What Comes Next?

Turmoil, war, new “variants”, car-jackings, record homicides… The news of late has been full of gloom and doom. The decline of the US, the ascendance of China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, increasing ideological divisions, not just in the US but globally, the decline of the Church in our post-Christian world, and our young people embracing socialist and neo-Marxist ideals that have resulted in misery everywhere they have been imposed. Everything seems to be either falling apart or hanging by a thread.

And to some extent, these assessments and observations are not overblown. Our institutions have been failing for a very long time. The events of the past two years, during the Covid-19 pandemic, have both accelerated their decline and given us a clear picture of the true nature and extent of their destruction.

In FY2020, our military’s budget was $738 billion, which is far larger than any other nation. And yet, this military has demonstrated repeatedly that they are incapable of winning a war. Our leaders certainly have all the tools, manpower, and training necessary to win a war. They simply lack the will. While our adversaries are developing hypersonic missiles, modernizing weapons systems, and training for battlefield scenarios, our military leadership is obsessed with integrating transgender people into the services, instilling cultural awareness into our troops (e.g., wokeness), and purging the ranks of those who believe wrong thoughts (e.g., the Truth). The latest example of our military leadership’s failure is Afghanistan, but the record of failure goes through Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Never before in world history has a nation built the technical capacity to win every battle and then made a willful decision to lose every war.

The failures of our intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracies are too numerous to count and go back many decades. The Iranian revolution, The Tiananmen uprising in China, the fall of the USSR and the Berlin wall, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, North Korea’s nuclear threat, Syria’s civil war, the fall of Lybia (Benghazi), Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the recent destruction of self-rule in Hong Kong, and now we wring our hands and impose weak financial sanctions as Russian troops commit atrocities on the civilians in Ukrainian cities. Each of these events took our professional ruling class by surprise while the agencies we have built to monitor, predict, and influence them sat haplessly on the sidelines and watched each of these events unfold, or made meaningless threatening diplomatic gestures that were eventually vetoed in the UN.

Justice requires that our laws be applied equally, regardless of circumstances and the societal status of those involved. And yet, we have district attorneys (Boudin, Becton, Gascon, etc.) whose sole job is to fairly administer justice, scattered throughout the country that intentionally select which crimes to prosecute based solely on political considerations. We have entire sections of congressionally enacted immigration laws that are intentionally ignored by those who swore an oath to enforce them. Perpetrators that rioted, broke windows, destroyed property, torched police cars, and firebombed federal buildings in Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and New York during the BLM protests of 2020 were caught, released, and never charged. Yet those who attacked the Capitol Building on January 6 of 2021 have been held without bail for over a year and are being prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Same crimes, different politics, opposite results.

Our newest supreme court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was selected solely because she is a black woman. During her recent confirmation hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn (who is now MY senator!) asked her, “Can you define what a woman is?” Her eventual response was, “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.” Which begs the question, how was President Biden able to select her to fulfill his goal of appointing a woman?

By any objective measure, our public education system is an unmitigated disaster. After decades of federal “reform” and ever-increasing levels of funding including No Child Left Behind, under Bush, and Every Student Succeeds, under Obama, assessment test scores have continued to decline as the teaching of basic academic skills are replaced with woke indoctrination. Only 40% of students perform at or above grade level in mathematics and 35% perform at or above grade level in reading. The pandemic has given the teacher’s unions the opportunity to demonstrate their actual priorities and they have made it abundantly clear that educating our students is far down on their list.

Less than 30% of people trust what is presented by our national news media, and I’m frankly surprised that the level of confidence is that high. Between the Russia-collusion hoax perpetrated during the 2016 election and the four years of the Trump administration, cheerleading during the “peaceful” riots of the summer of 2020, the chicanery and extreme bias of the 2020 election, and over two years of Covid panic-porn, the media has earned every bit of American’s distrust and disdain. Just this past month, the New York Times admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was originally broken by the New York Post in October 2020, was true. This story was spiked by the mainstream media, censored by Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, and denied by 51 high level intelligence bureaucrats who published a letter claiming that it was most likely Russian propaganda and should be ignored by voters. And here we are, 18 months later, with President Biden safely in office, finding out that all those people blatantly lied to us. Our media’s relationship with the administrative state fully parallels Pravda’s relationship with the Kremlin during the 1970s and 80s. When the truth gets in the way of the preferred narrative, the truth is sacrificed every time.

We are ruled by men and women with weak minds and massive egos. People convinced of their own importance and the necessity of their ideals in shaping the future and controlling our lives to suit their utopian vision. In fact, they are merely societal parasites. It’s what they call “public service”. One of the many ridiculous euphemisms we have been trained to accept. They produce nothing of value while consuming vast resources. The institutional edifices they desperately try to maintain have been revealed as crumbling facades, built on a foundation of sand.

The institutional Church has fared no better. “Affirming” churches, which include many mainline denominations, welcome, encourage, and celebrate sexual sin. It starts as an expression of tolerance, advances to the “it’s complicated” stage, and eventually evolves into outright approval. Church leadership cannot at once hold the inerrancy of scripture and the promotion of sin, so they are forced to try and straddle a line between trying to be culturally relevant by ignoring major topics, and blatantly false teaching. Many will choose the latter, and their flocks will be led astray.

What I hope I’ve made clear to this point is that we are living in a culture that is in rapid decline. As many of our churches seek to remain culturally relevant, they are simply following the lemmings that are hurdling themselves toward the edge of the cliff.

What comes next? While the last two years have taught us that the future is completely unpredictable, there are some pretty clear indications for many aspects of where we are headed.

• The elites of our ruling class will do whatever is necessary to maintain their power, regardless of their obvious failures.

• To maintain power, they will continue to transform our society into an increasingly authoritarian state. This will include mass surveillance, a social credit system, and giving up more of our inalienable freedoms in the name of social harmony and “staying safe”. Our Canadian neighbors learned this the hard way when those who supported the Freedom Convoy this past January had their financial assets frozen by their Prime Minister. And they were brought to heel.

• Truth will be suppressed, and those who proclaim truth will be marginalized and persecuted for failure to comply with the edicts of the authoritarians. If you continue to insist that a man cannot be a woman (unless you’re a biologist, apparently) you may find yourself no longer suitable for participation in polite society. It is only a matter of time before the penalties are imposed.

• Perversion will become increasingly normalized while the nuclear family is attacked and rendered irrelevant. If you think otherwise, you are a bigot and a homophobe.

• Institutional churches will be required to decide if they are going to comply with the edicts of the ruling class or remain faithful to the Truth. History has shown that most will willingly follow the former course. For a very recent example, look at the response of the Russian Orthodox Church to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A “man of God” excusing the murder of civilians.

• Through all of this, God will remain fully in control, and completely faithful to those who put their trust in Him.

What should our response be, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. [Ephesians 4:14]”? We too, as individuals, have a choice to make. Are we willing to follow our faith and proclaim the Truth, regardless of our circumstances, or are we going to play it safe, do what we’re told and just try to get along?

The answer is clear. “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” [2 Timothy 4:3-5]

Fulfill our ministry. Love God. Love one another. Make disciples. Keep our eyes on Jesus and what is eternal. Even when all hell breaks loose, we have some pretty straightforward direction.

* The photo is of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived out his convictions regardless of the temporal consequences.