PCG's Andrew Müller: McCarthyite Imitator

The March 2015 issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet, contains this a bizarre, scare mongering article by Andrew Müller entitled "Has America Been Influenced by Communism?"

(Illustration by Melissa Barreiro as seen on page 14 of the March 2014 issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet.)

This article is largely a rewrite of a chapter in the 2014 edition of PCG's booklet, He Was Right. That chapter is given a more inflammatory name: "The Communist Infiltration of America Was Prophesied". A major purpose of this article is to "prove" that HWA was right about Communist infiltration in America.

Let us see what Müller has to say.

Many today ridicule prior generations’ concern over Communist infiltration. But current trends are bringing that concern back into focus. 

Really? Maybe this supposed "ridicule" might have something to do with the fact that many of the accusations of Communist infiltration during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s were later discovered to be largely imaginary.

In the 1940s and 1950s, many Americans found that warning to ring true. But as time went on, many dismissed it as a Communist scare that never quite appeared. By the new millennium, such a notion seemed outdated.

Today, however, many are starting to wonder what has happened to America and the West—and if this invisible Communist threat was real after all.

There was a Communist movement that found adherents all over the world including America but the problem with McCarthyism that arose in the 1950s (which Müller obliquely refers to) is that many innocent people were unfairly tainted with often false and/or exaggerated accusations. The accusation that one was Communist or somehow like the Communists was often used to blacklist many innocent people and caused much suffering to innocent people. The accusation was used not just to condemn actual Communists but was cynically used to silence unwanted voices.

In practice, communism has never been the grassroots movement Karl Marx predicted. It has been driven by small groups of intellectuals and elites who seize power. Hence the targeting of the American intelligentsia—present and future.

Mr. Armstrong understood this—and he saw a much bigger picture. He warned that demoralization tactics originated from a source beyond Marx, the KGB or the Soviet Union. That warning also explains the effectiveness of the demoralization process: “Communism is the devil’s effort, through his demon-inspired human tools, to take from us this greatest national and economic blessing God ever conferred on any people,” he wrote in 1949.

PCG, like many other marginal religious movements, has a long history of belittling education because they know that if PCG members go to College beyond PCG's control they will discover that many things that PCG's leaders say are simply not true.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet archives revealed the Communist Party-u.s.a. [sic] (an organization that is still alive and well today) received $2 to $3 million a year from the Kremlin to further its subversion activities.

Does the Kremlin fund them today? If they do not then we do not need to worry about the Communist Party-USA receiving funding from them. That thought is never mentioned in this article.

The Communist Party-USA is indeed still in existence but how important is it? Can they mobilize people to effect the political scene? If they are so important then why is it that PCG has rarely mentioned them in their writings? This is just blatant scare mongering with little evidence to back it up.

Müller then asserts that Communism planned to abolish the family. He cites The Communist Manifesto.

Perhaps the most diabolical of these means is the Marxist plot to destroy the family. The Communist Manifesto calls the family a capitalist institution based “on private gain.” Marriage, it says, is but the “hypocritical” concealment of private prostitution. The authors hoped and predicted that both “bourgeois family” and “bourgeois marriage” would disappear with the vanishing of private capital. ...

In his book The Naked Communist, author Willard Cleon Skousen identified 45 Communist goals for the ideological subversion of America. These goals were read on the floor of Congress on Jan. 10, 1963. Among them are: discrediting the family as an institution; encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce; emphasizing the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents; promoting pornography; and presenting homosexuality as “normal, natural, healthy.”

Under the influence of Marxist philosophy and Soviet subversion tactics, American educators have spent decades trumpeting sexual liberation, militant feminism and homosexual rights. All this has been done under the banner of freedom, but the truth is that these movements have served as Trojan horses in the assault on marriage.

And so we see how Müller exploits the exaggerated fear of Communism to condemn unwanted political and social movements. No attempt is made to sift out the wheat and the chaff here. It is all chaff Müller fearfully tells us.

But did the Soviet Union, a state that based its legitimacy on Marxist ideology, the supposed source of these undesired ideas and acts, actually try to abolish the family?

Of course not. In actual fact the Soviet Union was very conservative in regard to family matters. From 1936 till 1955 abortion was banned in the Soviet Union.

Some insight into just how conservative the Soviet Union was in regards to family matters may be seen in the blog, This Ruthless World, written by a woman who grew up in the Soviet Union. This is from her 2013 post, The Long 1950s ... Behind the Iron Curtain.

Second, although it is true that the Soviet Union exercised a tremendous degree of power over its citizens, and it was known to take children away from parents who were deemed Enemies of the People (though this mostly happened during the Great Purges of the 1930’s), no one actually said that “children belong to the state”, much less in front of a bunch of Americans. That is just a straight-up lie. You know how I know that? Because Soviet ideology was very, very heavily into what American conservatives call “traditional family values”. ...

In fact, the Soviet establishment’s attitude towards sex was so conservative, it would make Victorians seem almost randy by comparison. For most of the USSR’s existence, there was virtually no public discussion of sex in any context whatsoever — and inasmuch as the state controlled all means of mass communication, this literally meant there was virtually no public discussion of sex in any context whatsoever.

Also similar to such reluctance to publicly discuss sexual matters there was also a severe social stigma towards children born out of wedlock.

The stigma of unwed motherhood was deep and intractable. An unwed mother had virtually no chance of ever getting married (it was considered emasculating to raise another man’s child, especially a child born illegitimate), and lifelong harassment and ostracism were assured. After I befriended a very nice little girl who lived in the same apartment complex, my father forbade me to play with her because her mother had her out of wedlock. This was also the reason why no other kids played with her, and she was always alone.

“Her mother is a prostitute, and she services Africans. In her home!” my father said.

This was patently untrue, at least the part about African clients coming to the woman’s apartment. Black people were so rarely seen in Russia, if one came to visit in our apartment complex, it would be a sensation. Everyone would come out and stare. And since Russia had a strong courtyard culture, with children and elderly apartment tenants hanging outside their buildings at all hours of the day, this isn’t something that could go unnoticed. And a regular stream of multiple black men? Forget about it. I would have at least heard something. What my father was saying was a pure invention, and I knew it then. But it was the standard way that unwed mothers were treated, and they were considered deserving of the most fantastical and obviously contrived accusations. Society did not recognize any moral obligation towards a woman who had a child out of wedlock, least of all any duty to be fair to her and not to make stuff up.

So considering that the Soviet Union was so conservative about family matters Müller's assertion that Communists plotted to abolish the family must be viewed as nonsense. Instead of trying to understand what actually happened in the Communist countries he just took a few words from The Communist Manifesto that were rarely acted upon to scare monger about Communists in a fanciful way. Considering the many terrible things that actually did occur in the Communist countries it is bizarre that Müller used such a largely delusional assertion to vilify the Communists.

We now return to Müller's article.

America may not have replaced the stars on its flag with hammers and sickles, but it is by now undeniable that it is divided between the idea of freedom and that of communism. The American people long ago rejected God and allowed Satan-inspired Communist philosophy to infiltrate, subvert and divide the nation. God will allow this experience to teach America the natural consequences of broken law.

Talk of equality sounds noble, but as Mr. Armstrong warned, the Communist version of “equality” is only a means to an end. ...

Looking at America today, you have to admit that Mr. Armstrong was right.

This is nonsense. What exactly are "the idea of freedom and that of communism" that he talks of here?

Müller writes that "Talk of equality sounds noble" which insinuates that anyone talking about equality is "actually" a Communist. That would be a terrible and fanciful slur upon many people trying to deal with the pressing social problems in America today. Just because one talks of equality does not mean he or she is trying to launch a wave of violence like Lenin or Stalin.

And so Müller's article comes to an end.

What a bizarre, strange article PCG has produced. Why have the editors of this publication, namely Gerald Flurry, Stephen Flurry, Joel Hilliker, Brad MacDonald, Dennis Leap, Robert Morley, Jeremiah Jacques and Phillip Nice allowed this to be published? Didn't any of them worry that this article was so badly flawed? Couldn't they see what was wrong with this article? Are they also that blind?

Clearly the spirit of McCarthyism is alive and well in the offices of The Philadelphia Trumpet. No good can come from this.

PCG's Stephen Flurry Defending President Bush from "Biased" "Antiwar" Media (2004)

Recently PCG's thetrumpet.com featured a 2004 article by Stephen Flurry on its front page, "The Media War Against the United States". This article is essentially a defense of the Bush Administration from the supposedly unfair, biased criticism by a "left-wing" biased "antiwar" media. It was published in the March-April 2004 issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet.

 
Let us see what Stephen Flurry has to say on this matter.

Bias has always existed in journalism. A reporter’s personal views will often influence the stories he decides to energetically pursue—or completely ignore. It also influences the way a reporter covers a subject—what gets stressed and re-emphasized; what gets suppressed and left out. Even an article that is purely factual can be terribly misleading if those facts are not given context.

 Is Stephen Flurry projecting?

This article will examine the media’s coverage of the war against terrorism and show how its bias is actually accelerating the fulfillment of prophesied events. 

How on earth can "prophesied events" be accelerated by biased news reports? Does this mean (PCG's) God will speed up "prophetic events" because of misleading reports by left wing journalists?\

***

Stephen Flurry starts with asserting that most American journalists are left wing. He then, like many others, uses this fact to assume that the media will be biased towards politicians of the Democratic Party.

In 1992, even many journalists were surprised by the findings of a now-famous Roper poll. It discovered that 89 percent of Washington news bureau chiefs and correspondents voted for Bill Clinton while only 7 percent voted for George Bush. Since that study, a number of books, articles and websites have shed further light on the effect of this reality—that ideological bias does influence what gets news coverage, what is ignored and how stories are reported.

But is it really so simple as that? If Stephen Flurry ever bothered to get out of the PCG information bubble he could easily learn that many American left wingers argue that many journalists, despite how they may personally vote, actually empower the right by uncritically presenting right wing ideas without subjecting them to proper scrutiny. Even if this view is inaccurate it still suggests that it is not so simply to assume that journalists would automatically support one party just because they may decide to vote for them.

***

After that Stephen Flurry, as has been the habit of PCG's leaders since 1999, proceeds to launch a condemnation of NATO's intervention against rump Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999 in order to blame the news media for contributing to the escalation of that armed conflict. Stephen Flurry says that this intervention was wrong and based on inaccurate information. Stephen Flurry at least partly blames the media, including the New York Times.

But the following year, investigators only found 1,835 bodies in the remaining graves, bringing the total to just under 4,000. Sad and tragic—but shocking? Unbelievable? Humanitarian catastrophe?

Fast forward to the present. One primary reason that motivated President Bush to invade Iraq was that, according to a number of intelligence sources, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a serious threat to the United States and its allies in the ongoing war against terrorism. By comparison, the primary reason President Clinton gave the American people before invading Kosovo was that Slobodan Milosevic had committed mass genocide against his own people. Of these two intelligence failures (assuming WMD will not be found), which story do you think drew the most media attention?

WMD were not found in Iraq because there was none to be found. That is far less then what was discovered in Kosovo according to Stephen Flurry's own account. The Bush Administration's search for WMD in Iraq ended in January 2005 just after Bush was inaugurated to start his second term.

***

After this Stephen Flurry talks about how the "biased" "antiwar" media turned against President Bush shortly after the start of war.

In the weeks that followed 9/11, America’s mainstream news media were remarkably free of ideological bias. The people inside the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and those four planes (excepting 19 of the passengers) were all innocent victims of a violent crime against humanity. The terrorists and their al-Qaeda network, on the other hand, were GUILTY of a most heinous and vile act of war—killing thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children.

But media bias soon re-emerged, once the images of those collapsing towers faded from television screens. Maybe the terrorists had a point. Maybe the U.S. government was a legitimate target. After all, hasn’t America targeted innocent civilians before? Left-wing ideas like these crept into mainstream coverage after the 9/11 shock wore off.

What is Stephen Flurry talking about? Is he talking about people trying to understand the intent behind this monstrous act of mass murder? Or is he talking about people defending this act of mass murder? Stephen Flurry is being terribly vague here so it is hard to be sure how one should respond to what he says here.

***

The next day, the New York Times complimented the president’s speech, but also set the antiwar tone for how the media would approach its war coverage: “[T]he country, while determined, is also understandably wary and realistic about achieving a victory over an enemy that is so diffuse and difficult to locate. … The country learned in Vietnam about the limits of a superpower’s ability to wage war against guerrilla troops in distant lands” (Sept. 21, 2001). The Times would give its support for the war on terrorism, but only to a point.

Did that New York Times article really say it would support the war on terrorism only to a point? Based on what Stephen Flurry quoted here it seems as though all this article did was mention how difficult things could get for US forces. How can pointing out how difficulties be viewed as "antiwar"? That seems a strange way to define what is "antiwar".

***

Stephen Flurry then minimizes Bush's responsibility for invading Iraq in 2003 by saying that President Clinton "wanted to invade Iraq before September 11" and says that whatever wrongs Bush did was also done by Clinton and the news media during the Clinton Administration.

On February 9 [2004], the New York Times opinion page accused President Bush of wanting to invade Iraq “even before September 11.” It then said voters this fall would have to determine whether Bush “manipulated the intelligence reports to frighten Congress and the public into supporting the idea.” In truth, if anyone wanted to invade Iraq before September 11, it was President Clinton. And if Mr. Bush is guilty of manipulating intelligence reports, then so too was President Clinton, not to mention the New York Times, as we will see later.

The problem with this argument is that, whatever President Clinton said, he never sent US soldiers to invade Iraq, but Bush did.

***

Stephen Flurry then castigates the media for moaning and complaining about problems in the execution of the invasion to topple Baathist Iraq and ignoring how well everything went.

In Baghdad, we were led to believe, Iraqis would be much less likely to welcome U.S. forces like they did in the south. And Saddam’s special forces were digging in. With their backs against the wall, scattered in a sprawling city of 5 million, Saddam loyalists could pick off American soldiers one by one. A Somalia-like street war would clearly favor the Iraqis. American casualties would be high.

Again, what actually happened proved these predictions of doom to be completely false. U.S. troops made it to Baghdad in three weeks, met little resistance and were greeted by throngs of Iraqis as liberating heroes. American forces conquered Baghdad in half the time and with half the troops it took in 1991 to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

“Forget the easy victories of the last 20 years,” Ted Koppel gravely warned just two weeks before U.S. soldiers pulled down Saddam’s statue. “This war is more like the ones we knew before.” He was dead wrong, even though imbedded in the front line of the U.S. invasion.

As seen above Stephen Flurry seems to view how the initial phase of the war occurred in a very rosy way, as a gloriously swift and decisive victory. This seems to be a greatly oversimplified view of those events.

To get a more detailed view of those events Stephen Flurry should have watched a film such as This is War: Memories of Iraq which was released in 2007. (Be warned: This documentary contains graphic footage of what happens in war.)

This harrowing documentary uses footage of the initial phase of the war as filmed by a soldier at the time. One particularly haunting scene showed how destructive the invasion was. He is driving on a vehicle and he films as he goes past (Can one believe this? But it's true.) many bodies lying on the side of the road. No doubt not a few insurgents were relatives or friends of those deceased persons. While not many US soldiers died more Iraqis died. If things had taken a better course maybe further negative developments could have been avoided but in the later tragic sequence of events the deaths of those Iraqis later motivated insurgents to take up arms unleashing the dreaded specter of guerrilla warfare upon Iraq.

Also Stephen Flurry makes little attempt to understand how the Iraqi people themselves viewed the intervention in 2003. One account of how the Iraqi people of Baghdad themselves viewed the battle in Baghdad in 2003 may be seen in the following blog post from Riverbend, an Iraqi women who lived in Baghdad at the time. (See post entitled National Day).

Here Riverband is criticizing a proposal to make April 9 a national holiday to celebrate the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by recounting what it was like for those who feared to be caught in the crossfire.

April 9 was a day of harried neighbors banging on the door, faces so contorted with anxiety they were almost beyond recognition. "Do we leave? Do we evacuate?! They sound so close..."

It was a day of shocked, horrified relatives, with dilated pupils and trembling lips, dragging duffel bags, spouses and terrified children needing shelter. All of us needing comfort that no one could give. ...

It was a day of stray dogs howling in the streets with fear, flocks of birds flying chaotically in the sky- trying to escape the horrible noises and smoke.

It was a day of charred bodies in blackened vehicles.

It was a grayish-yellow day that burns red in my memory... a day that easily rises to the surface when I contemplate the most horrible days of my life.

That was the 'National Day' for me. From most accounts, it was the same for millions of others. (Source, see post entitled "National Day".)

(Some of Riverbend's blog posts were later compiled into two books, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq and Baghdad Burning II. Or one may read Riverbend's blog.)

Clearly Stephen Flurry has no idea of how bad things were at the time nor did he have any idea about how bad things would be soon afterwards.

***

Stephen Flurry then continues to condemn how the mainstream media (supposedly) were utterly unable to foresee how well the war went in Iraq from his perspective.

That the media is not held accountable for such errors shows just how powerful and arrogant they are. Even though most of the media got it wrong on the war, you would never know it judging by their own post-war coverage. They continued searching for any way possible to put a negative spin on what was happening in Iraq. The U.S. won the war, but can it now bring peace? Does it even have an exit strategy? Is U.S. “occupation” really that much better than Saddam’s dictatorship? Why haven’t we yet found Saddam? American casualties are on the rise. Didn’t Mr. Bush say the war was over? Why are we still there? There’s no link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. There are no WMD. This whole war, it now turns out, was completely unnecessary.

And on and on it goes.

***

After this Stephen Flurry discusses Dr. David Kay who resigned from the Iraq Survey Group saying that Saddam Hussein's regime did not have weapons of mass destruction. Stephen Flurry then quotes other words by Dr. Kay to say that he believed that Saddam Hussein was a greater thrreat than was realized. That those words of Dr. Kay's were not given as much prominence as his statement that there likely were no weapons of mass destruction is cited by Stephen Flurry as evidence of the media's "antiwar" bias.

Let those words sink in. Based on the evidence uncovered by Kay, Saddam was even more dangerous than we thought. Yet, these findings were muted by the same thunderous message echoing out of newsrooms from coast to coast—there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! The war may have been unnecessary. President Bush might have manipulated U.S. intelligence and lied to the American people!

Sorry. It’s the media that exaggerated and manipulated information.

There actually were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Media bias has nothing to do with that. If one should develop negative views about the invasion because of that development media bias cannot be blamed for that in this particular topic.

***

On February 13, in a front-page article, the Washington Post reported, “A majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war.” That majority opinion was shaped solely by dishonest journalism. That’s how powerful media bias is.

Or maybe they remembered what was said before the war started and simply concluded that something was very wrong considering that there were no weapons of mass destruction as was asserted before the war.

***

Stephen Flurry then proceeds to mock Reuters by insinuating they are no better then Al Jazeera.

Compare Jennings’ remarks with what Al Jazeera reported the next day: “Joy at the capture of Saddam Hussein gave way to resentment toward Washington Monday, as Iraqis confronted afresh the bloodshed, shortages and soaring prices of life under U.S. occupation.” Oops! That report actually came from Reuters. It continued by quoting one Iraqi who compared life under Saddam with life after liberation: “The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans will kill you in public.”

Reading this I cannot help but wonder if Stephen Flurry was aware that an Al Jazeera journalist,  Tareq Ayyoub, was killed in Baghdad on April 8, 2003. Sad to say he was killed by US gunfire during the Battle of Baghdad. While Al Jazeera reporters went through this agony Stephen Flurry mocks them as somehow hopelessly biased.

It is also worth noting that no one from Al Jazeera is cited in this article. They are left silenced, regarded as unworthy of serious consideration.

***

Then Stephen Flurry insists that things are not so bad in Iraq.

To be sure, there was widespread looting and chaos right after Iraq was liberated—and the U.S. military could have done more to prevent it. But how would the liberal media have reacted to the sight of U.S. forces overwhelming “ordinary Iraqis” with a show of brute force to help prevent stealing and looting?

Crime rates in Iraq are still very high—but how about some perspective? They are not yet as high as in New York—mainstream media’s OWN BACKYARD. We did lose more than 500 American soldiers during the war last year—about the same number of Americans murdered in Los Angeles. Where’s the media outcry about that?

Maybe one Iraqi car salesman is finding business more difficult than it was under Saddam. But what about the 220,000 teachers in Iraq who are now making 12 times more money than they were under Saddam? Or doctors’ salaries, which are eight times higher? Or the multiple millions of metric tons of food sent to Iraq by the World Food Program? Or the $20 billion pumped into the Iraqi economy by, of all countries, the United States of America?

Of course there are still criminals and terrorists on the run in Iraq, lashing out in desperate attempts to slow America’s progress. And there have been a number of terrorist attacks in Iraq. The media have reported all this—and rightly so. But why hasn’t it been weighed against the remarkable good the United States has done for that nation?

Clearly Stephen Flurry did not know that things were about to get a whole lot worse in Iraq. PCG's leaders claim they can see the future by properly understanding the Bible but they could not see that things were about to get a whole lot worse in Iraq in early 2004.

***

Stephen Flurry then complains that the media ignored the good things America was doing in Iraq. He cites a report by the White House released in December 2003 which, according to Stephen Flurry, some in the White House felt had been ignored by the mainstream media. Stephen Flurry views this assertion as further evidence of his assertion that the media was biased against the Bush Administration to the detriment of America.

Why were all the big media voices muted when the White House released its report? Why didn’t the Times and the Post feature a story? Why did the big networks ignore it? Because the situation in Iraq is not supposed to be good. That’s the story. And if the facts don’t fit within those parameters, they’re not reported.

The situation in Iraq later became extremely bad.

***

Stephen Flurry then cites a letter by Zarqawi in which he moans in a letter sent to Osama bin Laden that he is suffocating in the situation in which he finds himself utterly impotent to wage war in Iraq.

In the letter to al-Qaeda, Zarqawi pleaded for help to incite civil war in Iraq before America left. He lamented his inability to recruit extremists inside Iraq to fight against Americans. And because Iraq was not mountainous, it made life more difficult for terrorists living on the run (especially, he could have added, for those with one leg). The American enemy was growing stronger by the day, Zarqawi said. “THIS IS SUFFOCATION!” he exclaimed.

That from one of the world’s leading terrorists.

Doesn’t this show that President Bush, while he has made mistakes, has also had a good deal of success in the war on terrorism? The Taliban is out of power—no longer providing safe havens for terrorist organizations in Afghanistan. Terrorists still in that country are on the run. Saddam’s regime is gone and will never come back in power, as President Bush assured the Iraqi people. The terrorist network inside Iraq, according to Zarqawi, is suffocating. And whether inspectors find large or small amounts of WMD in Iraq, indeed we now know the Iraqi threat won’t develop into an imminent one.

Stephen Flurry also boasts of how Gaddafi decided to be more cooperative towards the West following the invasion of Iraq.

Clearly Stephen Flurry had no idea that, despite these initial difficulties, alas, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would later indeed lead his minions to commit all kinds of monstrous mayhem within Iraq in order to gain power for themselves. Although that hateful murderer was killed off by a bombing attack in 2006, alas, his minions continued to spread chaos and warfare within Iraq. Even today his blood stained successors under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have continued to exploit the turbulent situation to seize power for themselves and even spread the big lie that the only true Muslims are those affiliated with themselves, which is complete nonsense considering that the vast majority of their victims are other Muslims.

***

Stephen Flurry then ends his article insisting that PCG has accurately predicted that Iran will emerge as the dominant power in the Middle East.

During the early to mid-1990s, while President Clinton and the establishment media were concerned about the WMD build-up in Iraq, the Trumpet kept pointing to the rising threat of radical Islam spearheaded by Iran. (The Bible calls this end-time power the “king of the south.”) As early as July 1992, we prophesied, “It looks very much like the end-time king of the south will rule the radical Islamists! … Much of the world is unaware of what a powerful and dangerous force the Islamic camp is becoming.”

In July 1993, we again prophesied, “Islamic extremism is almost certainly going to be the king of the south.” Forget about Iraq, we kept saying—focus on Islamic extremism and its number-one state sponsor: IRAN. On 9/11, Americans awakened to the reality of Islamist terror. 

It was not until 1994 that Gerald Flurry dogmatically proclaimed Iran to be the King of the South.

***

Stephen Flurry ends the article with these words.

The war on terrorism has revealed just how powerful and widespread anti-American forces are around the world—not just in terrorist camps and caves—but in liberal newsrooms within America and Britain. Together, these forces are working to accelerate the downfall of the United States.

And so Stephen Flurry's article comes to an end.

***

Now he asserted that the news media were too negative regarding the prospects of going to war with Iraq. But is that really true. As time went on many people excoriated the mainstream media, not for being too negative about the war, but for uncritically accepting what the Bush Administration said in the days leading up to war. One example of this train of thought may be seen in the 2007 PBS documentary Buying the War.

Also many were discouraged to learn about the severe deficiency regarding reports by New York Times correspondent, Judith Miller.

It seems fair to say that many disagree with Stephen Flurry's view regarding the media supposedly opposing the Bush Administration's decision to go to war as may be seen in this article.

And so we see how severely flawed this horribly dated defense of the Bush Administration against the supposedly "biased" and "antiwar" news media is. Clearly Stephen Flurry, he who is being prepared to succeed his father Gerald Flurry, has no power to see the future as PCG's leaders so often claim to be ale to do.

Overview of the March 2015 Issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet

The latest issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet (March 2015), is now out. Let us see what PCG's leaders say this time in order to get more tithe money from PCG members and co-workers.

This issue has a circulation of 311,350. This is the lowest figure since the March 2011 issue (307,097). This is part of a continuing decline since the December 2012 issue (341,259). Where is all that money going?

Gerald Flurry has a 'from the editor' article condemning the recent thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba and exploiting this development to indulge in anti-Catholic fear mongering.

Robert Morley has an article fear mongering about the recent decline in oil prices.

Robert Morley also has an article fear mongering that too many Americans are becoming dependent on government welfare.

Jeremiah Jacques has an article condemning welfare fraud.

Andrew Müller has a particularly silly, ahistorical article that fear mongers about Communists in America. It is essentially nonsensical. (His name is sometimes rendered "Miiller" but his actual name is Müller.)

This issue's Infographic is used to promote marriage.

Joel Hilliker has an article insisting that welfare is wrong and presenting his own ideas about on how welfare should be given based on his understanding of the Bible. Hilliker seems to not notice that PCG lives on the welfare acquired from PCG members.

David Vejil has an article insisting that one should listen to would be Prophets who supposedly understand the Bible better then anyone else.

Jeremiah Jacques has an article fear mongering about Russia.

The Bible IQ article encourages people on how to make decisions.

Worldwatch has articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a little article insisting that Prime Minister Netanyahu is preparing to ally with Europe, a canard PCG's writers have been promoting since at least 2001. It also talks about recent massacres by the Pakistani Taliban, claims that Germany is preparing to arm Europe, the uncertainty regarding Greece's finances because of its election, fear mongering against China for providing loans to various nations and fear mongering against Japan because of moves to weaken the pacifist character of the Japanese government.

Societywatch has articles fear mongering that more Americans are no longer have family relations that do not conform to PCG's ideals and fear mongering that many people are vulnerable to falling into homelessness.

Stephen Flurry has a little article encouraging people to view problems as an opportunity to improve oneself and learn to follow PCG's God more perfectly.

The Letters talk about Britain. There's not much to say about it.

Joel Hilliker also has a little article bemoaning people being dependent upon government welfare. As though being dependent upon the privately given welfare of tithe payers is any different.

PCG's Ron Fraser's Demonization of Muslims After 9/11 (2001)

Following the horrors of 9/11 PCG's writers decided it was a good time to vilify Muslims. This may be seen in the following article by Ron Fraser, "The Battle Lines Broaden", published in the November 2001 issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet.

Here Fraser conspiratorially claims that Americans are being lied to about Muslims.

Americans, in their extreme penchant for even-handedness, have been selling themselves the lie that most Muslims are peaceful folks. If this be the case, why is it that America’s own media continue to throw up perpetual video images of hundreds, even thousands, in Iraq and Pakistan, demonstrating against the U.S. and baying for the blood of American men, women and children?

What a facile statement. Astoundingly Fraser cites news stories to scare people into ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are simply law abiding citizens who wish to have lives of peace like anyone else.

Also Fraser was not in Iraq or Pakistan back in 2001. He was living in Edmond, Oklahoma. And he came from Australia.

This disgusting statement also misleads people by obscuring the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks was a criminal conspiracy planned in secret. Only those responsible are to be blamed. It is wrong to try and slur innocent people into thinking ill of them because of what a few murderous social deviants did.

Granted, the terrorists themselves represent the extreme of violent Islamic hatred. Writing for the British Spectator magazine, [a non-PCG writer] indicates that the militant Islamic sect from which the terrorists hailed is the Wahhabi, dating from the very establishment of Islam in the seventh century.

This is ridiculously incorrect statement. As noted in a previous post Wahhabism actually started in the 1700s, about eleven centuries after "the very establishment of Islam in the seventh century."

So after bringing Wahhabism without even bothering to correctly note when it started he then says many Muslims within America are Wahhabis in a viciously cruel attempt to get people scared of innocent people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Among the 10 million-strong Islamic community in America, the Wahhabi doctrine is rampant—as it is among over 2 million Muslims in Britain and over 1 million in Australia. It is estimated that over 80 percent of the mosques in the U.S. are under the influence, if not control, of Wahhabi imams (leaders), daily preaching extremism within the very nation which has given them freedoms and blessings they could never experience in their home countries.

So says the man who didn't even bother to research the fact that Wahhabism started in the 1700s.

This is complete nonsense. The terrorists are social deviants. It is a terrible thing to slur innocent people who had nothing to do with acts of terror or to vilify them. It only serves to empower the extremists. The extremists only represent themselves. They fantasize that they are the hollowed representatives of all Muslims but this is only a big lie. If Fraser was responsible he would have said something like that, but he does not.

If some people choose to say that these terrorists are genuine representatives of all Muslims then the terrorists can just say to potential recruits, Even the unbelievers know we are the true Muslims and you need to follow us. Talk like this empowers the terrorists. They should not be given what they want.

We continue with Fraser's article.

Although its adherents will not agree, Islam, by its very nature, is inherently extreme. In its purest form, it tolerates no accord with those who do not submit to its claims. They are collectively regarded as “the infidel.” 

Although he will not agree, what Fraser actually means here is that he is going to create a straw man about what "Islam" actually is and disregard any evidence that he might be wrong.

Also it is very strange that Fraser should condemn (his straw man fantasy of) Islam "tolerates no accord with those who do not submit to its claims" considering the well documented practice of PCG shunning ex-members and encouraging PCG members to shun the members of other COG groups who are falsely demonized as "Laodiceans".

It is wrong and shameful that following the monstrous catastrophe on 9/11 Fraser chose to stir up fear and anger by scare mongering that many American Muslims are somehow just like Al Qaeda. This is a terrible false accusation. What a terrible thing this slur this article is.

PCG's Ron Fraser Mistakes Wahhabism's Age by 1100 Years

Here is Ron Fraser getting his facts wrong and inaccurately dating Wahhabism about 1100 years too early. 

The November 2001 issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet was the first issue of PCG's recruitment magazine published following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In Ron Fraser's highly inflammatory article (The Battle Lines Broaden) he makes the following statement. 

Granted, the terrorists themselves represent the extreme of violent Islamic hatred. Writing for the British Spectator magazine, [a non-PCG writer] indicates that the militant Islamic sect from which the terrorists hailed is the Wahhabi, dating from the very establishment of Islam in the seventh century.

Wahhabism started in the 1700s. It named after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792).

It is amazing how Ron Fraser did not even bother to get his facts straight and simply stated that Wahhabism dated "from the very establishment of Islam in the seventh century" when in fact it started about 1100 years later in the 1700s.

Now one could say Fraser was repeating erroneous information. But it is still a display of shoddy research that somehow neither Fraser nor anyone else else at The Philadelphia Trumpet bothered to learn that this information is totally incorrect. 

Didn't anyone who helped to produce this recruitment magazine notice that Ron Fraser got this wrong?

Didn't anyone who worked on this issue know that Wahhabism only dates to the 1700s?

And to think thousands of people trust these people with their lives and gave them about $19.5 million in 2012.

PCG Blaming President Obama For Diplomatic Problem with Netanyahu

So the Speaker of the House Boehner invites Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress without telling President Obama thus causing President Obama to be somewhat offended that such a diplomatic move was made without his knowledge and reacts against an attempt to undermine him. So of course this is all President Obama's fault. At least in the eyes of PCG's writers. This may be seen in the article "President Obama Splitting Apart U.S.-Israel Alliance" by Kiall Lorenz. (February 9, 2015).

Since at least 2001 PCG's writers have insisted that the American government will somehow lose the confidence of the government of the State of Israel causing the State of Israel to look for a new ally in Germany but they will simply be betrayed, conquered and enslaved by a frenzied European Empire.

Naturally PCG's writers exploit this diplomatic problem by insisting that this proves their prophecy that the State of Israel will ally itself with Europe is about to occur very soon.

Let us see what Lorenz has to say.

President Barack Obama won’t meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his trip to the United States in March. Netanyahu was invited by Speaker of the House John Boehner to address Congress on March 3. President Obama and high-ranking White House officials are upset by the invitation.

This just might have something to do with the House Speaker inviting Prime Minister Netanyahu without President Obama's knowledge as is obliquely admitted in this article as seen above.

Netanyahu’s decision to address Congress, even after the president’s displeasure, sends a strong signal about Obama-Netanyahu relations. You don’t defy the president of the United States unless the situation is desperate or relations are beyond healing.

Once again only President Obama is portrayed as being at fault.

It has been reported that President Obama’s officials are currently in Israel trying to undermine Netanyahu’s attempt at reelection.

Lorenz never states in this article who reported this occurring.

PCG's leader, Gerald Flurry, teaches that President Obama is a Man of Sin just like Tkach and the supposedly soon coming European dictator fated to destroy America and Britain. Consequently PCG's writers have a strong motive to insist that President Obama is at fault on this matter and whatever other matter they wish to blame on him.

PCG and Bigotry Against Muslims (Islamophobia)

Recently I have been reading issues of the Philadelphia Church of God (PCG)'s Trumpet Weekly. While writing the first of these posts I found myself quite taken aback by the way The Trumpet Weekly constantly spread fear of Muslims and portrayed them in a negative manner. (Thank goodness that are only a small group apparently composed of about 5000 members, according to PCG Information.) This is what I wrote about this topic in that post.

One thing that really took me aback while looking through these [issues of The Trumpet Weekly] was just how constantly they fear monger about Muslims. Just about every issue contains comment about some extreme thing that some extremist Muslim said. Now I am sure they [PCG's leaders] would say they are only talking about militant Muslims who are quite prominent in certain parts of the world. But really one reading this could be forgiven for thinking that Muslims are bloodthirsty war mongers out to get a gun and kill you.

Of course The Trumpet Weekly goes on about things as well but they just constantly go on about these Islamic fundamentalists. There seems to be very few attempts to portray Muslims simply as ordinary people. There also seems to be few attempts to understand why certain militant groups behave the way they do, instead they are just stereotyped as the bad guys who cannot be reasoned with. It is true that certain countries that have Muslim majority population have problems and there are violent conflicts in certain Muslim majority countries but to go on and on about it the way they do.

If they wrote an article entitled, Most Muslims are Normal People who Hate Violence as Much as You, that would be truly amazing, not the fear mongering this publication indulges in so much.

I was uncertain about what I was dealing with here so as a direct result of result of reading PCG's Trumpet Weekly I proceeded to read The Islamophobia Industry by Nathan Lean (2012).

Lean's book is a frightening account of how certain demagogues have fear mongered about Muslims. One fact Lean reveals is that these manipulative demagogues have been able to make bigotry and fear against Muslims into a profitable business.

Lean reveals that Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch did not earn his academic degrees in studying Islam but rather his degree was for studying early Catholic history, and so it must be reported that Robert Spencer is not a trained specialist in regards to Islam.

Lean mentions the wealth possessed by some of these groups that specialize in vilifying Muslims.

One of these demagogues that come to Lean's attention is a Florida based preacher named Bill Keller. Lean mentions how much money his group has gained over the years.

By May 2008, Bill Keller Ministries had accumulated nearly $2.5 million in assets according to an independent auditor's report, with $1.4 million coming from private donations, including his "Gold for Souls" program--a campaign that solicits gold jewelry donations from followers in return for God's blessing.

Another group that earns Lean's critique is a group that is called the Family Research Council, led by Tony Perkins.

While many powerful religious right-wing groups ... eventually ran out of stream, Perkins's $12 million-a-year operation proved to be more durable and became one of the most influential and longest lasting organizations of its kind...

Another group that is mentioned is the American Family Association and its leader Bryan Fischer.

Macabre descriptions of Muslims were the modus operandi of Fischer and his AFA associates, whose net assets in 2010 totaled nearly $37 million. ... [They got] $18 million a year in private donations...

Also mentioned is ACT! for America which is headed by Brigette Gabriel.

When the anti-Sharia scare began to emerge in 2009, Gabriel's organization was at the pulse of the paranoia. ACT! had stretched its operation to all 50 states and ten foreign countries and was fueled by an annual budget of $1.6 million; that year Gabriel drew a $180,000 salary.

It is worth noting that Lean never mentions PCG. PCG had an income of $19.5 million in 2012. Several organizations cited by Lean had incomes smaller than PCG's, yet PCG did not even warrant mention in this book despite the constant vilification of Muslims PCG's leaders consistently spew out in their writings.

This is an indication of how insignificant and unimportant PCG is despite the vast amounts of money at PCG's disposal. Where is PCG's money going?

***

In case there is any reader who prefers to believe that PCG's writers do not vilify Muslims here are a few quotes from PCG's leaders.

Here Joel Hilliker condemns attempts by British leaders to calm down social tensions after the July 7, 2005 bombings in London.

Though the malignancy of radical Islamism is spreading in many non-Muslim nations—throughout Europe, North America and Southeast Asia in particular—in Britain the problem is uniquely bad. For its pathetic response to the incursion of militant Islam, commentator Daniel Pipes calls it the “weakest link in the Western chain.” [Please note: Lean also identifies Daniel Pipes as one who vilifies Muslims.]

Official response to the July 7, 2005, terrorist attack in London provided a perfect cat scan of the advanced state of the disease. Reportage of the event quickly produced a politically correct, Islam-free version of the murders: The perpetrators were “bombers,” not “terrorists.” That they were Muslims who had been recruited at a British- and EU-government-funded Islamic youth center known for its radical politics was glossed over.

In the official account, the real victims were British Muslims, who were certain to suffer an increase in “Islamophobia” from ignorant Britons who would naturally conclude from the attack that all Muslims are evil. The deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, tried to head off public mistrust of Muslims by saying, “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.” The Nottinghamshire chief constable made it his top priority to deal with the problem—not by clamping down on extremism, but by pacifying the Muslim community with gestures such as ordering 20,000 green ribbons for all public officials to wear in a show of solidarity with Muslims. (Joel Hilliker, "The Sickness in Britain's Heart", The Philadelphia Trumpet, November-December 2006, p. 18.)

Here the late Ron Fraser describes how (alledgedly) the secession of Bosnia from Yugoslavia in 1992 was partly the creation of "pan-Islam" (whatever that is) and "Muslim interests" in trying to "consolidate Islam's terrorist enclave on European soil", which refers to the creation of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The overarching reality of the Balkans situation is that of all the ethnic groups the Balkan Peninsula contains, the Serbs are the largest nationality and were the most opposed to the German/Vatican-instigated breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Serbia and the Serb enclaves within Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo simply stood in the way of the EU’s hegemonic goals in its southward and eastward landgrab following the reunification of Germany in 1990. The Serbs also stood in the way of pan-Islam’s efforts to establish a beachhead on European soil in Bosnia from which to further its northward push.

Both EU and Muslim interests coaxed Washington to endorse and even underwrite efforts to have NATO forces fight the Serbs on their behalf—the former to aid its colonizing of the whole Balkan Peninsula, the latter to consolidate Islam’s terrorist enclave on European soil. (Ron Fraser, "The Demonizing of a Nation", The Philadelphia Trumpet, October 2008, pp. 25-26.)

In fact it was the Bosnian Muslim community that would endure the worst deprivations during the Yugoslav Wars, including most infamously the Srebrenica massacre in which the forces of Karadžić and Mladić murdered 8000 Bosnian men.

Here Hilliker condemns attempts by US officials to prevent communal backlash against innocent people who happen to be Muslim regarding the mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. Hilliker said that the murder should be blamed on the murderer's professed Islamic faith.

Nevertheless, don’t expect many retractions from those over the past week who have insisted people not assume Hasan’s religion had any bearing on his motive in the attack. That is because they cherish some things more than the truth.

To hold fast the imagined virtues of diversity and political correctness, they have closed their eyes.

Washington, the military and the mainstream press knew enough to conscientiously downplay or bury the jihadist connection from the moment the tragedy happened. They ascribed the attack to Hasan’s supposed mental imbalances, or stress from counseling traumatized soldiers, or harassment he endured for being Muslim.

Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army chief of staff, said it’s important not to speculate about the role his Muslim faith played in the outburst. His concern is to prevent a backlash against Muslims in the military; he instructed his commanders to watch out for that reaction at Fort Hood. (Joel Hilliker, "Fort Hood Attack: Accept The Truth", November 9, 2009.)

Here Joel Hilliker once again referring to the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London and condemning attempts by British leaders to minimize social strife.

The rush to exhibit such multicultural sanctimony has become so predictable after such incidents. The more that Muslims attack, the louder we praise them. The same Upside-Down reaction was on parade five years ago, after Islamic suicide bombers killed 52 Londoners on their morning commute. British officials didn’t blame Islam—but Islamophobia. London’s mayor asserted that the true fault lay in “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.”

Reality is screaming in their faces, and they are closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and saying “La la la la la.” (Joel Hilliker, "The Upside-Down World", The Philadelphia Trumpet, August 2010, p. 5.)

Here Joel Hilliker vilifies Palestinian children as being raised up on the hatred of Jews.

[Here President Obama says that the Palestinians need their own state in a speech he gave while visiting Jerusalem.] “The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, their right to justice, must also be recognized.” Applause. “And put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own.” Applause. “Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people, but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished.” Applause. “It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank (applause begins) or displace Palestinian families from their homes.” Applause. “Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.” Cheering applause. “Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their homeland.” Applause.

These words characterize the Palestinians as yearning for peace through negotiations with Israel, if only Israel would cooperate. Apparently this view is shared by these Jewish academics.

They woefully ignore several pressing realities: that the Palestinian children of which the president speaks are being raised on virulent Jew hatred; that Arab leaders who support negotiations with Israel lose public support; that Arab leaders, whatever they may say to the international press, consistently speak to their own people in terms of war with the Jews; that when Israel ended its “occupation” of Gaza, that territory became a terrorist haven; that Israel’s “controlling” security measures are necessary to protect citizens from unprovoked terrorist attacks. The crowd’s applause signifies stubborn adherence to beliefs long proven false. (Joel Hilliker, "Obama in Israel", March 23, 2013.)

Even their children are condemned and politicized.

Here is Gerald Flurry speaking of Muslims in a negative way in his 2014 book, The Former Prophets: How to Become a King, as noted in a previous post. (It must be stated here Joel Hilliker was an editor of that book.)

Think for a moment about the people within Islamist culture today. They are raising their children—from the time they are little babies—to hate, even to murder. Those young people constantly hear that message of hatred, and they become more evil as they grow older. They say they want to wipe Israel (biblical Judah) off the face of the Earth! What is the solution to that problem? God has a plan for them. He will resurrect them into a world that has been transformed into a paradise by keeping God’s law of love! He plans to educate them and give them all the love that they never received in this evil world today! (Gerald Flurry, The Former Prophets: How to Become a King, Chapter 2, 2014, p. 30.)

Judges 1:29 shows the Ephraimites allowing the Canaanites to live in their land. Modern Ephraim, Britain, does the same thing. Today, Muslims practice sharia law there, in some cases with the blessing of the British government! Those people don’t want British law: They are importing their own Islamic judicial system! There is no way you can live in peace with such individuals for long. (Gerald Flurry, The Former Prophets: How to Become a King, Chapter 3, 2014, pp. 42-43.)

This attitude of contempt against Muslims that PCG's leaders express is wrong and deserves to be condemned.

PCG's Ron Fraser Falsely Blaming Sexual Promiscuity for "Giving Birth" to AIDS

Back in the May 1999 issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet, Ron Fraser wrote an article (What's Behind The Crisis in Foreign Relations?) once again bemoaning Western leaders in America and Britain as hopelessly befuddled and leading those nations into catastrophe to be destroyed by Germany.

While writing in this vein Fraser incorrectly asserted that sexual promiscuity must bear responsibility for "giving birth" to AIDS.

The current generation of foreign policy formulators and administrators in the West, particularly in the present British and American administrations, is the product of a left-wing, socialist-engineered education system that had its genesis in the 1960s (though its true origins may be traced to the Marxist-Leninist thought engendered by the fathers of socialism in the early 1900s). Socialist philosophy has always had particular appeal to the intelligentsia. Often described as the “baby-boom generation,” the post-World War II generation, which had their minds bent by German rationalist thought, tends to predicate all analyses, judgments and conclusions on godless evolutionary theory, based on the overall assumption that there are no absolutes.

In general terms, to this generation all of the values, mores, honorable traditions—even documented history of past events—are held up to question. This approach to subjective analysis is fundamentally sourced at a basic and false assumption—that the theory of relativity applies not just in the arena of physical sciences. By extension it is assumed that it generally may be applied to human behavior—religion, moral standards, ethics and human values. Thus we have the concept of “moral relativity,” which spawned the “new morality” of the 1960s, giving birth to a new and uncontrollable communicable disease—AIDS.

Sexual promiscuity had nothing to do with "giving birth" to AIDS. What actually happened was that a disease that previously infected apes developed a strain that could infect humans as well. The first infections occurred in Africa. However it was not until 1981 when scientists in America and France proved that this was a new disease that had not previously infected humans.

Sexual promiscuity had nothing to do with "giving birth" to AIDS. Fraser is wrong.

How is it that Fraser can say such nonsensical things and get away with it? PCG keeps saying only they have the truth but people like Fraser say untrue things like this.

PCG's Joel Hilliker Misunderstanding the US Federal Debt

Let us take a look at an article by Joel Hilliker, "An Awesome Secret About America’s National Debt". This article during the height of the 2012 US Presidential campaign. This article was published in the April 2012 issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet.

For many years PCG's leaders have been claiming with much alarm that the US economy will soon collapse. One thing they like to fear monger is that the US federal debt is rising to (they say) to unparalleled heights.

Let us see what Joel Hilliker has to say.

Black is better than red. You’d rather have someone owe you $100 than owe someone $100. Better to have $10,000 in the bank than to be $10,000 in the hole. Financial security brings peace—debt brings grief. That’s just common sense.
Except, apparently, when applied nationally.

That might just have something to do with the fact that the US federal government can print money but people cannot privately do so.

Total federal debt now surpasses $15 trillion, and that doesn’t count the more than $50 trillion the government owes in unfunded retirement promises. The debt exceeds America’s GDP. And on January 26, the Senate agreed to allow President Obama to raise the debt ceiling $1.2 trillion higher...

So Hilliker is complaining that the federal debt is $15 trillion.

Just do the math: The federal government collected $2.2 trillion last year—a huge heap of money that is nowhere near the $3.7 trillion it spent.

Imagine a household...

Stop right there. Can this household legally print money which is recognized by the government of the land and foreign governments as legal currency? Clearly not. Therefore this analogy is totally false.

But let us see where Hilliker is taking the unsuspecting reader, who in all likelihood is unaware of just how inaccurate this analogy is.

Imagine a household that makes $4,000 a month sitting down to make a budget, and patting itself on the back for planning to spend $6,500. We’re not talking about impulse buying. We’re talking about planning to go $2,500 deeper into debt every month—$30,000 a year.
Comparing income to spending, that reckless family would actually be doing somewhat better than America.

Every year, the federal government takes an average of about $7,000 in taxes per American—and then spends nearly $12,000 per American. That is how it goes a heart-stopping $4 billion deeper into debt every single day.

It must be stated once again that comparing the US federal debt with the spending of a household is a completely incorrect analogy.

In the last few decades, debt spending and borrowing have increased dramatically, and the U.S. has become a net debtor, borrowing billions of dollars per year from the rest of the world. Nearly one third of the money the government overspends, it borrows from foreign countries. Today America is the most indebted nation on Earth.

But if "Nearly one third of the money the government overspends [is burrowed] from foreign countries" wouldn't that mean, according to Hilliker's own words, that over two-thirds of the federal debt is actually owed to fellow Americans? 

What are they going to do? Are they going to call in all the debts at the same time and bankrupt America? Somehow the federal debt sounds far less scary knowing that over two-thirds of it is owed to fellow Americans, assuming that Hilliker is correct.

Another thing that really needs to be mentioned about the federal debt is that, once you account for inflation and the concurrent growth of the economy, the US actually owed more money, per capita, back in the 1940s because of World War II. Here is a chart that shows this to be the case.

US federal debt compared with GDP 1940-2014

So it is not true that the US owes more money then anyone ever has, it owed more in the 1940s. But this fact is not mentioned in Hilliker's article.

Now if one regularly reads PCG's writings it could be fairly easy to miss that there are economists out there who currently are not worried about the federal debt. Hilliker obliquely refers to them but dismisses them as people who do not have a clue about what is "really" happening. Hilliker even refuses to acknowledge that they are economists but simply dismiss them as "[p]undits".

Pundits can kid themselves with fancy formulas and say this is no big deal; some even argue America should borrow more.

What that sentence reveals is that Hilliker does not appear to understand these "fancy formulas" he dismiss without ever trying to discuss specifically. Maybe Hilliker should try to understand what these "fancy formulas" actually are before simply dismissing them as nonsense.

We shall learn more about these "[p]undits" and "fancy formulas" (which he does not even bother to describe) later on.

Take a good look at all the money being sucked out of America’s coffers by interest payments on that debt. In fiscal year 2011, the government paid $454 billion in interest. Last December alone, maintenance on the debt cost $98.6 billion.
Look at how such enormous payouts hurt the nation.

How is this hurting the nation specifically? One would think Hilliker would mention something specific to support his case. Does he?

Hilliker immediately continues with these words.

Last year, America’s top military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, called America’s national debt “the biggest threat to our national security.” Why? He was just looking at the defense budget. U.S. military policy is being dictated less and less by strategic imperatives and more and more by budget constraints.

Why is Hilliker quoting this high ranking Admiral? Shouldn't Hilliker be quoting an economist? Shouldn't Hilliker quote a person who analyzes matters of this sort full-time as a profession?

Maybe Hilliker should have quoted Paul Krugman, an economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics. As may be seen in the following link, A Country Is Not A Kitchen Table: Why Austerity Is Bad Economics, he said:

We are not a household; we are an economy. And an economy is a very different thing from an individual family because (in an economy) we are each others customers. Your spending is my income. And my spending is your income. And if we both try to get ourselves in better shape by spending less, all that happens is we end up reducing all our incomes.

And just imagine, Hilliker dismisses an argument like this by just calling it a "fancy formula".

Another economist Hilliker could have quoted is James Galbraith. Back in 2010 he wrote an article entitled "In Defense of Deficits", which contained precisely the opposite message from what Hilliker would have us believe. This article was discussed in a previous post at the time. (Emphases added.)

The misinformation [and fear that the US state will become bankrupt] is rooted in what many consider to be plain common sense. It may seem like homely wisdom, especially, to say that "just like the family, the government can't live beyond its means." But it's not. In these matters the public and private sectors differ on a very basic point. Your family needs income in order to pay its debts. Your government does not.

Private borrowers can and do default. They go bankrupt (a protection civilized societies afford them instead of debtors' prisons). ...

With government, the risk of nonpayment does not exist. Government spends money (and pays interest) simply by typing numbers into a computer. Unlike private debtors, government does not need to have cash on hand. ... If you choose to pay taxes in cash, the government will give you a receipt--and shred the bills. Since it [the US government] is the source of money, government can't run out.

It's true that government can spend imprudently. Too much spending, net of taxes, may lead to inflation, often via currency depreciation--though with the world in recession, that's not an immediate risk. Wasteful spending--on unnecessary military adventures, say--burns real resources. But no government can ever be forced to default on debts in a currency it controls. Public defaults happen only when governments don't control the currency in which they owe debts--as Argentina owed dollars or as Greece now (it hasn't defaulted yet) owes euros. But for true sovereigns, bankruptcy is an irrelevant concept. When Obama says, even offhand, that the United States is "out of money," he's talking nonsense--dangerous nonsense. One wonders if he believes it.

Nor is public debt a burden on future generations. It does not have to be repaid, and in practice it will never be repaid. Personal debts are generally settled during the lifetime of the debtor or at death, because one person cannot easily encumber another. But public debt does not ever have to be repaid. Governments do not die--except in war or revolution, and when that happens, their debts are generally moot anyway.

Galbraith also has some words about Social Security.

What is true of government as a whole is also true of particular programs. Social Security and Medicare are government programs; they cannot go bankrupt, and they cannot fail to meet their obligations unless Congress decides--say on the recommendation of the Simpson-Bowles Commission--to cut the benefits they provide. The exercise of linking future benefits and projected payroll tax revenues is an accounting farce, done for political reasons. That farce was started by FDR as a way of protecting Social Security from cuts. But it has become a way of creating needless anxiety about these programs and of precluding sensible reforms, like expanding Medicare to those 55 and older, or even to the whole population.

These must be some of those "fancy formulas" Hilliker dismissed with but a sentence without confronting what they actually said.

We now return to Hilliker's article.

Hilliker then insinuates that this foreign debt is allowing China to "defy" America.

And think about how that foreign debt can influence policy—even change the balance of global power. America’s largest creditor is China. How much of Beijing’s growing confidence and militarism within Asia, how much of its willingness to defy the U.S. in the international arena, owes to the fact that America owes it well over a trillion dollars?

Wait a minute! Hilliker just said at the start of this article that the federal debt was $15 trillion. Now he says that China is owed "well over a trillion dollars". This means that, according to Hilliker himself, that only about 7% of the federal debt is owed to China. Is it really reasonable to assume that being owed just 7% of the federal debt could really grant so much power to China?

And it deserves repeating again that over two-thirds of the federal debt is owed to fellow Americans according to Hilliker. The following article also support the fact that the federal debt is mostly owed to fellow Americans: Guess Who’s America’s Largest Creditor (Hint: It’s NOT China)

Strange how when the federal debt is viewed in this way it seems so less threatening.

Is it not strange how Hilliker seems to be unaware of the implications of what he is obliquely admitting?

Perhaps the fact that Hilliker used such weak arguments can perhaps be explained somewhat by noting how at the end of this article Hilliker states that his real proof that the federal debt will destroy America is because he has a specific interpretation of the Bible and he will simply continue to say his interpretation is true.

Fundamentally, though, this isn’t a case of bad economics. This is a curse—a curse imposed by God for the nation’s disobedience to Him.

It’s not very fashionable to believe in curses in our modern world. But if you believe the Bible, it’s not at all difficult to see the contrast in Deuteronomy 28 between verses 12 and 44, and to recognize which of those prophecies—issued by the Almighty God—applies to America today. It’s already hurting the nation, but the situation is precarious, and it’s about to get far worse.

So for Hilliker it is simply magic. His citing of Admiral Mullen and bringing up China having about %7 of the federal debt is just for decoration. His main argument is that his interpretation of the Bible tells him the federal debt will lead to America's fall.

But his interpretation is largely based on British Israelism. But British Israelism happens to be false. So this interpretation is non-biblical nonsense.

And so we see that Hilliker was quite badly informed in writing this article.

***

In the following issue three letters discussing Hilliker's terribly flawed article are reprinted.

Here's the first letter.

It seems that the majority of U.S. politicians think they have a bottomless money source at their disposal (“An Awesome Secret About America’s National Debt,” April). We hear a lot about how they will save the economy by tackling this serious problem, especially around election time, but all they seem to do is continually add to it. The whole system is based on Satan’s way of get, i.e. politicians want to get elected, so they continually make promises the country can’t afford to deliver, and the voters want to get the promises the politicians are making. We are most definitely heading for ruin ....

Here's the second letter.

Americans seems to have their heads sunk in the sand and can’t see where they are going. It’s sad that no one seems to notice, much less care. Maybe it’s because deep down they don’t know what to do and it’s better just to ignore the financial tsunami headed our way and hope it will all pass soon and things will be better in the morning, but this time that won’t happen.

And here's the third letter. Incidentally this person gets printed in the letters section fairly often.

The universal problem of debt boils down to just one thing: greed. A common disease around the world is the “I have more than you” syndrome. People would go to insane lengths of borrowing just to buy things that they do not really need—all because they want to show off to their friends and neighbors. Humility is associated with stupidity in this sinful world. Entire nations have this attitude. Some impoverished nations are burning billions of dollars developing nuclear weapons just to show off. The Bible has warned that in the end times the weak will say they are strong. This toxic attitude contributes greatly to the debt problem globally.

Here are some comments left with the article at PCG's website.

Wow! Talk about the earth shaking under your feet or the curses of Deuteronomy 28 truly comming [sic] to pass in the lives of the people of this great country. As I was reading the words of this passage in the Bible I could see the curses in my own life there in plain view, word for word, curse for curse. My oh my, may the Eternal help me to see and choose life and blessings and not curses and death. The more I follow the Lords lead the more he blesses me. But don’t be fooled God is not mocked he will not at all acquit the wicked. That includes you and me. Unless we repent, truly repent and turn toward the God of our fathers and choose life, we will see nothing but more and more curses.

Here's another one.

As much as the American people would like, there isn’t a man or a woman—no, not even a nation full of men and women whom we might vote into office this November, who can save this Nation from this very hard downfall and civil turmoil.

How unfortunate it is that those who believe PCG's writings are unaware of the severe flaws of Hilliker's article.

PCG has Only "About 20 Native German-Speaking Members"

Sometimes it is pointed out that PCG's writers have a severe fixation on Germany.

What do PCG's leaders have to say about this? Here is how Gerald Flurry responded on this matter as seen in a previous post.

Churchill was accused of having a “strong anti-German obsession.” Sometimes we are so accused. But some of our own members are German. We believe in facing the truth. Those who fail to do so are going to learn by the sledge hammer of events! (Gerald Flurry, Winston S. Churchill: The Watchman, 1999, 2002, 2006, Chapter 3, p. 18)

But how strong is this argument? PCG only has about 20 German speaking members in Germany and Austria.

The pcg [sic] has about 20 native German-speaking members in Germany and Austria. Members in Vienna, Salzburg and northern and southern Germany receive recorded messages from headquarters. (Source.)

Let people remember that fact from PCG's own writings the next time this weak argument is used again by PCG's leaders.

Now why would people think PCG has a “strong anti-German obsession”?

It might just have something to do with the fact that Gerald Flurry called Germans a people fated to be "a continual curse upon mankind" and chosen by Satan "to inflict a stream of misery and destruction upon mankind"?

Nahum is a book about Germany, a nation which has been a continual curse upon mankind. Satan chose the Germans to inflict a stream of misery and destruction upon mankind. (Gerald Flurry, Royal Vision, July-August, 2000, p. 39.)

Why did Robert Morley once call Germans "Huns"?

Sixty-nine years later, London is under attack again. Only this time, the Huns are burning it economically. (Robert Morley, "The Battle for Britain Begins", Trumpet Weekly, October 17, 2009, p. 7.)

The reason PCG's writers are said to have “strong anti-German obsession” is because this is an accurate assessment of what PCG's writers actually say.