There can be no doubt that our Constitutional Republic exists in name only, having been replaced by Communist Rule by force (The Enemy). I am convinced that we will win back the Republic, but at great cost, because the Parasitic Super Rich Ruing Class (PSRRC) and their Communist minions (THE ENEMY) will not go down without a fight. To hell with abstract terms, the Enemy of the people is the Enemy. Period. Remember, they have been attempting to take over our country for more than 200 years.

Communists Are Now in Charge. Can We Win Back This Republic?

To address the problem we must make the following assumptions:

1.The Enemy has taken over total control of the government and is ruling by the barrel of a gun in complete contravention of the Constitution, without any legality whatsoever.

2. Equal Justice does not exist in the faux federal government. There is no safety or justice in large Democrat/Communist cities or states.

3. The Majority of all federal legislation is unconstitutional, as it does not comport with the Enumerated Powers in our Constitution.

4. More than half the population is dependent directly or indirectly on income from the federal government. This of course is a big plus for the Enemy. But this advantage will be short-lived, because the printed money will soon be worthless and people will turn on the government. (It is impossible to change this situation without returning to Constitutional gold money, which the Enemy does not want to do because they would lose control.)

5. About half of our population supports the Enemy because of handouts, brainwashing by teachers and media, and just plain ignorance. But mostly its just the free money. The fools don’t know that this is economically impossible in the long run. Remember the fall of Rome.

6.The people of this country live in fear of the FBI and other rogue federal agencies acting under “the color of law”. The people know their Constitutional Rights and that the Enemy has none, which is a disaster waiting to happen. This could and likely will trigger a massive upheaval.

7.At the present time the Enemy (Parasitic Super Rich Ruling Class, wealthy families, elites, big money, corporations, government officials, etc) control everything and everybody with money and the barrel of a gun.

8. Leaders of both political parties are subservient minions of the Enemy for money and power.

9. It is impossible to win national elections due to corruption, fraud and a complicit Supreme Court. In the short run, you can’t inform the brainwashed, but you must live in the short run. With cowardly and corrupt governors, complicit courts and a compromised Department of Justice, you have no remedy about unfair elections.

We are going to suffer for years, through many levels, before we regain our freedom. I predict that some levels will be fraught with destruction and bloodshed. I am predicting the following levels:

1. We are at the starting gate, where everyone is hoping that the recent election will result in a slowdown in the destruction of the country. But when faced with the barrels of guns by totally corrupt usurpers, little or no progress will be made. We can’t forget that long-term elected officials are under control of the Enemy (Parasitic Super Rich Ruling Class, Elites, Big Money, Establishment, Wealthy Families, etc). Please note, I just call them what they are: The Enemy!

2. We could experience some real hell in the period before the next election, if borders are not closed, inflation continues unabated, open-ended funding of the Ukraine War continues, FBI continues “Color of Law” attacks, etc. The real danger comes from citizen resistance to unlawful attacks by government. If the feds then respond even harder, it will precipitate severe and escalating blowback. Frankly, it will be a miracle if we get to the 2024 elections without a major confrontation and over-reaction on both sides.

3. The 2024 elections are our last, best chance to prevent a civil war. The “America First Republicans”, a minority of the Republican legislators, must force fair and Constitutional elections. If they fail, the people will lose their only opportunity to regain their Constitutional Republic without destruction and bloodshed, resulting in a civil war (not my recommendation, but a reality).

Our only hope is President Trump, who has demonstrated his patriotism and capability in the face of The Enemy to do the right things. I don’t care how many crooked politicians he calls pigs or worse, because they are pigs. The Enemy hates his guts because he interfered with their theft and degradation of the American people and our Constitution. Every major media outlet, including Fox News, will smear and vilify him because his election would result in a return to prosperity of the People at the expense of The Enemy (PSRRC, etc.).

President Trump speaks the plain, unvarnished language of the people and not the phony polished words of the Enemy (the “upper crust” and “woke” crowd).

The Election of 2024 will be a contest between the informed working -class, former middle-class (MAGA voters) and the wealthy, self-proclaimed elite Democrat/Communists (The Enemy), government, media, corporations and their brainwashed free-loaders in the inner-city plantations. The Democrat Party is not the party of your grandfather! It is the party of the wealthy, The Enemy.

Anyone who thinks that a government that produces nothing can support people who do nothing is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Let’s look at the numbers (I have little confidence in the absolute accuracy of these numbers, however.). National debt is $31 Trillion, GDP is $24 trillion, Revenue is $3.6 trillion, Federal Budget is estimated to be $5.8 Trillion, Every citizen owes $92,772 of the debt. Interest on the debt will soon exceed total revenue. It is economically impossible for federal government to continue funding most of its “unconstitutional “ expenditures that produce a $2 trillion or more deficit a year.

(Say Goodbye to Social Security, Medicare, Pensions and all government benefits!) It has been reported that 40 million able-bodied people refuse to work because they are paid not to work by government, resulting in inflation and shortages. If we don’t return to a government of “constitutional size”, we will continue as bankrupt, and everything we cherish will be gone. Period.

4. Assume we managed to take back control of all three branches of government in 2024, while replacing the old guard of the Republican Party with “America First” Republicans. Now we can make our federal government comply with the Constitution 100%, and our prosperity will soar. But if we fail, I can see nothing but destruction and bloodshed for years to come as Lenin’s “Useful Idiots” learn the truth by starvation and experience (the only way they will learn in the short run).

5. I want to make clear that, win or lose the 2024 election, drastic changes will take place over which no one has control. All creditable experts say that we will soon be in a massive, long and enduring economic depression with the dollar in free-fall. If we terminate all “unconstitutional” parts of the federal government, return usurped powers back to the states, put the able- bodied back to work, etc., we can return the Republic to the People with all its benefits. If we can’t do this, we will suffer a civil war and sink into economic oblivion until we again fund government with tariffs, rather than the income tax.

CRITICAL WARNING: If The Enemy, through the government, again violates the Constitution and instigates instant and comprehensive slavery known as DIGITAL MONEY, it is an immediate DECLARATION OF CIVIL WAR. You would be like a Chinese serf with no God-given Rights, no property, no nothing. You would be a convict in a “country-wide prison”.

Anyone who questions this truth is an idiot.

I am a Patriot and an 88 year old, legally-blind disabled veteran with a modicum of education and experience. My writing is based upon this, and my knowledge of History, Economics and The Constitution. At my age, I don’t have time for BS, so I call a spade a spade. I am not advocating any course of action because I can’t participate. I report circumstances as I see them.

God Bless the Constitutional Republic.

© 2022 NWV Andrew Wallace – All Rights Reserved

Why does a civilization, providing peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to its inhabitants turn to self-hatred?  Why do those who richly enjoy the fruits of the West, also agree to abhor it?

To understand this destructive habit of mind, we must first turn to the nineteenth century, when Christianity was finally and fully replaced by collectivism. People were no longer defined by God but by society; that is, individual identity was said to be achieved only through social interaction. Without society, there was no humanity.

This idea belongs to the German philosopher, Georg Hegel, who in many ways is the father of the modern world. His philosophy (Hegelianism), though vast and difficult, changed the West.

“The rational alone is real” summarizes his ideas. This means that reality is a manifestation of reason, including both nature and history. Hegelians define reason in two ways: as Infinite, which belongs to God, or as finite, which belongs to man. The latter definition establishes materialism, as embodied, for example, by Marx, who was himself a Hegelian.

There is also a third strain, namely, the anti-Hegelians, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both thinkers gave primacy to the will (voluntarism), where reality was the manifestation of the human will, making reason untrustworthy, if not needless. The West’s current secularism stems from both Hegelianism and voluntarism.

So, why does the West hate itself? Because anything that hinders or denies human reason and the human will must be destroyed. The biggest hindrance is the West’s past, its root: Christianity. Western self-abhorrence is hatred of what stands in the way of a “better” future.

Voluntarism values strength and hates weakness. Materialism values reason and hates faith. Both engender hatred, which is the first step towards self-annihilation.

The historical culture of the West affirms that it is impossible for human reason to be all-encompassing or understand the totality of existence; nor can reason provide a rationale for all reality. Human reason can only discover God. It can never explain Him.

As for human will, it is tyranny without faith.

But despite the hatred, the West refuses to vanish, and its historical morality persists. Temperance, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, duty, charity, courage, wisdom and compassion have not faded away and thus evoke hatred – for these virtues are reminders of the West’s vitality.

In other words, morality remains the West’s second nature, which self-hatred is not yet strong enough to erase. The West is yet haunted by the memory of a life greater than the needs of the body — and there still lingers the ghostly grandeur of goodness and of beauty. The satisfaction of appetites cannot give meaning to life, while the force of will is empty without spiritual purpose. Therefore, collectivism is a hollow substitute for faith, because there will always be the question of the human soul.

A godly Hegelian, Max Stirner, once observed: “Moral people skimmed off the finest fat from religion [Christianity], ate it up, and are now having a hard time trying to get rid of the ensuing scrofula.”

This, in a nutshell, is the West. It hates itself because it despises its “scrofula,” which it got by deciding to believe that its traditional morality could feed a civilization finer than the one that sprouted and matured from its true root.

Thus, the West hates itself because its materialism and voluntarism have failed. It contrived various political stunts, like identity politics, social justice, gender confusion and the borderless post-nation state — but they bore no fruit.

Two further such stunts derive from the ideas of Edward Said and Will Kymlicka. Both men, especially Said, are now fundamental to any sort of liberal education.

Thus, it is Said who spawned the now-trendy anti-white bigotry, when he openly declared that whites are by nature oppressors, colonialists and imperialists, who had done enough damage to the world and its people and time had come to replace them. Of course, until his death, Said was well rewarded for his hateful rhetoric by Western universities, and his book, Orientalism, has now attained scriptural status. Conservatives have never fully challenged him (except one – Ibn Warraq).

(As an aside, Said also hated the scholars of the Frankfurt School, labeling them all as Eurocentric imperialists who should be ridiculed and ignored. Thus, the Frankfurt School is hardly anti-West).

Then there is Will Kymlicka, the father of multiculturalism, who is a one-man industry. Again, few conservatives challenge him, because most likely they accept the premise that the West has no inherent value, other than being an economic structure built to generate profit. Kymlicka advocates more and more people from all over the world living in the West, until all qualities that distinguish it are gone.

Kymlicka naively assumes that the West will continue to offer peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to all, even though the people living within its borders despise everything that made the West unique, or who carry ideas from their own cultures and histories which only fashioned failure and oppression.

As for the true root of the West, Christianity, its claim remains the strongest – that life has eternal meaning. Why does the West hate itself? Because it has forgotten this truth and is now trying to content itself with emptiness.

Copyright © 2018 Nirmal Dass The Daily Caller-All rights reserved.

The causes of African poverty is often misunderstood, but the continent’s economic history provides an opportunity to take a closer look at what went wrong.

“African poverty was not caused by colonialism, capitalism or free trade,” says Tupy. “As I have noted before, many of Europe’s former dependencies became rich precisely because they maintained many of the colonial institutions and partook in global trade.”

Tupy notes that African poverty preceded the continent’s contact with Europe and persists where Europeans have departed. “That is an outcome of unfortunate policy choices, most of which were freely chosen by Africa’s leaders after independence,” she says.

Africa, much like Europe, started out desperately poor. The late Professor Angus Maddison of Groningen University estimated in 1990 that, at the start of the Common Era, average per capita income in Africa was $470 per year.

The global average was roughly equal to that of Africa. Western Europe and North Africa, which were parts of the Roman Empire, were slightly better off, at $600, while North America lagged behind Africa at $400. Thus poverty in the world was fairly equally distributed.

Global inequality coincided with the rise of Northern Italian city states in the 14th century and the Renaissance in the 15th century. By 1500, a typical European was about twice as rich as a typical African. But the real gap opened only after the Industrial Revolution that started in England in the late 18th century and later spread to Europe and North America during the 19th century.

In 1870, Europeans controlled no more than 10 per cent of the African continent, mostly only the northern and southern parts of the continent. But Western European incomes were already four times higher than those in Africa. Europe, in other words, did not need Africa in order to become prosperous.

Europe colonised Africa because Europe was already far more prosperous, a chronological fact that many blame sayers overlook.

Africa’s fortunes under colonial rule included progress in health and education. Maddison estimates that in 1870, there were 91 million Africans. By 1960, the year of independence, the African population had grown more than threefold to 285 million.

The OECD estimates that at the same time the share of the African population attending school rose from less than 5 percent to over 20 percent.

After Africa’s struggles for independence, African leaders inherited countries where fierce repression of political dissent had already been established by Africans themselves. Instead of repealing censorship and detention laws, African leaders chose to expand such laws.

Post-independence African governments were determined to expunge colonial institutions because they represented rule of law, accountable government, property rights and free trade. African leaders instead opted for political arrangements and economic policies of the Soviet Union.

Even today, Africa remains the least economically free and most protectionist continent in the world.

Copyright © 2018 Freewestmedia.com-All rights reserved.

I recently read Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s book Triple Jeopardy for the West: Aggressive Secularism, Radical Islamism and Multiculturalism. Nazir-Ali’s point is that all three movements pose a grave threat to the West as the vacuum where Christianity once was is filled.

It is increasingly obvious that the multitude of errors in thinking that dog the modern world can be brought back to the same root problem: the rejection of God. An obvious example is the transgender obsession that has swept the country, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

Penny Mordaunt, a minister for the ‘Conservative’ party, said this week: ‘Trans women are women, that’s the starting point.’ She aims to make changing one’s gender easier. There was talk not long ago that the ‘Conservative’ government was going to allow individuals to change their gender on their birth certificates without even a doctor’s opinion.

In a society that respects God and believes in Him, this destructive confusion simply does not permeate. How can it? With faith in God you know that a man and a woman are two very different beings, created for one another, to complement. Further, God wouldn’t make such a mistake as placing the soul of a man in the body of a woman.

Yet because we don’t believe in anything, and everything is up for grabs, then why not gender? Once we’ve rejected the Truth and reality of the universe then everything will become confused. Transgenderism is but one example.

It’s clear to anyone with any semblance of intellectual honesty that radical Islam poses a profound danger to Western civilisation. Not only the terror attacks, nor the rape (not ‘grooming’) gangs, but the hard-won liberties that are now being sacrificed in a pitiful act of appeasement.

Even in the 25 years I have been on the planet I have seen freedom of speech undermined at a terrifying pace. How it must feel for someone older I can’t imagine. After Charlie Hebdo, the vast majority of British newspapers refused to publish its defiant cover cartoon despite overwhelming support for the magazine.

Obviously this is because they were frightened of repercussions: clear evidence that already there exists in British society a strain of radical Islam that wields considerable influence.

I do not, under any circumstances, want to have to give up the fantastic, life-affirming ability to discuss and exchange ideas freely because our political class are utterly naive about the extremely violent strains within Islam that have shown themselves, again and again, throughout history.

The problem goes back to the same root: God. A properly Christian nation, proud of its heritage, would not be so woefully ignorant about this historical tendency amongst Islam. Yet because we have abandoned our God, and have a woolly, fuzzy view that religions are all the same, we will continue to capitulate in the face of people who actually believe in something.

Bishop Nazir-Ali makes an excellent point in his book that before Christianity came along, England was an organised group of warring tribes. Christianity created an overarching narrative, and system of thought and morality, in which all can partake.

Multiculturalism will see us return to this pre-Christian age, bickering and arguing amongst ourselves, divided along lines of ethnicity or politics or whatever mad thing we come up with to distinguish ourselves from one another in order to feel special and different.

The soul of the West is in grave danger and the further we retreat from God the more errors in thinking we will see abound. The way we think, and the ideas a society is governed by, has a profound effect on every aspect of our lives.

It is for this reason that I am fully behind Nazir-Ali’s book and pray every single day that my beloved country will return to its Christian roots before it is too late.

Copyright © 2018 Fionn Shiner The Conservative Woman–All rights reserved

(These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years. Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.)

Many British people, concerned about the state of our nation, mistakenly believe that it is the United States of America which has led the United Kingdom down a decadent road of destruction in relation to our moral values.

Believing that they have taken us away from some of our foundational roots which were once grounded in solid Christian principles, you can be certain when anything goes wrong, and when we see an increase in violence, an uptake in drug use, or a slide down a shady grey road of more promiscuity, there will be some who will point a finger across the Atlantic to where the pilgrim fathers once set sail and blame it all on the Americans.   It’s easier that way.

Sure, we happen to have adopted an insatiable taste for your ham-burgers as well as a love for your westerns, and a penchant for the freedom expressed by a ride on a Harley Davidson along the open plains of an Arizonan desert; and for some, in more recent days, we have become decidedly taken by the messages that are being provided by American televangelists who have imported their best life now to our screens.

We have also willingly adopted the word ‘awesome’ and ‘sure’ and we interject the word ‘like’ into many of our sentences. Like we know what we are talking about. Yes, the yanks have a lot to answer for. But, ya’ll watch carefully now.

British Values have not been tainted by America; they have been tainted by a non-judgemental multiculturalism which has been focused on changing attitudes and feelings towards others rather than valuing and protecting our own Christian heritage first.

Leading and opening the door into our demise, has been the British establishment themselves, supported by some leaders in the Anglican Church. We have been considerably polite to everyone else but have never stood up or set boundaries for ourselves.

To my knowledge, America is still a few years behind us attempting to stem off the tide of destruction against the same formidable enemy affecting all areas of the American way of life.

An American reaches England

Over the years I have been very fortunate to meet people from America who are still standing up for the truth. In fact, it was almost 20 years ago when I found myself very alone in a church which was sliding down the road of complacency that friendship and help came from what we also once called a bright light on a shining hill. America.

It was a strange experience at that time to find myself working in a traditional parish church yet finding the confirmation of the truth which was being revealed to me via correspondence and telephone calls, from America. God has mysterious ways of answering prayers, but he surely sent a friend one day from the best place there is.

Consequently, over the years it has been of tremendous relief to visit American sites such as News with Views and also make friends with other like-minded searchers of truth. Some of the greatest encouragers that I know have always come from America.

I possess a beautiful Ryrie Bible which unexpectedly arrived in the post one day some years ago from Kelleigh Nelson who writes for this site, and as a result of my writing have also made a few friends across the UK who have also become very disillusioned with the church and the state of our country.

Today, many British people will still find either their information, or their confirmation, revealed to them from the more honest and inquisitive minds of America. Many Americans still highly value their independence and their right to speak up and speak out, to a much higher degree.

Recently, I was also able to also meet up with a minister and his wife from Perry in Georgia, Wayne and Linda Edwards from Heritage Baptist Church.

Through mutual connections he was able to come and visit people here who basically no longer belong to main stream religion and find themselves holding small house churches, or else they are walking alone.  The book of Revelation may refer to them as the remnant.

I cannot speak personally for him, but I do believe he was very sad to see just how far we have declined in this country, most especially when the UK used to produce some of the best Christian witnesses and inspirational speakers there was, such as C. H. Spurgeon, William Wilberforce, William Tyndale, C.S. Lewis, David Livingstone, and of course the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Today, for the best part, the Christian church has become very weak. Of what is remaining, we have the architecture, the stained glass windows and selective words from the bible, which can sound very beautiful, but they have lost the spirit of truth.

Many ministers cannot see the truth, or else they possess no courage to speak the most difficult parts, which spoken without love or understanding sound harsh, and as a consequence have isolated true believers and damaged many lives with its lies.

Consider, since 2001, in the capital alone over 500 London churches of various denominations are now private homes.   In the area where I live myself there are 3 small chapels which have now become recently converted, and some years ago I shopped at a large Sainsbury’s supermarket which was once called St George’s church. (St George was executed for refusing to make a sacrifice in honour of pagan Gods)  There is a loss of respect for the Christian faith as the solid stability it once provided, crumbles.

London however, has over 423 new mosques and many stand on the site of former Christian churches.   In a suburb of Birmingham, which is the second largest city in the UK, it is an Islamic minaret which now dominates the skyline calling people to prayer every day through loudspeakers.

Multiculturism accused of being the actual threat to Islamic terrorists is really a friend to a growing religion in the UK.

But ‘hey’ let’s still blame it all on America!

Saying it like it is will have you criticised for creating division.

“Houston – We have a problem”

A Lot of Hot Air!

British activists who see the America president, Donald Trump, as a threat to all things liberal and multi-cultural in the United Kingdom have decided to make their own personal statement in the skies when he visits this once great country in July this year.

It is reported that already over $14,000 has been raised to inflate a large ‘Trump Baby’ balloon which features an inflated oversized baby Trump wearing a diaper.   They believe that this represents all of Britain looking down on him and laughing at his over-sized ego.

How wrong and how childish can people be? However does this represent a majority of people who are living in denial about the state of our nation?

Of those who know about the stint, over 9,000 people have now signed a petition calling on London mayor, Sadiq Khan to allow the balloon to fly. The plea reads:

Donald Trump is a big, angry baby with a fragile ego. He’s also a racist demagogue who is a danger to women, immigrants and minorities and a mortal threat to world peace and the very future of life on earth. Moral outrage is water off a duck’s back to Trump, but he really seems to hate it when people make fun of him.

You can see the petition here.

Wow! 

It will be interesting to see the outcome on which way this baby flies!

Silent No More 

Travelling home on the train after meeting with Wayne and Linda Edwards and my friends, I reflected on the years since God first spoke to me in his still silent voice when I was all alone in a world of chaos in a small parish church. He has consistently revealed things to me which have gone against all I was ever indoctrinated in to through believing lies and liberal propaganda.

The train journey took twice as long as expected. A person who was having a particular bad time had decided to take his life on the rail track that day. I started a conversation with a young man from the army who carried my case and shook my hand when he left, and I later spoke to an elderly English lady who was returning home to New York on the Queen Mary from Southampton. She jokingly told me she had originally gone to America to learn them to speak English. Yeah.

As the train commenced its journey, I eventually watched the patchwork green fields of England whiz past the train window once more and thought about all the people I’d met and heard about just in one weekend, I wondered how after God had helped me so much I could ever stay silent.

Despite hardship and suffering God gives us peace and a certain quiet joy when we adhere to the truth. You can always respect another’s traditions but you can never let them displace you.  Displacement is the key issue in the battle for our souls.

Wayne Edwards spoke on how the bible relates to the time period and the events taking please, in relation to where we are in history at this current time. I did not understand a lot of the interpretation of this but could see without a doubt just by looking out of the window the truth of all this.

It is now so evident to see just how far the UK has declined you wonder how people can still rejoice over a multi-cultural society.

Despite these days, and the relationship with the timelines of the bible, America and the UK should never stay silent. We should still always have hope and speak about it. Let’s always talk about it.

Lives depend on it.

How sweet it is to learn the Saviour’s love when nobody else loves us! When friends flee, what a blessed thing it is to see that the Saviour does not forsake us but still keeps us and holds us fast and clings to us and will not let us go! —Charles Spurgeon

© 2018 Shirley Edwards  News With Views–All Rights Reserved

In 1215, King John was at war with his barons over the abuse of power. Magna Carta agreed as a settlement between the parties at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, establishing that a monarch could not rule as he pleased but was limited by the rights of his subjects.

Church historians tell us that Stephen Langton (c1150 – 9 July 1228), Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and 1228 had a dispute between King John of England and Pope Innocent III over his election. This was a major factor in the crisis that resulted in the formation of the Magna Carta legal document in 1215.

Although Stephen Langton had been credited with the birth of the Magna Carta, Professor Alvin J. Schmidt’s book, How Christianity Changed the World, points out how Bishop Ambrose, an early architect of liberty and justice, is largely ignored in secular discussions of the growth and development of civic freedom in the Western world.

In AD 390 some people in Thessalonica rioted, arousing the anger of the Christian emperor, Theodosius the Great. He overreacted, slaughtering some 7,000 people, most of whom were innocent. Bishop Ambrose, who was located in Milan at the time, did not turn a blind eye to the emperor’s vindictive and unjust behaviour.

He asked him to repent of his massacre. When the emperor refused to do so, the bishop excommunicated him from the Church. After a month of stubborn hesitation, Theodosius prostrated himself and repented in Ambrose’s cathedral bringing tears of joy to fellow believers.

Unfortunately, Ambrose’s action against Theodosius has often been portrayed as a power struggle between church and state rather than being the first instance of applying the principle that no one, not even an emperor or king or president, is above the laws of the state. The facts, indeed, support the latter interpretation.

This is evident from one of Ambrose’s letters to the emperor, which shows that he was solely concerned for the emperor’s spiritual welfare in the matter. Bishop Ambrose declared:

If you demand my person, I am ready to submit: carry me to prison or to death, I will not resist; but I will never betray the church of Christ. I will not call upon the people to succour me; I will die at the foot of the altar rather than desert it. The tumult of the people I will not encourage: but God alone can appease it.

Like King David before him, who deliberately had Uriah killed in battle, the emperor had placed himself above one of God’s laws and committed murder, and for that, Ambrose demanded genuine repentance. This was a major factor that could have influenced Langton and his Christian colleagues which reiterated Ambrose’s principle in producing the Magna Carta in 1215.

Today modern democracies take pride in saying that no one is above the law, but they fail to note that this landmark of civilization, which is now commonly imitated in free societies, was first implemented by a courageous, uncompromising Christian Bishop some 1,600 years ago. In a sense, Ambrose also set the stage for the Magna Carta that followed some 800 years later in England.

No One Is Above the Law

One of the oldest means of depriving individuals of liberty and justice was for the top ruler (often a king or emperor of a country) to set himself above the law. Functioning above the law meant he was a law unto himself, often curtailing and even obliterating the natural rights and freedoms of the country’s citizens.

The pages of history are filled with examples of such rulers: Hebrew kings in the Old Testament era and most of the Roman emperors who arbitrarily snuffed out the lives of individuals who were perceived to be opposed to their policies. Whether such individuals were a threat to the welfare of the nation was irrelevant. What a ruler wanted was what he got. These rulers were not accountable to anyone (in Rome, not even to the senate) for their arbitrary and often bloody acts.

King John (24 December 1166-19 October 1216) was probably one of the worst kings England had ever had. He murdered those who stood in his way, seized property, twisted the law to his ends, imposed taxes without justification and usurped all other legitimate authority, attempting to rule as a tyrant. One historian said of King John, “He feared not God, nor respected men.”

In May 1215 the barons rebelled and an army was gathered to confront the King. This was a battle that John knew he could not win. So at Runnymede Magna Carta was drafted as a peace treaty. It remained in force for a mere ten weeks, but its influence has endured for 800 years. After John’s death, Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, 1217, 1225 and 1297 until its impact became permanent.

When the barons forced King John to consent to and sign the Magna Carta (the Large Charter) at Runnymede in Surrey, outside of London, they obtained several rights that they did not have before this historic occasion. Specifically, the charter granted that (1) justice could no longer be sold or denied to freemen who were under the authority of barons; (2) no taxes could be levied without representation; (3) no one would be imprisoned without a trial; and (4) property could not be taken from the owner without just compensation.

The Magna Carta, presented by the Barons of England to King John in 1215, opens with this:

Article 1 We have, in the first place, granted to God, and by this our present charter have confirmed, for us and our heirs forever, that the English Church shall be free, its rights undiminished, its liberties unimpaired; and that we wish this to be observed appears from the fact that we of our own free will, before the outbreak of the disputes between us and our barons, granted and confirmed by Charter the freedom of elections, which is considered most important and necessary to the English Church. We have also granted to all the free men of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the liberties underwritten, to have and to hold to them and their heirs of us and our heirs.

These are the other articles of the Magna Carta that are still law today:

Article 13: The city of London shall enjoy all her ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and water. We also decree and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.

Article 39: No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his equals and by the law of the land.

Article 40: To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.

In his book, Magna Carta, J.C. Holt, professor of medieval history, at the University of Cambridge, notes that three of the chapters of this ancient document still stand on the English Stature Book and that so much of what survives of the Great Charter is “concerned with individual liberty,” which “is a reflection of the quality of the original act of 1215.”

The Magna Carta, like many other highly beneficial phenomena that lifted civilization to a higher plateau in the Western world, had important Christian ties. Its preamble began:

John, by the grace of God…” and then it stated that the Charter was formulated out of “reverence for God and for the salvation of our souls and those of all our ancestors and heirs, for the honor of God and the exaltation of the Holy Church and the reform of our realm, on the advice of our reverend [church] fathers.

These achievements were monumental and history-making. The era of the king being above the law had effectively come to an end. Commonly, this document is hailed as ushering in English liberty and justice; and some 500 years later it also served as a courageous precedent to the American patriots to establish liberty and justice in the newly founded United States of America. The early advocates of American independence often referred to the Magna Carta in support of their arguments:

That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.—Declaration of Independence.

As a result of the solid biblical foundation from the Pilgrims, these early statesmen signed the Declaration of Independence because they recognized that there was a higher authority—the Creator to whom they could appeal to establish objective moral grounds for their independence. Had they begun the Declaration with, “We hold these opinions as our own” (rather than “self-evident” and “truths”), they wouldn’t have expressed an objective moral justification for their Declaration of Independence.

This would have been their opinion against that of King George. They appealed to their Creator because they believed His moral law was the ultimate standard of right and wrong that would justify their cause—to end the rule of King George in the American colonies. They were convinced that George’s rule needed to be ended because he was violating the basic human rights of the colonists.

Western individual liberties can only be upheld and safeguarded by legal, social and cultural traditions embedded in the ethics of the Bible. Indeed, humanity cannot make a law that will bind the conscience of the people. God alone can make that type of law. Public opinion must be brought up to God’s law; it must never be lowered to suit the unpredictable human nature of mankind. The institution of the state, as God’s minister (see Romans 13:4), must therefore enforce the divine law as it pertains to civil life alone.

The criminal and civil justice systems of Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and many other free countries, employ the Christian requirement of having witnesses testify in a court of law before a sentence is passed. In British and American jurisprudence, witnesses are part of what is legally called the “due process of law,” which is a legal concept precisely because of the West’s biblical roots.

The liberty and justice enjoyed by the people in the Western world and other countries are increasingly seen as the products of a benevolent, secular government that is the provider of all things. Unfortunately, there is no awareness that the liberties and rights that are currently operative in the free societies of the West are to a great degree the result of Christian influence.

All previous architects of civic freedom and justice drew extensively from the Christian perspective regarding humanity’s God-given freedoms, which had for most of human history never really been implemented.

Christianity’s accent on the individual was a necessary condition for freedom and liberty to surface in the Magna Carta (1215), in England’s Petition of Rights (1628), Habeas Corpus Act, limiting detention without trial,(1679) in the Bill of Rights (1689), used by Granville Sharp to argue against slavery in England (1772) and, of course, in the writing of U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) American Bill of Rights (1791).

Political, economic, and religious freedom can only exist where there is liberty and freedom of the individual. Group rights that determine a person’s rights based on belonging to a given ethnic or racial group, as presently advocated by multiculturalists and by affirmative action laws, nullify the rights of the individual. Christianity in the West has laid the foundation of civil and religious liberty.

Alvin Schmidt said, “In whatever nations where the heritage of Christianity has had a prominent presence, there has been marked improvement in liberty and justice as opposed to societies that have been, or continue to be, dominated by non-Christian religions.

And regarding Western countries outside the United States, the historian Carlton Hayes has remarked, “Wherever Christian ideals have been generally accepted and their practice sincerely accepted, there is a dynamic liberty; and wherever Christianity had been ignored or rejected, persecuted or chained to the state, there is tyranny.

At present, we are seeing an unprecedented acceleration of tyranny in the history of the United States and the West in general. Some are speculating that we almost now live in a police state that is run by an “elite” group who pass laws for the people but exempt themselves from those same laws.

This is happening because most Christians no longer believe in God’s Word as the basis of justice. Or to say it another way, nothing will restore true liberty to the West unless, and until, there is a return to God and His revealed Word. The West should not abandon the Christian principles that made them great; we cannot continue violating the moral laws of God without any consequences.

We are now at a moment in time at which we Christians and our leaders must devote ourselves to a time of prayer, fasting, and repentance for a true revival and a Great Awakening, and to once again acknowledge that we surely cannot survive unless God Himself intervenes.

Part of this article is an excerpt from the book, Reclaiming the Forgotten Biblical Heritage

Image description: A 19th-century recreation of King John signing the Magna Carta. Pubic Domain

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Parts of the liberal establishment are falling over themselves with excitement, marking the occasion with a wave of books, articles and events. My favourite gem is Radio 4’s scheduled drama based on Marx’s Das Kapital. Squashing Marx’s economic ponderousness into a sixty-minute play seems so unlikely that until I hear it for myself I won’t be convinced it’s not an elaborate leg-pull. But perhaps it’s foolish to be surprised by anything the BBC does.

The blurb for the show describes Das Kapital as ‘one of the few books that have changed the world’. I agree. Tens of millions of corpses, from the Cambodian killing fields to the slave camps of Siberia, are evidence for that claim even if it’s not quite what the BBC meant.

But is it fair to judge Marx himself by the homicidal regimes that acted in his name, long after his death? Marx never held political office and never killed anyone himself. He died decades before any Communist government was established. But his ideas provided cover and justification for some of humanity’s greatest crimes.

Marx thought that he had uncovered the great laws of history, comparing his ‘discoveries’ about how societies evolve to Darwin’s ideas on biological evolution. Marx insisted that all of politics, in fact virtually all of human behaviour, could be could be reduced to these laws. These were concerned of course with the economic relationships between classes. Imbalances in economic power were the source of all evil. Meaning that any political movement not obviously motivated by a ‘bourgeois’ desire to enhance its own economic status, and that claimed to seek economic justice for the oppressed, was on the side of virtue. In fact, on the side of history itself.

Marx refused to understand that some of the most evil people and political movements are motivated not by material wealth, but by a simple love of power or the hyper-inflated sense of superiority that comes with ideological certainty. His crass insistence on the primacy of economics in all circumstances gave cover to some of the most monstrous and murderous criminals in history.

Marx’s defenders would claim that Stalin or Pol Pot or any of the other Communist despots weren’t genuine Marxists, but chancers abusing Marx for their own ends. That’s no defence. Marx gave them their ideological framework and cloak to hide behind. And although Marx was long gone when the first Communist dictatorships were established, he had many contemporaries, including comrades from the earliest days of the proto-Communist movement, warning him that his ideas carried the seeds of terrible tyranny. He failed to listen.

Of course the system Marx wanted to replace had its own injustices, and unregulated monopoly capitalism can be rapacious. But I would rather live under Al Capone or a pirate chief than Enver Hoxha or Lenin. Better to be robbed blind than led to Utopia by a maniac.

Marx also failed as a prophet. His claims to have unravelled the laws of history and to ‘scientifically’ predict the course of human events were wrong on the grandest of scales. Particularly his claim that capitalism would lead to the catastrophic pauperisation of the ‘proletariat’. Even between his publication of the Communist manifesto in 1848 and his death in 1883, workers’ living standards were going up and up. Of course that process accelerated massively in the 20th century. Despite two world wars, capitalism did the exact opposite of Marx’s predictions. Yet many, including the BBC, would have us believe that Marx was a ‘genius of the modern age.’

But capitalism could only perform its miracle in countries not infected by the Marxist virus. Decades and decades of potential economic advancement were lost across huge areas of the world. From Mongolia to Cuba, blinkered ideologues armed with Marx’s cranky ideas stifled development and kept the poor, poor. Marx’s name should be cursed for that alone.

There are plenty of other idiocies or evils you can explore in Marx’s work. For example, there is its closed and circular logic by which anyone not accepting its wisdom can be diagnosed as suffering from false-consciousness or mental enslavement to bourgeois values. Marxism is the antithesis of open thought or genuine enquiry. Marx’s verbose and pompous output has closed the minds and clogged the intellects of generations of young people anxious to understand the world. As Communism’s great historian Robert Conquest has pointed out, as well as being a bad economist, Marx was a bad historian and a bad philosopher too.

Whatever the BBC or bien-pensant academics would have us believe, Karl Marx’s legacy is death, misery and poverty. His 200th birthday should be mourned, not celebrated.

Copyright © 2018 Ollie Wright The Conservative Woman-All rights reserved

This week Congress has the opportunity in the Graham-Cassidy Health Care Bill to end the Federal funding of Planned Parenthood. We pray they act before it is too late. It is undeniable that God’s judgment hangs over our land for the atrocious sin of abortion. Many Americans were not aware that God spared us a devastating judgment just 10 years and 8 months after Roe v. Wade.

Video of the sermon

A crisis reveals the character that a man has built over the course of his lifetime. Each little step builds upon the previous step, his thought life, his decisions, and his affections all form his character. When the moment of crisis arrives, it is too late to build those things into his life – the crisis will reveal what he has made of his soul.

Such a crisis took place 34 years ago last Tuesday. On the night of September 26, 1983, the military officer on duty at the Soviet Union’s early warning center received repeated urgent messages that indicated a nuclear war had begun. His “computers warned that the United States had fired five nuclear missiles at his country.

‘The machine indicated the information was of the highest certainty,’ he later recalled. ‘On the wall big red letters burnt the word: START. That meant the missile had definitely been fired.’ And the clock was ticking before they came to their designated targets obliterating millions upon millions of people.

The Soviet government’s policy in the event of a US nuclear attack was to launch an immediate and all-out retaliatory strike in accordance with the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction.” One phone call and that would have happened.

The officer had just minutes to decide whether to assess the attack as genuine and inform the Kremlin that the United States was starting World War III – or tell his commanders that the Soviet Union’s early warning system was faulty.

Imagine the pressure he was under. His career would certainly be effected – what would come of telling his superiors that the system they built and trusted was at fault, telling them to trust his instincts rather than the super computers. They had no reason not to trust their computers, and why should they trust him?

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces in that crisis made the right decision. “Guessing that a genuine American attack would have involved hundreds of missiles, he put the alarm down to a computer malfunction.

Lt Col Petrov was vindicated when an internal investigation following the incident concluded that Soviet satellites had mistaken sunlight reflected on clouds for rocket engines.

Although Petrov was feted by his colleagues and initially praised by superiors for his actions, he was not rewarded.

He later complained that he was scolded by superiors for failing to complete a routine paperwork during the incident and had been scapegoated by generals embarrassed by the failure of their early warning system.  

He took early retirement from the armed forces the following year.”

It is interesting that no one outside the USSR knew about this incident until the Iron Curtain came down.

“The incident was only made public in 1998 with the publication of the memoirs of General Yury Vontintsev, Mr Petrov’s superior at the time.

In the 2014 documentary The Man Who Saved the World, Mr Petrov said: ‘All that happened didn’t matter to me — it was my job. I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that’s all.’” Indeed he was. The man whose, “decision to ignore warnings is credited with averting nuclear armageddon” died this past May 19 at age 77. We only learned of his death this past week because, “Karl Schumacher, a German film maker who first publicized the story in the West, …tried to get in touch to wish him happy birthday” this September 7th. Petrov’s son, Dmitry, informed him of his father’s death.

Stanislav Petrov, the ‘man who saved the world’ made the right decision when the crisis came. Note that he was not rewarded for doing so; indeed he paid a price for doing the right thing, but he never regretted that decision. And God spared our land a judgment which in 10 years and 8 months of abortion it had earned. We are now at 44 years and 8 months and we should remember that God’s judgment has not altered, indeed His cup of wrath is much fuller than it was in 1983. It is high time to repent of our sins.

Copyright 2017, Rev David Whitney, News With Views. All rights reserved.

Trump, the NFL, and Us: America’s Descent into Triviality

Could it be that our fascination with the story is more important than the story itself? President Trump, the NFL, and us.

Last week was a week full of headlines. On Wednesday, the president, speaking before the United Nations, said that if the U.S. “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Later that day, Hurricane Maria crossed Puerto Rico from southeast to northwest, dropping upwards of forty inches of rain, including fourteen inches in a two-hour period, which may be a world record nobody wants to own. More than three million American citizens were left without power or water, and face a humanitarian crisis.

Oh, and somewhere in there was another failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare.

But by the weekend, the story that most Americans seemed to care about was a feud between the president and professional athletes.

By now, you undoubtedly know more than you need to know about that feud—I mean that literally—and I don’t want to contribute to a problem I’m about to decry. So for details, I’ll direct your attention to a fine piece by David French in the National Review.

But we’re still left with the question about why this discussion is consuming so much of our national attention when there are issues far more deserving that we are increasingly disinclined to care about.

I suggest the reason was the subject of a 1985 book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by the late Neil Postman. Postman, the founder of New York University’s Media Ecology program, wrote about our culture’s “vast descent into triviality.”

Comparing George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Postman concluded that Huxley had proved to be more prophetic. Whereas “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”

Whereas “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

The consequences of becoming the sort of culture Huxley predicted was on full display this weekend. Namely, as Postman warned, by caring about things that aren’t important, while being distracted from things that truly are important.

We live in an age where the phrase “Instagram celebrity” can be said with a straight face. Historian Daniel Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity—“someone who is well-known for his well-knownness”—is now truer than ever. In such a culture, as Postman forewarned, being popular is confused with being important.

As Bill Brown, Senior Fellow for Worldview and Culture at the Colson Center has long said, “In other times and places, heroes made history. In our time and place, they make CD’s and touchdowns.” And yet, we are the people who know their lyrics and stats better than our own national history or Constitution. We can name the judges of “The Voice,” but not those on the Supreme Court.

Postman also worried that our desire for entertainment and distraction would rob us of our ability to think critically or to even think for ourselves at all.

Here’s a case in point: David French rightly asked how many people yelling ‘free speech’ for athletes are only too happy to sic the government on the tiny few bakers or florists who don’t want to use their artistic talents to celebrate events they find offensive?”

It is amazing just how prophetic Postman has proven to be, even though he was writing years before Internet or social media, and only a few years after cable television. He knew we were embracing self-destructive habits of the soul, and he tried to warn us.

But listening is not nearly as amusing as a Twitter war, and requires much more sustained attention than watching a football game.

Lord, have mercy on us all!

Copyright 2017, John Stonestreet BreakPoint-All rights reserved