Armageddon ahead? Signs of the End Times? Here’s how you can get ready for a challenging future. Watch Troy Anderson’s interview on CBN News with Gary Lane about he and Col. David Giammona’s #1 bestselling new book – The Military Guide to Armageddon: Battle-Tested Strategies to Prepare Your Life and Soul for the...
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The Military Guide to Armageddon: Surviving the Coming Turbulence
As mayhem, chaos and uncertainty from this past year threaten a new one, a retired Army chaplain and colonel and Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist issued a challenging indictment. “Christians today are powerless and weaponless,” believes Col. David Giammona, an Assemblies of God minister who served three combat tours in...
It’s Time to Prepare for the War We Face
Minneapolis, MN—From U.S. Army Chaplain Colonel David J. Giammona and Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Troy Anderson, The Military Guide to Armageddon: Battle-Tested Strategies to Prepare Your Life and Soul for the End Times (Chosen Books, January 2021) is here to equip believers to be battle ready.
The war ahead is unavoidable, yet many Christians remain unprepared to face the coming darkness as our world moves closer and closer to the end of the age. Without preparation, America’s church will falter in the end times. But the time is now to be battle ready!
Col. David Giammona and Troy Anderson are available to discuss how believers can
• counter the darkness of approaching end-times forces
• develop your spiritual gifts so you can walk in the supernatural power and protection of the Holy Spirit
• move to a new level of spiritual warfare following biblical and military principles
• prepare for the intersection of biblical prophecy with real-time world events
You are gifted by the Holy Spirit; now be empowered, disciplined and courageous, ready to do battle with the forces of this present darkness in these last days.
“The Military Guide to Armageddon is filled not with theories, suggested strategies and general ideas for you to consider but with real battlefield-tested facts, tactics and information that will convert an apathetic churchgoer into a soldier of salt and light.” —from the foreword by Matt Hagee, lead pastor, Cornerstone Church
The Military Guide to Armageddon
U.S. Army Chaplain Colonel David J. Giammona retired in 2018 after 32 years of military service. He is an end-times expert, scholar, author, writer and speaker who oversees the Warrior Refuge, a 46-acre ministry resort near Columbus, Georgia. Find out more at https://davidjgiammona.com and https://battle-ready.org.
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated investigative journalist and the bestselling coauthor of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse. He writes for Reuters, Newsmax, Townhall and other media outlets. Find out more at troyanderson.us and https://prophecyinvestigators.org.
Chosen Books publishes well-crafted books that recognize the gifts and ministry of the Holy Spirit and help readers live more empowered and effective lives for Jesus Christ.
The Military Guide to Armageddon: Battle-Tested Strategies to Prepare Your Life and Soul for the End Times
By Col. David J. Giammona and Troy Anderson
http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-military-guide-toarmageddon/404490
Available January 5, 2021, from Chosen Books
Price: U.S. $16.99
Format: Trade Paper Pages: 256 ISBN: 978-0-8007-6194-3 BISAC
Categories: RELIGION / Christian Living / Spiritual Warfare RELIGION / Christian Theology / Eschatology RELIGION / Christian Living / Inspirational
By Col. David Giammona and Troy Anderson
We are persuaded that things on this planet are about to change drastically, and that we need to prepare for coming earth-shattering events. In fact, I had a life-changing spiritual encounter (which I will describe in chapter 5) that convinced me that God has called us all to go out and wake up the Church and the world to what is about to happen.
We are about to face the most difficult days in the history of mankind. If we are not prepared, we could be swept away by all the propaganda and politics of the world that Satan is using against us. Unless we are ready—awakened from our sleep and prepared to encounter God—we will not be able to engage fully in the ministry and spiritual warfare God has for us.
The Church in her current state is not ready for the end times or the return of Jesus Christ. We have been paralyzed with fear of what human beings may do to us. But if we are not prepared, we are going to falter or, worse, reject our faith and succumb to the world system and the worship of the Antichrist.
Whether you know it or not, we are at war. The forces of light and darkness are lined up in battle array. You are either on one side or the other; there is no neutral ground.
I learned this in a profound way during 32 years of military service, including tours of combat and other duties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Honduras. I have witnessed war firsthand and can tell you this: Most young soldiers came back from combat very different from when they went in. Many young soldiers (and older ones too, even chaplains) lose their faith in a God they believed would protect them and their buddies from harm.
I am not saying God does not protect, care for and love us—just not in a way most of our troops expected or had previously experienced. They were not prepared for what they encountered. When you are young, idealistic and impressionable, you have an immature worldview. After these soldiers witnessed the true horrors of war—the inhumanity, bloodshed, anxiety, stress and fog of war—they would never be the same.
I have dealt with many of them and their families. Even chaplains returning with the 101st Airborne Division from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) were in shambles on returning home. One chaplain, when I asked him how he was doing, broke into uncontrollable tears from remembering picking up body parts after seventeen of his own soldiers died in a midair Black Hawk helicopter collision.
I include myself in that number. I had all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. So did my son, who was deployed with a Long-Range Surveillance detachment in OIF. Some things will never leave me, and maybe I don’t want them to. I still love God and serve Him, but my worldview has changed because of what I experienced.
Given what I went through, I believe God has called us to prepare people for what is surely to come and help Jesus’ followers become end-times warriors for God. Whether or not you believe that the Church will go through the Tribulation (a seven-year period of the greatest trouble, war, persecution and devastation the world has ever witnessed), many believers are not prepared.
Our hope is that this book will open the eyes of your heart. We don’t want any of us to be unprepared. Get ready.
Read the rest of the excerpt of U.S. Army Chaplain and Colonel David Giammona and Troy Anderson’s new book The Military Guide to Armageddon at http://cdn.bakerpublishinggroup.com/processed/book-resources/files/Excerpt_9780800761943.pdf?1604345662.
Share ThisImage A Dangerous Time To Be Christian
Though its incidence is not shared by major media, violence — including torture and murder — against Christians around the world is at historic levels.
By Troy Anderson
This past Easter will live in infamy — as an omen and wake-up call for global Christendom and Western civilization.
At a time when many of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians were celebrating the resurrection of their crucified savior Jesus Christ, two shocking events just days apart sent reverberations around the world.
First, a few days before Easter, the world watched as the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was largely consumed in flames. In an article, the following day, nationally syndicated radio talk-show host Dennis Prager captured the tragic irony of the disaster. “The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss,” Prager wrote in his column “Notre Dame: An Omen.”
“It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning — and with it, Western civilization.”
A few days later, on Easter Sunday, over 250 people were killed, including nearly 50 children, when three Christian churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanka were targeted in a series of coordinated Islamic terrorist bombings.
“What you have in these kinds of events are people who have a radical agenda who want to attack churches, attack Christians, and destroy the freedom of religious expression of Christians,” says David Curry, president and chief executive officer of Open Doors USA.
“This attack on these churches, by the way, is not rare. It’s happening regularly in various parts of the world where Christian churches are attacked, not just on Easter, but many times throughout the year. It’s based on this radical idea that they think Christians are infidels and they want to eradicate them.”
This attack on Christians, among the worst in modern history, came amid reports that persecution of Christ’s followers globally is worse today “than at any time in history.”
Not only are Christians more persecuted than any other faith group, but ever-increasing numbers are experiencing the very worst forms of persecution, according to the authors of a study by Aid to the Church in Need.
“There is a war being waged against the world’s Christians and unfortunately American Christians have been lulled or shamed into silence while secular and progressive voices in media and our own government have sought to keep us in the dark about the brutal, worldwide war being waged against Christianity in a growing and record number of countries,” Dede Laugesen, executive director of Save the Persecuted Christians (STPC) coalition, said at the recent National Religious Broadcasters “Proclaim 19” convention in Anaheim, California.
“Rest assured, the cake baker here in the United States, the 15-year-old school girl being held by jihadists as a slave for life in Nigeria, and the imprisoned North Korean being slowly starved to death for the crime of being Christian, are casualties of the same brutal war that has been festering for centuries. This war, most accurately, a war between love and hate, a war between good and evil, is raging and spreading like a wildfire left to burn uncontrolled.”
All this has occurred, Laugesen continued, as the citizens of the only nation in the world built upon the principles of Christian love and justice, are safely sleeping in a “carefully constructed bubble of ignorance and distraction.”
This may be the most dangerous time in history to be a Christian.
“More Christians have died for their faith over the last 100 years than in all prior centuries since Jesus’ time,” Laugesen says.
An April 2019 study commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office echoed this assessment, noting Christians are “by far the most persecuted” religious group and are experiencing what amounts to genocide in some parts of the world.
“The eradication of Christians and other minorities on pain of ‘the sword’ or other violent means was revealed to be the specific and stated objective of extremist groups in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, north-east Nigeria and the Philippines,” Bishop of Truro Reverend Philip Mounstephen wrote. “An intent to erase all evidence of the Christian presence was made plain by the removal of crosses, the destruction of Church buildings and other Church symbols…. Where these and other incidents meet the tests of genocide, governments will be required to bring perpetrators to justice, aid victims and take preventative measures for the future.”
“The main impact of such genocidal acts against Christians is exodus. Christianity now faces the possibility of being wiped out in parts of the Middle East where its roots go back furthest. In Palestine, Christians number below 1.5 percent; in Syria, the Christian population has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000 and in Iraq, Christian numbers have slumped from 1.5 million before 2003 to below 120,000 today.”
Pockets of Christianity Facing Extermination
Today, according to Open Doors, which supports persecuted believers around the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group on the planet.
While Christian persecution takes many forms, it is defined as any hostility experienced as a result of identification with Christ. The persecution of Christians is a serious issue for believers throughout the world, many of whom are beaten, tortured, beheaded, crucified, raped, imprisoned or enslaved, or wind up losing their livelihoods, homes, and assets as a result of their faith.
Trends show that countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa are intensifying persecution against Christians, and perhaps the most vulnerable are Christian women and girls, who often face sexual assault and double persecution for their faith and sex.
Each month, on average, 345 Christians are killed for faith-related reasons, 105 churches and Christian buildings are burned or attacked, and 219 Christians are detained without trial, arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned, according to Open Doors.
Today, nearly a quarter billion Christians experience high levels of persecution in the countries on Open Door’s World Watch List.
“It’s severe and we base that on the fact that there are more Christians being persecuted than ever before and the intensity is higher,” Curry says. “Sometimes it’s governments that are doing it, other times it’s non-state actors and radical groups like ISIS, and others. Persecution has been spiking for the last seven to eight years in record numbers and every year it seems to be getting more intense.”
Christians in a record number of countries are being subjected to brutal human rights abuses and even genocidal violence by authoritarian regimes and radical groups, according to STPC, a coalition of over 130 faith leaders and community influencers.
“There have been 26 million martyrs over the past 100 years which is more than the previous 1,900 years combined,” says Kevin Jessip, chairman of the Board of Directors of STPC, which endeavors to provide American policymakers with the popular support they need to effect real change worldwide and alleviate the suffering being experienced by so many of those following Christ.
“If you think of the worst atrocities in the history of the world — what Pol Pot did in Cambodia, what Adolf Hitler did in the Third Reich, what Joseph Stalin did in the Soviet Union, what Mao Tse-tung did in China — and if you put the numbers of people that they killed together, they would pale by comparison to the number of lives that are being destroyed — not in every case people being killed — but their lives are being destroyed around the world today,” says Frank J. Gaffney, president and chief executive officer of STPC and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy during the Reagan administration.
In 2018, Open Doors estimated there were 215 million Christians who were heavily persecuted — not just inconvenienced or suffering, but heavily persecuted, meaning tortured, raped, sold into slavery, crucified, murdered, expelled from their homes, and harmed in egregious ways, including genocide, Gaffney says.
“But their estimate [in 2019] is there are now 245 million Christians who are experiencing that kind of persecution,” he says.
One in Nine Christians Experiences High Levels of Persecution
Globally, one in nine Christians experiences high levels of persecution, and Islamic oppression fuels Christian persecution in eight of the top 10 countries on Open Doors’ World Watch List.
Open Doors has identified many factors behind the increase in persecution, including the rise and spread of radical Islam.
“It’s more than just whether ISIS owns territories,” Curry says. “They don’t need territory to share their ideas. These ideas — first recognized in Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda — are now widely spread and it’s like a cancer that has metastasized.”
“That’s a driver that is still in place and it’s driving persecution in a number of countries in the world, so when you look at the top countries on the World Watch List, North Korea is number one, but then you jump to Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, Iran. All those countries are driven by radical Islam. They have a radical ideology that wants to force Islamic belief on other people, attack Christians and restrict the rights of Christians.”
This means that for millions of Christians — particularly those who grew up Muslim — openly following Jesus can have painful consequences.
But it’s not just adherents of radical Islam that persecute Christians. For the first time since the start of the World Watch List over two decades ago, India has entered the top 10. Additionally, China jumped 16 spots, from 43 to 27.
Hindu nationalists in India continue to attack Christians with what seems like no consequences, and in China, the increased power of the government and the rule of Xi Jinping continue to make open worship difficult in some parts of the country, according to Open Doors.
And while the violent excesses of ISIS and other Islamic militants have mostly disappeared from headlines in the Middle East, their loss of territory there means the fighters have dispersed to a larger number of countries not only in the region but, increasingly, into sub-Saharan Africa.
“Despite broad-based agreement that people should not suffer for their faith, in spite of most of the world’s countries signing on with the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in a religiously-restricted atmosphere,” Sam Brownback, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, told hundreds of mostly Christian television and radio broadcasters at the NRB International Christian Media Convention.
“As I travel the world, I’m struck with stories of men and women who suffer restrictions, discrimination and persecution, yet their souls are beautifully crafted through pain. It is their voices that spur me on in our office and work, and I believe it is their voices that will help turn the tide of religious persecution around the world.”
Voices of the Persecuted
One of these voices is American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who spent a couple of years in a “nightmare prison” in Turkey until President Donald Trump intervened late last year.
Afterwards, Brunson, who had been in Turkish custody since October 2016, returned to the United States. He was accused of being party to a failed coup attempt against Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, charges he denied.
Brunson’s imprisonment sparked a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Turkey, with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump’s Twitter accounts all calling for Brunson’s release, while Erdoğan insisted on a prisoner exchange. Then, in October 2018, a Turkish court ordered Brunson’s release amid reports of a “secret deal.”
“President Trump got this done,” Brownback said. “I was pushing, pushing, but he just got fed up and said, ‘I’m going to slap these tariffs on, tank the economy, and wait for them to do the right thing.’ And they eventually did. No other president has ever put tariffs and sanctions on a fellow NATO ally, but this president did.”
While Brunson’s story has a happy ending, many of the believers imprisoned for their faith around the world face horrifying conditions.
Hea Woo, a pseudonym Open Doors created for a woman who spent time in North Korean prisons, lost her husband and daughter and narrowly escaped with her own life.
In 1997, amid a famine in North Korea, her daughter starved to death. Woo’s husband fled to China, where he became a Christian, but he was caught by the secret police and thrown in a North Korean prison. He died there.
It wasn’t long after that Woo also escaped to China. A short time later, she was also caught by the secret police, sent back to North Korea, and put in a prison camp. In an interview with Open Doors, she explained what the conditions were like:
“There were different parts within the prison,” Woo says. “Some [sectors] did agriculture, some did construction work, some did mining. Men and women were separated; all the inmates seemed like they were about to faint. They were all hopeless and in despair. And plus, they were starving. Each person received one handful of rotten corn [and] there was nothing else to eat.”
“We got something watery — it wasn’t even a soup. We got those as food for the whole year. Nothing else. And people are obligated to work more than cows or animals. Because everyone is forced to labor, people die from malnutrition. People died from accidents while working, too…. So many died — and there was no hope in the prison. All [inmates] were on the verge of death.”
Open Doors estimates about 250,000 people are suffering in North Korea’s “Nazi-style prison camps,” 50,000 of whom are imprisoned for their faith.
A 2017 report by the International Bar Association War Committee noted that a child survivor of the World War II concentration camp Auschwitz said the conditions in North Korea were as bad — or even worse — than what he experienced at the hands of the Nazis.
The report described routine public executions carried out in front of both children and adults, designed to “subdue the prison population.”
Dominic Sputo, director of STPC and author of Heirloom Love: Authentic Christianity in This Age of Persecution, visited persecuted believers in the Middle East several years ago and met a man who had been “shot by men with beards and machineguns for preaching the gospel.”
“The Lord miraculously healed him and when I arrived, I met him in the same place and he was still preaching the gospel,” Sputo says. “I was scared hanging out with him that day.”
Sputo went to his home and visited with him, his wife, and three children.
“It just etched something deeply in my spirit to see and meet with brothers and sisters who, for them, the normal Christian life is taking up the cross and denying themselves in ways that I never would have imagined,” Sputo says. “After I left them, a couple of weeks later, a brother in their church was clubbed to death on his driveway in front of his family. Another was shot in the back of the head.”
China and Social Credit Scores
The violent persecution of Christians in the Middle East and other parts of the world is just one aspect of the persecution that believers are experiencing globally.
In China, the world’s largest country, with 1.4 billion people, the nation’s rapidly growing Christian population has recently experienced serious persecution. China’s Communist Party is intensifying religious persecution of Christians, closing and demolishing churches, jailing pastors, and proposing a new state translation of the Bible that will establish a “correct understanding of the text.”
“Think about the 90 million Christians in China who are followers of Jesus who are now facing growing restrictions, having to deal with facial recognition technologies and having a social credit score,” Curry says.
“China is increasing the pressure and trying to force Christians into a ‘China first’ kind of idea — and that’s because there are now more Christians in China than the Communist Party, and they quickly realized they needed to control the Christian movement. So, they are starting to force unregistered churches to register with the government, allowing cameras to be posted in the churches and outside the churches, and trying to approve the theology and sermons of pastors.”
One of the biggest concerns among proponents of religious freedom involves China’s social credit scores that rate a person’s trustworthiness. In China, the government and private companies collect data about people’s finances, social-media activities, credit history, online purchases, health records, legal matters, tax payments, and the people they associate with — information gleaned from the nation’s hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras.
This data is used to determine citizens’ social credit scores. Generally, higher scores give people advantages, such as avoiding deposits on rental properties. Those with lower scores may find their ability to purchase a new house restricted or be prohibited from buying airline tickets.
“For a long time, China viewed Christians as a great part of society,” Curry says. “They taught a moral framework that the Chinese didn’t teach, drug use wasn’t as prevalent in the Christian population, and so they saw it as a valuable thing.” He added:
Now they see it as a threat to their communist system. The fear is that anybody with a low social credit score will be denied rights that others would otherwise have. Now that sounds like a new thing to us in the West, but this is what has happened in other places like North Korea where Christians are considered enemies of the state. They’re the last to get food in a famine and are put in labor camps, sometimes for up to three generations because their grandfather was a Christian or was found with a Bible.
Brownback says it’s “truly scary what is taking place” in China and could be exported to other countries.
“I saw a report recently that nearly 400 million security cameras are being deployed in China by the end of next year,” Brownback says. “And then there are the facial-recognition systems behind it to be able to recognize who is going into the church, who is going into a mosque, and then be able to sort through that data.”
“And now they have the social credit score system that they are saying is to make people better people, but it can also be used to remove you from your apartment, keep you from your job, and not allow your children in school. So, they’ve got these systems they’re developing as a security apparatus and are using artificial intelligence to sort through the data to really focus on persecuting people of faith, to marginalize you in society. How do you participate in society with this?”
Brownback says he’s concerned that China may sell the system to other countries, and those nations will be able to “use this system to put down populations that governments don’t like.”
“The Chinese Communist party does not trust its own people to allow them to choose their own path for their souls,” Brownback says. “There are over one billion souls at stake. It seems the Chinese government is at war with faith, and it is a war they will not win.”
“A War They Will Not Win”
In response, Brownback says, the Trump administration is committed to helping persecuted Christians throughout the world and is “pursuing this aggressively,” with economic sanctions on countries that persecute Christians and other measures.
“Religious freedom is a top foreign policy priority for this administration,” Brownback says. “We believe this is a universal and natural right. When I reflect on my own faith, I think about how God gave man the free will to choose to believe or not. That freedom is a beautiful one, a sacred right. If God has given man this freedom, how much more should governments leave it to their citizens this freedom to do with their own soul as they choose?”
Western media, many elected officials, and even some faith leaders have been silent for too long about this anti-Christian plague of oppression and death sweeping the globe. These crimes against humanity have thus festered and proliferated, according to the STPC.
To combat this, STPC (www.savethepersecutedchristians.org) is determined to raise America’s awareness of the plight of the world’s Christians and call them to join in a movement to hold the persecutors accountable and create real costs for their crimes. The group seeks not only to alleviate the suffering, but also to discourage and ultimately stop those responsible. The movement is bringing political pressure to bear on governments that are engaged as a matter of state policy in the persecution of Christians, on those who allow it to take place on their watch, and on those who persecute with impunity. One of the strategies STPC is encouraging the Trump administration to use, as it did with Turkey, involves the imposition of economic sanctions.
“The problem clearly isn’t being ameliorated just by trying to relieve some of the suffering,” Gaffney says. “Our theory is that’s because the persecutors don’t perceive any particular downside to doing what they’re doing. They see the upside — it’s good for the party, it’s good for the leader, it’s good for their service to Allah — whatever their particular rationale may be, but they just don’t see real costs associated with doing so. And our job, it seems to me, is to create those costs, to hold the persecutors accountable, and to create penalties for engaging in this kind of behavior.”
Many organizations in America and elsewhere, including Open Doors, are doing important work on behalf of persecuted Christians, helping feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise help them. What is needed is more awareness on the part of the American faithful to drive charitable giving, and to apply political pressure to enact policy that will relieve the suffering, obtain justice for those harmed, and exact heavy costs on persecutors of Christians, according to STPC.
As part of this effort, STPC is building a movement such as one in the 1970s that helped free another population suffering from heavy persecution — Soviet Jews — to impel policy changes that will hold the persecutors accountable and increase the costs for their crimes against humanity. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union ruthlessly persecuted the religious, particularly those of the Jewish faith. However, in the 1970s, the “Save Soviet Jewry” campaign launched an effort that would one day help free the Soviet Union’s oppressed Jews. This campaign began with banners and signs outside synagogues and other houses of worship across America.
“Over time it developed into a powerful political force and a guy I happened to work for later by the name of U.S. Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson turned it into the kind of punitive sanctions on the Soviets that we’re talking about,” Gaffney says. “It was called the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and what it said was simply that the Soviets would not get most-favored nation status unless they let the Jews out and anybody else who wanted to go.”
President Ronald Reagan used “economic warfare against the Soviet Union decisively to not only free a lot of Jews, but hundreds of millions of other people who were enslaved in the Soviet empire, the ‘Evil Empire,’ as it was famously called.”
The same thing could happen today with persecuted Christians, Gaffney says.
At the first-ever Help the Persecuted Summit in Washington, D.C., in March, Vice President Pence said no people of faith face greater hostility or hatred than followers of Christ. “In Iraq, we see monasteries demolished, priests and monks beheaded, and the two-millennia-old Christian tradition in Mosul clinging for survival,” Pence said. “In Syria, we see ancient communities burned to the ground and believers tortured for confessing the name of Christ.”
“It’s heartbreaking to think that the Christian population in Syria has been cut in half in just the past six years, and many of those who remain have been displaced from their ancient homes. In Iraq, the followers of Christ have fallen by 80 percent in the past decade and a half.”
Like the “miracle” that helped free millions of Soviet Jews and others, Gaffney believes “another miracle is entirely possible.”
“Now maybe it’s not going to stop all the persecution all over the world,” he says. “Christ said that won’t happen, but we could alleviate it in any of the places where it’s currently happening, save lives — and save a few souls too.”
In addition, the group is lobbying Trump and Congress to serve notice that those responsible for persecution of Christians will jeopardize the benefits they garner from U.S. foreign aid, military sales, bilateral relations and the opportunity for the leaders of these countries, their family members, and citizens of their nations to visit the United States, go to college and maintain bank accounts in America.
Critics of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East have noted that the policies couldn’t be intentionally designed to do a better job of liquidating Christians.
Many of the Christians who have suffered and died have lived in countries that receive billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars every year. After trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives were sacrificed by the U.S. government over the last few decades intervening in the Middle East — the birthplace of Christianity — Christian communities now face genocide and serious persecution.
In many cases, U.S. taxpayers are either subsidizing the slaughter by distributing billions of dollars to oppressive regimes, or worse, helping to create the conditions that allow the persecution to happen in the first place.
In response, Gaffney says, STPC is urging Trump and Congress to withhold foreign aid from those nations that are persecuting believers.
“The point is that when Christians are persecuted in places around the world like these we find that they often feel as though they have been abandoned by the rest of us, which only further emboldens their persecutors,” Gaffney says. “So, I’m very pleased to say I’m leading an organization that aspires to become a movement that will change the calculus with these persons, not simply by helping people who are providing symptomatic relief to those suffering, but by holding the persecutors accountable and creating real costs for what they’re doing.”
SaveUs Banner
The SaveUs movement asks houses of worship and concerned Americans to place a SaveUs banner in a prominent place to build awareness.
People can encourage their pastors to visit the STPC website and order a free banner to display in front of their houses of worship. These banners feature a graphic “SaveUs” plea with a cross and the coalition’s website where Americans can learn about the global persecution of Christians and find out what they can do to help stop the violence.
STPC also invites people and groups to host their traveling exhibit, “The People of the Cross.” This exhibit shows what millions of Christians are suffering.
In the summer of 2018, as a side event to the U.S. Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, STPC debuted an exhibit at the U.S. Capitol that featured a series of more than 20 7-foot-by-32-inch vertical banners showing what millions of people experience simply because they follow Christ. Since then, the banners have toured the nation and been featured at 21 events in 10 states, reaching an audience of at least 14,500.
Also, with such staggering statistics, and the knowledge that most of these crimes are not covered in the media, STPC developed a special news aggregator — www.ChristianPersecutionNews.com — to capture those present-day stories of persecution that do make the news and to provide STPC coalition members an easy way to share these heartbreaking stories with others.
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist, bestselling FaithWords/Hachette co-author of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse, former executive editor of Charisma magazine, and a Los Angeles Daily News reporter. He writes for Reuters, Newsmax, Townhall, and other media outlets. He’s also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the digital news magazine Prophecy Investigators. Find out more at www.troyanderson.us, www.troyandersonwriter.com and www.prophecyinvestigators.org.
Share ThisImage Unplanned: Could Roe v. Wade Be Overturned Soon?
By Troy Anderson
Abby Johnson was Planned Parenthood’s superstar. In eight years, she rose from a college volunteer to one of their youngest clinic directors to “Employee of the Year.”
Then she assisted with an ultrasound-guided abortion for the first time, and what she saw changed everything.
“We were expanding abortion services in our affiliates to perform abortions through six months of pregnancy,” Johnson told The New American. “I didn’t support abortion that far into the pregnancy. Then we were instructed to double our abortion quota — a certain number of abortions that we had to sell to women coming in, which was bothersome to me.”
At the time, Johnson believed, “foolishly,” what she had been told — that Planned Parenthood was “trying to keep abortion rare,” but the demand to double their abortion quota didn’t align with what she believed the nonprofit organization’s mission was.
Then, in October 2009, a co-worker asked her to assist with an abortion at the clinic in Texas.
“Ultimately, I left [Planned Parenthood] after witnessing a live ultrasound-guided abortion procedure where I saw a 13-week-old baby fight and struggle for his life against the abortion instruments only to lose his life, and I knew that there was humanity in the womb,” Johnson says. “I knew that for all these years I had essentially put the rights of the woman above the rights of the unborn child, and it became very clear to me in that moment that our rights should be equal — that one shouldn’t supersede the other.”
After Johnson quit her job, Planned Parenthood sued and tried to slap a gag order on her.
“They tried to get a permanent gag order against me so I wouldn’t be able to talk about my experiences and the things I knew about the organization,” Johnson says. “And that was actually what was picked up by the media and really propelled me to then start sharing my story publicly and then subsequently writing Unplanned [a best-selling book based on her experiences].”
Divine Orchestration?
Described as a “divinely orchestrated thing” by those involved, a film based off her book, also called Unplanned, opens March 29 at about 800 theaters nationwide amid a number of other pro-life films, as speculation grows that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon weigh in on the controversial 1973 case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion in America. The decision ruled that state laws banning abortion are unconstitutional.
Since that time, more than 61 million unborn children have died, according to National Right to Life, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization.
Planned Parenthood, which reported more than $1.6 billion in revenues in 2017-18, while posting over $240 million in “excess revenues,” is estimated to have made nearly $160 million performing over 330,000 abortions last year, according to National Right to Life’s annual report.
“I went in really naïve about what abortion was, what the abortion industry was,” Johnson says. “I certainly learned that it is an industry, that they are in this for profit. I remember being told by a supervisor that nonprofit is a tax status, not a business status.”
“They’re not a charitable organization. Abortions are not done for free. They are not done because they are trying to help women. They are done because they are trying to exploit women and manipulate women in a very vulnerable time of their lives, and I think we need to talk more about that — what true women’s empowerment means because I don’t think Planned Parenthood really understands what that is, and I think to profit off the crisis of another human being is really the antithesis of what it means to empower someone.”
With President Trump’s appointment of conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the high court, and the possibility he may make other appointments if one or more of the aging, liberal justices die, concerns are growing among abortion supporters that the Supreme Court may weaken or overturn Roe v. Wade.
If Trump names a replacement for 86-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has suffered health-related setbacks over the years and had two malignant nodules removed from her left lung in December, Republican appointees to the high court would outnumber Democratic ones six to three.
At least 20 abortion-related cases are now in the pipeline to the Supreme Court, and legal experts say any one of them could be the one that results in a decision that would send shockwaves around the planet.
“I think we are living in times where we could see Roe v. Wade overturned in the Supreme Court and pro-choice legislators are saying that as well,” says Johnson, now an anti-abortion activist and the founder and chief executive officer of And Then There Were None, a nonprofit organization that exists to help abortion-clinic workers leave the industry.
“I think the response that we have seen with these incredibly liberal abortion laws in states like New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Virginia and New Mexico are very reactionary to that line of thinking — that we are living in times where we could see an end to the federal legality of abortion and move it back to the states.”
The film Unplanned, made by the writers and co-producers of God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2 and distributed by Pure Flix, tells the inspiring true story of Johnson’s journey of transformation.
Throughout her life, Johnson wanted to help women. As one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the nation, she was involved in upward of 22,000 abortions and counseled countless women about their reproductive choices. Her passion for a women’s right to choose even led her to become a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, fighting to enact legislation for the cause she believed in.
But all that changed on the day she witnessed the tragic reality of what an abortion involves, leading her to join her former enemies at 40 Days for Life and become one of the most ardent pro-life speakers in America.
The film is one of several pro-life movies that have been released recently or will be released soon. Others include Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (October 12, 2018), Roe v. Wade (late 2019), Order of Rights (pre-production), and The Moral Outcry (pre-production).
Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the director of civil rights for the unborn at Priests for Life, and the executive producer of Roe v. Wade, told The New American that the film Roe v. Wade tells the real history of the landmark case.
“It highlights the main players of the time as well as the Supreme Court justices,” King says. “It also looks at Norma McCorvey, the woman who was the ‘Roe’ in Roe v. Wade, who never had an abortion and never desired an abortion. But she was set up to be a poster child for something that she could never imagine. Before Norma’s death, she repented of her participation in that whole scenario and of course wanted to see Roe v. Wade reversed.”
Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight, who plays Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in Roe v. Wade, told The New American at the Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala in February in Universal City, California, that it’s an important film for people to watch.
“People are emotionally upset about the issue,” Voight says. “They are locked into their point of view about this issue without knowing very much about it; I have to say — that’s all of us. We all must go and see exactly what happened, what the issues are, and then we can look at it and then we can we have a conversation about it.
“Right now, we’re dealing with mostly folks who aren’t quite clear about what actually happened so let’s get a little history lesson and see the personalities that created this decision, and what their criteria was, and then we’ll see was it good, was it bad, what was it? So, I’m looking forward to the conversations after people see the film, not before.”
The Moral Outcry
Unplanned, Roe v. Wade, and other pro-life films come as the debate over abortion has taken center stage in the national conversation following New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s order in January directing the One World Trade Center and other landmarks to be lit in pink to celebrate the signing of a law permitting late-term abortions.
“The Reproductive Health Act is a historic victory for New Yorkers and for our progressive values,” Cuomo said in a statement. “In the face of a federal government intent on rolling back Roe v. Wade and women’s reproductive rights, I promised that we would enact this critical legislation within the first 30 days of the new session — and we got it done.”
In his State of the Union Address in February, Trump spoke against the law:
There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days. Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments from birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world. And then, we had the case of the Governor of Virginia where he stated he would execute a baby after birth.
To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother’s womb.
Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Cuomo wrote that the law protects “against the Republicans’ efforts to pack the Supreme Court with extreme conservatives to overturn the constitutional protections recognized in Roe v. Wade.”
The Republicans’ “goal is to end all legal abortion in our nation,” Cuomo wrote. “The Reproductive Health Act guarantees a woman’s right to abortion in the first 24 weeks of a pregnancy or when the fetus is not viable and permits it afterward only when a woman’s life or health is threatened or at risk.”
In this increasingly fractious political environment, Cuomo wrote that there has been continual anxiety that the high court will overrule Roe v. Wade. “Most observers of the Supreme Court believe the question is not if Roe will be overturned, but when,” Cuomo wrote.
Allan Parker, president of The Justice Foundation, a Texas attorney who practices mostly before the Supreme Court, the lead counsel for McCorvey in her 2000-to-2012 effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, and an advisor to The Moral Outcry film, told The New American that five justices on the Supreme Court have “at least an open mind about reversing Roe.”
Parker has gathered more than 161,000 signatures for the Moral Outcry Petition, a multi-year, multi-phase, public-interest litigation strategy designed to win reversal of the Supreme Court’s abortion cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton (1973), and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). A coalition of dozens of prominent pro-life groups announced on February 27 that they are supporting the Moral Outcry Petition as a national project. The petition calls on the Supreme Court to reverse its abortion cases and gives all Americans an opportunity to voice their moral outrage over abortion by signing the petition at www.TheMoralOutcry.com. The goal is to collect over a million signatures on this petition, which would constitute severe criticism of the abortion cases, which is a reason under the law of judicial precedent for overturning Supreme Court decisions.
The petition argues, based on the law of judicial precedent, that Roe v. Wade should be overturned because abortion is a crime against humanity and results in a variety of health problems for women, and new scientific evidence shows life begins at conception.
For example, there is substantial medical evidence that an unborn child can experience pain by at least 20 weeks after fertilization, according to the National Right to Life report.
Meanwhile, the Human Genome Project found that as soon as the human egg and sperm come together, they have a complete, unique human genetic code, demonstrating that “this is a brand new, unique human individual,” Parker says.
“DNA testing wasn’t used in the courts until the 1980s, and if you DNA tested the mother’s arm and the baby in the womb anonymously, a DNA lab would tell you that these are two separate human beings,” Parker says. “Another thing that scientifically didn’t exist [in 1973] is the sonogram. These were not used in American medicine until about 1985. A dozen years after Roe v. Wade, we began to be able to see what’s in the womb and the sonogram shows that you can detect a heartbeat at six weeks, but the heart actually starts beating at 12 to 21 days, so there is a lot of new scientific evidence.”
Confident that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, Parker has urged states to pass post-Roe activation laws that would ban abortion the day that Roe v. Wade is overturned. In February, Arkansas lawmakers approved the Arkansas Human Life Protection Act based on The Moral Outcry petition, Parker says.
The act declares it is “time for the United States Supreme Court to redress and correct the grave injustice and the crime against humanity” that is abortion.
“States like New York are feverishly working to protect abortion in their state laws because they are desperately afraid that the U.S. Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe v. Wade within the next one to three years,” Parker says. “So, they are looking ahead and trying to protect it at the state level when [abortion] loses its federal protection. The Arkansas statute says when Roe v. Wade is reversed abortion will be automatically illegal in Arkansas.”
Meanwhile, a poll in late February confirmed that many people are horrified by what’s happened in New York, and other states and are now walking away from the “pro-choice” label.
“Current proposals that promote late-term abortion have reset the landscape and language on abortion in a pronounced — and very measurable way,” Barbara Carvalho, director of The Marist Poll, said in a statement. “In a substantial, double-digit shift, according to the poll, Americans are now as likely to identify as pro-life (47 percent) as pro-choice (47 percent). Just last month, a similar survey conducted by The Marist Poll found Americans more likely to identify as pro-choice than pro-life by 17 percentage points (55 to 38 percent).”
Many States Ready to Outlaw Abortion
The recent changes in the makeup of the Supreme Court have raised the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be “severely undermined — or even overturned — essentially leaving the legality of abortion to individual states,” according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization named after the former president of Planned Parenthood.
Currently, at least 20 cases that could prompt a reversal of Roe v. Wade are working their way up to the Supreme Court, Parker says.
One of these involves a Louisiana law that requires doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facilities where an abortion is to take place. It may seem innocuous, but it’s a TRAP (Targeted Restriction on Abortion Providers) law designed to protect women’s health and may shut down unsafe abortion clinics. Several states have adopted TRAP laws in recent years, including Louisiana and Mississippi. A few years ago, the high court rejected a TRAP law in Texas, saying it was not medically justified and constituted an “undue burden” on abortion access, but that was in 2016, before the confirmations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court put a hold on the enforcement of the Louisiana law while the court considers whether to hear the case. If the court decides to do so, it could open the door to revisiting and potentially overturning the ruling in Roe v. Wade.
“If a state passes a 20-week abortion ban or a heartbeat bill, or even a fetal burial statute or a dismemberment ban, these are all cases the Supreme Court could use to reverse Roe,” Parker says. “It does not have to be a complete and total ban on abortion. Any case in which the other side is saying, ‘You can’t do this because of Roe v. Wade,’ which is [the proponents of abortion’s] basic argument in all these cases, could be the case in which the court says, ‘You’re right and therefore we’re going to reverse Roe. v. Wade.’”
A reversal of Roe v. Wade could establish a legal path for states’ pre-1973 abortion bans, as well as currently unenforced post-1973 bans, to take effect, according to Guttmacher.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Parker says, a “big battle” would surely ensue in state courts and legislatures. Some state judges have found a constitutional right to abortion in their state constitutions. Meanwhile, some states have found a right to life in their constitutions. These states would ban abortion. The states that found a right to abortion in their constitutions would protect abortion unless the constitution was amended.
“So, the battle might be in the state court or might be in the state legislature to determine what the state law on abortion is going to be,” Parker says. “That is the most probable result.”
“It is possible that the Supreme Court could reverse Roe v. Wade and find a right to life in the Constitution because the right to life is expressly guaranteed in the 5th Amendment and the 14th Amendment. The 5th Amendment says no person shall be deprived of life without due process of the law. So, they could go all the way to striking down every state law on abortion.”
Nullification Is Alive and Well in America
Even as hope rises that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, pro-life advocates note that the U.S. Supreme Court, like the two other branches of the federal government, may only exercise those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and that the Constitution doesn’t give the Supreme Court the power to decide whether abortion is legal.
“People just don’t understand the Constitution if they agree to submit to unconstitutional rulings,” Dr. Matthew Clark, a South Carolina doctor and chairman of the Board of Personhood SC, told The New American. “The Supreme Court has been wrong over 200 times. They have reversed their own rulings over 200 times.”
“They were wrong about Dred Scott [the 1857 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court] and they were wrong about Roe v. Wade. They were wrong, and the states need to stand up and tell them so and refuse to submit. Ignore Roe v. Wade is what we need to be crying out across our country.”
Clark and others note that Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution could be used to take away the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction to hear abortion cases. Also, they say that America’s most influential Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — recognized the duty of state governments to protect citizens and their rights from unconstitutional or immoral federal actions, an idea commonly referred to as “nullification.” And the God-given right to life, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, should certainly affect abortion legislation.
In recent years, voters in a growing number of states have nullified unconstitutional federal statutes by officially ending marijuana prohibition.
The idea behind nullification is simple: Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government was delegated a few defined powers by the states and the people. Prohibiting substances was not among those powers, hence the need for the constitutional amendment to ban alcohol in the early 20th century. Known as Prohibition, the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquors from 1920 to 1933.
“Nullification is happening with sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants, it’s happening with marijuana states, so the question is, do we have the courage necessary to stand for innocent lives when in America there are people who have the courage to stand for illegal immigration and for marijuana? I mean, it’s already being done. Nullification is alive and well in the United States of America,” Clark says.
Mercy for Mothers and Healing for America
Even if abortion is ultimately banned throughout the nation, or just in some states, Parker says, women won’t have to care for a child that they don’t want to take care of.
Currently, all 50 states have safe-haven laws that decriminalize the leaving of a baby at a hospital, police or fire station, or with a statutorily designated private person. These babies become wards of the state.
“The time periods [to leave the baby at a hospital or other location] vary from three days in California to a year in North Dakota, so there will be no coat-hanger abortions, there will be no going back to 1973,” Parker says. “We’ll move forward to a time where we say, ‘We are going to give justice to the child and mercy for the mother,’ mercy that says, ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ because abortion hurts women.”
“I have collected over 4,600 legally admissible testimonies of women hurt by abortion and we know from scientific evidence that abortion hurts millions of women to varying degrees. Right now, this is a secret pain they carry — they bury it; they bury it with their aborted babies; but they bury it in their heart as well.”
Parker says at any time there are about a million people waiting to adopt healthy, newborn infants.
“So, don’t kill the baby, don’t hurt yourself, and give the baby to the families that are desperately longing to adopt babies in this country,” Parker says.
While Johnson shares Parker’s confidence that abortion laws will be overturned in America, she says the nation is not yet prepared for the massive changes that would bring.
“Are we ready for that? I don’t know,” Johnson says. “I think that we culturally have a long way to go before abortion truly becomes unthinkable, not just illegal, because that’s really my end goal — it’s not just to see the overturning of legal abortion in the United States, but to really see a time when abortion is unthinkable, so when we look back at the times of legal abortion, we will look back similarly as the way we look back at slavery or the Jewish Holocaust; that we look back and say, ‘We cannot believe that happened. We cannot believe that was allowed to happen.’”
Johnson believes that time is coming, preceded by a national debate over -abortion.
“I think that changing society overall is a longer process and changing the resources’ structure and just the cultural thinking of a society does take longer, but many times our morality is dictated by legality,” she says. “There are many women who have walked into our offices and said, ‘Well, I’ve never liked abortion, but it’s legal so it must be okay.’ So, I do think that even as abortion becomes illegal that would move our society in a way that would make it morally reprehensible in the minds of some people.”
Julie Wilkinson, a Holdenville, Oklahoma, nurse who once worked at an abortion clinic in Colorado and plays the role of an abortion nurse in Unplanned, told The New American that she believes the film will help people heal, because statistics show that abortion affects at least a third of all people in the United States.
“Either a wife, daughter, granddaughter — somebody’s had one,” Wilkinson says. “And because of that many people feel some shame for it; they may not openly say that, but they have it in their past, and because of that, they’re reluctant to go all out [to make] abortion illegal because there is a little part of them that still thinks, ‘Maybe somebody like my daughter who is only 16 will need to have this.’”
“But I believe when they see Unplanned and what goes on in these clinics, and how generally poor the care is and that the after-effects are still lingering for people for the rest of their lives as far as what they’ve done, I think it’s going to make people think again and realize that this is something that isn’t a convenience and it needs to end.”
Wilkinson says it’s hard to describe how shocking an abortion really is.
“When you see the parts of human beings who have been killed, there just really is no words for it,” Wilkinson says. “You can see pictures of it, but when you see that these are babies…. It’s something that will affect me the rest of my life. I kept it a secret for a really, long time because I was ashamed, and when I met Abby, I, of course, had already left the business, but I became part of the group she has to help support former workers. She helps get people out of the business.”
Actress Ashley Bratcher, who plays Johnson in Unplanned, says she believes the film will help many women who have had abortions, along with fathers of the babies, begin the process of healing.
“I think that in order to heal you have to reveal,” Bratcher says. “The only way you can come up out of the darkness is to confess and say, ‘This horrible thing happened in my life, I experienced this.’ Otherwise, you are just carrying around this burden and you think nobody can understand it and nobody can forgive you. But that’s what this movie is here to say: That’s not the truth.”
“Abby facilitated 22,000 abortions during her time at Planned Parenthood. That’s a pretty heavy burden to carry. And through the film we show how that burden was lifted for her, how she found forgiveness, and how she ultimately became part of a movement that is bringing healing.”
Bratcher believes the movie will help bring healing to a nation where nearly one in four women will have an abortion by age 45.
“It will bring about healing because we’ll start talking,” Bratcher says. “People will start saying, ‘I had a similar experience,’ or ‘I can relate to Abby because I did this,’ or ‘I worked in an abortion clinic and I understand.’”
The movie shows the “humanity of people on both sides of the fence,” she says.
“It’s understood in our film that we’re not dehumanizing abortion workers,” Bratcher says. “We show their hearts, we show that they really do believe they are helping women, as misguided as that sounds.”
The film doesn’t “dehumanize anyone,” (including the pre-born babies) and because of that it will help open up a conversation in America and a “way for people to speak out and say, ‘Yeah, that was my experience.’”
“I think that the response is going to be more incredible than we could have ever imagined,” Bratcher says. “It already has been, and I really think it’s been a divinely orchestrated thing for it all to come together at the time that it has.”
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist, bestselling FaithWords/Hachette author of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse, former executive editor of Charisma magazine and Charisma Media, and Los Angeles Daily News reporter. He writes for Reuters, Newsmax, Townhall and other media outlets. Learn more at www.troyandersonwriter.com, www.troyanderson.us, and www.prophecyinvestigators.org.
The Power of Unplanned – A Movie Review
By Troy Anderson
As much of America is still reeling from New York and other states moving to legalize abortion up until the time of birth, a powerful new film — Unplanned — tells the explosive story of former Planned Parenthood director-turned-pro-life-activist Abby Johnson.
Made by the writers and co-producers of God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2 — Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman — Unplanned opens March 29 at 800 theaters nationwide. The trailer for the film, distributed by Pure Flix, reached the top spot on iTunes and garnered more than seven million views on Facebook.
Speaking about one of the most polarizing topics of our day, the heartrending film is compelling and very well made, and will leave a deep impact on viewers long after it’s over. Like God’s Not Dead, which grossed over $62 million, Unplanned features excellent acting, high-quality cinematography, and eye-opening revelations about the shocking reality of what really happens in an abortion.
“We are being told by people who watch it that they believe it’s an incredibly important film for everyone to watch, no matter what side of this debate you’re on,” Johnson told The New American. “People need to know what they’re supporting, and if you’re going to support abortion, then we need to have a realistic view of what that is, and not hide away from the reality because it’s shocking, or because it’s more disturbing than we thought it might be.”
The film was assigned an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for some “disturbing/bloody images” depicting the “abortion process.” The “R” rating seems like overkill, given the amount of sex and violence in most Hollywood films with an “R” rating today.
The filmmakers say the MPAA’s rating seems to ironically endorse the pro-life position that abortion is an act of violence.
Actress Ashley Bratcher, who plays Johnson in the movie, told The New American that she thought the “R” rating was “great because essentially to me that just means the MPAA agrees with us that abortion is a violent, disturbing act because they didn’t give us the ‘R’ for nudity, not for sex, not for profanity, for none of those things; they only gave it to us for violence, so that means they agree with us.”
The movie, based off the best-selling book Unplanned: The True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Courageous Choice in Favor of Life, tells the story of Johnson’s journey from being a staunch abortion advocate to standing side-by-side with the people who prayed for her spiritual transformation as she faces a full, head-on attack by one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
In the movie, as well as in real life, Johnson was recruited as a volunteer by Planned Parenthood while a student at Texas A&M University, believing the organization’s pitch that it provided safe, affordable contraception and healthcare for women.
Although she was a Christian, her volunteering turned into a job in 2001. While her parents and husband disagreed with her career choice, they loved and supported her regardless.
Later, she became a Planned Parenthood superstar, rising in just eight years from volunteer to one of the organization’s youngest clinic directors.
Each day she eagerly drove to work, parked in the fenced parking lot, and walked past the gauntlet of pro-life activists outside the fence. Some protesters were overbearing, but volunteers for 40 Days for Life were the opposite — prayerful and respectful of both women seeking abortions and Planned Parenthood employees.
She became acquainted with 40 Days for Life leaders. She became a mother herself while leading the abortion clinic in College Station, Texas. Her husband was elated at her pregnancy, yet she continued working throughout it. She was made Planned Parenthood’s employee of the year.
Then she assisted with an abortion for the first time. By way of a sonogram, she saw the baby in the womb fighting for its life during the procedure involving a suction tool. She watched the doctor vacuum the body parts up, joking, “Beam me up, Scotty.”
“I think our society has really sanitized abortion,” Johnson told The New American. “They have made it seem like it’s a very easy, non-painful experience for women, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s incredibly painful; it’s often performed by people who are not trained to perform abortions on women — unlicensed staff is a common issue inside abortion clinics — and it’s very bloody. There are certainly risks that are part of an abortion procedure.”
Also, Johnson said, there is a lot of “deception in general that women can go back to life, living a normal life like it never happened.”
“I don’t think that’s true for most women,” Johnson says. “That’s probably true for some, but I think for most women they feel like a part of them has been lost because it has been, but society tells them that abortion is normal so they feel like if they regret their decision that something is wrong with them, and so they don’t talk about it, they don’t talk about the regret, and they don’t talk about the suffering and pain they feel. It’s all supposed to be normal, and so hopefully one of the things that this film Unplanned will do is show just how incredibly abnormal abortion is, how it’s not a safe option, and it’s not this sanitized procedure that takes place without any effects.”
After witnessing the baby’s death, a life-changing moment, Johnson left the organization and sought help from the very people at 40 Days for Life who had maintained a prayerful presence for years outside the fenced parking lot.
When Planned Parenthood brought its full weight on her to keep her silent — slapping a gag order on her and taking her to court — Johnson learned who her true friends were. With the 40 Days for Life leaders by her side, she enlisted the help of a pro-life personal injury attorney willing to stand up to Planned Parenthood.
In making the film, actress Bratcher learned something about her own life that she never knew. Her mother told her that she had an abortion when she was younger and “was going to abort you, but I chose not to.”
During a telephone call shortly after Bratcher decided to take the part, her mother became “really emotional.”
“What happened next I just had no idea would ever come out of her mouth,” Bratcher told The New American. “She said, ‘Ashley, I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told you before. What you don’t know is that when I was 19, I was in the clinic for the second time. I had been called back and I was on the table being examined by a very pregnant nurse, and I got sick and I knew that I couldn’t go through with it, and I decided to get up and I walked out and decided to have you.’”
Bratcher says that was “pretty incredible given that I had never heard that story before.”
“I was really overwhelmed with emotion,” she says, adding she was in a salon getting her hair colored at the time and decided she should take some time to process the revelation and call her mother back later. She spoke to her mother again a couple of days later.
“More than anything there was this overwhelming feeling of, ‘Wow, that this life I’ve lived almost never happened.’ I was never once mad at my mom or anything like that; it was just more like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that God would bring my story full circle, that he would use me like this.’”
At the time, Bratcher says, she was “kind of middle of the road” in terms of her views on abortion. But hearing Johnson’s testimony and playing her in the film “really got my attention and I had a firmer stance on abortion.”
“And then to come to find out on top of that that I was almost aborted myself. It was just mind-blowing to think that having never known that here I was speaking and performing as one of the greatest pro-life voices of our time. I don’t have words for how much I think that God loves us, that he would do something like that, that he would craft my story in that way.”
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist, bestselling FaithWords/Hachette author of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse, former executive editor of Charisma magazine and Charisma Media, and Los Angeles Daily News reporter. He writes for Reuters, Newsmax, Townhall and other media outlets. Learn more at www.troyandersonwriter.com, www.troyanderson.us, and www.prophecyinvestigators.org.
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Image The Good, The True, The Beautiful
The highest-ever percentage of faith-based movies ever hit the Big Screen in 2018.
By Troy Anderson
Since its release last year, millions of people have seen the film I Can Only Imagine – imagining the power of faith reconciling and transforming their families. At the 27th Annual Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala on February 8, Producer Cindy Bond told me that the film’s impact has been “absolutely phenomenal.”
The film, one of the highest-grossing faith-based movies of 2018, earning $85 million at the box office, won the Epiphany Prize for Most Inspiring Movie at the gala. The movie tells the story behind the most-played Christian contemporary song, “I Can Only Imagine,” by the band MercyMe.
The film follows the true story of Christian singer Bart Millard, whose father was emotionally and physically abusive. The film stars J. Michael Finley as Bart, who wrote the song about his relationship with his father played by Dennis Quaid.
“I mean I’ve had people tell me that they’ve forgiven a father they hadn’t spoken to in 20 years, and that they’ve actually come to a relationship with God and Jesus through this,” Bond says. “They’ve forgiven themselves for something. I mean about anything and everything – it’s uplifted their lives. The movie is full of liquid hope and it’s given a lot of people hope in some dark times that we go through just in life and as a society.”
The film, one of an exploding number of movies with positive, redemptive content, comes amid a revival of sorts in Hollywood and hope that the trend will continue.
After issuing reports to the entertainment industry for decades finding movies with morally uplifting themes do much better at the box office, Movieguide Publisher Dr. Ted Baehr told hundreds of studio executives, producers, directors, stars and others at the event in Universal City, California that films with at least some Christian, redemptive content hit an all-time high in 2018.
“I’ve known Ted almost since the beginning (of Movieguide) and his work has been critical – there are hardly words to explain it,” Bond told me on the red carpet at the Universal Hilton Hollywood. “He set the foundation for what we’re doing because he proved that there is a market for these films. His annual report to the industry has been a huge help to us filmmakers to get films made because he’s shown Hollywood, year in and year out, how risk adverse faith and family films are. He’s helped a lot of us get movies made, so Movieguide is absolutely irreplaceable.”
When Baehr founded Movieguide in 1985, Bond says few people could get into a “bonified door in Hollywood and talk about doing a film that had faith elements or was faith-based.”
“I was here in the early 1990s and nobody was interested. You had to be careful,” Bond says. “The market and audience were there – we had seen these (faith-based) films in the 1930s, 40s and 50s (The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, etc.) – but there were a few decades when everybody kind of went away from it, so Ted opened up the market. God bless him!”
Gregg Smrz, the director of Medal of Honor: Hiroshi Hershey Miyamura on Netflix, which won Movieguide’s Faith & Freedom Award for TV, says this was the first time he attended the Movieguide awards.
“This is a great awards’ show,” says Smrz, a longtime Hollywood stuntman who worked as the action unit director and in other roles on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Fantastic Four and other blockbuster films. “Anytime you can promote these awards for stuff like this, I think it’s fantastic.”
Record Percentage of Faith Movies Hit the Big Screen in 2018
Over the past 35 years, Movieguide, which reviews movies from a faith perspective for families, has developed working relationships with the six major studios and other production companies, encouraging them to make positive, uplifting films.
Movieguide is the largest, longest-running non-profit ministry dedicated to “redeeming the values of the entertainment industry.” One in three parents uses Movieguide, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Movieguide reaches 55 million people on radio, television, and social media, and via www.movieguide.org.
In the entertainment industry, the Movieguide awards gala has become known as “The Christian Oscars.” On February 24, the Academy Awards were held in Hollywood. In contrast to the Movieguide Awards that honored family-friendly films with Judeo-Christian values, the Academy Awards mostly celebrated films that embody the progressive and humanistic worldview of identity politics and political correctness. At the gala, Spike Lee won an Oscar for BlacKkKlansman, and Bohemian Rhapsody won four Oscars while Black Panther and Roma won three each. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won in the Animated Feature Film category, and Lady Gaga won the Oscar for Original Song for her performance in A Star Is Born. Green Book took home the Oscar for Best Picture. Spider-Man was also a Movieguide nominee.
In its early years, Movieguide fought an uphill battle in Hollywood to persuade the entertainment industry to make more films with redemptive content. But the tide began to shift in 1999 when 40 movies were released with strong, positive Christian content, including The Green Mile, Runaway Bride, and Toy Story 2.
Then, in 2004, came another watershed year when Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ, which grossed $612 million at the box office. That proved a pivotal event in the entertainment industry, convincing Hollywood that faith-based films are profitable.
The film featured Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ. Caviezel, who will again play Jesus in Gibson’s sequel, The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection, now in pre-production, told USA Today that it will be “the biggest film in history.” Caviezel, who played Luke in last year’s Paul, Apostle of Christ, thanked Baehr during the gala for “recognizing the true value of film.”
Caviezel won the Christie Peters Grace Award for Most Inspiring Performance in Movies for his role in Paul, Apostle of Christ.
“These are hard movies to make,” Caviezel told the audience. “I often say it’s like putting a square peg in a circular hole with a very limited budget. As a 19-year-old, I stumbled across a movie theater that was playing old classic films on 70-Millimeter. Still to this day, I remember the impact of watching the 1959 version of Ben-Hur on the Big Screen. Not once, not twice, but I was drawn back again and again to watch this epic tale night after night for two straight weeks. What I was drawn to was the power of this three-hour masterpiece to transport people, to reaffirm me in my purpose, and to redirect my hope and belief that movies can really make a difference.
“There have been many attempts at biblical films, but often they lack the power to do what the original Ben-Hur and a handful of other films have done, and that’s to remain in our consciousness long after the film ends. Should it not be our goal as filmmakers to make a difference, to create awareness, to demand a response long, long after the film ends?
“What captured my attention with this screenplay (Paul, Apostle of Christ) that focused on the end of Paul’s life was how so many extraordinary gifts came out of very ordinary and often very weak people that, ladies and gentlemen, speaks to every one of us. Paul’s message of Jesus’ transforming love spoke to people two thousand years ago and still captivates people today.”
Last year, there were 66 movies with at least some strong Christian, redemptive content, compared to 34 in 2004 when The Passion of the Christ was released, and these movies earned more than $5 billion in the United States and Canada alone. In 2018, the percentage of movies with at least some Christian redemptive faith and values reached a record 67 percent.
“We’ve been (reviewing movies) since 1985 and we found a pattern,” Baehr told the crowd. “We found a pattern that showed that every year it was getting better. When we started there was only one movie with positive, faith-based content.
“Now, of the top 10 movies in 2018, 90 percent had some strong or very strong redemptive, morally-uplifting content. Last year it was only 80 percent. That means people are seeking out these movies more and more. And the percentage of movies with positive faith, values, morals and decency has increased up to 67 percent. Last year it was 62 percent. I didn’t think it would get any better, but that’s because of you and God’s grace.”
Has Hollywood Seen the Light?
Some of these films in 2018 included Incredibles 2, The Grinch, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Peter Rabbit, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Mary Poppin Returns, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, I Can Only Imagine and Ralph Breaks the Internet.
One of the highest-grossing films of 2018, The Grinch, which grossed over $270 million and won Movieguide’s Best Movie for Families’ award, celebrated the birth of Jesus in a “winsome, delightful way that attracted moviegoers of all ages,” according to the “2019 Movieguide Report to the Entertainment Industry.”
Since Movieguide began releasing the report in 1991, the percentage of movies with at least some positive biblical or moral content has increased from an average of 18 percent to 75 percent last year.
“That’s a 310 percent increase,” Baehr wrote in the report. “Many major entertainment industry executives have gotten the message that movies with positive Christian, moral, biblical, redemptive content and values are great for business.”
The report noted that movies in 2018 with very strong Christian, biblical and moral content outperformed movies with very strong mixed, non-Christian, or anti-Christian content by about 2.5 to one, and often much more. In addition, movies with very strong Christian content earned more money overall in the United States and Canada — $796 million versus $73 million – than movies with very strong humanist or atheistic content.
“The studios are recognizing the benefits (of faith-based films) because they’re making money,” Baehr told me. “Lionsgate, whose head of development is a close friend and Christian, did a film four years ago that we honored, and now they just did I Can Only Imagine, which made a lot of money. They have a contract with (the I Can Only Imagine directors the) Erwin Brothers.
“Now, everybody wants a contract with these people. Sony got a contract with the Kendrick Brothers. Christian filmmakers who used to be sort of out in the cold in Iowa have now been welcomed into Hollywood and given free reign to do what they want to do because we told (the studios) that they can make more money at the box office.”
Of the top 10 highest-grossing films in 2018, six were Movieguide award winners, including Incredibles 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, The Grinch, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Ultimately, 90 percent of the top 10 movies had strong Christian, redemptive or moral worldviews and 70 percent had at least some strong or overt Christian content, references and values. These movies earned about 77 percent of the money, or about $5.4 billion out of $7 billion.
“That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to continually benchmark (by releasing the annual reports) because some of the companies doing really strong family films tend to start to drift into adding some extra material, but every year we’re out there, saying these are the films that do well and movies with faith and movies with values always do a lot better at the box office,” Baehr says. That’s because every week 125 million people go to church and only 20-25 million people go to the movies.”
A Gigantic Audience Hollywood Ignored
Today, polls show 77 percent of American teenagers ages 13-17 and 76 percent of American adults 18 and over believe in God.
Meanwhile, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that between 1998 and 2012 the number of congregations in the United States increased from 336,000 to 384,000, largely due to the growth of nondenominational churches. During the same period, Statista found that the number of movie theaters dropped from 7,418 to 5,683. Looking at it another way, in 2012 there were 62 churches for every movie theater.
These facts show why movies with strong and very strong Christian, biblical or moral content make much more money than movies with non-Christian or immoral content.
“The Hollywood entertainment industry may not want to ignore the world’s 2.51 billion Christians, including America’s 233.75 million or so Christians,” Baehr wrote in the report. “They also may not want to ignore the 252.79 million Americans who believe Jesus Christ is ‘the son of God sent to Earth to die for our sins,’ the 246.23 million Americans who believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, nor the 124.75 million Americans who say they go to church each week. Neither can Christians afford to ignore the influence Hollywood has on the world’s children and grandchildren, and on the society in which they live.”
Despite the increase in films with redemptive content, children are deeply impacted by Hollywood and the media, often in a negative fashion. The average child or teenager spends far more time-consuming products from the mass media than they do with their parents or at church, or even at school, up to 66,504 hours compared to 2,000 hours, 800 hours, and 11,000 hours, respectively, according to the Movieguide report.
Also, thousands of scientific studies show that undisciplined media consumption has led to increased violence, aggression, sexual promiscuity, and illegal drug use among children and teenagers.
As a result, millions of people now turn to Movieguide to help them navigate the entertainment landscape.
“The audience we have includes about a third Democrats, a third Republicans, and a third independents,” Baehr says. “So, it’s kind of split like the country. It’s a gigantic audience. They want to be able to protect their children, they want to be able to make wise decisions for their children. Yet teenagers use Movieguide more than anybody, come to the site, spender longer time on the site, and look at more articles on the site. It’s quite incredible.
“The reason I say all that is the most powerful person in Hollywood is not (Disney CEO Bob) Iger or one of the studio heads, it’s the teenager. If he or she goes to see a good movie, it will do well at the box office. If they don’t go see a movie, it won’t do well at the box office, So, their vote counts and there are a lot of teenagers with faith and values. The latest Barna report showed us that many of those teenagers have even stronger faith than their grandparents, so they’re making wise decisions and coming to Movieguide, and so they become a force to reckon with.”
The History of Movieguide and Hollywood
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studios worked closely with the Protestant Film Office and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency to reach the broadest possible audience and to avoid government censorship.
In 1946, when the Golden Age of Hollywood was in its heyday, Americans bought about 4.07 billion tickets at about 42 cents per ticket. At the time, 55 percent of the American population, about 78 million people, went to the movies every week.
Then, contrary to the desires of many studio heads, the Protestant Film Office shut its doors in 1966. Shutting down this advisory resource on spiritual, moral and religious matters left a vacuum in the entertainment industry. Within three years, box office earnings plummeted from 44 million weekly tickets sales to 17 million weekly ticket sales.
National television had been around for 25 years at the time of this precipitous drop, and VCR and cable were 20 years into the future. The biggest impact on the box office over this three-year period was the decline in the moral content of movies.
Last year, only about 26 million Americans went to the movies every week. While box office earnings have been climbing over the past 12 years, the actual number of movie admissions today has declined nearly 67 percent, more than two-thirds since its height in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
“There are many factors to consider,” Baehr wrote in the Movieguide report. “One of which is the introduction of the MPAA rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) in 1968. This system was not created as a means of making culture more informed on their entertainment choices, but as a thinly veiled way for the studios to avoid censoring inappropriate content. Prior to this time, studios held to a positive set of moral codes that appealed to the viewing public. With the introduction of MPAA ratings came a significant up-swing in anti-family and anti-Christian content, and a decline in box office ticket sales.
“While the population since 1966 in the United States and Canada has increased from about 210 million people to about 348.3 million people, the number of ticket sales in North America has continued to drop – nearly 61 percent – from 9.43 tickets sold per person to less than 3.70 tickets sold per person. Annual ticket sales of 1.346 billion admissions for the domestic box office in 2017 are still about 32 percent below the 1.98 billion admissions in the middle 1960s, before MPAA’s rating system came into being and started alienating family audiences and mainstream moviegoers.”
In 1985, Baehr was given custodianship of the files and records of the Protestant Film Office and started Movieguide as a guide for parents and helpful report card to Hollywood.
Since the first Movieguide Faith & Values Awards in 1992, the number of family movies and movies marketed to families has increased to more than 110 per year, and the number of movies with at least some redemptive or religious values has increased almost 500 percent, regularly involving more than 180 movies per year.
Movieguide is now on radio and television, online at www.movieguide.org, on YouTube, and is republished in many magazines, newspapers, newsletters and websites domestically and overseas. Movieguide radio is on many stations and networks, reaching millions of listeners monthly in the United States and overseas. Additionally, Movieguide’s weekly television program is broadcast, cablecast, and satellite cast to millions of viewers throughout the United States and the world.
Last year, Movieguide researchers and writers screened more than 400 television programs and 330 movies. Movieguide looks at each movie in at least 30 separate ways, including aesthetics, theme, morality, cognitive impact, philosophy, politics, and faith, taking more than 150 different criteria into account. Worldview, a comprehensive way of interpreting all of reality, is one of the most important aspects of Movieguide’s analysis. Since many movies have competing or mixed worldview elements in them, Movieguide tries to pick each movie’s dominant worldview.
The Man Who Redeemed Hollywood
Chris Zarpas, the executive producer of The SandLot, G.I. Jane and other films, says Baehr, more than anybody else in Hollywood, is responsible for the enormous increase in movies that are not only faith-based, but celebrate the traditional values that made America a great country.
“Ted has been at this for over 30 years and nobody was listening 30 years ago,” Zarpas says. “Now, to see how Movieguide has grown and how millions of people are using it as a resource to help their families determine what kind of programming is appropriate for their families – it just gives me a lot of happiness.
“Ted is a visionary and families all over American can thank him for creating a resource that was never available before which allowed you to determine what programming is appropriate for your kids and what programming is appropriate for you. There has never been anything like it. There are lots of copycats, but Ted was there first.”
Here is the list of winners and nominees for Movieguide’s 27th Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala:
– The Visionary Award for Furthering Entertainment with Faith & Values – Bill Abbott and Michelle Vicary of Hallmark Channel Programming
– Best Movie for Families – DR. SEUSS’ THE GRINCH
– Best Movie for Mature Audiences – A QUIET PLACE
– Epiphany Prize for Most Inspiring Movie – I CAN ONLY IMAGINE
– Epiphany Prize for Most Inspiring TV Program – WHEN CALLS THE HEART: The Greatest Christmas Blessing
– Faith & Freedom Award for Movies – LITTLE PINK HOUSE
– Faith & Freedom Award for TV – MEDAL OF HONOR: Hiroshi Hershey Miyamura
Christie Peters Grace Award for Most Inspiring Performance in Movies:
– Winner: Jim Caviezel for PAUL, APOSTLE OF CHRIST
Christie Peters Grace Award for Most Inspiring Performance in TV:
– Winner: Jean Smart for A SHOE ADDICT’S CHRISTMAS
$15,000 Kairos Prize for Most Spiritually Uplifting Screenplay by a First-Time or Beginning Screenwriters
– Nathan Leon for GRACE BY NIGHT
$15,000 Kairos Pro Prize for Most Inspiring Screenplay by an Experienced Filmmaker
– Paul Cooper for MINGO ROAD
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, bestselling FaithWords/Hachette author of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse, former executive editor of Charisma magazine and Charisma Media, and Los Angeles Daily News reporter. He writes for Reuters, Newsmax, Townhall, and other media outlets. He’s the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the new digital news and commentary magazine – Prophecy Investigators. Learn more at www.troyanderson.us, www.prophecyinvestigators.org, and www.troyandersonwriter.com.
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Image What is Coming in 2019 in Prophecy?
Watch Paul McGuire and Troy Anderson discussing the Deep State threats facing America and President Trump as the 2020 election approaches.
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Investigative journalist Troy Anderson, co-author of the new book Trumpocalypse, says President Trump may be the last hope for America.
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Image What is Destroying Our World?
After the deadliest wildfire in California history, liberals blame capitalism and global warming for environmental destruction, but conservatives say forestry mismanagement, socialism and globalism are at fault.
By Troy Anderson
As the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in California history burned Paradise in November, President Donald Trump attributed the fire to “gross mismanagement” of the state’s forests.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
California Gov. Jerry Brown, speaking at a press conference the day after Trump made the remarks, fired back, attributing the state’s wildfires to global warming.
“This is not the new normal,” Brown said. “This is the new abnormal, and this new abnormal will continue certainly in the next 10 to 15 years. We’re going to have to invest more and more in adaptation. It’s not millions. It’s billions and tens and probably hundreds of billions (of dollars).”
Brown also said that “those who deny” man-made climate change are “definitely contributing” to the wildfires.”
“Managing the forests in every way we can does not stop climate change, and those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies that we’re now witnessing and will continue to witness in the coming years,” Brown said.
Afterward, Brown was joined by a chorus of mainstream media pundits, celebrities and others who agreed that climate change is not only behind wildfires but many other natural disasters in America and around the world.
“California is vulnerable – not because of poor forest management as DT (our so-called president) would have us think,” wrote rocker Neil Young, one of many celebrities like actor Gerard Butler and singer Miley Cyrus who lost their Southern California homes to the Woolsey Fire.
“As a matter of fact, this is not a forest fire that rages on as I write this. We are vulnerable because of Climate Change; the extreme weather events and our extended drought is part of it. Our temperatures are higher than ever here in our hottest summer on record. California is a paradise for us all. We are sad not to be able to defend it against Mother Nature’s wrath.”
A few days later, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke joined the debate, blaming radical environmentalists for blocking proper management of the forests and causing dangerous conditions that contribute to wildfires.
“When lawsuit after lawsuit by, yes, the radical environmental groups that would rather burn down the entire forest than cut a single tree or thin the forest, then it’s easy to find who is suing and who promulgates these destructive policies,” Zinke said. “Take a look at who’s suing – every time there’s a thinning project. The density of dead and dying trees is higher. When nature alone takes its course without management, there are consequences.”
The remarks by Trump and Zinke, on one hand, and those by Brown and Young on the other, highlight one of the most contentious debates of the modern world.
This controversy is not only about whether climate change or mismanagement of the forests are catalysts for wildfires. This debate also involves a colossal battle between globalists and nationalists, a massive indoctrination campaign of youth into the purported virtues of socialism and climate change, and whether nations around the planet will ultimately advance toward some form of world government.
“Since the 1960s, the environmental left has had the same solutions regardless of the current environmental scare of the day,” Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, a former Republican political aide, and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, told The New American. “The solution is global governance, central planning, wealth redistribution, and loss of national sovereignty to international bodies. They started this in the late 1960s chiefly with overpopulation – the Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) scare, resource scarcity, and other environmental concerns at the time, and always the same solution.”
All global warming is, is the latest environmental scare with the same solution, Morano says.
“In my book, I interviewed Naomi Klein who has a book called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. They are very open by saying that capitalism is not compatible with a livable climate. ‘We must get rid of this (capitalism). This has to be overthrown.’ In fact, the latest (United Nations’) report featured many climate activists and one of them said, ‘This report makes it clear that we cannot have capitalism any further. It’s destroying the planet.’”
Is Capitalism Destroying the Planet?
This message, now drilled into young people’s heads from kindergarten through college graduation and beyond, has convinced a sizeable proportion of America’s young people, and increasingly older generations, that not only is climate change destroying the planet and their future, but that socialism is the answer.
A recent Gallup poll noted that 51 percent of young people now prefer socialism over capitalism – a trend that has accelerated since socialist Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, and more recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won the Democratic nomination in New York’s 14th Congressional District.
“(Socialism) has become hip,” Morano says. (“Climate change and socialism) fits together because the youth are the ones being most severely indoctrinated on climate change. They are basically told that you can’t have single family homes, you can’t have modern appliances unless they’re completely de-neutered of power and regulated, you can’t eat meat, you must limit your plane travel, etc.
“There are all these limits on modern society in order to essentially pay homage to the planet, and it’s all being dovetailed perfectly with this whole Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez sort-of-in-vogue- socialism that capitalism is the enemy, it’s destroying their planet, and that every time there is a hurricane, a flood, a tornado, a fire, that’s because of our economic system. It adds another layer (of ammunition) that they can argue that we must reform our economic system and address climate change. In other words, (the globalists) need the crisis because people wouldn’t otherwise agree to change their ways unless there was this crisis.”
Is Climate Change or Forest Mismanagement Behind the Wildfires?
In the wake of the wildfires in California, along with a series of devastating hurricanes and other natural disasters that have battered the United States in recent years, this debate is going to intensify exponentially in the months and years ahead, especially given the stunning death toll of the Camp Fire in the city of Paradise about 100 miles north of Sacramento.
As of late November, officials said the fire had killed at least 84 people. Since it started on November 8, the fire destroyed nearly 14,000 homes, over 500 businesses, and more than 4,200 other buildings. The fire burned over 153,000 acres, an area about the size of Chicago. And the death toll could grow – significantly. According to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, 249 people remain missing.
Meanwhile, the Woolsey Fire in Southern California killed three people, burned more than 96,000 acres and destroyed 1,600 structures before it was contained on Thanksgiving Day.
About a week after their contentious exchange, Trump and Brown toured the devastation in Paradise. When asked about the role of climate changes in the fires, Trump said he believed that there were “a lot of factors” involved in the fires, including the “management factor.”
For many years, Brown and environmental groups have claimed that climate change is triggering the wildfires in California, but there is little credible evidence that a slight increase in global temperatures in recent decades has contributed to the types of severe fires in California and other parts of the nation, H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the free-market think tank The Heartland Institute, told The New American.
“The temperature hasn’t gone up appreciably over the past three decades in California,” Burnett says. “It may have gone up a degree in Fahrenheit, a half-degree Celsius, but that’s not enough to account for this huge change. It’s been warmer in the past. Also, the government’s own data and irrefutable studies have shown that the world is not becoming more arid. We’re not having less rainfall. We are having longer and more severe periods of drought, but that’s true for the world as well as California.
So, what conditions have changed?
“It’s not the temperature and it’s not the aridity of the soil, or the climate, so that can’t be causing these fires, or even be a significant contributing factor,” Burnett says. “By contrast, a lot has changed in the management of forests and lands in California, both in the last three decades, but even longer than that.”
Decades of Dying Forests
For decades after it was established in 1905, the U.S. Forest Service built thousands of miles of roads into the forests, not primarily to suppress forest fires, but to facilitate logging. The Forest Service, after all, is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Trees on national forests were considered crops to be harvested to provide wood for homes and businesses throughout the country,” Burnett says. “But in the 1970s and 80s they started to change the management of those forests, and following the (President) Reagan years, (the management ideology) really turned over.”
In the 1970s, Congress passed laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act that have resulted in time-consuming and cost-prohibitive restrictions and requirements that have made the scientific management of forests nearly impossible.
It was during those years that environmental groups began filing lawsuits to stop clearcutting, a practice in which most or all trees are cut down, leaving an eyesore and disrupting wildlife habitats such as those of the northern spotted owl – the first in a series of endangered species that became symbols and a cause célèbre for environmentalists.
These groups placed concerted pressure on states and the federal government, along with timber companies, to stop clearcutting. But once the practice was halted the environmental groups continued to file lawsuits, ultimately resulting in a new forestry management philosophy to let trees and underbrush grow largely unabated in California and other states.
At the time in the 1980s, the nation was logging about 12 billion board feet of timber annually from national forests. That figure has dropped to less than 2 billion board feet annually today – an 80 percent decline. In California alone, the number of sawmills dropped from 149 in 1981 to 27 in 2017.
“At the same time, we were actively ripping roads out of the national forests so when a forest fire starts in some remote location, firefighters can no longer get to it readily to stop it before it reaches a populated area because there are no roads there, so you have to use helicopters and airplanes to drop water on it,” Burnett says.
“When forests burn under the policies that were implemented after Reagan – I call them ‘burn, baby, burn’ policies – they let nature take its course. ‘Oh, let nature reclaim itself.’ I’m sorry, nature doesn’t replant trees in soil that’s been burned so hot that it’s sterile. It takes active intervention, and nature doesn’t remove dead and dying timber that has been created by overgrowth.”
Today, many of the national forests are overgrown with 300 to 900 trees per acre whereas in the past it was 60 to 90 trees per acre. So, when insect infestations occur, the bugs easily hop from tree to tree and wipe out entire forests, leaving dead and dying timber to dry out and turn into a veritable tinderbox. Then, when lightning strikes, someone gets careless with a campfire, or a powerline sparks, a nearly unstoppable inferno erupts because the forest has not been logged in decades, its full of combustible undergrowth and dying trees, and most of the roads to get into the area have been ripped out in the name of letting “nature take its course.”
“The wildfire crisis facing our forests across the West comes down to a simple adage,” U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said last year in a speech titled, “We Are Running Out of Forests to Save.” “Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It is either carried out, or it burns out. But it comes out.”
After 45 years of experience with these environmental laws – all passed with the promise they would improve the forest environment – McClintock said the public is entitled to ask, “How is the forest environment doing?”
“All around us, the answer is damning,” he said. “These laws have not only failed to improve our forest environment – they are literally killing our forests.”
One of the most common refrains people hear about the causes of the wildfires is “that old dependable, climate change,” McClintock said.
“Let’s put that to the smell test. Throughout our vast forests, it is often very easy to visually identify the property lines between well managed private forests and the neglected federal lands – I’ve seen it myself on aerial inspections. The managed forests are green, healthy and thriving. The neglected federal forests are densely overcrowded and often scarred by fire because we can’t even salvage the fire-killed timber while it still has value. How clever of the climate to know exactly what the boundary between private and government lands is!”
At an oversight hearing called “Seeking Better Management of America’s Overgrown, Fire-Prone National Forests” before the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources last year, Steve Brink, vice president of public resources at the California Forestry Association, testified that the national forests in California are “in trouble.”
“The 8.8 million acres of productive forest land on these forests are grossly overly dense; recently experienced 5-plus years of drought; experience wildfires that on average burn 322,000 acres per year; and now are experiencing a major insect and disease epidemic that has killed trees on 4.5 million acres,” Brink testified. “About 2 million of the 4.5 million acres affected (by insect and disease epidemics) on the national forests are up to 85 percent dead.”
Brown Vetoes Bill to Reduce Wildfire Risks
Despite these and many other warnings about the dire state of the national forests, Brown and environmental groups have adamantly opposed most plans to mitigate wildfire risks.
In 2016, Brown vetoed a critical wildfire safety bill, even though it was unanimously approved by both houses of the California Legislature, that would have better safeguarded fire-prone communities in the state. The bill, SB 1463, sponsored by California Sen. John Moorlach, a Costa Mesa Republican, was aimed at reducing wildfire risks from power lines and utility equipment that has become the focus of the cause of the recent wildfires in California. The bill was designed to address wildfires caused by sparking electrical lines.
“It was a simple bill,” Moorlach told The New American. “You know, a wildfire that runs for two-and-a-half days creates about the same amount of greenhouse gases as all the cars driving in California for a year, so we figured this was a no-brainer for the governor. He would not only take care of a wildfire issue, but he would also reduce greenhouse gases, which is his religion. And so, I still, to this point, don’t know why he vetoed it. It would have been easy for him to sign it.”
Considering the staggering death toll in the Camp and Woolsey fires and that the investigation is centered around sparking electrical lines, Moorlach says it’s been “heartrending” to know the bill was vetoed in 2016.
“The goal was to prevent this from occurring,” Moorlach says. “The minute (Brown) walked into the governor’s house he should have said, ‘Let’s fix this because it’s causing fires and it would reduce wildfires and it would reduce greenhouse gases. This is a high priority.’ Instead, in his veto message, he just said those two agencies (CPUC and CalFire) were already working on it — nothing to see here, move along. And, so he sent the wrong managerial response.
“He should have said, ‘Get moving on this,’ because now in hindsight it’s tragic what occurred not only in the (recent) fires but last year the (Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, Napa, and Lake counties) was caused by the same electrical problem of not having hardened the poles and the transmitters and 44 people died there.”
What is the Trump Administration Doing?
Given this situation, the Trump administration is working to address the dire state of our national forests, but the administration is often blocked by environmental groups, Burnett says.
“(The Trump administration) has tried to alter the way the forests are managed, but every time it proposes new rules, new forest plans, the environmentalists take them to court and tie things up,” Burnett says. “It’s only been two years. There is not a lot they’ve been able to do. These problems took decades to create. It will take a full term or more than a full term, a second term, or even longer, to reverse this.
“The U.S. Forest Service said fully 60 percent of our nation’s forests are at abnormal fire risk. The (forests) are hazardous conditions, so even if you went back to the kind of logging that was done under Reagan, and that’s not going to happen overnight, you would still take years to substantially reduce the risk of those fires. You must rebuild roads that were ripped out. That doesn’t happen overnight. But what we can do is start that way so these kinds of (wildfires) don’t continue and get worse in the future.”
Morano says his criticism of the Trump administration is that it’s not pushed back hard enough on the so-called “science” of the climate change narrative.
“The only guy who did was (former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator) Scott Pruitt who was basically forced out by the media and sadly the administration let him go at the EPA,” Morano says. “They need a science czar who is going to push back on all of this and they are not doing that so what is happening here is that the electorate is uninformed.
“Now we’re going into the next election, and if the next president is a Democrat, everything President Trump has done can be undone in two years of the next Democrat’s turn. We could be back in the Paris climate agreement, back with the EPA regulations, so my biggest complaint here is that the public needs to be educated, the public needs to be aware, and I don’t know that we’re getting that right now because the media is cracking down (on any dissenters in their ranks) and Republicans are still essentially running scared of the science.”
Climate Change, ‘Hoodwinking,’ and the Plot for World Government
The day after Thanksgiving, as the Camp Fire was nearing containment, the federal government released the 1,500-page Fourth National Climate Assessment report, finding that the “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.”
The report noted that extreme weather disasters “have already become more frequent, intense, widespread or of long duration and have cost the U.S. nearly $400 billion since 2015.” The report claimed that “extreme weather and climate-related events” are going to worsen in the years to come.
In response, Trump said, “I don’t believe it,” reiterating his response on a recent episode of “60 Minutes.”
In recent years, federal government agencies, the United Nations, and various environmental groups have released countless reports, citing the current and future catastrophic consequences of climate change.
Yet a close investigation of the “evidence” cited by the “multibillion-dollar ‘climate change’ complex” reveals a different picture, Morano says, referring to his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change (Regnery Publishing, February 2018).
“The gist of it is that not only is there not a climate crisis, you can’t even detect so-called man-made climate change from natural variability, whether it’s the temperature, the polar bear population, extreme weather, a sea level rise, and I go into great depth in the book,” Morano says. “I use peer-reviewed studies, scientists and data. Even the United Nations admits that extreme weather, for instance specifically in California, and global droughts have been in decline. California has had much worse droughts in previous centuries.
“In other words, when CO2, carbon dioxide, was lower in the atmosphere, droughts were worse. It’s the same with fires, by the way. Now fires are probably the worst metric of climate change because there are so many different factors involved. It’s not just drought, but also land use, forest policy, development, water resource management, etc. But if you are to use just straight wildfires, we’ve had much worse wildfires in the first part of the 20th century.”
In terms of rising temperatures, the book reveals that NASA’s claim that at least 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists think that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely caused by human activities” is actually based on a survey of 77 anonymous scientists, Morano says.
“So, I go through all the hoodwinking, I go through the agenda of climate change, which the agenda is very clear: it’s the United Nations actually seeking global governance on one hand, but also admitting that they are going to be redistributing wealth by climate policy,” Morano says. “In the words of Al Gore in October, the U.N. has ‘torqued up’ their reports for climate action. We all know that the United Nations put themselves in charge of this issue in 1988 with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and if they fail to find a climate crisis, they’ve failed to have a reason to exist and go to all these exotic locations for conferences. I’m going to Poland in two weeks for the next U.N. Climate Summit.”
Meanwhile, the youth of the world and much of the population have bought into this “hoodwinking” and are now confirming their lives and worldviews around this narrative, believing they’re helping to save the planet.
An October poll conducted by Stanford University, ABC News and Resources for the Future found public awareness of global warming is widespread and support for action is broad, with eight in 10 Americans saying the federal government should try to achieve the same deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions called for in the Paris climate change treaty that Trump rejected.
“They are sweeping up young people, using (climate change) to turn them against the economic system,” Morano says. “They openly admit that even if we face the crisis (of climate change) their solutions would have no detectable impact, but they are so important anyway because we must act, and as John Kerry says, we need an insurance policy in case the climate skeptics are wrong.
“Well, I don’t know what insurance policy anyone would buy on their home if the policy costs more than the home if it burned down. That’s what they’re selling us. It’s a false argument, but the thing is they’re doing well.”
This article appeared originally in the December 24, 2018 edition of The New American magazine. Read it here: https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/30857-what-is-destroying-our-world
Troy Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist, best-selling FaithWords/Hachette author of The Babylon Code and Trumpocalypse, former executive editor of Charisma magazine and Charisma Media, and a Los Angeles Daily News reporter. Discover more at www.troyanderson.us, www.troyandersonwriter.com and www.prophecyinvestigators.org. Share This