​​See, I have today set before you life and good, death and evil.

If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I am giving you today,

loving the LORD, your God, and walking in his ways,

and keeping his commandments, statutes and ordinances,

you will live and grow numerous,

and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

​​​​

If, however, your heart turns away and you do not obey,

but are led astray and bow down to other gods and serve them, 

I tell you today that you will certainly perish;

you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you. 

​​​​

I have set before you [therefore] life and death, the blessing and the curse.

Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live. [2]

​​​​​​

These were Moses's parting words to the Israelites as they were preparing to enter the Promised Land. And they sound as applicable to our time as they must have sounded back then, giving us plenty of pause to wonder whether we really are in the grip of the apocalypse St. John warned us of in the last book of the Bible. We do appear, after all, to deserve it, the way we seem to have abandoned, as a country, our allegiance to all ten Commandments (and in their correct order) over the past 100 years. 

​​​​​​​​​​​

But whether it is the present world's ultimate end, or not, history has shown that when any country sinks to our level of depravity, its collapse is almost almost sure to follow. [3] And in consideration of the heavy reliance so many countries have on American might and commerce, it is hard to imagine bedlam not breaking out throughout the globe if the US were to suddenly fall. Our future is, therefore, dire if we fail to heed the warning signs and repent. [4] And if these really are the end times, as so many indicators suggest, Scripture foretells an even darker future.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“‘In the whole land,' says the LORD, ‘two-thirds shall be cut off and perish,

and one-third shall be left alive.’” [5]

​​​​​​​​​​​​

And with so little left standing in the way of all this coming to fruition, it’s interesting to note that one-third of the population may be a good estimate for the size of our diminished faith community. But the prophecy has even more to tell us.

​​​​​​​​​​​

“And I will put this third into the fire,

refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.

They will call on my name, and I will answer them.

I will say, ‘They are my people’;

and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.’” [6] 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So if Christ did allow Satan one hundred years of increased power to wreak havoc in our world, within these Scriptures lies maybe the reason. He knows Satan’s boasts are empty and that His Church will never fall. And He also knows that through such trials we are made stronger (some of us anyway). So let the wind blow. If the end times truly are upon us, we have no need or desire for any Rapture to take us away from it. By the grace of God, we’ve taken all that Satan has thrown at us, thus far. And in Christ, [7] we can take whatever he has in mind for the end. [8] And we are encouraged, too, in knowing Satan’s time is indeed short. [9] But we’re also aware of what awaits with the majority in this country shedding their adherence to God’s first Command.

​​​​​​​​​​​​

Make no mistake, what we are talking about here is the 8th Day. [10] Christ who was with us at the end of the 6th Day to give us free will (to make us human), the Law (to civilize us) and finally the Sacraments (to make us whole), will be here again on the 8th as we return those gifts and devolve back into the animals we once were. [11] And He won’t be here to give us anything, either, as He has in prior times (at least not until He’s judged us on what we did with His gifts). The 7th Day Sabbath rest, which began at Calvary, will have ended. And on this, the following Day, the 8th Day, in accord with the scriptural prescription, the entire world is to be circumcised. [12] The sheep are to be separated from the goats, [13] the wheat from the chaff. [14] And, as we are seeing, the wheat and the chaff are no longer indistinguishable. [15] 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

That was the opinion of this book, anyway, when first published, as it was, during the darkest days of the Obama administration. That opinion improved slightly, however, in the second edition, coming out as it did at the end of the first term of Obama's successor, for within that administration there appeared a glimmer of hope. But it was ending badly, making it a toss up whether it could continue on to a second term. So everything seemed to be hinging on the outcome of the 2020 election. Would it bring us darkness or light?

​​

Oddly, the very year seemed to be trumpetting the answer. It was as though its numercal value had been specifically designed to tell us what was coming. And it was saying that regardless of the outcome of the election, 2020 was to be a year of enlightenment, a year where we would all be able to finally see things as they truly are (with 20-20 vision, so to speak). That is the way this book's 2nd edition sized things up. And that prophecy did turn out to be accurate, only not in the way it was first imagined. The election, that is, did give us the promised clarity, however, God apparently wanted it to for everyone, so for some it would take another 4 years to sink in. 

​​​​​​

But we are getting way ahead of ourselves here, as there is a great deal more that transpired in the 8 years that followed the first publication of this book. And to do it justice we need to resume the discussion from chapter 8, that ended there with the final days of the Obama adminstration. The country, as many may recall, appeared adrift and rudderless after 8 years of a presidency seemingly at war with God. [16] And adding to the pessimism was the chaos of the 2016 election process.

​

Not that that year started so badly. Sure, the country was in shambles. [17] And yes, with just 4 more years to go, we also seemed, as a country, to be right on the cusp of rejecting the last of the Ten Commandments. So, in keeping with the farewell warning of Moses just cited, this could have easily been the last nail in our coffin, bringing down a curse from which we would not survive. But God apparently had other plans, so at the start of those final 4 years He planted a seed of hope. [18]

​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Democrats had stupidly neglected to groom a viable candidate to take the reins after Obama’s term was over. [19] And the Republicans were poised and ready with 17 candidates of their own to pounce on that mistake and take the country back in the void the Democrats had abandoned it to. Given also, the economic malaise the country was in, and how low the Democrat party's popularity had sunk because of it, any of those 17 candidates (with but one exception) should have had no difficulty defeating any Democrat challenger no matter who they chose to run.​​​

​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It was that one exception, however, that was fouling everythng up and giving the Republican party leadership fits. He was more of a joke candidate than a legitimate contender. He had zero political experience and even less political sense. He also had a checkered (adulterous) past and had only just recently switched parties which made his loyalty to Republican ideals extremely suspect, especially as regards abortion. So that, in itself, was bad enough, But it was still nothing compared his seeming immaturity. And it became impossible to ignore whenever he was lashing out at his opponents, for it mattered not to him which side of the fence they were on, or how ridiculous the topic. He would attack anyone at anytime and often for the most petty of reasons.

​​​​​​​​​

But in spite of all the well deserved criticism he received (and he received a lot) he refused to bow out to make way for a more suitable candidate. And the most frustrating thing about it was that for some very mysterious reason he was gaining a following. In appearance he was the polar opposite of the polished, Beau Brummel, Obama. Yet in defiance of all politcal wisdom, it did not seem to be having a detrimental effect on the electorate. In primary after primary he kept winning and building up momentum. It was maddening, ​​​​

​​

Some thought it a consequence of there being such a wealth of good candidates that year, the majority of conservative voters were split evenly between them, leaving him with the lion's share of the vote from those who opted for none of the above. There were some rumors, too, that Democrat operatives were crossing over to vote for him in states where they had open primaries, just to ensure that he'd win. And it makes a great deal of sense that they would do this.

​

​The Democrats relished the idea of running against such a politically inept candidate. It would seemingly guarantee the election would go in their favor no matter who they chose to run. And by mid-year they got what they'd hoped for. Donald Trump was nominated the Republican candidate for president and much to the chagrin of all those who voted for the other more electable candidates. ​​​​​​​​It basically split the party in half leaving many committed to just sitting this election out. With a choice between a loose canon, real estate mogul of questionable party loyalty who would likely destroy the party if elected and the Democrat challenger, Hillary Clinton, what difference would it make they pondered. The country seemed doomed either way. And Satan would apparently win after all. Or at least that is what many were thinking.

​​​​​​​​

But there was one other important aspect of this election that made its outcome more eventful than most. And that tiny wrinkle would turn everything on its head. Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, died in 2016, leaving a vacancy in the Court that the winner of the election would be given the right to fill. [20] So Trump, fully recognizing he needed a miracle to pull things out of the fire, did something that was tantamount to a masterstroke, something no presidential candidate had done before. And whether he fully recognized how brilliant it was at the time, or not, it did turn the tide of the election. He published a list of justices he would choose from, all of whom having the same strict constitutionalist judicial philosophy as Scalia. And it won a lot of people over, especially the pro-lifers in the party, who saw in this list that the repeal of Roe v. Wade was suddenly within their grasp.

​​​​​​​​​

So that's where things stood as the election neared. The polls had tightened significantly by this ploy, although most pundits still heavily favored the Democrats. And they were, of course, ecstatic at how the contest they'd seemingly rigged was going. But they were also concerned about how Trump's popularity was growing with the Christian right. So, to ostensibly secure the win, they also had a surprise ready to be sprung on the public just before the election. It was another sex scandal from Trump's past (some extremely lewd comments he'd made about women in an old Access Hollywood interview) that the Democrat controlled media was sitting on, waiting for just the right moment to air. And that moment was October 7, which was exactly 1 month before the election. [21]

​​​

How could any Christian in good conscience, they chuckled, vote for him after hearing that? The election was seemingly in the bag. And then the unthinkable happened. Trump won. It was a narrow victory where he didn't even receive the majority of votes. But he did win it electorially, [22] and it sent shock waves throughout the US and the world. The October Surprise had had no effect with the pro-lifers who came out in droves in the battleground states to vote for Scalia's replacement. And with Roe v. Wade's repeal in the balance, they were not going to be duped by any last ditch effort to steer them away from the candidate promising to deliver it.

​​​​​​

The 2010s, Part 2: A Brief Respite in the Storm (aka, Trump's First Term) [23] 

(​

So at the start of 2017 (the year that would also mark the 100th anniversary of Our Lady's appearance at Fatima), on January 20th of that year, Donald Trump was sworn in as America's 45th president. And it allowed all those who voted for him (even those who had to hold their noses to do it) to finally see the wisdom of his candidacy, as there was much more to him than what appeared on the surface and his would be a presidency unlike anything seen before. [24] 

​​

His first act was to strip away most of the stifling regulations the Democrats had burderned business with. This was followed shortly after by a bill he launched through Congress that lowered taxes for everyone. And both brought on an economic boom that rivalled what was seen in the 1920s. [aa] But unlike the '20s, this one was based on sound economic practices, so there were no concerns of a crash (at least not from any natural cause). At its heart it was simply a rejection of globalism and the artificial restraints the globalist agenda was putting on wealthy countries (like the US) in order to redistribute their wealth. In other words, Trump's policies were a complete repudiation of the socialism that had infected the west and was threatening to conquer the world.

​​​​​

And in taking the opposite approach, what Trump called his America First approach, many long dormant American industries were revitalized with those involved wth oil and gas being in the forefront. This drove down prices even further, while making the US energy independent for the first time in a very long while. Unemployment levels dropped as a consequence to historic lows for seemingly every demographic and to balance it all out the stockmarket seemed to be hitting new record highs about every day.

​​​​

To be fair, the democrats had so mismanaged the country under Obama, it would have been difficult for any of the Republican contenders not to have made things better. But given that the disease of globalism had spread to some degree even into the Republican ranks it is questionable how much of an economic boom the others might have ushered in. Trump, however, was an outsider who had missed out on all the Washington thinktank indoctrinations. His understanding of globalism was strictly from his experience with it in the private sector. So he knew firsthand how detrimental it was to business. And he wanted no part of it.

​​​​​​​

That was Trump's strength, what God (and Mary, apparently) saw in him that we didn't. He was offering us a completely new perspective on running the country, one that we'd been led to believe by prior administrations, was selfish and inconsiderate of those less fortunate. But it was a perspective we quickly warmed up to once we saw it in action, because it wasn't just benefitting us. In stimulating growth everyone was profitting.

​

His was the perspective of a free market industrialist. And in that capacity there is but one goal (winning) and but two guiding principles (getting things done ON TIME and UNDER BUDGET). What a concept! - running the country as a business venture with the goal of cutting out all the fat and getting the most out of the taxpayer's money. Had no one ever tried this before?! And if they had how did we lose sight of it?

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Democrats were, of course, fuming over all of this. Having become hopelessly entangled in the socialist agenda during the Obama administration, they were seeing all their well laid plans being dashed to the ground by one clownish looking, orange-skinned usurper. And all he had to do to accomplish this was expose them by giving the people a taste of the benefits of a burgeoning free market economy over the malaisse they'd been getting with globalism.

​​​​​​​​

And to make matters for the Democrats even worse, Trump's America First philosophy proved to be just as effective on the world stage as it had been domestically. He showed no respect for the tired and ineffectual tactics of the globalist state departments of past administrations. They seemed more interested in appeasement and apologizing for America's existence than in actually accomplshing anything. And their track record reflected their incompetence.

​​​

Trump's position was, in contrast, comparatively simple. It was the classic, peace through strength approach, but with a subtle nuance that made it classic Trump and allowed him to accomplish a great deal more with very little added effort. Some thought him a mastermind of diplomacy because of it, as though he was playing 4D chess while the rest of the world was playing checkers. But it was nothing that complicated.

​​​

Trump saw things not as chess or even checkers. That was overthinking. To Trump it was a simple game of poker, one where America was holding all the cards. And unlike all the presidents of former times, he had no qualms about playing them. This sent shockwaves throughout the world. All countries (whether friendly or not) suddenly had to contend with a president who actually liked America and saw nothing to apologize for, a president who couldn't be shamed or guilted into compromise or otherwise taken advantage of. And given his reputation for being a loose canon all countries quickly learned he was not to be trifled with. World peace, as a result, became the only viable option that meshed with this resurgent American presence. And it soon, therefore, became the norm. 

​​​​​​

So Trump was phenomonally successful in his dealings both home and abroad. And he did it all simply by doing the exact opposite of what his predecesssors had done. He also never seemed to tire talking about it, which was irksome to some. But for others it was refreshing to see a president who was upfront about all he was doing, someone who didn't seem to be operating under the cover of night. That was the way of prior administrations. Candidates were always promising full transparency, but never delivering. Trump, in sharp contrast, was actually making good on the promise. [bb]

 

And he wasn't constantly carefully chosing his words to keep from offending the wrong parties. In fact he was quite courageous in his criticisms, being the first to publically acknowledge that he was up against two main adversaries, the democrats on the left and the two-pronged media that empowered them. Prior Republican administrations had tried to just play along with the media bias or simply ignore it when it got too beligerant, hoping they'd just go away. They recognized how much power it wielded and saw any confrontation doomed to fail. But not Trump. He seemed to relish the challenge, calling the media out on its bias at every opportunity. And in the process he saddled them with a name they've never been able to shake, given that they have more than proven, in countless ways since, how deserving they are to be called the "fake news." 

​​​​​​

But this was all part and parcel of what was undoubtedly Trump's most endearing quality, his honesty. We had all been conditioned into the sad reality of politicians saying whatever was needed to get elected only to see them suddenly getting amnesia once they get in. It had been this way for seemingly forever. But it had really become pronounced over the past few decades. And with both major parties now employing the tactic there was seemingly nothing that could be done about it. But here was this guy, Trump, who on the campaign trail was not tailoring his speeches to appeal to the interests of whatever niche group he may have been addressing that day. He was saying, rather, simply what he really thought and intended to do, regardless of the audience. And that in itself was pretty novel. But then, on being elected, we could see that he was actually doing his utmost to keep his campaign promises. And it was once again, whoa, what planet did he come from?! We couldn't remember the last time a politician kept his word.

​​​​​​​​​​

To be clear, though, there was a negative side to his unfiltered, stream of consciousness, style of speaking. He was known, at times, to say the ugliest things about those he saw as his enemies (whether real or imagined). And he compunded the ugliness of these personal attacks, by never apologizing or even acknowledging that he had said anything wrong. [cc] When compared, however, to the nonstop lies and the vitriol his leftist opponents were leveling against him, Trump's comments do not even register on that scale. And they can also be chalked up to just Trump's way of coping with the personal attacks he was receiving and staying on top of it all. Nevertheless, his counterattacks were often petty and misdirected. And it, understandably, drove many away.

​​​​

But once Trump got in, he won a lot of those same people back simply by the amount of success he was having and by being a president who strived to be as good as his word. Case in point, he said he was going to get us out of all the never ending wars we'd become entangled in. And on getting into office he worked tirelessly to make it so. [dd] He'd also campaigned heavily on constructing a southern border wall to give our patrol agents better control of it. And he kept that promise too. He even got Mexico to pay for it (just as he'd promised) through all the trade deals he renegotiated with them. [ee] There were many, of course, on the other side of the political aisle who despised what he was doing. But as much as they hated him, they couldn't deny the fact that everything he was doing was precisely what he'd said he would do.

​​​​

Sure, he was guilty of making mean comments on occasion. And it lent even more fodder to those who opposed him. But it kept them also from wanting to look deeper, which is a shame, because the objective observers could see through the smokescreen and were enthralled instead by all the promises he was keeping. And the biggest, by far, to his religious-right supporters, were his Supreme Court justice appointments. Providence would dictate that he would have three such appointments. And he would strive to make good on his pledge to appoint strict constitutionalist justices in all three occasions, putting the continuation of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision (which did not really comply with the US constitution) into serious jeopardy. [ff]

​​​​​​

For Satan, however, allowing Roe to fall was unconscionable. Anything else that Trump proposed to do could be easily undone after he left office. But Roe was the jewel in his crown. It enshrined into law all of the unquenchable hatred he had for humanity and made us his unwitting accomplices in that fight by getting us to view abortion as not merely a moral good. In the fifty odd years that the ruling stood he was able to elevate the idea to the absurd notion that killing our own children is our God-given right. Allowing it to fall could cause people to question how true that was. So Satan was not going to let this one go without a ferocious fight and he would muster every foot soldier enlisted in his army to stop it, whether they realized what they were doing or not.

​​​

In other words, in spite of what most chronicallers might have reported of the massive resistance Trump was experiencing from the left at the start of his presidency, it was not about Russian collusion, [gg] or climate change, [hh] or racial injustice, [ii] or overpopulation, [jj] or any of the myriad other hugely exaggerated or wholly invented existential crisises the left came up with to take Trump down. It was about saving Roe. And the allout war Satan waged to save it began from the very instant Trump shocked the world by winning the election. This is when Obama, in the final days of his presidency, weaponized the intelligence community to covertly investigate the Trump transition team for any ammunition they could use to cripple if not destroy his term of office. And the tactic they decided on was to mark him somehow as a Russian asset in spite of the fact that hey knew full well from the start that he wasn't. [kk] (talk on how they gave themselves pulitzers for all their phony stories.

​​​

This has rightly been characterized today as treasonous and it demonstrates quite well the desperation of the left felt and the depths they were willing to plumb to take Trump down. And the tactic did do a great deal of damage to Trump's presidency, especially after a special prosecutor was assigned to the matter to investigate. The hope on the left was that they might find something, anything in all all their subsequent digging they could use to hang him with. They found nothing, however, since there was nothing to find so that ploy fizzled out after a couple of years when the Special Prosecutor, even though he'd been handpicked by the leftists, could not bring himself to charge Trump with anything.

​​

But that was just one of the many tactics Satan employed. Roaming the streets, he also had bands of brownshirt Nazis with Orwellian names [ll] looting and torching businesses, seemingly about every month, spurred on by dubious claims of racial injustice put forth by the false prophets of the fake news media. And it was monstrous. So many businesses were destroyed, and so many police officers were falsely chargedm put on trial and imprisoned for the crime of simply doing their jobs and having the bad luck of the person of color they were dealing with dying while resisting arrest.

 

Some remain in prison to this day, because weak-kneed politicians still feel it politically expedient to ignore it. [mm] And it is amazing that no class action lawsuit has yet been filed against the media on behalf of the shop keepers who lost their businesses because of their lies. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the NY Times all took part in perpetrating the life destroying hoaxes and they deserve to be fined out of existence. 

​​​

The violent protests, however, were just one prong of Satan's all-out assault. Inside the government he also had his fifth columnists, unelected leftwing fanatics implanted throughout the various agencies by prior administrations who were willing to do whatever was necessary to gum up the works and delay if not thwart everything executive action Trump would take. It was pure treason but they did not see it that way. Their minds had become so warped by all the leftist propaganda that Trump, to them, was Hitler. And it was their patriotic duty to delay his directives and leak to the press anything they felt could hurt him.

 

And their motto was one simple call word, RESIST. But the right (and even those in the center) just looked on in amazement at easily they were being manipulated. and it spawned their own term for the phenomenon. TDS they called it, Trump Derangement Syndrome. And it was on display in everything that they did, but never so obvious than when it came time to approve Trump's second Supreme Court nominee.

​

It wasn't his first nominee. the replacement of Antonin Scalia with Neil Gorsuch was just a swap of one strict constitutionalist with another. And it wasn't Trump's third pick either. The war was basically over when Trump nominated Amy coney Barrett to fill the vacancy created when justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away. But when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement midway into Trump's first term it spawned a firestorm in the Senate like nothing seen before in Democrat resistance. Kennedy had been the swing vote that kept the Court tilted to the left. Losing his voice for another in the mold of Scalia was an intolerable prospect. And what followed is one of the most shameful displays of character assassination ever witnessed in the US Senate. 

​

Knowing that the left was going to be throwing out all the stops on this one, Trump chose a man with a seemingly impeccable background whom he felt also had the backbone to take all the mud that would likely be thrown at him. So Brett Kavanaugh became his nominee. And you would be hard pressed to find any member of the Supreme court in its 250 year history with a resume so squeaky clean. but that didn't, of course, stop the left from smearing him. They were able to dig up all sorts of witnesses to testify against him. Almost all were gold diggers with dubious motives and no compnction against lying. And the sole witness they did find that did seem to have an air of credibility told a story of a teenager who overstepped the bounds one night on acceptable behavior.

 

In short it was the sort of thing every teenager experiences as they try to learn how to be civilized adults. And no one was raped or even molested with the victim unable 40 years later to provide any evidence to prove it had ever even happened. Nevertheless, to hear the left tell the story, Kavanaugh was a fiend. And the Satan's feminist shock troops were convinced of it. They are to this day. He had to be, otherwise Roe would be lost. Fortunately sober heads prevailed. Kavanaugh nomination was approved and largely on the vote of one courageous pro-choice Senator from New Hampshire (Susan Collins) who could not stand the spectacle of crucifying an innocent man no matter what it meant to Roe.

​

From here on in, though, it was no longer about saving legalized abortion on a federal level. With five (and then six) strict constitutionalists on the bench, that now seemed a lost cause. For the remainder of Trump's term it was about revenge. Trump had committed the unforgiveable sin and no punishment could be too severe. This first became evident after the Democrats won back the House of Representatives in the midterm elections (due largely to how charged up their base was over the Kavanaugh hearings a month earlier). And from the day they took over every effort Trump made to pass legislation was thwarted. It mattered not how beneficial or bipartisan it was, the House Dems were against it. And the their rationale for opposing it was that anything that helped the country also helped Trump in his reelection bid, which made it intolerable.

 

So instead of doing anything productive, they put all their efforts into an impeachment investifgation that the media was only too happy to publicize. And in the end, to no ones surprise they did vote to impeach Trump. But to no avail. The Senate wanted nothig to do with it, the charges being so ludicrous. [nn] And the Democrats could also see that try as they might they were having no success in winning people over. The times were just too good and Trump's economy had brought prosperity to too many people for them to turn on him. to gain any traction Satan was going to have to deploy a much bigger tactic.

​

Enter COVID. It began in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China. How it escaped into the public is anybody's guess, but a malevolent hand must have certainly played a role. And the left siezed on it almost immediatley as though it was a gift given them from heaven. Through the media they would blow the threat way out of proportion, scare everyone half to death and use it as justification for the governrs they controlled to shut their states down. And the beauty of it all was that the longer they could drag the threat on, the more they could blame the delay on Trump's incompetency. The country's economy would be destroyed. And so, in their minds, would Trump.

​

This is not to say that there was no real threat. There was. As flus go, COVID was pretty nasty and it took a toll on people in high risk categories at a rate about ten time greater than most seaonal flus. [oo] But the left played it up like it was the Black Death of medeival times, or the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. Those pandemics, however, devastated populations worldwide featureing death tolls in the hundreds of millions.  And they targetted people in all age groups, the infirm and the healthy alike. [pp] COVID's main threat, by comparison, was almost entirely to the elderly and those in the high risk medical categories, or to put it bluntly, those that were already at, or near, death's door. So while it was still very tragic that some in our number lost their lives sooner than they should have, COVID was not the indiscriminate killer it was being portrayed. The young and the healthy escaped virtually unscathed from their bouts with this flu. [qq]

​​

But that didn't really fit with the narrative the left had hoped for. So as they did as they always do when the world will not comply with their strategies, they lied and made out like the sky was once again falling. And true to the script they never tired of using, they presented their leadership as our only hope of survival. Governors in blue states and even some in red became quasi dictators seemingly overnight, declaring marshall law, shutting down schools and places of worship and prohibiting commerce to all but those businesses deemed absolutely essential.

​​

Many small businesses died in the frenzy, unable to weather this storm. [rr] And our children, in spite of their being in no serious danger, lost one to two years of their precious schooling, misssing out also on their proms and robbing them of the many other formative high school memories most of us take for granted. But the biggest hypocrisy was seen in the decisions these power mad mayors and governors were making as to what constituted an essential service. For while church's were almost universally deemed as being nonessential, in many states liquor stores and strip joints were. [ss] And the most insane part of that is in how many of our spiritual leaders agreed.

​

2020 was the year of vision all right, in at least one respect, that is. It was the year we got to see what our pastors were really made of. And to their great credit, there were a few, here and there that did shine. They defied the lockdown orders, [tt] preferring to be fined and some even jailed rather than turn their backs on their flocks. But, sadly, for every cleric who stood his ground there seemed to be thousands more that buckled. And the most egregious example is maybe found in the response of the US Catholic Bishops. To a man they sided with the state, shutting the Church's doors for about two months when ordered, without so much as a wimper of protest. And in so doing the message they sent to the faithful was uunmistakeable.

​

Satan was apparently right after all. The Sacraments aren't really all that essential to our well being. It is the temporal things in our lives that are of the utmost importance.

​

Church attendance was understandably considerably diminished after the doors were reopened. But it eventually got recovered in most parishes. It nevertheless gives pause to wonder how high the Church might have soared if her modern shepherds had had a modicum of faith and a tenth of the backbone of those who stood up to the pagans in the days of the early Church. [ss] (a condemnation of the bishops, not the priests in their charge.)  

​​

As to the attitudes of the US governors, it was kind of a mixed bag where the official position toward the shutdowns was largely dependent on the party in control of the state. And it was in the blue (democrat controlled) states where the lunacy was unchallenged. In the red (republican controlled) states, however, and in some of the mixed party "purple" states there were a lot of questions being asked as to the efficacy of shutting things down. And the most auspicious examples of states that did not buy what the democrats were selling are South Dakota (which never shut down) and Florida that opened back up once the science started to come to confirm that shutting down would have no effect.

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Both state governors These governors (Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron Desantis of Florida) refused to destroy their economies for the foolhardiness of trying to stop a force of nature. And they took a lot of heat in the media for their apostacy. But in the end they were proven right ​as the final death tolls in their states were no different from those that were shut down for two years. [tt]

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As for Trump, he never seemed to challenge the narrative the Democrats were spinning. And whether this was the best approach is hard to say in hindsight, because the left was out to get him regardless of which way he went. But given all the reports of people dying he seemed to accept that compliance was the only way to go. In other words, he chose was to address all the issues as would any Democrat president only with added vigor typical of his administration. In so doing, he moved heaven and earth to ensure every state had all the resources it needed to deal with the disease and held news conferences about every day. He also initated a program he called Operation Warpspeed that was dedicated to finding a vaccine for the disease within a year instead of the standard ten due to all the safeguards the government had in place to ensure vaccines are safe to use.

 

The big problem though is that trump was not a Democrat president, so the media attacked him mercilessly everyday of the outbreak, ignoring everything he was doing to help and making it appear as though he was responsible for every death. And those death counts were inflated too to make things out to be as horrible as possible. 

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The oddest part of it, though, is that left never criticized the one place where Trump actually deserved criticism. And that was his removal of the testing requirements for the vaccines. The media merely scoffed at his claim that he could produce a vaccine with a year. But that was it. Ad that in itself is sufficient to tell which side represented the sheep and which side the goats, because the Pharmaceutical companies Trump employed were given carte blanche to produce a vaccine with the guarantee that they would not be held responsible for any detrimental side effects due to lack of adequate testing. So they could have produced deadly poisons that killed off entre populations over time and all they would get is the billions of doallars Trump promised them for producing a vaccine quickly regardless of its danger.

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And in one very obvious respect these vaccines did pose a mortal danger, in that everyone of them made use of fetal tissue taken from an aborted baby in either their production oir in their testing. This is not to say that there is anything unethical in using fetal tissue to produce a vaccine. There isn't. At issue though is that they felt the need to use tissue from a child that did not die by natural causes. For no other reason than that they wanted to make a statement in favor of abortion they used the tissue of a child that had been murdered. And that made it impossible for any person of faith to take the vaccine. It would the equivalent of injecting intrinsic evil into one's veins. So there would be a certain segment of the population that would never allow those vaccines in their bloodstream. And that may have been for them a godsend (more on that later).

 

In any event, and as he had promised, Trump did produce more than one working vaccine before the end of his presidency. But by the time they came out the country was in shambles, both emotionally and economically just as the Democrats had planned. And 2020 being an election year there was no way they could imagine Trump winning now. But they were not about to leave it to chance this time as they'd done before. They'd been just as confident of winning in 2016 only to see their hopes and dreams trashed by a narrow Trump victory. So this time they would make it impossible to lose, because this time the they were going to cheat.

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And COVID was going to help them do it. It did so by giving legislators is states controlled by Democrats licence to change their voting laws (and in some cases override them) [uu] to allow for widespread mail-in ballots. And their excuse for doing this was that the electorate, they claimed, could not be expected to vote in person given how afraid they may be to brave the crowds at the voting booth. Whether people truly were afraid or not is not important, however. At issue is that mail-in voting is the easiest way to cheat because it allows for forged and faked ballot.

 

And that does appear to be what transpired come election night, November 3, 2020. From all accounts when the results started coming in Trump seemed to be well on his way to winning a second term in spite of all the tricks the Democrats had played to destroy his public image. By midnight he was leading in all the swing states with leads that seemed insurmountable even though there were stil a lot of mail-in ballots left to be counted. And then his supporters went to bed grateful that he would serve out another 4 years.

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But then things started get strange. In several of the swing states Republican ballot watchers were barred from observing the vote count in the major metropolitan areas like Philadelphia and Detroit. In Atlanta a water main was claimed to have broken forcing all the ballot watchers out with the claim that counting would not start until the following morning. Yet as soon as the Republicans had left the precinct, boxes of ballots were brought in of unknown origin and the counting resumed without anyone being notified. [vv]

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But these are the sorts of things that were happening in all the Democrat controlled cities of the swing states. And when people woke up the next morning Trump had lost his lead in each state with Biden the challenger receiving more votes in some districts than were voters registered to vote. [ww] His supporters were understandably enraged and for the next two months it was a battle for the courts, with the Trump team screaming foul and the Biden team calling it the "most secure election uin US history."

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But the Democrats were ready for this phase of the election. They'd been planning it for months and had a whole army lawyers waiting to take on the challenges. And in the courts too, many of the justices were left leaning and did not like the idea of being blamed for helping Trump win a second term. So it was common to see them throw a lot of the cases the Trump lawyers filed on mere technicalities. They simply didn't want to get involved. And that complacency went all the way up to the Supreme court as it is rumored that the Chief Justice Roberts (an apparent never-Trumper) was screaming at his fellow Justices to keep them from stepping in.

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In the end the injustice fell on the shoulders of the Vice President, Pence to correct. The Constitution required that the Vice President declare the winner of the election on January 20th. So the hope was that he would refuse to ratify the election until the Supreme Court took up the case. This would have resulted in a Constitutional crises that would force the Supreme Court's hand. And it is notewrthy what Pence did in response, bacause it is so rare that a person has such a spotlight turned on them. Would he choose to be forever remembered as the man who said no and changed the course of US history? Or would the glare of the spotlight be too much for him? He chose the later and so ended Trump's first term.

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​​The 2020s, Part 1: The Storm Resumes (aka the Biden Years) [33]

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Sometimes called the Great Awokening, the first order of business for the democrats, once Biden was sworn in, was to enshrine the results of the election, making his win so undeniable that no one would ever question it again. And the process of doing this actually began nine days prior to Biden's January 20 Inauguration. It commenced at a Washington DC protest rally Trump had held on the 11th for the purpose of demonstrating to the country and to Mike Pence how outraged half the country was over the appearance of a stolen election and thus persuade Pence to rethink his position on certifying the vote. Pence, however, was unmoved and the rally degraded into a break-in at the capitol building. 

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That is the generic explanation of what happened anyway. But there are a lot of clues that suggest that the Democrats had a lot to do with encouraging the break-in. They had, for instance, turned down Trump's offer to bring in the national guard the day before to ensure the rally would remain peaceful. [aaa] And there were also what appeared to be FBI operatives planted in the crowd encouraging the people to break through the barriers and enter the capitol. [bbb] Given how upset people were it was not a difficult task especially since mixed into the crowd were several members of a rightwing group known as The Proud Boys who had formed to counter all the violence being put forth by the leftist Antifa thugs.

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But the vast majority of the people that did find their way into the capitol building that day were not violent. They were mostly just mom and pop protesters that had been waved in after the doors had been breeched. And once they got in all they did basically was walk around until they got bored and they left. But the damage was done. The left had their whipping boy and for the next 4 years all you heard on the news was how horrible it was, comparing it at various times to 9/11, Pearl Harbor or the Civil War. Although no police officers were killed and the protesters were unarmed, "it was violent insurrection," they screamed, a Trumpian attempt to sieze power from a duly elected president. And nevermore would the media have to suffer the embarrassment of all the truly violent behavior of their far left agitators. They could simply point their finger at January 11 and end all discussion.

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It didn't stop with that though. with the left now in power, the right had to now be taught a lesson for challenging their authority and their lies. thousands of the protesters were rounded up and put on trial for taking part in an insurrection. And prosecutors coerced many into admitting to be insurrectionists to get more lenient sentences. Many others were incarcerated in the DC jail awaiting trials that never seemed to come. And most of these people were guilty of only illegal trespassing at best. That didn't keep them from receiving exorbitant prison terms from DC courts where the population is about 95% Democrat making it impossible to get a fair hearing.

 

And in case America still didn't get the message that the leftists were in charge, anyone still who questioned the outcome of the election and tried to express that opinion on the internet was summarily kicked off the platforms due to the government pressuring these mostly leftist run platforms to do so. And Donald Trump was probably the first to be censured in this manner being kicked off Twitter almost immediately on leaving office for the crime, they said, of disseminating disinformation that led to an insurrection.

 

This was a crucial first step by the democrats. They had a lot of changes they wanted to make to better America, changes that had been put on hold for 4 years, and they needed the undivided attention of the media, they felt, to pull it all off. I mean, how else could it be explained that clearly half the country had seemingly gone insane and voted for the Neo-Nazi Trump. They were obviously being brainwashed by propagandists. If the left could only, therefore, get complete control of the airwaves everyone would finally see things correctly and the world could be saved.

 

The problem they faced, though, was that the US Constitution had all those annoying safegurds built into it, archaic ideas like freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom to lawfully assemble and freedom of the press. The now right-leaning Supreme Court presented a challenge to their plans as well. Something was going to have to be done about all of that and the first order of business was the regulation of speech. and they couldn't legally yet ban what the right was saying on their various media platforms so they went after the platforms.

 

On the three biggest Twitter, Facebook and Google's YouTube it wasn't merely the president who was censured and it wasn't merely talk of a stolen election that bot you kicked off. They were pressured to kick people off their platforms for all sorts of reasons. It was the US version of the hate speech bans that had become so popular in Europe. And in theory it does sound pretty good. They were banning, they said, the speech of bigots and fascists. And who wants to listen to that? In practice, however, it was egregiously awful as the term hate speech became simply whatever speech the left hated. And that, of course, included any opinions coming from the right.

 

And differential treatment didn't stop with social media, either. Private institutions and banks especially were rated by how closely aligned they were to the leftist cause and received Government perks or penalties on the basis of their rating. [ccc] And with these institutions on their side their intent was to drive all heterodox opinions out of existence. They called adherance to the leftist agenda being "woke" while those who resisted became known as the "cancelled". And in its heyday it resembled in many ways France's Reign of Terror when its first attempt at democracy failed. The only major exception was that the guillotine was replaced by turning people into social pariah's while destroying their means of making a living in the process.

 

And they truly believed that this was all that was needed to win over the hearts and minds of the country, this and the way they coddled up to the people they'd labelled the disenfranchised. Women and people of color did after all make up the majority of the population in the country. And they were traditionally  So treating all white men as secondclass citizens for a change and giving everyone else a shot at their places in society would surely strike a positive chord with the electorate and ensure reelection for decades to come.

 

They called it their DEI initiative (short for Diversity. Equity and Inclusion). And there was some merit to the idea of helping people overcome social adversity by levelling the playing field. But the Democrats worshipped it like it was their God ([ddd] giving the term deism a whole new meaning). and cared very little about ensuring that the people they raised up were qualified for their positions. If someone was black or female and had some sort of degree, no matter how unrelated, they were promoted to positions of power over candidates that actually were qualified but possessed the fatal flaw of being white males.

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To their great astonishment, however, none of this seemed to be working and if anything the polls were showing that the right was actually gaining in popularity through it all. And it was frustrating to them. The people in the opposition party did not appear to be at all affected by the limiting of their sources of information. And although they ideally wanted to get rrd of all of those sources, that darn Constitution and its guardians, the now heavily constitutionalist Supreme Court kept getting in the way. [eee] So a scheme was hatched to pack the Supreme Court with enough leftist justices to basically make it a rubber stamp for whatever attack the Biden administration might want to assail against the Bill of Rights.

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This was the biggest threat to the country the democrats had attempted yet, as the one governmental factor that separates the US from all fascist dictatorships is its independent juduciary. Dismantling it, via the proposed court packing, would have made it just an extension of the executive branch. And the US as a result would be indistinguishable in leadership to, say, North Korea. [fff] The democrats had also been proposing it since the Kavanaugh appointment. And they also now held a slim majority in the Senate. So the country seemed doomed to find out what fascism really was. And it would have but for the courage of two stalwart Democrat Senators [ggg] who courageously chose what was best for the country over that of their party and voted accordingly.

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So to say that the country was miraculously preserved by their stand is not an exageration, because it effected far more than the ability of news sources to speak freely. Every freedom afforded us in the Bill of Rights was in Satan's crosshairs. And probably the biggest thorn in his side was the religious right. But to fully understand why, some backstory is required.

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In trading away the wisdom of God for worldly wisdom decades earlier, the left, by now, had fallen prey to all manner of depravity. Their stance on killing babies through abortion, for instance, was no longer, "let's keep it legal, but rare."  It had become for them the moral equivalent of having an infected tooth pulled. So with the latest generation of liberals the second half of that mantra, the rarity clause, no longer held any meaning. After decades of embracing hedonism, their beliefs on sexuality had similarly gone off the deep end. No longer just satisfied with a society that had put homosexual relations on the same pedestal of legitimacy as heterosexual relations, by the 2020s almost every manner of aberrant sexual activity had been elevated to that status.

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The one big exception was pedophilia. ​But the left had ben flirting with bringing that depravity into the mainstream for decades. And to seemingly pave the way for its acceptance, traditional gender roles were now being challenged in two major areas, with children being terribly victimized in each case. Of the two the least damaging, in physical terms but not necessarily psychological, was cross dressing, with drag queen parties being held across the country in bars and even in libraries to introduce children and hopefully indoctrinate them into that sick culture.

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Much more pernicious though was the rash of children being encouraged (in many cases by some witless adult) to adopt a gender contrary toi their genetic makeup, simply because they were going through a phase, as children are prone to do, of gender confusion. Parents were told it is a crime to discourage it and that they should in many cases actually allow their children to take puberty blocking drugs and be surgically altered to take on the appearance of the gender they wer4e experimenting with. To do otherwise, they were told, was to risk seeing their child take their own life. And so the trans craze began with transexuals suddenly coming out in the open demanding access to every arena and facility previously reserved solely for members of the opposite sex.

 

Such was the sad state of the union under Biden, with some cleverly dubbing it "The Great Awokening." But for people of faith, the Biden years were more and more seen as an assualt on God, Himself.  and his justice department didn't even try to disguise it. The went after evangelicals, traditional Catholics, prolifers bunching them all together into the category of white supremicists regardless of what race and individual in those categories belonged to. Some were jailed simply for praying.

 

And the same went for parents who showed up at school meetings and town halls complaining about what was going on the schools. They were labelled domestic terrorits and put on FBI watch lists for having the temerity to comlain about boys being allowed to use the same bathrooms and showers as their daughters or because they didn't want their children indoctrinated with leftist anti-Western Civilization history courses or exposed to the sexually explicit teachng aids some of the more radical teachers were using.

 

The world had seemingly gone insane almost overnight, as every day some new afront to Judeo-Christian ethics was being introduced to expand the norm. But it wasn't just the Commandments they'd abandoned or the Satanic substitutes they'd relaced them with. All 7 of the Deadly Sins were on display and in their full colors to honor all the various factions that made up the Democratic voting block. 

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Gluttony, for instance, had come into its own in all the drug users and addicts that typically voted in favor of the only party that promised to make them more available. It was seen also in how obesity had suddenly become beautiful and to say otherwise was to be cancelled for fat shaming. As to Pride, an entire month was set aside to honor those who suffered from it. There could have, however, been a month devoted to every one of the Deadly Sins, as much as the country was embracing them. And it would not be difficult to show this. 

 

But the Bible has prophesied that there would be a rider for this 7-headed beast, someone it called the Whore of Babylon. [hhh] This person would be someone who theoretically embraced all these sins and used them as a vehicle to propel him (or her) into power. And Scripture also informs us he (or she) will be drunk on the blood of the martyrs. So their deaths, too, should have something to do with this person's rise to supreme prominence. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​