America Is a Prison Disguised as Paradise

John & Nisha Whitehead

From the OffGuardian

 If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates. It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

Still, he refuses to give up.

“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired:

Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual.

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never stop being prisoners.

Support the Off Guardian

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at john@rutherford.org

Political and Cultural essay : Then and Now. Part 1 of 3 repost

 

"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator…will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude that is their fate". -   Aldous Huxley Introduction to ‘Brave New World’ The Great Generation The generation that fought World War II was arguably the finest produced by this or any other nation. Those who fought did so to save their country’s freedom and to secure a better future for themselves, their families and their people, the British.  Many of those who did and are still with us are bitter and despairing, when they contemplate the changes which have occurred in the country they loved. Certainly, there is no denying that on the whole, its people are materially much better off now than they were then. Social relations show a sometimes welcome relaxation. People have readier access to healthcare and to education. Foreign travel is no longer the prerogative of the better off; and so on. But in many other important respects, the future that those who went to war had hoped for has never arrived. Changes for the Worse And there has been so much change for the worse. The country’s method of government, the elective dictatorship, never truly represented the people so much as the ruling elites. Now, in key areas of life, it represents them even less as these elites have changed to those of the liberal left and power shifts to Europe.  Additionally, other, heart-rending changes have occurred which have brought alienation and decay to the land. Changes which were unwanted and unasked for by most of its people and have crept up on them unawares, engineered or allowed to happen by the political elites. Views Now Held By the BNP Though they were conscious of much social and economic injustice, the war-time generation were united by a strong sense of community and of loyalty, arising from a common history and culture, religious background and notions of morality. The importance of all this is that they had views which are now not much different from those now held by the BNP.  Those who fought the Nazis would today find themselves, very often, vilified as ‘fascist’ and ‘bigoted’ by the current ruling power elites in politics, the media and elsewhere. Invasion Threat Then and Now In the war, inspired by their great leader, Churchill, who epitomised the national spirit, they had fought, in his words, to ‘save Christian Civilisation’ and to keep their islands from invasion so that their nation could continue its way of life unmolested in this, the ancient homeland of their ancestors. Then, they were inspired by their pride in the tremendous achievements of their ancestors in every sphere of human endeavour, including their pioneering struggles to create a free, fair and decent society for themselves and their descendants. Now, their love of country and their natural and humanly normal affection for their own people and their ways are officially despised and if not actually illegal, then almost so. Now, the British  must watch as their nation’s great past is ignored or traduced by their own leadership, or its very existence denied, while the elite state teaches their young people a perverted, truncated version of history  designed to give no real idea of the continuing story of their people in these islands and which dwells too much on that which can be held to their country’s discredit. An Evil Policy of Deliberate Deracination By this means our rulers hope that our youth will be deprived of any real knowledge of or regard for their ancestors and of any idea of themselves as their heirs, in order to crush their sense of belonging to the land of their forefathers, its towns and communities. The Goal This, they hope, will facilitate their apparent goal; the creation of an atomised, essentially empty and inhuman society of rootless, anonymous, connectionless individuals; producers and consumers feeling no real attachment or loyalty towards anything outside themselves and their family, friends and ‘partners’ except perhaps consumer brands, football teams or entertainment stars.. Filching our Freedoms Now, that independence from Continental domination from which they had saved their inheritance with the blood of hundreds of thousands is stealthily filched from them with lies and subterfuge, as their country is surrendered by their rulers to a European Superstate recognisably in the mould of continental tyrannies from Napoleon to the Soviet Union. Like its forerunners, this latest doomed creation of the internationalist power elites is hostile to everything distinctively British: British institutions, British freedoms under the common law, British ways, the British character, the British nation.. … Our cultural Bedrock                                At the time of World War II, though weakened by the false perceptions that it is incompatible with the modern science it had created and that the horrors of war meant that God must be absent, the British interpretation of Christianity still held powerful sway in the land they knew. It remained the unspoken assumption of the best in thought and action for nearly everyone, and lay behind the honour of public, and the decencies of private life. Christian ideas about the individual and Christian principles of morality moulded the institutions and the laws of the state and the behaviour required of its members. Now, their state is ‘morally neutral’, which is to say actively anti-Christian in practice, in the interests of a Marxist - inspired,  politically correct vision of society. Now, that war–time generation sees how the religion of their forefathers is routinely set aside by their political masters, and contempt for the creed that helped make the British surely one of the most successful peoples in history, a society at once decent and rumbustious, charitable and self reliant, traditional and innovative, spiritual and commonsensical, is fostered both covertly and openly by those in charge of the public culture. Our Culture Pushed Aside In our schools and elsewhere it is diminished as just one faith among many, whilst the faiths of ethnic minorities are ‘celebrated.’ Thus many British schoolchildren come home to their parents having celebrated Hindu and Islamic festivals, with Easter being ignored. Christmas is renamed ‘Winterval,’ Christian symbols are banned in the workplace and Christians are otherwise forced to adopt the diktats of Political Correctness Christianity is at the very core of British  culture, civilisation and achievement. Britain was the birth place of the Industrial Revolution, a Revolution which would not have taken place without Christianity. Uniquely Christian ideas about a rational God and his lawful universe were the origin of the modern scientific method, which requires the belief that the universe can and should be understood and predicted. Non-Conformist attitudes about the dignity of labour allowed scientific ideas to be turned into technology. Christian stress on the importance of the individual lay behind the growth of personal liberty, without which a modern economy is impossible, and of Parliamentary Democracy. All these developments have lifted hundreds of millions out of ignorance, poverty, disease and oppression and have been instrumental in the rise of the status of women. Marxism Patronises Then, because of Christianity, people were dignified and esteemed as equal in the sight of God. As such, and through the ancient traditions of their ancestors, they were held responsible for their own actions, knowing right from wrong. Now, the patronising Marxist idea holds sway that environment is responsible for all, and that indeed there is no right and wrong, only different, equally valid ‘values’. Thus the worst offender is excused as either ill or a victim of some imagined oppression, and he or she is diminished as a mere creature of environment rather than a sovereign person of free will and choice. Then (1941), at the height of the war and deprivation, England had 359,000 recorded crimes. In 2001 at a time of unparalleled prosperity, there were 5,200,000. Our Common law –The Guarantee of Our Freedoms Then, the common law allowed everything that was not expressly forbidden. Now, as Britain falls increasingly under the sway of the EU, Continental law takes precedence. This forbids everything that is not expressly allowed. Thus British freedoms, so prized in the past as infinitely superior to Continental ‘rights’ are being circumscribed as European EU law takes precedence. Now, ‘Human Rights, a device for removing swathes of behaviour from democratic control, are handed down from the liberal left internationalist power elites and interpreted by them. The call  to moral behaviour of traditional religion and the duties and rights growing out of the people’s own common law are being supplanted so that morality has become , too often, not that which free individuals owe to God, to themselves and to others but what is required by their rulers and what they think they can get away with. Pornography Rules Then, pornography was to be found only under the counter in seedy back streets. Now it is to be seen nightly on National Television. Then, popular songs were about love, tenderness, romance and marriage. Now they are about sex, selfishness aggression and anger. Then, divorce and single parenthood were a rarity. Now, Britain has the highest divorce rate and the greatest proportion of unmarried mothers in Europe, as that bulwark of freedom against the state and transmission of tradition, the family, is attacked by  leftism and unrestrained capitalism. Then, children were innocent and allowed their childhood.  Now, our children are taught about anal sex in schools. Sexual relations are peddled by ‘opinion formers’ as morality-free zones: like drugs, just another consumer requisite in a material society based on self indulgence and emotional incontinence,  rather than self discipline and duty to others…. The Sanctity of Life is becoming History Then, the sanctity of human life was a given. Now, the genetics industry treats human tissue from the unborn as raw material and thousands of babies are murdered in the womb. Some who could live outside their mothers’ bodies have their heads drilled through in partial birth abortions. Now the euthanasia movement gathers strength. So what will follow? This latter will, as has already happened elsewhere,  lead to the pressured  suicide of old people who are made to think they are a burden, and to the killing of others whether they want it or not if medical professionals think their ‘quality of life’ is insufficient. Thus the most repellent aspect of the Nazis,  the killing off of those deemed unworthy of life, is creeping in at the back door with the individuals ‘right to choose.’ And with it will come all human beings as less than they were; as expendable. It’s a Free Country?  No Longer Then, when someone did or said something that another might have found somewhat offensive, both might well have said, as many did,  ‘Well, it’s a free country.’ Now, one never hears this once popular rejoinder. People know that we are no longer free. Read part " of this article at this link part 2 Then and Now

Roald Dahl: The first man down the 1984 memory hole

From The Off Guardian

Roald Dahl: The first man down the memory hole

Kit Knightly

 

The first shocking censorship of 2023 dropped last week. As covered by CJ Hopkins in his most recent column, Roald Dahl’s publishers have hired a team of “sensitivity readers”, in order to edit the next edition of Dahl’s books to remove outdated language.

According to this piece in The New Statesman:

The changes range from the removal of outright racist stereotypes to the deletion of the word “fat”, gendered phrases (be it “chambermaid”, “females” or “hag”) and references to “pink” or “white” skin. In some cases, these are minor tweaks to one or two words in a sentence. Others are far more interventionist, including entire songs rewritten in James and the Giant Peach, or new sentences added in The Witches which explain that there are myriad reasons why people might wear wigs.

While that may read like a PC nightmare, it’s more insidious than that. This is not about being woke or unwoke, it’s about the normalisation of post hoc censorship that should concern everyone.

Some have described the edits as a natural by-product of capitalism.

It’s been noted that the edits come in the wake of the Dahl estate closing a huge deal with Netflix for exclusive rights to all of Dahl’s work. So some are framing this as Netflix seeking to protect their investment by making sure Dahl remains profitable in the age of cancel culture.

But even that is a simplification – after all, Netflix is more than just an entertainment company, they have noted political ties and have relentlessly pushed state-backed propaganda in the past.

Even the choice of Dahl as the man to lead a forlorn hope down the memory hole is carefully calculated. His known racist attitudes make him controversial enough that some will be hesitant to defend his work. While the fact he was a children’s author means anyone who does raise concerns can be dismissed with either indifference (“it’s just a kids books, it doesn’t matter”) or false-moralising (“we need to protect children!”).

He’s the perfect choice to be laid down on the wire.

And if they set a precedent that it’s now ok to go back and “revise language”…what’s next? who’s next? Dickens? Twain?

What about the news. That’s the big ticket item after all, right?

What words will no longer be acceptable next year? “Inside job”? “Guantanamo bay”?

What history will be deemed “offensive”? What facts will be “potentially harmful”?

We’ve already had a little taste of this with Covid, when the death rate of the 1918 Spanish Flu was suddenly revised down in February 2020, to literally physically impossible numbers, just to make covid appear more dangerous.

Mainstream precedents would allow this process to switch from small covert examples to much larger overt ones.

In other book-related news, this week it was widely reported, that the UK government’s anti- terror program, “PREVENT” had placed (among others) Shakespeare, Tolkien and George Orwell on their list of “key texts” that could “radicalise right-wing extremists”.

Somewhat ironically, this practice of retroactive censorship is a tactic straight out of 1984.

No wonder they don’t want us to read it. It doesn’t “create extremists”, but it does give away their plans.

Neil Oliver ‘Under attack…again!!!’ from the Government

.the social contract between the people and governments around the world is broken and it’s the actions of governments, MSM and big pharma that broken it!’ To help support this channel & get extra, exclusive content every week sign up to the ‘Neil Oliver’ Patreon site, https://www.patreon.com/neiloliver Audio Podcasts, Neil Oliver's Love Letter To The World &, Neil Oliver's Love Letter To The British Isles Available on all the usual providers https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Check out the Instagram account: Neil Oliver Love Letter https://www.instagram.com/neiloliverl... #neiloliver #bigpharma #MSM #freedom #debate #neiloliverGBNews

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Nick Griffin And The Irish Model For Resistance Against Cultural Erasure

Thunberg Against Wind - Theology current affairs Irreverend Episode 115

Church of England vicars with a difference as Tom Pelham, Jamie Franklin and Daniel French get together to discuss all the big stories: - Lockdown Files reveal thousands of government WhatsApp messages sent at the height of Covid crisis and Matt Hancock does not come off well. - Hancock squirms on Good Morning Britain as he attempts to excuse his rule-shattering behaviour because it was technically not illegal. - Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall is unsuccessful in unfair dismissal case against Trent College Nottingham. - Greta Thunberg protests against windfarm because it will disturb reindeer. - CofE "spokesman" says Putin is wrong in his criticisms of Church. All this, your email of the week taking Daniel to task for comments about Putin in last week's episode and much more as always! For your merchandise needs: https://irreverendmerch.bss.design Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/irreverend) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/irreverend) Links: Lockdown Files: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/f... Hancock squirms on Good Morning Britain: https://thehighwire.com/videos/bill-g... Bernard Randall: Rod Dreher (https://www.theamericanconservative.c...) and Bernard Randall ( and Bernard Randall) https://thecritic.co.uk/my-fight-for-... Thunberg Against Wind: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/27/g... Church "Spokesman” hits back at Putin: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/article... Notices: Find links to our episodes, social media accounts and ways to support us at https://www.irreverendpod.com! Thursday Circles: http://thursdaycircle.com Jamie's Good Things Substack: https://jamiefranklin.substack.com Irreverend Sermon Audio: https://irreverendsermonaudio.buzzspr...

What's in your water? - Nick Griffin at the Templar Final F 2023 Feb Report

 

What Christian Martyrdom In The West Now Looks Like

 Martyrdom in Trashworld

By: Pastor Andrew Isker

Most American Christians have been told their entire lives to be ready to give their lives for Jesus Christ. But the enemies of Christ in the modern globalist world are not going to feed you to lions or burn you at the stake. Instead, if you are a Christian in modern trashworld, your martyrdom will be psychological. Not only will this psychological torment happen to you, it already has begun.

Like many young Christians who first discovered the history of the Christian faith, I was inspired by the stories of martyrs. How could you not be filled with enthusiasm and passion hearing the examples of men and women who gladly went to their excruciating deaths, refusing to deny their Lord? Being thrown to lions, set on fire, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and starved. I read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the history of Christian martyrs from the early church to the Reformation, and was filled with awe. After all, how could you not be?

Next, I read Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand, the founder of Voice of the Martyrs, who spent 14 years imprisoned and tortured by Communists for his Christian faith. Wurmbrand was held in pitch-black and soundless solitary confinement for three years. He was regularly beaten and tortured and had the flesh from his feet torn off down to the bone. After being released once and told not to preach Christ, he immediately resumed his work in the underground church, preaching and teaching God’s Word, undeterred and without concern for what he had just experienced. And less than three years later, he was arrested and imprisoned again, only ending with a ransom being paid for his amnesty in 1964.

Stories like these that show the devotion of faithful Christians give us heroes to emulate. Of course, the second you begin to apply the lessons of Christian martyrs in our age, malicious people, often within the church, will attack you. College campuses are a window into the future 15 years down the road (or maybe five or ten—the pace has quickened considerably). When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, I began to see the growing hostility to the Christian faith.

At my four-year state university, professors would openly mock the Christian faith in class. It was never even tangentially related to the subject matter they were teaching. They despised evangelicals especially and blamed them for that iteration of “literally Hitler,” George W. Bush. When I spoke up and said, “I am a Christian, I disagree with you and don’t appreciate how you talk about what I believe,” I was met with derision from the professors and my classmates under the professor’s sway. When I would discuss such things with other conservative, evangelical Christians, some were sympathetic and shared similar experiences, while others would scoff and say, “that’s not real persecution. you have a ‘martyr complex.’”

It was at that point, despite not having a framework to articulate it, that I realized the battle lines that would be drawn over the next 15-20 years, not only within the culture at large but within the church. Only very recently, with the “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” model of Aaron Renn, did the hostility to the Christian faith in our culture and the tepid response to it by many evangelicals begin to make sense. In that model, Renn outlines “positive, neutral, and negative worlds” where the larger culture views Christianity as something generally good (how the culture viewed Christianity until the 1990s), then something neither good nor bad (from the 90s until the mid-2010s), then finally something that is bad and low status (from the mid-2010s to the present).

When I was in college, what Renn calls the “Negative World” had already arrived. If you were a Christian, you were unequivocally low-status. People would think you are an uncool loser, even if you came from money, wore the proper clothing, were good-looking, or possessed anything else that would give you social status; your Christian faith negated all of that.

After the Obergefell decision and definitely after the “mostly peaceful” summer of 2020, my experience in college in the early 2000s—Negative World—had finally arrived for everyone else. Now, simply being a Christian who believes the Bible is true and who desires to live a life according to the commands of Jesus Christ, is something which is a clear impediment to pursuing a “normal life.” A successful career, finding a spouse, and gaining the respect of your friends and neighbors, all of these become much more difficult to attain if you are a Christian living in Trashworld.

Then, as now, the Christians devoted to collaborating with the enemies of Christ will say, “that’s not real persecution.” Of course, it is not the same as Richard Wurmbrand having the flesh of his feet torn off or Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive. No one would dare claim such a thing. Nevertheless, it is a real thing that is happening to us. You wouldn’t say to someone who just broke their leg and was on the ground writhing in pain, “get over yourself. I know someone in hospice with stage four cancer and has way more pain than you.” Only a monster would behave that way.

The fact is, outside of a few exceptional cases, the kind of martyrdom experienced by Christians in the past is not likely to take place here. That is not how the demonic Regime operates. Such overt, direct persecution that came at the hands of First Century Jews, Romans, medieval governments, French Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Jihadists is not the kind of martyrdom we face. The demons that rule over us are not so direct and confrontational, not so masculine. No, the demons that rule over us are passive-aggressive and rely upon psychological and social manipulation to torment us.

Our persecution is and will increasingly be much more subtle and feminine. The difference between persecution then and now is like the difference between being bullied by Biff Tannen in Back to the Future and being bullied by the antagonists from Mean Girls. Rather than being brutalized, tortured, or murdered, you will be socially ostracized, you will be cut off from participation in the mainstream economy, your children will be taken from you and brainwashed, and all the while, the Christians who collaborate with the Regime will tell you “it isn’t happening.”

What makes modern persecution so insidious is that it doesn’t seem like it is happening, especially compared to the overt brutality prior Christians experienced. It is important to remember the words of the Apostle Paul that “all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (1 Timothy 3:12-13 NKJV). If you are a Christian, you will suffer persecution for your faith. There is no way around it. That persecution isn’t always going to come in the form of men with swords or guns at your door ready to torture and kill you.

But if you are a faithful man in a godless world that rages against its Creator, you are the tangible, flesh and blood representative of that Creator it is raging against. You are going to suffer. The suffering you are going to face and many of us already face is the social exclusion and intense, unremitting psychological torment of a godless society that is almost designed to get you to apostatize from Christ. There are myriad vectors and mechanisms it employs. It will use your family to pry you away. It will use corporate financial power to dangle incentives for you to compromise just a little bit. It will rob you of your children, and then hold them hostage against you.

Every message, from every corner of the world is a constant, 24/7 stream of that preaches the oh-so-subtle message of: “if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe the Bible is true, you are a loser and we hate you. You have no place in our society. We hope you kill yourself.” That is the subtext of every form of popular culture that Trashworld pumps out.

You are not being killed and tortured, but your mind, soul, and spirit absolutely are. Trashworld has perfected a kind of persecution that is even worse than lighting you on fire or feeding you to a starving lion. It has industrialized a kind of persecution of the Christian that 1. doesn’t look “like persecution,” 2. when it is successful makes it appear as if the apostate one day woke up and freely chose to just stop believing in Jesus, and 3. therefore causes Christians to not have their guard up when they face it, leaving them totally vulnerable to its pernicious effects.

But what is the answer to this problem? It is to understand that you are at war against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, no less than the saints of old. is to bear this suffering with dignity and resolve just as the heroic martyrs of the early church did. It doesn’t matter what faithless collaborating Christians say; they already have their reward. Just as St. Paul said we will suffer for pursuing a Christian life, fake Christians are going to mock us when that suffering comes. But those with eyes of faith understand we pursue a golden crown from the hands of our king.

And though the scars of our persecution cannot be seen with eyes, it is a kind of suffering for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, one we should count as joy, having been found worthy to bear it. That is the perspective ancient Christians had of their suffering for the sake of Christ, and that is how we should view it as well. Whatever affliction we bear is adding to the suffering of Christ. Remaining faithful to Christ and losing out on career opportunities is a genuine sacrifice. Sacrificing a much more comfortable life so you can protect your children from those who seek to do them harm is a very real sacrifice. Being called a bigot, racist, homophobe, fascist, and every other slur because you refuse to bend the knee to anyone but He Who Rules at His Father’s Right Hand is a very real indignity and is very much worth it.

The Bible describes the suffering of Christians as filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). It may not seem like it at all, but by suffering in this way, you are conquering. Just as the blood of Christ’s people spilled out does not fall on deaf ears but cries out to heaven, so also does the anguish and terror you experience for the sake of steadfastly holding to Christ.

Your duty as a Christian is to band together with those who bear Christ’s name and build real, flesh-and-blood communities impervious to the terror of the “Negative World.” Christ’s enemies are forcing us to band together, which is what we must do. We must build our own society with our own economy within the one that is collapsing before our eyes. “Negative World” is not the end of the story. There have been “Negative Worlds” many times before, and they have all been overcome by the victory of Jesus Christ. So too, will the negative world of the Globalist American Empire.