It used to be said that the media’s role was to challenge the powerful on behalf of the powerless, or to “speak truth to power,” or at least to help keep the government in check and controllable by the citizenry by writing stories exposing misgovernment and official misconduct.
How times have changed! These days, there is an informal partnership between government, powerful corporate interests, and media. I’ve called this group “the hive” but another term, “the blob,” seems to be winning out.
Big government, big corporate, big NGO, and big media all are part of the hive/blob, the hive/blob has an unofficial official narrative, and the media slavishly promote this narrative, no matter how outlandish the lies—and over the last few years, the lies have gotten bigger and bigger—and still BIGGER.
You know them, because they are repeated hundreds of times a day by “mainstream” media:
Covid is a grave risk to children, such that 6-year-olds must wear masks and schools must be shut down until the teachers’ unions say it is okay to re-start them.
Covid kills healthy, young adults.
There is no treatment for Covid; you must get the vaccine or die.
Covid came from a wet market in Wuhan; it was not a genetically engineered bioweapon, funded in part with U.S. tax dollars, that emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Covid vaccine prevents you from contracting or spreading Covid, or at least it prevents you from dying of Covid.
The Covid vaccine is safe and effective.
No one has died from the Covid vaccine.
Human use of hydrocarbon fuels is warming the planet.
We must all drive electric vehicles to save the planet.
It is safe to store and charge an electric vehicle in a garage attached to your house.
A man can become a woman, and a woman can become a man.
A man can give birth and breastfeed
It is fair to girls to make them compete in sports against men, and it is perfectly decent to put gender-confused men in female bathrooms and locker rooms.
It is good to cut the breasts off 14-year-old girls, and give puberty blockers to under-age children; it prevents them committing suicide.
January 6th was an insurrection.
The federal government can run a $2 trillion annual deficit, on $7 trillion of outlays, every year, forever, without debasing the currency and causing a hyper-inflation, or being forced to repudiate the national debt.
Inflation is only 3% (well, maybe that is true if you leave out food, fuel, car payments, house payments, rent, home and auto insurance, and pretty much everything else you must pay for in order to live). If you include that stuff, inflation has been cumulatively about 35% over the past three years. (Flat screen televisions are still very cheap, however, because the regime needs you to be entertained, anesthetized, and docile.)
It is not just that the media tells you these things, endlessly repeating them; you are required to believe them. If you don’t, the blob/hive will do bad things to you, if they can, the mildest of which is to call you a conspiracy theorist. They will accuse you of spreading “misinformation” or “mal-information” or “disinformation,” all of which mean truth and facts that go against their narrative. They will deplatform you from social media, then they will really get serious and look around for an implement with which to beat you, and they can usually find one quickly.
If you own a business, they will send the IRS, OSHA, CPSC, Interior, EEOC, SEC, and/or some other bureau or agency to investigate you and ruin you. If you are a doctor or lawyer, they will try to take your license away; if you do business with a large bank, they will de-bank you. They will criminally prosecute you if they can find a statute (which isn’t that hard to do: read “Three Felonies a Day,” by Harvey Silverglate, or “Cardiac Arrest” by Howard Root, or “Licensed to Lie” by Sydney Powell); if you are a high-enough profile target, like “orange man bad,” they’ll just make up a crime, as they did in New York. There are teeth behind the lies.
The most recent example is Joe Biden’s mental condition. It has been obvious for years that Biden is suffering from senility or dementia of one type or another. Tucker Carlson was told by a member of Biden’s family in 2019 that Biden had dementia, and the family was concerned because Biden had decided to run for president.
The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, who by their early primaries have assigned themselves the job of deep vetting the presidential candidates at close range, were not impressed with the 2020 version of Joe Biden. In a crowded Democratic field, he finished 4th in Iowa and 5th in New Hampshire, behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren.
But the power brokers of the Democratic Party (chiefly Barack Obama and James Clyburn, an 84-year-old Congressmen from South Carolina who is influential with the AME black church) got together and decided that the Leftists who had won in Iowa and New Hampshire were too scary and couldn’t beat Trump, but good ‘ole lunch bucket Joe from Scranton, PA, would do just fine. So Joe got the nod, the others were told to drop out. (That’s “our democracy” as Democrats define it.)
So Joe Biden “campaigned from his basement,” and somehow “won” the 2020 election. But it was obvious from the beginning that about the most he manage was to read speeches from a teleprompter. Nevertheless, the compliant regime media insisted that he was “sharp as a tack,” a phrase repeated thousands of times, right up until just a few days ago. The truth, known to everyone in Washington, DC, was that Joe Biden was badly demented, and was acting as a figurehead for the real power players behind the scenes, mostly Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and their loyalists in the West Wing, and the rest of the executive branch.
Then last Thursday’s debate happened. After a week of rest and preparation, and presumably the best cocktail of stimulants known to science, an undead Biden shuffled onto the stage and proceeded to mumble, grunt, and wheeze through the 90-minute debate, after which his wife took him by the arm and carefully helped him down a small step off the stage.
Suddenly, the media did an about face. No more “sharp as a tack”; now, “top-level Democrat strategists” were concerned that Biden’s senility could no longer be hidden, and that he would lose to Trump. It was like flipping a switch. Suddenly everyone was talking about Biden’s senility. The next morning, the New York Times, the “paper of record” to America’s Left, called on Biden to quit the presidential race.
What happened? Did the media suddenly decide it was now okay to report the facts? Did they suddenly realize that they were supposed to be reporters and journalists, not propagandists. Just kidding (and yes, it is okay to laugh). What happened is that very powerful factions in the Democratic Party, namely the Obamas and the Clintons, decided that it was too risky to try to ride Joe Biden’s brittle husk through another election and another four years of increasingly iffy teleprompter readings.
The media were given the signal that it was now okay to report truthfully about Biden’s dementia. For the good of the Party, he needed to go, they were told. He needed to be swapped out for a younger model. So, without missing a beat, the same thousands of media scribblers and talking heads who just days before were echoing the “sharp as a tack” line, were now saying, “time for Joe to go.”
The announcement that Biden is withdrawing from the race will probably come in the next few days, as soon as the Party heads and Jill Biden have negotiated a sufficiently rich golden parachute for the Bidens.
Should Adventist Christians be concerned about government by gaslighting? So far as I am aware, the blob/hive is not trying to push an unofficial official narrative that the Sabbath is now Sunday, and anyone who wants to worship on Saturday must be put to death. And aren’t we told somewhere that the Sabbath is the only issue that could possibly make any difference, or have any real meaning or significance, to Seventh-day Adventists? So the current regime of officially enforced lies should be A-Okay with us, right?
Wrong. Christians are not at liberty to live by lies. Some of the lies we are now being asked to live by—gender ideology, for one—are clearly at odds with the biblical worldview and with the plainest teachings of Jesus Christ.
And gender ideology is one of the lies being enforced with teeth. Just in the last few days we have learned that (1) a doctor who exposed ongoing sexual mutilation at a Texas hospital is being criminally prosecuted by the “Biden Administration” (and after last Thursday, my longstanding practice of putting quotation marks around “Biden Administration” has been more than amply vindicated) and (2) two Christian couples have been de-licensed as foster parents for questioning gender ideology.
Christians cannot pretend this is okay. That God created two sexes, male and female, both in the image of God, is as important a part of the created order as that God created in six days and rested on the Sabbath day, making it holy. Do we think we can jettison all aspects of the created order other than the Sabbath and still have a biblical worldview?
But our differences with the current cultural Marxist regime in America are even more basic than that. It is no accident that these people lie constantly and tell ever larger and more sweeping lies. They do not believe in truth.
The cultural Marxist regime—"wokism,” “social justice”, whatever you want to call it—believes simply this: (1) the central fact of human existence is power, (2) There is no such thing as objective truth; truth claims are attempts to wield power, (3) Whether one is an oppressor or an oppressed depends only on race or other identity marker, not on intent or actions, (4) credibility and status come from being in an “oppressed” group, preferably more than one (intersectionality!), and (5) there is no external reality, only what words and language create.
These people do not believe in truth or objective reality. They believe only in power, and that they should wield it. Hence, nothing they say is true, and everything they say is designed to get and keep power. That is the America we are living in today, the America they are forcing us to live in.
Obviously, this is a satanic, profoundly anti-Christian and anti-biblical belief system. Recognizing this and publicly calling it out is our Christian duty and our calling as Seventh-day Adventists. How can Christians evangelize in a culture that denies that there is any objective truth or reality?
Don’t let anyone gaslight you into believing that this is “just politics.” Don’t let them make you live by lies.
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. . . . When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44