will never have; yet Biden acts with more freedom than an FDR or a Ronald Reagan at the peak of their popularity and influence.

The point is: When you have won the battle for the culture and the government, it no longer matters who’s in charge. Because the people in charge know there will be no challenge to their authority.

Andrew Cuomo is at the whim of the powers that be, just like the rest of us. Lockdowns will be restored and scaled back at the whim of the dictators. As the governor of my own state says about the next impending lockdown, “I’m monitoring the situation closely.” All this means is: “I don’t feel like locking things down right this minute. In an hour, or a day, or a week, I might. It depends on my personal, political and financial prospects. I do what I feel like.”

Even most patriots and Republicans do not grasp, I fear, the magnitude of the real danger we’re in. It’s far worse than Democrats having stolen the election; and the Supreme Court (about to be stacked with Communists) refusing to do anything about it. The real danger is that tyrants are in charge, they know they have won, and they know the population is dominated by sheep who cannot and will not challenge them — even on masks and vaccines.

Evil is, by definition, irrational and weak. But when the good guys, when the previously proud and the strong, succumb to the bad guys, and do the bidding of the bad guys (however resentfully) — well, then it’s all over. Because confident, arrogant bad guys are the last thing you want. Yet look at them. They know they have won … because we have let them.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Paraphrase from Ephesians 2:2

It is not difficult to imagine that we have entered one more dark history of humanity on a long string of dark histories.  I want to say that others have suffered much worse, and they have.  We can think of those in the path of Genghis Khan; the early Christians under Rome; medieval Europeans under siege by Vikings, Huns, or Charlemagne; almost anyone in France in the late eighteenth century; Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; those living in between Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s; Chinese under Mao; Vietnamese under napalm; Arabs under drones.

But I think I am on safe ground to consider that never before in the recorded history of humanity has the entire population of the world been under siege simultaneously and placed in a medical experiment, forced to face the risk of early death regardless of the path chosen.  All of humanity; one-hundred percent.  More than seven billion people.

Ephesians 6: 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

These sons of disobedience, are they merely ghosts?  Or do they walk among us, flesh and blood?  Certainly, as the Apostle Paul writes, they are in the heavenly places, but he also writes that they are world forces.  We find this reality elsewhere:

1 Peter 5: 8(b) Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

The Apostle Peter doesn’t say he is floating, coming only in a dream to fill our heads with evil thoughts.  He prowls, like a lion; he devours – a physical act.

Jesus furthers this idea that they walk among us, on the surface quite religious and devout.  He says to the Pharisees:

John 8: 44 You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Those to whom Jesus is speaking are the sons of disobedience; the sons of their father, the devil.  They want to do the devil’s work.  We see them on television daily; they fill every major outlet.  Their father was a murderer from the beginning, and they want to do his work.  We also have come to see them in positions of church leadership, bowing in obedience to the sons of disobedience, speaking lies as their father does.  They are doing their father’s work and teaching others that they also must do their father’s work.

One of the paths I have taken at this blog is a significant examination of the many false histories we have been taught, the lies used to justify action, the way evil was described as virtuous.  When I began that journey, I was already somewhat skeptical of the narrative; as I worked through that journey, I have come to conclude that everything being described to us about meaningful events in our history is a lie.

The sons of disobedience always lie, because their father always lies.  It is in their nature because it is their father’s nature.  Every major event in my lifetime (and for centuries before this) has been based on a lie or explained away by a lie.

For this reason, I didn’t believe for a minute that we faced a plague of medieval proportions (see my earliest thoughts here, here, and here – all from March 2020).  I didn’t need to have a complete answer of the truth; just that I knew what we were being told was a lie.

Revelation 9: 11 They have as king over them, the angel of the abyss; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon [destruction], and in the Greek he has the name Apollyon [destroyer].

Their king brings only destruction.  And the sons want to do his work; they want to please him and actively strive to do so.  Lying and destruction comes as easily to them as breathing does to me and you.

The Apostle Paul knows that many Christians will be deceived and follow the destroyer, becoming sons of disobedience themselves:

2 Corinthians 11: 3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14 No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.

There are several important factors I consider regarding which church to attend, and it is a question I – like many of us, I suppose – have had to face in the last year.  I am coming to the conclusion that the highest factor on the list might be how that church dealt with the nonsense of the last eighteen months.  Closing last Easter…I still can’t believe how willingly this was done.

Revelation 2: 9 ‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich), and the blasphemy by those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. 10 Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, so that you will be tested, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.

Is Satan himself physically going to cast believers into prison, or will he act through his sons of disobedience?  The faithful will suffer tribulation, it is a tribulation from which there is no escape – we will be made to physically suffer whether we obey the lies of Satan or we don’t:

1 John 5: 9 We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.

The world lies in his power; but we have a means to resist:

Ephesians 2: 13 Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.

Stand firm.  Remember that no matter which path you take, you face the risk of physical death: follow in the path of these sons of disobedience, and you will have poison pumped into your arm; do not follow in their path, and they may shut you out of society.

But this is only the physical death.

Conclusion

In the face of this, how should we then live?

Ephesians 2: 14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

1 Peter 5: 6 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, 7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

James 4: 7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Reprinted with permission from Bionic Mosquito.