Who is the antichrist? - part 3

Point 2) The entourage of the Antichrist.

No more than fifty or sixty years ago the most important attribute for a national leader was personal charisma. Looks took a back seat to the ability to inspire. Franklin Roosevelt was wheelchair bound, Adolf Hitler was a short little man with a Groucho Marx mustache. It didn't matter. They communicated to the masses through sound -- mostly radio, and the written word -- mostly newspaper print. Then something happened: we invented the cathode ray tube.

Television began the change. The internet finished it. Now the most important attribute for a national leader is that they "look" like a national leader. We live in an age where actors make good politicians. My goodness! Half the cast of the movie Predator segued into political careers! The Govenator... Jesse Ventura... what is the guy who wore the alien suit doing these days? He's got to be secretary of something or another.

What are the words of that old Don Henley song? I could have been an actor, but I wound up here. I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear.

He was writing about the nightly news, but he may have well have been talking about our current batch of politicians. On screen persona is everything now. They are talking heads that all seem to be reading the same script. Could Obama be one of the ten kings spoken of in Revelation? I think so. But here's the kicker: so could George W Bush. Why would an evangelical Christian like Bush 'give power and authority to the beast' the same way as an lip-service Christian who has more humanist leanings like Obama. That's easy.

Many will go here and there to increase knowledge. -- Daniel 12

This is given to Daniel as one of the intervening events between his prophecy and the end times, and it explains why a president who ran on the platform of "change" is at the head of an administration that looks -- in practice -- virtually identical to the one it replaced.

You see, President Obama's belief system may be totally different than Bush the Younger's, but it doesn't make any different if he's not the one who is calling the shots. And make no mistake, the President of the United States has not been calling the shots in this country since at least the 80's. It's the entourage, and not just here in America. The entourage is running the show all over the world. They have to. There is simply too much information for it to be any other way.

Example: Why does Obama's financial program look exactly the same as Bush's? It's because both men were reliant on same batch of so-called 'financial experts'. Obama used to work in the financial sector; he's not ignorant on financial matters. But it makes no difference. Modern financial institutions rely on transactions that are so complex that only the aforementioned 'financial experts' can shed any light on them.

But haven't leaders always been reliant on advisers? For that matter doesn't the book of proverbs commend a king who defers to his advisers?

Yes, but this is operating on a wildly different scale, and creating a radically different set of conditions. Historically an "adviser" was someone who would listen to his leaders wishes and then use his expertise to provide logistical council (ie: the nuts and bolts of the how to) to make it work, or to tell him if the plan was simply not feasible. These days, our president sits in a room surrounded by advisers whose job it is to take an encyclopedia's worth of information and distill it down to five minutes of "briefing". The information they provide and the way in which they frame it puts them in control. This is the power of the entourage: while the leader busies himself with the job of getting reelected the informational elites run the show from the shadows.

At this point it may be tempting to ask, "but doesn't money still run the show? What about the lobbyists and special interests?

This still may play a role to some degree, but less and less I think now that we are going to a more socialist economy. It would take time to explain. Maybe I'll give it it's own post at some point. For now, let me just point out that the laws being passed in this country have typically never been read by the people who are passing them. This is because those laws are often over a thousand pages long. Some are over 10,000 pages. At this point it's not the person passing the laws who is running the show; it's the people responsible for the content in those thousands of pages and the entourage of advisers who tell the legislators how to think about that mysterious content.

So here's the point -- what good is an antichrist who has to be spoon fed all of his information?

At that point, the individual takes a back seat in terms of importance. It wouldn't be any good for Satan to possess that single individual. The Devil would have to use a different tactic. He would have to find a way to somehow embed himself into that flow of information like some sort of corrupt software system. And for that, he would need the man of lawlessness.

Next post, the man of lawlessness is revealed, as is the organization he belongs to.