Latest news with #EndTimes
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Greene warns of 'Mark of the Beast,' Gabbard cries 'Deep State Coup'
Two high-profile conservative figures ignited backlash this week after sharing viral posts promoting unfounded and conspiratorial claims — one invoking government betrayal, the other end-times prophecy. On Friday, Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who now serves as Director of National Intelligence under Donald Trump, accused former President Barack Obama of leading a coordinated 'coup' to undermine Trump's 2016 win. 'This was an attempted coup. A treasonous conspiracy orchestrated by Obama,' she wrote Tuesday on X. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which conducted a bipartisan investigation, previously found no evidence to support claims of a conspiracy against Trump. 'She's not competent,' said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) at the Aspen Security Forum, responding to Gabbard's statement. On the same platform just days earlier, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) shared her own warning. This time about a cashless economy. Quoting Bible verses and referencing Revelation 13:16–17, Greene claimed that digital currency initiatives like the GENIUS Act signal 'the mark of the beast' system, a Biblical motif that signals the 'End Times.' 'I am NOT voting for the mark of the beast system,' she wrote, in opposition to efforts that would modernize digital ID and financial systems. In her post, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tied the push toward a cashless society to the biblical 'Mark of the Beast.' But many scholars dispute that interpretation. A theologian explained in an eschatological commentary that the mark of Revelation 13:16–17 was not about credit systems or digital payments. It was an economic symbol of allegiance, not tied to modern technology or monetary systems like CBDCs or cryptocurrencies. The mark served to distinguish those aligned with the beast in the ancient world — not to track purchases via digital devices. Similarly, a 2023 commentary in the Los Angeles Review of Books describes how certain modern interpretations like linking cryptocurrency to the mark blend end-times theology with contemporary political fears. The author warns that conflating biblical prophecy with secular conspiracies undermines both theological integrity and rational critique. While Gabbard's comments feed into long-standing 'deep state' narratives, Greene's evoke evangelical concerns about biblical prophecy. Neither offered further comment in the days since, but both drew criticism for advancing conspiracies that have no grounding in fact but hold lasting appeal among their bases. The post Greene warns of 'Mark of the Beast,' Gabbard cries 'Deep State Coup' appeared first on
Irish Times
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Israeli-American plan seems intended to kill off any hope of a two-state solution by deporting population of Gaza
Some American Christian fundamentalists fervently believe and even hope we are living in End Times and that the second coming of Jesus is nearly upon us and will come in the context of the coming battle of Armageddon, believed to be located at Megiddo. All this was recently described in a TV documentary entitled ' Praying for Armageddon ', available on YouTube. They may be a tad disappointed that their political idol, Donald Trump , is now claiming to have brought lasting peace to the Middle East and that Binyamin Netanyahu is nominating Trump for the Nobel peace prize. It now appears the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz is proposing the Israel Defense Forces will herd all the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip into a camp erected on the site of the ruined city of Rafah at the southern end of the strip, and that they will designate that camp as a 'humanitarian city' with no right of exit except by migration to foreign states. Those entering the ghetto camp will be vetted to make sure they are not Hamas activists (in which case they will be dealt with elsewhere). But the rest of the Gaza Strip will be made Arab-free (with the possible exception perhaps of richer Gulf Arabs who may choose to holiday briefly on the 'new riviera' envisaged by Trump, Jared Kushner and the Israeli government, for the rest of Gaza). READ MORE Netanyahu openly claims to be in negotiation for the mass clearance of Gaza to neighbouring Arab states; Trump predicts that 'good things' will happen in that context Hand in hand with the ghettoisation of the Arabs in Gaza, the Israeli government is intent on annexing the occupied territories of the West Bank. Increasing pressure on the West Bank's Palestinian population involves mass displacement of the Arab population. The United Nations reported in June about the extent of this displacement. Forty thousand Palestinians have been displaced from long-established refugee camps in the northern West Bank including Tulkarem and Jenin, and more than 6,000 have had their homes demolished in reprisal actions (a martial law tactic practised and perfected in Ireland by the British in the Irish War of Independence and bequeathed to the Israelis in the aftermath of the ending of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948). [ Ireland has a proud history of opposing anti-Semitism Opens in new window ] The latest accelerated Israeli clearance involves removing forcibly the Palestinian population of 1,200 from a chunk of the West Bank known as Masafer Yatta, to create a new military firing range area of 32 square kilometres in the occupied territories. The Israeli-American plan seems to be nakedly intended to kill off any hope of a two-state solution by the deportation of the population of Gaza. Netanyahu claims the two allies are progressing negotiations with unnamed Arab states to receive the Gazans as migrants from the planned 'humanitarian city' at ruined Rafah. Netanyahu openly claims to be in negotiation for the mass clearance of Gaza to neighbouring Arab states; Trump predicts that 'good things' will happen in that context. At the moment, about six million Arabs live between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. That is demographically unmanageable for the 7.2 million Israeli Jews (including 500,000 West Bank settlers). By deporting two million Palestinian Arabs from Gaza, and making preparations for ethnically cleansing most of the West Bank, the land described as Greater Israel including Gaza, Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) could all be kept as a majority Jewish state – even in the face of greater fertility rates among its Arab population. That appears to be the US-Israeli long-term strategy – the lasting peace for which the Israelis propose Trump as a Nobel Prize winner. All this flouts all notions of international law. All this amounts to a programme of war crimes. All this is happening before our eyes. But what, you ask, about the unforgivable Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023? They were and are atrocities. They were and are unforgivable. Hamas, so carefully, consistently and cynically nurtured by right-wing Israeli politicians as an 'asset' to weaken the West Bank Palestinian administration's claim for statehood, does not deserve to survive. Its ideology is poisonous; its agenda is criminal – annihilation of Israel. These alone demand its deposition. But none of that justifies what has been done – or is planned to be done – to millions of innocent civilian women and children in Gaza and the West Bank. October 7th, 2023, did not justify two years of slaughter. Fifty-seven thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered. And unless the two million survivors in the Gaza Strip are now forcibly displaced and deported, Israel apparently has no answer. In Biblical terms, are we not now back to the absurd notion of the divinely justified and ordained genocide of men, women and children described in the Book of Joshua at chapters six to 11, and the mass exile of entire peoples? Forget fundamentalism. Is enlightened Christianity preaching love or Armageddon?
Spectator
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Who's pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?
'This never would have happened if I had been president,' says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It's a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter. Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who 'made Iran rich' with $300 billion for the evil regime's dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. Those actions may have weakened or strengthened Ayatollah Khamenei's grip on power (it depends who you ask). Yet there's no denying that the latest hostilities have broken out on Trump's watch. So this one's on him. What, then, is he thinking? That's the $100 trillion question – to which there may not be an answer. We can turn, in vain, to Trump's posts on Truth Social. From that platform, he has this week ordered everyone to 'immediately evacuate Tehran!' and demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!'. On Tuesday, he even posted a screenshot of a text message from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel and a fervent Christian, who told him that God had spared him from assassination last year for this moment. 'There is only ONE voice that matters,' wrote Huckabee. 'HIS voice… No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.' Does that mean Trump is considering doing to Tehran what Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Has he succumbed to Huckabee's premillenarian dispensationalist theology and now thinks of himself, as the radical evangelical Zionists do, as a sort of handmaiden to the End Times? In recent days, Trump has turned on the peaceniks in his orbit, who have been issuing grave warnings about the start of a third world war. Trump called Tucker Carlson, the broadcaster previously thought to be his most trusted anti-war confidant, 'kooky'. And he's ignoring Tulsi Gabbard, his dovish director of national intelligence, who has been trying to debunk Israeli assessments that Iran is perilously close to being a nuclear-armed power. On 8 June, Gabbard was left out of a crunch meeting about Iran at Camp David. 'I don't care what she says,' said Trump on Air Force One on Monday night, which is a pretty extraordinary statement to make about the woman he's put in charge of the CIA. The mystery, then, is who Trump has been listening to. Even if polls suggest strong support for Israel from the MAGA base, nobody in his cabinet wants to be exposed as the Bush-era warmonger on the inside. Vice-President J.D. Vance has been publicly supportive of Trump's maximalist position this week. But Vance is unlikely to push Trump towards an intervention which could turn off the voters he hopes will elect him as Commander-in-Chief in 2028. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is thought to have neoconservative inclinations, but his latest public statements have been less robustly pro-Israel than Trump's. And secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, a passionate supporter of Israel in the past, also been circumspect. Carlson and Steve Bannon, the godfather of MAGA, are adamant that Trump has been persuaded by Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. America's most popular news channel has quickly defaulted to its familiar war-on-terror setting. The channel's hosts are once again talking about good vs evil and conjuring up fanciful notions of beneficent regime change in the Islamic Republic. But Israel vs Iran is not a rerun of George Bush's invasion in Iraq, no matter how much the pro- and anti-war ideologues want it to be so. Trump's great trick is convincing opposing forces within his coalition that he is on their side and that a master plan will soon be revealed to settle matters in their favour. For months, the America Firsters, Trump's supporters and staff who are opposed to all foreign entanglements, had convinced themselves that he had been gulling the hawks in service of the doves. Trump had frustrated Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu behind the scenes and dispatched his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to strike a new grand bargain for the region. Then last week Israel attacked Iran and Trump appeared to take credit. 'Heads-up? It wasn't a heads-up,' he said last week, when asked about the level of his advanced knowledge of Israel's plan. It was 'we know what's going on'. Washington's war lobbyists instantly claimed that Trump's peace agenda had been a ruse all along to give Tel Aviv time to prepare for action. At the same time, however, sources suggest Trump also spoke to the Emir of Qatar and the Emir then reached out to Tehran in another bid to stop the war. 'There is still a middle ground for a cessation of fire,' said one insider. 'But the window is closing fast.' The truth, then, is that the Commander-in-Chief is bluffing and not bluffing. Trump is always improvising, leveraging all options, and using the world stage to appeal to different sections of his domestic audience. Throughout both his presidencies, he has played hawkish Republicans and the anti-war MAGA elements off against each other. The danger for him now is that, in the nightmarish context of Iran vs Israel, his hyper-transactional approach has brought him closer than ever to pushing America into a new conflict in the Middle East. 'If there's one guiding rule about Trump,' says Justin Logan, director of defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, 'it's his self-conception. He thinks of himself as a winner, a dealmaker and a peacemaker.' The problem with Iran is that, having failed to pull off a deal, Donald the winner is in conflict with Donald the peacemaker. Trump sees no contradictions, however. It's 'peace through strength'. He seems increasingly confident that he can hurl the Mother of All Bombs at Iran's mountain nuclear-development lair in Fordo, claim 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!' and let the Israelis and the Iranians settle the rest. Such an exercise could prove to be the greatest test of his ability to bend reality to his will.
The Onion
19-05-2025
- The Onion
Jesus Circles Earth Few Times So He Not First To Arrive To Judgment Day
LOW EARTH ORBIT—Dreading a scenario in which He showed up early and was forced to make awkward small talk with mankind, Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, circled the earth a few times so He wouldn't be the first to arrive for Judgment Day, heavenly sources confirmed Tuesday. 'It's still looking pretty quiet down there, so I'm just gonna take a couple laps around the planet until the End Times get into full swing,' the Son of God said as He anxiously hovered high above South America, adding that almost everyone He was looking forward to seeing wouldn't show up until the resurrection of the dead anyway. 'Man, I really should have made plans to head over with the Four Horsemen. It's way less stressful to arrive for the Day of Wrath as part of a group. I could text Abaddon, the king of the locusts, to see when he's getting there, but that guy never checks his phone. If I'd been smarter about it, I'd just be leaving heaven now. Oh well. I'll give it one or two more trumpets, and then I should be good to head down.' After arriving upon the earth in the divine glory of His Second Coming, Christ was reportedly dismayed to find that everyone had already judged the souls of the living and the dead without Him.
Boston Globe
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Public broadcasting, RIP?
At my public middle school in Arizona, I was taught Intelligent Design, which is a pseudoscientific alternative to evolution more akin to creationism. I was told that humans did not 'come from monkeys,' and that to think so was insulting. An entrance to the Arizona PBS offices in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix. Katie Oyan/Associated Press PBS was the only educational channel I could watch at home, and while I was mostly interested in the kids' shows, I also tuned in to the National Geographic specials, where I watched experts discuss things like animal biology and evolutionary theory. I realized that PBS was making a better case than my teachers. Advertisement At the end of the school year, I moved to a rural ranch in the Pacific Northwest. At 13, I was fully in charge of my own education. I had one American history textbook and access to a shared desktop where I visited Khan Academy — and where I watched PBS. Without these resources, I would have resorted to scrounging for answers on Google or various social media sites. I had no digital media literacy, and doubt I would have been able to distinguish science and analysis from conspiracy and misinformation. I had few adults to guide me. My brother was listening to Joe Rogan. I lived with relatives who were climate-change deniers, one of whom was a state representative. They owned every National Geographic going back to the '60s, but told me to disregard most of what was written inside them. Advertisement The other reading material was the 'Left Behind' series about the biblical End Times and 'Hank the Cowdog.' Without PBS, I probably wouldn't have found trustworthy, or easily digestible, educational materials at all. The Trump Administration's latest efforts to cut federal funding for broadcasters like PBS and NPR would have jeopardized my ability to learn on my own, and for free. My story isn't unique. Sixty percent of all PBS viewers are in rural America, and roughly the same portion are low-income. When I was a child with limited resources, PBS was the only reliable education I had, especially as the adults around me failed. Good riddance, CPB By There have been plenty of loud protests about the Trump administration's efforts to cut spending on health care, scientific research, and public schools, and some of these are legitimate. But the outcry over its attempts to Public broadcasters like NPR and PBS are no longer the kind of necessary public goods President Lyndon Baines Johnson Moreover, public funding makes up only a fraction of NPR and PBS's budgets. Federal funding makes up Advertisement The headquarters for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press If they're so essential, people are likely to pay for them through memberships or donations, allowing them to survive on their own. Trump's executive order directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and all executive agencies to cease funding NPR and PBS. Congress has already allocated $535 million to CPB for this fiscal year. These cuts are fundamentally different from the Trump administration's attacks on basic scientific research, which And why should the government fund highly politicized media, anyway? Johnson promised a public broadcasting that would be 'free, and it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people.' But outlets like NPR belong to liberals. Don't take my word for it — take NPR's. The outlet's former senior editor Uri Berliner If NPR wants to be a liberal outlet, better do so on its own dime. So don't let the other misguided Trump cuts mislead you about this one. It's a win on many fronts. Less government spending. Less taxpayer-supported news poorly masked as unbiased public broadcasting. And a step toward restoring trust in the media. This column first appeared in , Globe Opinion's free weekly newsletter about local and national politics. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up . Advertisement Rebecca Spiess can be reached at
