The Fake News Media Complain About Fake News

The new buzz phrase of the left wing is “Fake News.” The defeat of Hillary Clinton is being blamed on websites being accused of publishing false news stories about her. To preserve the “integrity” of the obviously biased liberal news industry, there is a movement to red flag all sites that they falsely claim to promote hoaxes, propaganda or disinformation.

There are sites that purposely post bogus news stories. The Onion is probably best known for fictitious “news” intention of being humorous. The left’s agenda is to try to silence opposing views. The liberal media claims to be the source of truth and all sites run by conservatives are bias in their news coverage.

Sites like MSNBC, Huffington Post, Slate, Mother Jones, and Think Progress are all partisan left outlets. You never see them on a “fake news” list because the liberal bias media has appointed itself as the gatekeeper of the Internet.

The arrogance of the left has no limit. When the president gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine, he lamented the impact he believes so-called “fake news” had on the presidential election. It is pure irony for Obama to be lamenting about ‘fake news’ to a magazine that just lost in court after being sued for peddling a rape hoax.

The liberal media is following a standard socialist tacit: Blame the opposition for the same thing you’re doing. In October, Hillary Clinton was being investigated by the FBI for wrongdoing related to her emails and the Clinton Foundation. On one news service I counted 32 negative news stories about Trump, and there were zero negative news stories about Clinton. That is a good example of fake news and it is all being carried out by the liberal (progressive) left.

The greatest example of phony baloney media coverage occurred when Trump acted on this promise to save 1,000 jobs at the Indiana Carriers plant. The press could not hide their displeasure at having to report on Trump doing a good deed. Reporters for CNN were caught on a live feed joking about Trump’s plane crashing.

The topper of this story occurred in June when President Obama derided Trump for promising to save the Carrier jobs. He asked “What magic wand do you have?” This delicious news story never made is to the nightly news shows because we have a press that is heavily involved in the “fake news’ business.

The eagerness of the left to apply the alternative media with this “fake news” label has caused many of them to cross the line into defamation. The financial site, the Naked Capitalism has threatened The Washington Post with a defamation suit. The paper listed Naked Capitalism as a “fake news” site without providing any evidence for the claim.

Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean called Breitbart News executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, a “Nazi” during a recent interview. Pressed on whether he meant to use such a damning term, Mr. Dean responded, “Well, he’s anti-Semitic, he’s anti-black and he’s anti-women.” If Bannon decided to take Dean to court for defamation, he would easily win the case.

Breitbart News is now the favorite target of the left simply because Bannon is president-elect Trump has named him as his chief strategist. So I guess Fox News can rest a bit easier.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about creating a “fake news” filter for his social media site. He wants the majority of the news that gets posted on Facebook to come from a list of “trusted” sites. The firm already has a plug-in that blocks stories labeled as “fake news.”

Zuckerberg demonstrated the dangers of censorship when his own remarks on “fake news” were temporarily deleted from his own site.

Another way that liberals are going after conservative sites is by cutting off their ability to make money. Since nearly all news sites survive on ad revenue, “fake news” labeling can mean death. The Kellogg Company has stopped advertising on the Breitbart News website due to concerns about its content. If the Kellogg company doesn’t want anything to do with Hillary’s basket of deplorables, they should come right out and tell them to stop buying their products.

There is no logical reason why the left always has conservatives on the defense. A recent Gallup poll shows that trust in mainstream media fell to a record low 32 percent. Trust has been on the decline since 1972. The enemy controls the main media hubs, because the people on the right refuse to fight.

If the Kellogg company sales collapsed 20 percent because of a backlash boycott, Kellogg would be begging Breitbart to be its exclusive advertiser. If the same pressure would be applied to CNN, it would be renamed the Conservative Broadcasting Network.

Bible prophecy warns us that the day will come when there will be no freedom of the press. When the Antichrist system comes to power, all news will be fake. In the end, the only news that matters is the Good News of the saving grace that comes from those who put their trust in Jesus Christ.

“Now, brothers and sisters, I want you to remember the Good News I told you. You received that Good News message, and you continue to base your life on it. That Good News, the message you heard from me, is God’s way to save you” (1 Corinthians 15:1-2 ERV).

–Todd

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The Wall

Everyone who has access to any news outlet these days is familiar with the wall mentioned hundreds of times by Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign season. Now president-elect Trump continues to proclaim that he will build a wall on America’s southern border.

That highly controversial proposed wall involves Mr. Trump’s promise to keep illegal would-be immigrants from entering the United States. Those who support building of such a wall obviously believe this will prevent potential terrorists from entering the country en masse, as they fear is happening presently. A physical structure of the nature described by some will be a massive and expensive undertaking to be sure, as I perceive the project as proposed. It is to be constructed in order to keep American citizens safe.

There is a wall of another sort I would like to think on for a bit. This is a structure that also involves keeping America safe. However, it is a wall not of physical materials as in the case of the one proposed to stand between America and Mexico. I’m referring to the barrier that has suddenly appeared with this presidential election. Again, it is not a physical wall, but one that is made of much sterner stuff–as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony might put it.

Globalism’s growing invasion into the American way of life has been marching all but unchecked for at least two decades. Its force of movement into all strata of life has increased dramatically during the administration of Barack Obama over these past eight years.

Globalism’s threat is greater than just the hordes of illegals from the south–those illegals being but one ingredient within the globalist elite’s plans of action: to bring America into configuration with new world order as they envision it. The danger implied stretches across the broad spectrum of culture and society of our nation.

The inculcation has been a long time in process. The youth of America in particular have been dumbed-down to the point that they know little of truth about the country’s founding principles.

The churches of America have not, since the days of the Moral Majority efforts, resisted the globalist drive to take the nation as far away from God’s influence as possible. The godless teaching of the corrupted and corruptive educational system from K through the doctorate programs has convinced many that there must be a separation of church and state. That demand has come down, finally, to governmental dictate–approved by the Supreme Court–that opposition to social matters perceived as anti-biblical must be confined to the sanctuaries. Just as the president-elect plans to put up that wall to stem the physical flow of illegals in to America, there has suddenly been erected an even more spectacular wall.

It is a spiritual wall, as I view it. God, Himself, has put it up for His own good purposes. It is, almost certainly in part, a wall to stop the globalist invaders from continuing to move the United States farther along the pathway toward the new world order being prepared for Antichrist and his regime of horror. I wrote the following in my commentary that immediately preceded the November 8 presidential election.

Although the nucleus of God’s people who hold fast to the Heavenly Father’s precepts and promises might be a dwindling number, we are still here in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. We are engaged in this prayer war for a restoration of sanity in America’s government, society and culture.

We are praying specifically that the evil forces that are raging to make this nation into a state totally apart from all godliness will be, at least on an interim basis, kept from their lucifirian goal.

I say “on an interim basis,” because Bible prophecy plainly foretells that the satanic, globalist forces will for a time one day achieve establishment of a one-world order as Antichrist’s platform of power. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.

Meantime, however, while the church of Jesus Christ is here, thus the Restrainer(the Holy Spirit) resident within that body holding back evil, it is right and proper–and I believe expected–that God’s people, called by His name, are to pray the prayer of 2 Chronicles 7:14.

God has erected this wall in answer to the prayers of His people. Yet, only He knows the purposes in full. One reason, I sense, is to give the true church (all born-again believers) time and room to carry out the Great Commission. At the same time, as I’ve written previously, this wall seems to offer hope of a brighter economic future. The free enterprise forces seem to be saying this with their optimism.

But, this, if it does eventuate, makes these days just ahead precisely like the time predicted when Christ will next catastrophically intervene into the affairs of mankind.

Jesus indicated, as recorded in Matthew 24:36-42 and Luke 17:26-30 that business will be good–even perhaps booming–at the time He next intervenes. This will be the Rapture of the church.

There is one more wall I wish to touch on in this essay–the wall that separates lost mankind from God and Heaven in eternity. The wall is made of the awful, soul-killing matter called sin. Man himself constructed this wall with his disobedience in the Garden of Eden. This wall keeps all of the lost of mankind from entering into God’s Kingdom. They are aliens who cannot go through that great barrier.

But, God has provided a Gate in that great wall of separation. It is a narrow gate that leads to salvation, the Scripture tells us.

Jesus put it this way: “I am the door: if by me any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture” (John 10:9).

I believe the reason God has constructed this wall against globalism is primarily to provide time and opportunity to get out this message that Jesus is the only way to salvation. Let us who are called by His Holy Name do our utmost for His Highest in honoring Him for allowing this reprieve.

–Terry

The Mark of the Beast System Is Being Field Tested in China

In the United States “big data” is a major industry. Anytime you buy or show interest in something that can be tracked, a major retailer will try to convince you to buy their products. Last week I looked online for the price of a toner cartridge. Since then, nearly every site I visit has ads for the same toner cartridge. I also regularly get coupons in the mail from office supply firms, so some system is obviously keeping track of my office-related needs.

This use of “big data” may be creepy at times in a capitalist system, but the only thing its users are after—is money. For an autocratic government “big data” is a useful tool to keep people enslaved. China is currently plotting to use raw data to create a “social-credit system” that will assign a “personal citizen score” to every single person based on behavior.

With Beijing able to draw upon a growing network of data pools, a system of Algorithms could be set up. They could be used to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine a person’s social status. A good rating could mean faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels. A low rating could mean being blacklisted from loans, jobs, or access to the Internet.

China’s judiciary already uses a blacklisting system which can be linked into the national “social-credit system.” A legal scholar working in Hangzhou, cites the example of a client, part-owner of a travel company, who now can’t buy tickets for planes or high-speed trains because the local court put him on a blacklist after he lost a dispute with a landlord.

Beijing has chosen Hangzhou as the pilot for this “social credit” system. The Communist Party has said it wants to roll out the system nationwide by 2020.

The current means of control in China is the dungeon—a system of dossiers the Communist Party keeps on the behavior of urban workers. When you have 1.4 billion people, there is a massive amount of paperwork to just manage the wealthier citizens. The poor people living in the countryside don’t even show up on the radar. They are only managed by not being allowed to enter the major urban areas.

The primary reason why the heads of state fear the masses is because they have no way of tracking them. If a group of people are plotting a coup, the authorities may discover the problem too late to prevent it. During the days of the Cold War, the USSR and China spent enormous amounts of energy suppressing American influences that proved that Communism didn’t work. Now that China has used capitalism to modernize its economy, it can use the fruits of the free market to suppress dissenters.

The Communist Party is trying to put a happy face on their Orwellian plan. The national social-credit system’s aim, according to a slogan printed in planning documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

President Xi Jinping’s is a key mastermind behind this new ranking system. He has launched a campaign to tighten his grip on the country and dictate morality. Xi believes that economic uncertainty is threatening to undermine the Communist Party. In October, he called for innovation in “social governance” that would “heighten the capacity to forecast and prevent all manner of risks.”

It would seem to be a fairly reasonable to set up a system that rewards people for their actions. Because sinful human beings are the ones who set the rules, China’s blueprints for utopianism could end up producing something far worse than the police state that governs North Korea.

I’ve talked about the mark of the beast system many times in the past. Up until now, the system that the Antichrist will use enslave the world was in the future. What China is working on is clearly the prototype of what will be the 666 mark. For centuries dictators have dreamed of a system that would allow them to totally control the masses. Now that technology has made it possible, the stage is set for the man who will fulfill the passages of Revelation 13.

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Rev.13:16-17).

–Todd

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The A B C Questions

We are moving into stranger and stranger times, I sense from consideration of recent developments. Chief among those developments is the most obvious–the election of the candidate thought to have no chance at all just a few months previous. Yet here he is, poised to Make America Great Again–as his presidential campaign slogan would have it.

This being the case, I would ask that you indulge me just a bit, as I would like to construct a scenario or two based as much in biblically prophetic truth as in fictional cogitation.

That America has been forced toward movement into the globalist mold over the past several decades is without question in my view. This has especially been the case during the past eight years of the Obama administration. The nation’s sovereignty has been in process of usurpation by the new world order builders through a series of quasi-legitimate executive orders.

It is more than obvious, to me at least, that the United States was moving along an seemingly unalterable course dictated by the globalists’ agenda. This presidential election didn’t just slow that movement; it halted it in its tracks. The president-elect is an avowed antiglobalist. He views America not as the hegemonic superpower that must be brought down to third-world status, its wealth redistributed in order to create some insanely conceived socialistic Utopia, but as beneficent leader of a world of autonomous nations.

My idea isn’t to sing the praises of the future president. He is merely a man who has been thrust into the end-times picture for God’s own great purpose. My thinking here is to explore and examine a bit the possibilities that purpose might include. Thus we come to the title of this commentary: “The A B C Questions.”

I watch with great interest the uptick in the world’s fiscal markets as the wizards of finance contemplate changes taking place in our country. The records being set in the stock markets, etc., move in synchronization with the strangeness of this election. The whole matter, to my way of thinking, generates questions involving Bible prophecy potentiality.

My questions and ruminations follow.

Question A

AMERICA–Is this nation, rather than being on the brink of imploding economically as most prophecy students thought before this election, now about to enter a time of, perhaps, unprecedented financial boom?

Most who have been responsible for making profit within the private sector know and lament that regulations coming out of the current presidential administration have been deadly to business development. Mr. Obama, himself, has boasted that he has “a pen and a phone”–meaning that he could and would bypass Congress to accomplish what he wanted done. This he has done prolifically. His use of his pen and phone have been particularly ruinous to the free enterprise system in this nation. Increased taxation, added to the regulatory edicts, have resulted in horrendous job losses because of business down-sizings and closings. The nation seemed poised to go much deeper into the economic abyss. The election of Donald J. Trump, a highly successful business mogul, seems to have suddenly turned things around with promises to roll back taxes and regulations and to introduce a plethora of innovations.

The financial markets are apparently buying the promises, and the uptick in the stratospheric of economic anticipation shows it.

All of this just doesn’t fit the thinking of observers of Bible prophecy. Most seem to look for America to succumb to the forces of globalism. And, as stated before, the nation was certainly headed in that direction prior to this election.

So, it is reasonable to ask whether the United States of America might be headed into another great economic boom instead of descending into depression as feared just weeks ago. This conjecture brings forth another most interesting question.

Question B

BABYLON--Could we now be witness to the beginnings of the creation of the prophetic entity termed “Babylon the Great”?

Revelation chapter 18 presents a stunning portrait of the greatest human commercial entity of all of history. This nation and city is prophesied to dominate all the earth with its commerce and debaucheries. Here’s what is said of this city-state called “Babylon the Great”:

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. (Revelation 18:3)

This Babylonian system will be destroyed in one hour, God’s Word tells us. It will be a much-deserved judgment. All the world will mourn this destruction.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more. (Revelation 18:9-11)

Here you will, I hope, indulge my postulations a bit. If this generation is at the very end of he Age of Grace (Church Age) as most who are well-versed in Bible prophecy from the pre-Trib view believe, there is but one entity on the stage of history that could possibly be seen as doing business in such a mighty way as described in this prophecy.

For there to develop from the ground up such a commercial power, it would take decades, not just seven, or even twenty years. America, if there was a massive jinning up of enterprise, could possibly reach such heights of interaction with the rest of the world in a matter of a year or two. There is simply no nation on the planet that has ever been so materially blessed as the USA. There is no other city on planet earth that has the commercial outreach and influence as New York City.

Seeing as how the timeline seems to be a major factor in this prophecy–this destruction of Babylon the Great taking place within the seven-year Tribulation–we can legitimately ask, I think: Is America to develop into that judgment-bound entity?

Perhaps we might get a clue if the optimistic outlook of the current stock market elites plays out as they, at least at this moment, anticipate.

Question C

CHRISTIANITY –-Is Christianity about to experience a Great Awakening like in times past?

I have been hearing for years now preachers and others saying that there will be a great revival before the Rapture. Some of those who don’t hold that there is a Rapture coming also say there will be another Great Awakening, as in times past. I’ve never held that belief, I must say. However, the strange turn of events–with the anti-God forces of the left and the globalists’ ravenous desire to gobble up the United States being suddenly halted–or so it seems–one has to question” why?”.

Could we be about to experience a final outpouring of God’s great mercy in the form of the true church carrying out the Great Commission in a Holy Spirit directed outburst of supernatural witness?

–Terry