WHAT IS TRUTH?

A Journey Down the Rabbit Hole

This week I watched the important film made by Matt Walsh called “What Is A Woman?”. You can find the film at the Daily Wire website - and it is worthwhile subscribing to view the whole film. I also have included a link to an interview about the film, recorded in early June when the film was launched:

I was struck by a number of things in the film, which focuses on the simple question: what is a woman? It was remarkable to see the difficulty that most of those in academia, medicine and social sciences as well as many of the general public had in  answering this question. In the film, Matt Walsh says that he is interested in finding out “the truth” but it is clear that many people can’t understand the concept of there being truth. Somehow the concept of “your truth” has crept into society and this was echoed by almost all those interviewed in the film. Interestingly, 2,000 years ago the same question was asked by the Roman Governor of Judea from 26-34 AD, Pontius Pilate, in an interaction recorded by the apostle John (John 18:33-38). Here is the conversation that John reported:

Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning Me?”

Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered You to me. What have You done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.”

Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?”

Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”

Jesus declared to Pilate that he had come into the world to “bear witness to the truth” and that “everyone who is of the truth hears My voice”. A logical corollary to this statement of Jesus is that – everyone who is not of the truth will not hear His voice. It is noteworthy that in an earlier interaction with the apostle Thomas, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). So Jesus not only “bears witness to the truth” but He is the truth. He is the benchmark and His word and that of Old Testament, which Jesus relied upon, are the very foundations of truth. Unknowingly, if we reject Jesus, we reject truth.

The most common word used for truth in the Hebrew Bible is  אֱמֶת (emet) which means faithfulness, reliability and a genuine state of affairs rather than false. It is something or someone (Jesus) that you can depend on. There is a similar concept in the Greek in the New Testament with the word used being alētheia which means the act of being genuine and has a sense of verifiable and visible reality.

Jesus didn’t just declare Himself to speak truth but that He was truth and that everyone who is of the truth would hear His voice. It is significant that in Jesus’ appearance to the apostle John on the Island of Patmos, about 60 years after Jesus’ crucifixion ~AD95, Jesus tells the 7 churches scattered around modern Turkey “he who has an ear to hear, let him hear” (Revelation 2 and 3). Jesus said this not because hearing problems were common in Asia Minor in those days. Clearly it is difficult for us all to hear the truth (which is Jesus’ own word) because it is easier to hear and believe a lie. Satan is described as “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) and he also is “the prince of this world” (John 12:31). It is important for us to realize that there are two kingdoms and either we are part of the kingdom of light (truth) or the kingdom of darkness (lies). In past newsletters I have covered the challenge of deception and the influence of worldview on our ability to hear truth. Of course it is really difficult these days as there is a worldview the prevails throughout the modern education system that there is no such thing as truth.

Postmodernism has taken hold of education and in this philosophical view, there is no absolute truth. Up until the 20th century, the Bible was an agreed foundation of truth and law but in postmodernism “truth and reality are understood to be individually shaped by personal history, social class, gender, culture, and religion”

So we live in a world where people are taught that there is no defining source for truth but that “truth is whatever you believe it to be”. Of course this is completely ridiculous when weighed against everyday experience. If you believe you are Superman and jump of a 40 story building, the truth is that you will die even though your truth, according by postmodern theory, should be respected and so you should be encouraged to believe a lie.

In Matt Walsh’s film, it seemed impossible for people to define what a woman is because the worldview was that if you felt like you were a woman, then you needed to be affirmed in this view. This whole concept would have been laughed at, even 10 years ago, but now serious medical interventions and drug treatments are being given to children without any long-term studies because there is a belief that you need to affirm people’s “truths”. Rather than theories having to align with facts, it seems that in a post-modernist world that facts have to align with theories! It doesn’t require a clever academic (perhaps an oxymoron) to determine that this thinking is one that leads to disaster, for individuals and for a society that embraces such ideas. Although this thinking is relatively new for Western society, it is interesting that King Solomon identified the problem around 3,000 years ago when he wrote “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death”

A society that rejects truth and the One who is Truth, unwittingly becomes a death cult – and so we see this right before us in so many issues facing society.

Earlier this week I listened to a podcast on the JD Rucker Show interviewing John Leake, a true crime author, who has written a book with Dr Peter McCullough, the famous Dallas-based cardiologist who has raised the alarm about COVID-19 vaccines - . The interview related to their new book on COVID-19 and was compelling listening. I have just finished reading their book “The Courage to Face COVID-19” and you can find it and further information on a special website. Leake and McCullough demonstrate that there has been a worldwide propaganda campaign to suppress effective early treatments and promote unproven vaccines. The book is written as a narrative starting on 23 February 2020 when John Leake was alerted by a facebook post from a friend in Milan, Italy about people falling acutely ill with a new respiratory disease later identified as COVID-19. The authors trace key dates in the worldwide spread of the virus and the book is fascinating and very readable. I have read dozens of scientific papers, hundreds of reports and viewed hundreds of videos about COVID-19 and so I thought that I was familiar with most of the information available. However, I hadn’t picked up key points in the timeline of COVID-19 presented by Leake and McCullough in their book and some other insights. Here are just a few of these so that readers can understand the genesis and timeline of what ended up as a plot against humanity:

·  The book starts with an account of Professor Ignaz Semmelweis who made a breakthrough of understanding of disease transmission in 1847 at the Vienna Institute of Forensic Medicine. Semmelweis proposed that the death of the institute director at that time who died after he was accidently cut by a scalpel blade used on a dead body, may have been due to some type of “cadaver poison or cadaver particles” (this was before the concept of infectious microorganisms was known). He also hypothesized that students, who were working with cadavers in classes and afterwards examining women in a maternity clinic, could have been spreading “cadaver particles” because the death rates were high after these examinations. He advised that students wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining women in the maternity clinic. Illness from puerperal fever dropped dramatically. However, Semmelweis was dismissed out of hand by his medical colleagues as a quack. The important point made by the authors early in the book is that

“The moral of the Semmelweis story is clear: orthodoxy in medicine is deadly. The eminent authorities at one time may be revealed to be catastrophically wrong a few years later.”

This is relevant to COVID-19 and its management, where cheap and effective treatments have been denounced by the medical establishment and important information has been prevented by the mainstream media from reaching the public. Truth has been prevented from being told because a government and medical establishment “solution” must be promoted. Having been committed to disseminating a lie, the truth then has been rigorously suppressed by governments, health authorities, media, entertainment (and advertising), law, education, churches, Big Tech and Big Pharma. Few of the general public have understood that all these groups are “catastrophically wrong” and that the health impacts are disastrous for the global population.

Here are a few of the key timelines of COVID-19 outlined in the early chapters of the Leake and McCullough book:

·      March 2020 – McCullough proposes a clinical trial in Dallas. Research groups in China had reported favourable results from treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine on 19 February. Similar reports from India convinced Dr Peter McCullough and his colleague Dr Kevin Wheelan from Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, to apply to undertake a study of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, using 200 treated patients and 200 control patients.

·      25 February 2020 - Professor Didier Raoult in Marseilles, France posts a video on YouTube “Coronavirus: Game Over!”. He formulated a treatment protocol of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as these drugs had potential efficacy, had been used for a long time and were safe. He announced that he would treat anyone who came to his hospital. Professor Raoult treated a small group of patients and noted that treated patients cleared the virus much more quickly than the control group.

·      13 March 2020  - South Korean scientists publish a positive study about treatment of COVID-19 with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and this is picked up by Dr James Todaro and Gregory Rigano in the USA. Todaro and Rigano report the results and Elon Musk tweets a link to the paper and on Fox News there is the claim of a 100% cure rate. None of the mainstream media was interested in these results.

·      16 March 2020 – The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID - headed by Dr Tony Fauci) announces investigation of a new vaccine using mRNA technology. It was only 5 days earlier that the WHO had announced the COVID-19 pandemic. The vaccine, would need extraordinary investment and the only reason it could be justified would be that there were no other treatments available and therefore could receive emergency use authorization. As you read on with the timeline and narrative, it becomes clear that the medical establishment had “gone for broke” on a vaccine being effective (despite no other coronavirus vaccines ever being successful) and wanted to sideline and invalidate any alternative proposed treatments.

·      21 March 2020 – Dr Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko,  a physician to a Hasidic Jewish community in New York, uploads a YouTube video of his experience with the Professor Didier Raoult regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin with added zinc. The video was addressed to President Trump and Dr Zelenko received a phone call from Trump’s chief of staff just 16 hours later.

·      9 April 2020 – Professor Raoult and his team in France published results of 1,061 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin with 91% being cured within 10 days. They concluded that this combination drug treatment if used immediately after diagnosis is safe and effective. Many French doctors ridiculed the treatment and the French medical authorities then restricted the use of hydroxychloroquine which had been available over the counter for many years up until this time.

·      18 May 2020 – On 9 May, Professor Raoult is interviewed by Paris Match, the glossy French gossip magazine and declares about his detractors “My detractors are children! … I refuse to debate with people whose level of knowledge is so low”. This wasn’t designed to endear him to the medical establishment but it became worse on 18th May when President Trump announced that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19 infection. This sent the media into a frenzy of denunciation of Trump and the treatment and signed the death knell for the treatment regimen to be properly considered by the medical establishment. “Trump derangement syndrome” -  resulted in opposition to any treatment suggested by President Trump. Medical authorities then denounced the other promising treatment, ivermectin without any consideration of outstanding results being achieved in third world countries.

These snippets of the early chapters of the book provide some of the initial timelines of the pandemic and the fact that a “vaccine solution”, even though unlikely to be successful from previous experience with similar viruses, was the only acceptable official response. Millions of people were denied effective treatments and thousands were killed on ventilators in hospitals. Doctors were threatened with removal of their medical licenses if they spoke against the vaccines and informed consent was not provided to those being vaccinated. Taken together, this was a coordinated campaign in all Western countries and demonstrates the financial power of Big Pharma and its link to government and public health. It is always difficult to answer the question – why would they do this? The answer is I suspect, much more nefarious than we can contemplate. However in their book Leake and  McCullough end with this statement: “The new mRNA gene therapy shot does not use a dead or attenuated virus, but a segment of the virus’s genome that programs human cells to produce uncontrolled amounts of the virus’s pathogenic spike protein. If 95% of humanity understood this, and was still in possession of their common sense, they would have likely rejected the new gene therapy shots until far more safety data was available. Two years of relentless fear and propaganda had conditioned about 70% of humanity to embrace the new gene therapy shots.”

The rejection of truth takes us into the territory of the “father of lies” and the consequences are extremely serious for mankind. How could this happen and what does it mean? For me, many things started to fall into place when I heard Patrick Wood being interviewed by James Delingpole in November 2020 

 Patrick Wood has been researching the rise of technocracy for more than 40 years and has written a number of books that provide an overview of a move towards global control by an elite group. The YouTube interview is worthwhile watching even though it is 90 min long as it provides a good overview of what technocracy is and how ultimately it leads to the Word Economic Forum’s “great reset” so that we will “own nothing and be happy”. As a result of listening to the Patrick Wood interview and reading all his books, I went down the rabbit hole, as James Delingpole says, and have realized along the way that truth was a casualty of this “new world order” as the narrative being promoted was more important than the truth. I have attempted to show this in a simple diagram in Figure 1

Figure 1: An overview of some of the issues being used by the new world order to produce global control - or “what I discovered down the rabbit hole”

So – what can we do? Firstly stand for the truth and believe that there is truth – not my truth or your truth. There is simply truth and in most cases truth is self-evident. That is why governments have spent billions of dollars on propaganda campaigns related to COVID-19 – so they can convince populations of a lie: that there is a threat and we all need to hand over our autonomy and freedom to them. It is important to understand that almost every key issue is being manipulated by governments so that we lose our independence. Agenda 2030 ,  adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 is being implemented by most governments. There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - which require control by technocrats in an organization that has global power. These SDGs are being implemented by unelected bureaucrats in local and regional governments with increased regulation about land use, animals, CO2 emissions and education.

However no amount of propaganda can hide the truth: girls can’t be boys, untested vaccines are not “safe and effective”, abortion isn’t “a woman’s right to choose” but killing an innocent baby, euthanasia is evil, action to combat climate change has nothing to do with the environment but restriction of freedoms, and removing guns from the population is not about making people safer but permitting more government tyranny.

How extraordinary it is then that the main newspaper spreading lies in the USSR from 1918 to 1991 was called “Pravda” which translates as “Truth”. All Soviet citizens knew that the truth was the opposite of what was printed in Pravda.

We have come to a point today in Western society where truth is a hard to find. Those who want to present truth are censored by Big Tech and the result is that recent data show that only 26% of Americans trust the media. C.S. Lewis said

 “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

This perspective is reinforced by the simple perspective of the 20th President of the USA, James A. Garfield who is reported to have said:

“The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”

Mind you, Garfield was assassinated after only four months in office. So - if you feel miserable after reading this newsletter today it is good news – you may be closer to the truth!

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WORLD ROUNDUP

A Summary of Some Significant World Events in the Last Week

USA

Even Democrats are coming to grips with the disaster of the Joe Biden Presidency. Biden has declared his intent to run for President again in 2024 but polls indicating his approval at just 31% - have frightened Democrat leaders who see a potential wipeout in the 8 November mid-term elections. More than 85% of Americans believe that the US is “on the wrong track”.

Nonetheless, Biden’s minders, who are extreme left-wingers, are doubling down on their policies which have led to the highest inflation rate in decades and an energy and food crisis. Remarkably, the decision by the Biden administration to release 210 million barrels of oil since March 2022 to reduce price pressure at the pump has resulted in the oil ending up in China.

For this type of incompetence, as well as allowing an unsecured southern border with Mexico, Biden should be impeached but most Democrats will continue to support him. The Vice-President offers no alternative and 25 staffers have resigned since she took office in 2021. After the latest shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, Harris’ contribution was that “And we got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are – because you have been forced to have to take it seriously”.  The whole administration is an example of what happens when the narrative is more important than the facts, which need repackaging to support the “progressive” story.

Biden has just visited Ohio to announce the “American Rescue Plan”. The plan involves spending even more government money! However, Democrats are good at branding and some people may be fooled by the title of “American Rescue Plan”, even though the “rescue” is certain to lead to financial destruction.

Meanwhile the Biden administration is sending more money and equipment to Ukraine in a futile gesture to prop up the corrupt regime. With at least $60 billion dollars of US aid to Ukraine, Senator Rand Paul correctly says that Ukraine can’t be saved by destroying the US economy.  In his speech to the US Senate in May this year, Senator Paul said

“Congress should evaluate the cost of continuing down this path… the biggest threat to the United States today is debt and inflation and the destruction of the dollar."

Ukraine has been rated as one of the most corrupt countries in the world and so it can anticipated that much of the materiel and money will end up in the wrong hands.

Clear thinking US citizens need to stand up against bankruptcy of the country – morally and financially – by nothing less than a Marxist administration. It is critical that key battleground states implement processes to ensure free and fair elections in November. If the US is to have any future as a beacon of freedom, the current direction has to be arrested.

United Kingdom & Europe

It has been quite riveting watching the slow demise of Boris Johnson’s time as Prime Minister. The unraveling seems to have begun with the departure of Dominic Cummings his chief advisor in November 2020. Conflict between Cummings and the Prime Minister’s wife, Carrie, had come to a head and Boris backed his wife. There were reports in the media of a party in the flat at No10 Downing Street the night of Cummings’ departure, with Abba music being played and featuring the song “The Winner Takes It All”. I thought at the time this would only be a temporary win as Cummings was described by one commentator as a man who “takes a nuclear weapon to a pillow fight”.  He was relentless in briefing against Boris and highlighting the parties held in No10 Downing Street, including photographs being shared with police. When faced with the impossible task of justifying his behaviour, Boris chose to lie more than he may have liked. Ben Shapiro said in his Daily Wire podcast on the 7th July that there are only two things that bring leaders down: sex scandals and cover ups. There was a bit of both in the demise of Boris, who has been described by former PM David Cameron as a “slippery piglet”. It does look as though the slippery piglet has finally been run to ground but the piglet will cause a lot more mess before there is a new UK Prime Minister.

As I was reflecting on this story which has dominated UK news for most of 2022, I thought of the quote attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal in the second century AD who said something along the lines: “given them bread and circuses and they will never revolt”. I have a feeling that the Boris Johnson story has been a convenient “circus” to distract UK citizens from fundamental changes to freedom that are coming with the new Modern Bill of Rights and the Online Safety Bill. Iain Davis has written an article about the Modern Bill of Rights   - which he assesses as “being designed to provide it with a legal framework completely to ignore all of our rights.” He believes that it “is the keystone for the new UK dictatorship” which Iain wrote about in December 2021 and is worthwhile reading. Davis notes that governments cannot confer rights, rather that they are inherent and inalienable and easily understood from natural law. Iain writes

Natural law is an eternal, immutable truth that contradicts the postmodernist rejection of objective reality. But we don't need philosophical discourse to comprehend natural law; it can be demonstrated using simple logic.”

He then discusses the concept of theft and how this was recognized thousands of years ago as being wrong.

“Where did the concept of a "right" to possess something called “property” come from, prior to the existence of positive law? How did the court know that infringing that right was "wrong"? On what basis did it determine that the act of theft was morally unacceptable in the first place? The answer is simple. Human beings don't define what is right or wrong. We merely come to recognise it.”

Iain’s article on the UK’s Modern Bill of Rights is worthwhile reading and in particular the section about “inalienable rights” or what the US Constitution describes as “unalienable rights”. These rights are not bestowed on us by a government but is one of the laws of nature – God’s laws. Thus the Modern Bill of Rights will only further weaken rights and the Online Safety Bill will weaken freedom of speech as the bill seeks to stop material that may be legal but could be “harmful”. Who on earth is qualified to make these judgments – certainly not politicians or bureaucrats and definitely not the bishops of the Church of England!

All governments are seeking further restrictions of speech that do not agree with the billion dollar advertising narrative being supported by Big Media and Big Tech to promote a government view, often at odds with the truth. We need to be alert because even now, government bureaucrats around the world will be perusing these two UK bills and cutting and pasting sections into new laws that will make their way into all Western countries.

Russia and Ukraine

As I have written about in most newsletters, it is difficult to find credible information about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, given the extraordinary PR skills of President Zelensky and the fact that every Western politician is all in for Ukraine. One thing we can be certain of is that what is reported is undoubtedly wrong and also the billions of dollars going from the West to Ukraine will not be able to sustain Ukraine in the longer term. It is likely, however, that many Ukrainian politicians will become very wealthy if they can stay alive!

Putin is certainly no saint and this week I listened to an excellent talk by Alex Newman titled “Putin’s Role in the New World Order”. The presentation is about 30 min and Newman says in summary that “Putin is a villain who is working in close partnership with the villains in the West to bring humanity under this one world totalitarian system”.

There is no good news in the Ukrainian conflict but just like the concept of the butterfly wings flapping in the Amazonian jungle and impacting the environment, the flow on from the Russia-Ukraine war will be immense and will be felt most seriously in the coming European winter.

China vs The West

It was interesting to see a statement from the US FBI Director Christopher Wray this week that China is seeking to “ransack” Western companies intellectual property with the aim of dominance of all key industries. President Trump spoke about this continuously during his period in office and implemented tariffs against China. China is relentlessly pursuing a strategy for global dominance and they have a long-term plan which undoubtedly will be successful.

The zero COVID-19 policy of China is hard to understand and major cities like Shanghai are under continuing lockdown threat .

The major event ahead in China is the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, planned for October this year. These meetings have been held every 5 years since 1977 and are the forum for announcing new policies and leadership. It seems certain that President Xi will emerge with more power. The Heritage Foundation published a helpful report in March 2022 with good background about the significance of this congress and it is worthwhile reading.

Israel

Israeli politicians are very clever and have decided to honour Joe Biden on his visit to Jerusalem next week with the award of the Presidential Medal of Honor, from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. It is interesting that Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton received the same award which was instituted in 2012. The award is made “to individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to Israel or to humanity through their talents, their service, or in any other way.” The committee responsible for the award must all be left-wingers as no such award was given to President Trump, the US President who has done most to protect Israel and promote its security. This is widely recognized in Israel and I was most taken with banners in the streets of Jerusalem when I visited in 2018 saying “Thank You President Trump”.

A long election campaign has now commenced in Israel with elections for members of the 25th Knesset. Israelis go to the polls on 1st November and Joel Rosenberg, an insightful commentator on Israeli politics, believes that Benjamin Netanyahu’s party will regain control

Rosenberg says

“The problem with Netanyahu is not that there’s not enough people who agree with him in our parliament. It’s that he stabbed so many of them in the back. They don’t want to serve with Netanyahu any longer. That is why we’re going to the fifth round of elections.”

Summary

It is important to see the hand of the “prince of this world” at work in many nefarious ways around the globe and to be “alert but not alarmed”. A globalist agenda is in place and it is important to understand Agenda 2030 – which the UN describes as a “master plan for humanity”. Alex Newman of The New American has a 7 minute overview of Agenda 2030 which is worthwhile viewing

The Sons of Issachar need to understand the times and what we should do.