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One of the Bible’s most mysterious references concerns something called the “mark of the beast,” which a shadowy, satanic figure called the “Antichrist” would mandate.
This figure would demand “all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark…. (Revelation 13:16-17)”
Whatever those verses might mean, one thing is clear: Political events and technology are converging to make such a frightening device more than possible. Governments and financial institutions already are using digital technology to restrict the freedom of those who refuse to comply with autocratic directives or increasingly prevalent “woke” ideology.
Ask Nigel Farage, a former member of the European Parliament. Farage helped create the UK Independence Party, which led a successful campaign, nicknamed “Brexit,” in 2016 to get Great Britain out of the European Union despite intense opposition from the British political Establishment.
But in June, Farage’s bank locked him out of his accounts without his knowledge or consent.
“The establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts,” Farage tweeted June 29. “I have been given no explanation or recourse as to why this is happening to me. This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system.” (Emphases in original)
Despite the bank’s public denials to the contrary, bank documents Farage obtained stated otherwise.
In meetings held in November, officials chose not to renew his mortgage in July “given his publicly stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organization,” documents said. “This was not a political decision but one centered around inclusivity and Purpose.”
Yet with “woke” ideology overtaking the West, any decision involving “inclusivity” is now fundamentally political.
Farage, now a television commentator, violated the bank’s position on “inclusivity” by, among other things, equating Black Lives Matter with the Taliban and Islamist extremists. Farage also opposes open borders and same-sex marriage, asserts that climate change is a hoax, publicly supports both President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and blames the European Union and NATO for the war in Ukraine.
Bank officials not only cited articles from various outlets. Those officials monitored his Twitter account.
Political opinions notwithstanding, the bank found Farage’s dealings with its officials “professional, polite and respectful,” which is “what we expect.” Moreover, Farage has no links to the Russian government, has “not received any legal or other censure that we can establish,” and engages in commentary that “remains within the law regarding hate speech and arguably on the right side of ‘glorifying or promoting harmful behavior,’ ” the documents stated.
Nevertheless, the bank decided Farage would damage its reputation because of “factors and behaviors” that “arguably do not align with values that serve the common good and that treat people with dignity and respect.”
In other words, loyalty to a political narrative becomes more important than professional courtesy or personal integrity.
While Farage’s bank was cancelling him, China used what Reuters called its “COVID surveillance infrastructure” to stop local bank runs and prevent protestors from organizing in June.
Between April and June, Chinese banks froze at least $178 million in deposits. TRT World, the foreign service of Turkey’s state-run broadcaster, showed hundreds of depositors fighting with police while besieging a branch of the People’s Bank of China to get their money.
To control the crowds, Chinese officials turned all the health codes on cell phones red. China used those codes during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor behavior. Nobody with a red health code could travel or gather publicly with others.
“They are putting digital handcuffs on us,” a depositor with the last name of Chen told Reuters. He chose not to use his full name to avoid government retaliation.
Another told Reuters that if his health code stayed red, he feared his child would be unable to go to school.
“I can’t do anything; I can’t go anywhere. You’re treated as though you’re a criminal. It infringes on my human rights,” said Liu, who also declined to give his full name.
One woman found that her health code turned red after she registered to travel June 11 to a scheduled protest.
“The police had my identity details from the last time I went to protest in April,” Wang Qiong told Reuters. Wang said she lost access to 2.3 million yuan, or $341,550.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, FrontPage Magazine explored the likelihood of governments abusing digital vaccine passports for autocratic ends. Christine Anderson, a German member of the European Parliament, reached the same conclusion during China’s banking crisis.
“It is not about protecting the health of the population, but about protecting governments and politics from inconvenient citizens and their legitimate use of democratic freedoms and fundamental rights,” she posted on Telegram. “Democratic participation will then only be granted to those citizens who have previously been issued a ‘Digital Basic Rights Voucher’ by the government. Everyone else instead will be sent straight into a ‘Democracy Lockdown.’ ”
Anderson was describing China’s system of social credit, which awards benefits to citizens who comply with government directives and punishes citizens who refuse. The inevitable introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — which would replace cash and be stored in a digital device — would turn every technologically sophisticated nation into China.
Two of the digital currency’s biggest advocates are Agustin Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, which manages central banks, and Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and an economics professor at Cornell. Note well their comments.
“There is a huge difference,” Carstens said. “For example, we don’t know who is using a $100 bill today. We don’t know who is using a 1,000 peso bill today. A key difference is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that central bank liability, and we also will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important.”
Prasad elaborated enthusiastically.
“If you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains,” Prasad said. “You could potentially have a better — some people might say a darker — world, where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable.”
CBDCs would allow the United Nations to achieve its goal of creating a digital ID linked to bank accounts and payment platforms. CBDCs also would allow governments and such financial institutions as BlackRock to force compliance with diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and their financial counterparts: environmental, social and corporate governance criteria.
“You have to force behaviors,” Larry Fink, one of BlackRock’s founders, said in 2017. “If you don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race, or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re going to be impacted. We’re going to have to force change.”
Though Fink was talking about his own firm, what would stop BlackRock from imposing those criteria at a government’s request on its own citizens, given BlackRock’s worldwide power?
Farage believes such a day is here, as his tweet’s emphatic ending revealed.
“If they can do it to me,” he posted, “they can do it to you too.”
Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff has stated that absent the introduction of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism taught at the universities the West and America will collapse into a New Religious Dark Age within 50 to 100 years. A religious theocracy is the future of America and the West right now.
Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity and both prepared the ground for Islam and modern, secular, totalitarianism. Socialism is religious mysticism cloaked in the pretense of secularism.
Just as religion prepared the ground for secular totalitarianism, secular totalitarianism is preparing the ground back to religious totalitarianism. Because secular totalitarianism is, so to speak, a fish that jumped out of its religious waters thinking it could survive on secular ground, but it cannot, it must reintegrate with religion to survive. We see that happening now with Pope Francis’ strange but logical amalgam of Christianity, Socialism, and Islam. The Communist Globalists creating a Muslim invasion of America and the West.
The moral, logical, glue that binds the three monotheistic religions and Marxism is the moral code of sacrifice, the moral code of ALTRUISM.
“Socialism is really helping religion. The bigger the statism, the more people are accustomed to government rule over everything. The more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead away from the more secular side… the socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over….
I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it. And the people in the rising religious movements today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor in history but philosophy and culture [are the crucial factors that determine the course of history]….
Religion was the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning. It has ruled in disguised forms and still is. And now the disguise has to be stripped off if there is to be a lasting totalitarianism. For a lasting totalitarian state, religion is the only means.” – Leonard Peikoff
Atheism is a religion. Atheists replace God with themselves.
They have no restrictions on their behavior, no reason not to commit any atrocity other than the likelihood they will be caught and punished by other people. If the atheist is sneaky enough or acquires enough power they will fear no retribution for their evil deeds – nothing is stopping them.
Atheists can not be trusted, ever, in any position of authority or power over others.
“The word “faith” has a benevolent sound to many people. They think of a man of faith as a man of inner strength and compassion, such as the early Christians who, rejecting violence, were willing to die for their convictions. Yet it must be remembered that, whereas faith may have inspired acts of courage, it has also inspired moral atrocities. The Christian Inquisitor burning a heretic at the stake was as much a man of faith as the Christian martyr.
Whether their consequences are beneficial or harmful, acts of faith are united by their submission to an authoritarian moral code. God demanded of the early Christians that they refuse to submit to state decrees, and they sacrificed themselves in obedience to his will. God demanded of the medieval Christians that they eradicate heresy, and they sacrificed others in obedience to his will. Men praise the former as acts of courage and condemn the latter as moral atrocities, but the underlying principles in each case are identical; PASSIVE OBEDIENCE TO MORAL RULES.
When a politician asks people to have faith in their government, it is clear that he is calling for obedience and the suspension of criticism. And it should be equally clear that when a theologian speaks of faith in God, he means that divine rules are to be obeyed without question. The man who seeks truth calls on reason; the man who seeks conformity calls on faith. A morality of independence calls on reason; a morality of obedience calls on faith.” – George H. Smith
When a Christian is a true-believer in the afterlife, he will discount this life as merely a preparation for that after-life. Which is precisely one crucial motivation for the Massacre At Beziers in 1209.
“Kill them all; God will know His own!”
Amalric’s own version of the siege, described in his letter to Pope Innocent in August 1209 (col.139), states:
Indeed, because there is no strength nor is there cunning against God, while discussions were still going on with the barons about the release of those in the city who were deemed to be Catholics, the servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed attacked the city without waiting for orders from their leaders. To our amazement, crying “to arms, to arms!”, within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance miraculously raged against it.
About 20 years later, Caesarius of Heisterbach relates this story about the massacre:
When they discovered, from the admissions of some of them, that there were Catholics mingled with the heretics they said to the abbot “Sir, what shall we do, for we cannot distinguish between the faithful and the heretics.” The abbot, like the others, was afraid that many, in fear of death, would pretend to be Catholics, and after their departure, would return to their heresy, and is said to have replied “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius – Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. ii. 19) and so countless number in that town were slain.” – Wikipedia
God will know his own. And you ain’t one of them.
If it’s Wednesday it must be “irrelevant lecture day”
Too long….didn’t read. Don’t care about your opinions of faith since you have none.
I guess you are running out of material to spam us with. Like we haven’t heard this claptrap from this paranoid third rate “philosopher” about a million times before.
I’m still waiting for that “New Religious Dark Age within 50 to 100 years. A religious theocracy”. It’s kind of like global warming and climate change. It’s always in the distant future.
One really doesn’t really have to be correct about predictions. Just place them at a time when no one alive today will be around to call you out, especially when everything happens in 100 years.
I think I’m going to get into the prediction business, then I could be failure just like you and your objectivist buddies. But will anyone care 100 years from now? You are a fraud.
THX 1138,
I notice that you seem to copy and paste the same quotes quite a lot – as though you cannot think for yourself. An I’m still waiting for an answer to what I posed to you on the 9/11 thread… At any rate, I’ll leave you to it as it’s evident you have nothing to offer.
BIG GOV
BIG TECH.
BIG PHARMA
BIG MEDIA.
IN LOCKSTEP = FASCISM
Big United Nations organising it all.
There’s 195 members only a small minority are free democratic countries.
Yet millions of patriotic Americans still have their retirement money in Blackrock, are members of AARP instead of AMAC, have phone service with ATT or Verizon instead of Patriot Mobile or Puretalk, etc., etc. With a little research you can find conservative(or just sane) alternatives to almost everything you spend money on. We are funding our own destruction. Patriot Mobile, AMAC, My Pillow, lots of coffee to choose from, Public Square, Strive Funds(for at least a small portion of your investments), Melaleuca are just some. Buy local, avoid chains, use cash when you can. It’s more enjoyable once you get used to it.
The ACLU has become notorious for suing to stop any forms of Christianity and using that so called Separation of Church & State then we have the rest of the Atheists self centered demands that the whole Nation must abide by their demands
Switch back to using cash as often as possible, that is the only way to stop the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary dictatorship.
The author begins by quoting from The Revelation of JESUS CHRIST:
‘One of the Bible’s most mysterious references concerns something called the “mark of the beast,” which a shadowy, satanic figure called the “Antichrist” would mandate… Whatever those verses might mean…’
Firstly, the Scriptures make clear that there are many ‘antichrists’. For example, the Jew who denies Jesus Christ is an ‘antichrist’ – as is the Atheist, etc.
‘Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. … Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.’ (1 John 2:18, 22)
However, the for the ‘Protestant’ Christian there is no mystery surrounding who **THE** ANTICHRIST is (the man of sin), according to Scripture (and I suspect this author is well aware of this fact. THE ANTICHRIST is the PAPACY – The Roman Catholic Church.
I’m curious to know a little more about this author – of what religion, if any, is he (Jewish, Catholic – perhaps a Jesuit – or something else?).
You’ve lost me, Horowitz, with your sometimes cloaked, sometimes naked, anti-Catholic bias.
This article has nothing to do with Catholicism or any other religion. Using a quote from one book of the New Testament that has nothing to do with Catholics is not “anti-Catholic.”
unfortunately mr. THX is another sunday school certificate armchair theologian . replete with theological tomfoolery . no true theologian or non , requests blind allegiance to any govt. govt. was established by GOD . when a govt. oversteps its mandate christians are not obliged to obey . this site is not sufficient to refute mr. THX and I’m not going to waste my time pointing out his errors . as ben so famously said . facts don’t care about your feelings . and caesar quotes what is truth ? christs reply sealed his fate and the jews and gentiles murdered him . the 7 year tribulation will be a horrifying time . time to get your house in order while you can draw breath .
Enjoyed looking through this, very good stuff, thanks . “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” by Mother Theresa.