Luther at the Diet of Worms, by Anton von Werner, 1877.
And it cast down truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered.
Daniel 8:12
Truth is cast to the ground.
I’ve thought about that quite a lot in recent years. It seems as if the lie always prospers, while truth, it if even is heard at all, is quickly dismissed as nonsense and those who speak it as fools or worse.
I was reminded once again of just how corrupt things have become after watching some of the shenanigans in the stock market last week with the big dust up over the Gamestop stock and how, supposedly, a group of small investors beat the big guys on Wall Street.
I’ll not dive into the details of what took place, but on the surface we can say that at least one major hedge fund sustained significant losses when its short position on Gamestock was blown up by investors piling into the company’s stock and driving it to over $400 per share.
For our purposes, what important to understand is that when an investor – either an individual or an institution such as a hedge fund – short sells a stock, he profits when the price goes down. If the price goes up, the short seller loses money. If the stock price goes way up, as was the case with Gamestop, the short seller loses a lot of money.
When the losses were piling up for the big guys during the week, it didn’t take long for the weeping and gnashing of teeth to begin. Billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman went on an epic rant on CNBC last Thursday, 1/28, saying, “The reason the market is doing what it’s doing is people are sitting at home getting checks from the government. This fair share, is a (bleep) concept. It’s just a way of attacking wealthy people and I think it inappropriate and we all gotta work together and pull together.”
Just how true is the narrative that a bunch of unemployed Robin Hood traders on their own drove up the price of Gamestop, thus inflicting heavy losses on some hedge funds, I cannot say for sure. I have my doubts that things are what we’re being told, but, at the very least, Cooperman seemed to accept that narrative when he went on his rant last week.
Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
Genesis 11:6
He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him.
Acts 17:26-27
Among the besetting sins of the 21st century American Protestantism is its propensity to form ungodly pacts with unbelievers. It amounts to a return to the failed policy of Israel, which, when the going got tough, often resorted to going down to Egypt to seek Pharaoh’s help when they instead should have sought the Lord.
The close, and seemingly every closer, ties between mainstream Evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism one again were brought to mind this week by Joe Biden’s executive order blitz and the similar reaction to them from both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT). The reaction to Biden’s executive orders on immigration from the USCCB and the ersatz Evangelicals at EIT was so similar that one could be forgiven for thinking they were penned by the same person.
One of the landmark texts produced by the neo-evangelicals is an ecumenical document dating from 1994 and co-signed by Charles Colson and John Neuhaus, with Colson representing the Evangelicals and Neuhaus the Catholics.
A book titled Evangelicals & Catholics Together: Toward A Common Mission (ECT) was issued the following year edited by Colson and Neuhaus. The main argument of this evil book was that Evangelicals and Catholics, while they had their differences, in the end really are brothers in Christ and, for this reason, ought to cooperate toward the common goal of uniting Christians “that they may be all be one.”
Of course, for Evangelicals and Catholics to be one requires the prior understanding that both Evangelicals and Roman Catholics believe the same things are Christians. Now it may well be true that Southern Baptist Chuck Colson believed the same things as Richard Neuhaus, but this would simply prove that Colson himself was not a Christian, not that Protestantism and Catholicism have any propositions in common.
This March, it will be 27 years since the release of ECT, and that is enough time to trace out at least some of the evil fruit of this document. To do it full justice, would take far longer than could be done in a short blog post. But I’d like to take this opportunity to demonstrate just how close the cooperation has become between the Roman Church-State and conservative, ersatz Evangelicals in just one area: immigration.
On Immigration, the USCCB and EIT Speak as One
The past few days have been busy ones at the USCCB. The bishops, it seems, can hardly believe the embarrassment of riches that has fallen into their lap with the election of America’s second Roman Catholic president. Oddly enough, in both cases when America elected a Roman Catholic president, there were widespread and credible charges of election fraud, but that’s another story.
Focusing on just the USCCB’s press releases, we find four on immigration:
EIT, on the other hand, while a little less energetic than their colleagues at the USCCB, nevertheless managed to put together two recent press releases on immigration
In both cases, the press releases celebrate the fact that the Biden’s executive orders will release a flood of taxpayer subsidized immigration, migration, and refugee resettlement, the cost of which will be underwritten by the American people as their moral obligation.
The Evangelical Immigration Table includes Bethany Christian Services, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Faith and Community Empowerment, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, The Wesleyan Church, World Relief and World Vision.
Other signatories include additional faith groups including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration and Refugee Services, a wide range of trade associations and businesses, local police departments and chiefs of police, and a diverse spectrum of civic and advocacy organizations (emphasis mine).
One point of emphasis that I’ve made many times in print and in podcasts is that Roman Catholic Church-State is the premier globalist organization there is, a fact almost always overlooked, even by those who claim to be independent journalists and podcasters. They simply do not have eyes to see the exceedingly great evil of the Vatican’s globalism, even as it stares them right in the face.
So, we have EIT, which includes the influential Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention of which the prominent Russell Moore is currently president, connected both to the USCCB and George Soros, which never sleep in their efforts to subvert the Constitution of the United States of America and to bring about world government. Both the USCCB and George Soros see immigration as a way of destabilizing America and other nation states to make it easier to fold them into their hoped-for global superstate.
The Evil of Globalism
The 1648 Treat of Westphalia settled the Thirty Years’ War and ushered in the current system of international politics known as the Westphalian World Order. The Thirty Years’ War was the first pan-European war and was a battle between nations to which the Reformation had come and the nations in subjection to the Pope. Essentially, it was a war between Protestants and Catholics, and the Protestants won.
The principal ideas of Westphalian World Order (WWO), are such that if you were you to explain it to people, many likely would respond that it’s just common sense. Yet it took the Protestant Reformation and a major war to establish them in international law. So what are the main ideas of WWO? First, each state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers. Second, that each state, no matter how large or small, is equal in international law. One implication of this is that supranational organizations such as the United Nations impinge on the sovereignty of nation states and are, therefore, to be avoided.
In his 2014 book World Order, Henry Kissinger remarked, “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight,” but this is incorrect. The WWO is not merely a “practical accommodation to reality,” but an idea whose origins can be found in the Scriptures.
In Genesis 11, we see man’s first attempt to build a global empire in the form of the Tower of Babel frustrated by God. The reason given is that, if they were to succeed, then, “nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” To prevent the centralization of power and the evil that would follow from it, God confused the language of the people, scattering them into their own nations according to their languages. Another reason for separating people into their own nations was, as the Apostle Paul noted in his address on Mars Hill, to cause them to seek the Lord. “He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and ahs determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him.”
With these passages in mind, it seems that the nation state system that came out of the Peace of Westphalia was not so much a “practical accommodation to reality” as one of the implications of the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Put another way, the WWO is one of the implications of Christianity. If this is true, and I am persuaded that it is, then those individuals and organizations – individuals and organizations such as the afore mentioned George Soros and USCCB – are doing the devil’s work when they attempt to overthrow nation states to produce, as it were, their globalist Nirvana, which we could perhaps call Tower of Babel 2.0.
Mass, nation breaking, taxpayer subsidized immigration, migration and refugee resettlement are some of the most powerful tools in the toolbox of these wicked globalists. That Donald Trump opposed these policies is likely one of the reasons he was targeted for removal by the globalists.
To the degree that nominally Evangelical organizations such as EIT are aligned with George Soros and the USCCB, they share in their sins of immigration treason. To the degree that ordinary Christians are co-opted by EIT and other Romanist, globalist front organizations, they too share in the sins of the immigration reason lobby.
Protestants do not oppose immigration. Indeed, America has a history of being exceedingly generous with its immigration policy, and this is due in large measure to its Christian heritage. But immigration, migration and refugee resettlement of the sort supported by the Biden administration, EIT and the USCCB is destructive of nations, including America, represents immigration treason, and should be soundly rejected by Christians.
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We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard
Welcome to the first in what I hope to be a recurring series of posts highlighting the close connection between the political and economic agenda of the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS) and the Biden administration.
In many ways, this series is a successor to the earlier series of posts I wrote in this space under the title Rome Watch, which explored the political and economic agenda pursued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) with an eye to exposing their anti-American agenda hidden in plain sight.
Indeed, it is shocking the degree to which the USCCB openly conspires against the best interests of the American people, while at the same time it receives almost no scrutiny whatsoever for its subversive policy stances.
It seemed good to me, however, to update the title of this recurring series from Rome Watch to Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion in the first place, because the new title draws the readers attention to the long-running close connection between the Democratic party and the RCCS. The saying, “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” is taken from a speech given by Presbyterian minister and Union Civil War veteran Dr. Samuel D. Burchard shortly before the 1884 presidential election.
Although many Americans have heard the famous triplet, they have, at best, a vague sense where it came from or to what it originally applied.
Detail from The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths by JN Sylvestre, 1890.
“At the hour of midnight, the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia” (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 31).
With these words the English historian Edward Gibbon captured the sacking of Rome by Alaric king of the Visigoths on August 24, A.D. 410. Although the Western empire did not officially come to an end until A.D. 476, the sacking of Rome by Alaric was certainly an indication of the Empire’s fast approaching end.
As something of a history buff myself, I’ve often wondered what it was like for people who witnessed the end of their civilization. It must have been terrible and terrifying. One wonders at the horror that must have filled the hearts of the inhabitants of Jerusalem when the Babylonian army broke through the city walls in 586 B.C. and proceeded to destroy the city and burn the temple, which at that time had stood for over 300 years.
Reflecting on the excerpt above from Gibbon, what was it like for the Romans, and even non-Romans, in A.D. 410 to hear that Rome had been taken by a barbarian Germanic king?
At the time of the sacking of Rome, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa found himself confronted by many angry and puzzled questioners, many of whom were refugees from Alaric’s invasion of Italy, asking how, if Christianity were true, God could allow Christian civilization – recall that Constantine had become the first, at least nominally, Christian emperor about a century earlier – to be destroyed by a pagan barbarian king and his army?
That bishop, as you may already be aware, was none other than Aurelius Augustine, the greatest theologian of the early church.
According to one scholar,
More than any other single episode the sacking of Rome gave Augustine a reason to write the City of God. After 410 he found exiles, those escaping the disturbing events in Italy, arriving in North Africa where he was now Bishop of Hippo and asking how he could explain this collapse of a Christian Empire. It was their angry challenge that led him to begin work on a book which was to appear in episodes stretching over many years of composition (G. R. Evans, Introduction, City of God. Penguin Books, London, 2003, ix).
It seems to me that, although our present circumstances are in certain important respects different from those faced by Augustine in his day, nevertheless there are some important similarities. While Rome in the fifth century was sacked and burned by outside forces, America today is being sacked and burned – in some ways literally, in others figuratively – by forces from within. In both cases – Rome in A.D. 410; America in A.D. 2021 – the civilizations were in advanced states of decay well in advance of their sacking. One may fairly view the two events not as the beginning of their respective civilization’s collapse, but as another, more overt, step along the way to their demise.
The comparison of Rome’s sacking in 410 to the events in America over the past year – namely, the massive civil unrest carried out by BLM and Antifa and supported by the political, business, entertainment and academic establishments; the brutal Covid lockdowns in defiance of the Constitution, medical precedent, and the teachings of Scripture; and an overtly stolen presidential election – can be instructive to Christians today, because many of the same problems that plague America and the West today are the same problems that plagued Rome in Augustine’s day, and the answers he gave to his critics are just as applicable now as they were then.
Rioters wearing Trump paraphernalia breached the Capitol Wednesday as lawmakers met to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win PHOTO: MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
President Donald J. Trump, Washington D.C., January 6, 2021
As was the case with most kids who grew up in the late ‘70’s and early 80’s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. The original film, released in 1977, was such a huge hit that everyone knew it would be followed by a sequel.
The eagerly anticipated follow up, The Empire Strikes Back, debuted in 1980. Unlike so many movie sequels, this one was worthy of the original. In fact, many critics consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the best of the original Star Wars trilogy.
A lot of the things that forty years later we think of a quintessentially Star Wars were not in the first film. The Imperial Walkers, the Darth Vader theme music, Boba Fett, and Yoda all mode their debut in The Empire Strikes Back, not in the first 1977 movie.
Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about The Empire Strikes Back, a movie that came out over forty years ago, in the context of a piece about last week’s Capitol Hill riot.
My reason is this, just as The Empire Strikes Back was a movie, as the title tells us, of the Empire going on the offensive to once and for all crush the resistance of the Rebel Alliance that had blown up the Death Star, the Empire’s super weapon, so too the events of the past year, including the events of January 6, 2021, seem to be aimed at brining to a quick end the populist uprising that began in Great Britain and in America back in 2016.
After years of discussion, in June of 2016 Great Britain held a vote on Brexit, which was the popular name given to the movement to take the UK out of the European Union. The vote turned out, to the shock and horror of globalists everywhere, in favor of Brexit.
Across the pond, we here in America were faced with a similar choice in that year’s presidential election. We could support Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, who, we were told by all the experts, was and unstoppable electoral juggernaut, more than capable of crushing all resistance in her path, or we could support a very bad orange man named Donald John Trump.
Hillary supporters were the blessed, the righteous, the very elect of the Lord. The Donald’s backers? Well, we all know they were just a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic basket of toothless, uneducated, irredeemably deplorable rednecks, who, just like their leader Donald Trump, were very bad people who deserved very bad things to happen to them.
But, as was the case with Brexit, much to the shock and horror of the Masters of the Universe crowd, Queen Hillary lost and the Donald and his merry band of deplorables won.
It was at this point that the Empire – by “Empire” I mean the whole rotten basket of Deep Staters, establishment types, Clintonistas, RINO’s, Obamites, Bushies, crony capitalist billionaires, banksters, Vaticanites, Wall Streeters, globalists, etc. – began to plot how they were going to strike back, oust Donald Trump, and permanently return themselves to power.
In a nutshell, I believe this explains the last four years of nonstop shrieking from, and relentless attacks by, the establishment on Donald Trump, his supporters and about every single thing they have said and done.
Credit: AP Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, center, smiles with his mask pulled down as he watches an opening day baseball game between the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees at Nationals Park, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“New year, same old virus. Masks on, Ohio.” That was the cheery New Year’s greeting on the electronic message boards on the interstates around Cincinnati yesterday.
How is it that the government has managed to turn “fifteen days to flatten the curve” into over nine months of lockdowns, mask requirements, and social distancing with no end in sight?
From the very first time I heard about Covid and all the attendant liberty and economy destroying measures the experts insisted we follow lest we die the death, this entire so-called pandemic has struck this author as a psyop designed to allow wanna be tyrants the opportunity to enact measures they otherwise could never get away with.
From the standpoint of the authoritarians and globalists, Covid certainly has been a far better tool for restricting freedom and bolstering their own power than climate change.
Compared to the threat of a supposedly killer virus which could strike you dead without warning while driving to work, climate change seemed downright boring.
Two years ago, socialist con-artist and Congress critter Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tried to scare people with her Green New Deal, eloquently warning people that, “like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Queue the collective public yawn.
But a killer virus, one that’s not merely an epidemic, but a pandemic? Now that’s just the sort of thing to make people sit up and pay attention! And pay attention they did.
Nearly the entire developed world went into lockdown mode in February and March of 2020. When I first heard about lockdowns, I thought the whole idea was so absurd, so clearly a violation of people’s liberties, and so obviously destructive of the economy, that I really didn’t think governors would actually go through with them.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Not only have public officials – including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine – embraced lockdowns, mask requirements, business closures, etc., but they have done so with great gusto and with relatively little effective pushback from citizens who are daily having their lives destroyed by their policies.
And it’s the pretty much the same wherever you go in the formerly free West. Some places are a better, some are worse. But with very few exceptions, not only has Covid been used as an excuse to destroy liberty, but the level of destruction is continually ratcheted up.
It was only in November that headlines were declaring that the UK economy had suffered the worst recession in more than 300 years.
Now, Boris Johnson wants to do more of the same thing that’s already substantially destroyed the economy of his country and the liberties of his people.
This is madness.
It’s also sinful.
But, sadly, it’s also typical of the sort of thinking that has gripped the minds of civil magistrates throughout the West.
Lux Lucet 