Who are the great voices of our time?
I find things for this website - and it feels like an honor - to remind myself and some others of certain attributes and accomplishments of our Holy Father, and of His Son and our savior, Jesus, and of the work of the Holy Spirit. No man is really worth speaking of in comparison to them. They are higher and They are greater, and probably even the best of us knows ourselves to be nothing of note in the shadow of all that They are.
Yet we are humans, all around us are humans, and we all leave impressions upon the ones we run into, speak to, live with, etc. Some people harm us, some help us, some leave us with a bad taste in our mouths, and some ultimately inspire us. There are the 'heroes' of the past...the ones we know through the history books or the movies. But there are living heroes also. Our parents or our older siblings are often real-life heroes to us, and teachers or military leaders, sports players, or our national leaders, pastors or priests might be our real-life heroes. Such human heroes will always begin to show flaws if viewed closely enough. God will never fail you, but people usually will fail you in at least some small respects and all too often in large ones as enough time goes by. After all, we are all only human.
I have heroes. Don't most of us? I find much to praise and little to fault in my parents, for instance. They thought themselves ordinary, but if so they were 'ordinary' in the best sort of way. They met many of their life challenges well, and they were loving and caring. My brothers, sisters and I were fortunate and blessed.
But I wanted to mention a couple of people that I personally place at the top of the list as just great people, or as indispensable thought leaders in our day. I only speak English and so am certain to have missed out on many great people that come from cultures speaking other languages. And I grant that there are many categories of greatness, with the most wonderful persons of all being - almost certainly - too humble to let their names even be known. Yet I have some people in my mind that I would like to honor:
My favorite personal acquaintance is named Merril. He is about 40 years older than I am, and perhaps he is, unbeknownst to me, an axe murderer or some such horrible thing, but I found him to be truly and honestly great. I only knew him well for a couple of years, but for various reasons he is my favorite person on Earth, and it was always a joy to spend time around him. I learned some important practical stuff, and important life stuff, just by watching him. He is closely followed by a Sam, a person that brought so much enjoyment to others in just about any activity he was involved with. Both were just especially great spirits, excellent fun to be with, and oddly faultless in their ways.... family men and hard workers. Their kind and shining spirits set them apart. I've known some other fairly great people personally, but those two stand out.
I personally got to know at least one especially great woman. For a while I knew her well, and she was a great one in many ways. I'm certainly glad that I got to know her to the extent I did. She was so smart and insightful, and added much to my thoughts and understanding, though it is true that there was much that stood in need of being added! Sadly, that's still the case today!
But I've known some people only through their work who have affected me perhaps more than any. I wanted to hold up a couple of them as being worthy of special note in our times and in this world.
First, as an American, I'll mention Ann Coulter: I've not personally met her, but she is a gift from God to our generation I believe. She is an author, speaker, a 'polemicist', a talking head concerning politics and social issues on TV. She aims to inject humor as she speaks, and often succeeds. But she speaks of serious matters, though politics and social matters are muck in many ways. They have a seedy side to them, anyway. But politics is how nations do their earthly business. And social issues help determine how we treat each other, which is tremendously important. Satan, in order to control people that ought rightly to belong heart and soul to God, has to have tools through which to manipulate us. He is apparently not allowed or not able to act upon humanity openly and in person. At any rate he certainly tries to use our political institutions and our opinions on social issues to direct our Earthly efforts and energies into the accomplishment of his Hellish plans.
Our political authorities will always be one of those agencies that Satan attempts to commandeer and use. In fact, America is under a mighty Satanic assault even now, and the battle for control of our government is being waged with a truly implacable ferocity. The USA is a momentarily powerful nation and Satan can do much wicked work through us if he can just obtain the reigns. And he has obtained some of the reigns. All of the shadow government instrumentalities dance to his tune already, I believe. And the Democratic Party adamantly supports ideas that are so painfully wrong-minded that there can no longer be any reasonable doubt that this political party's top people are agents of God's enemies as well.
In truth, about 15 years ago the battle looked hopeless for America. We were spiritually besieged on so very many levels. Our cinema and TV modeled wicked behavior. Our media set a national tone of rebellion against common sense social positions and in truth against Godliness, portraying it as an outdated and long disproven viewpoint. Our schools were hostage to the same assaults upon reason. Our laws were tailored to allow easy destruction of the family. Our churches were in the grip of a creeping commercialism and trendy acceptance of things God has spoken against most emphatically. Even gender and reproduction were being twisted into all sorts of unnatural definitions. Like many people, like many sinners, I thought our times especially bad. I thought we might be forever lost as a nation.
But then came a counter-revolution of sorts, and many instrumentalities seemingly fashioned by God arose to try to oppose this new and twisted world. Without doubt the battle still is waged, and the outcome uncertain, yet there seems a better chance of God winning through human means (though He can always win by His own strength, and the scriptures assure us that in the end He will have to!) It will seem odd to many, but I believe God raised this woman, Ann Coulter, to be one of the mightiest of those tools that oppose God's enemies.
She is only human, and no human is perfect. So, without doubt she is a mix of both the 'good' and the 'not as good'. Surely there were others fighting as she arrived on the scene, Limbaugh, Hannity, and hundreds throughout the media and among the more localized arenas, but in general the fight was not going well. But as God raised her up to prominence through her own hard work and such doors as God chose to open, it began to be that she was a recognized 'television personality'. As such, her voice began to gain range and distance. She wrote books and she gave speeches, and she was a guest on various television shows. She was good in appearance, but her mind and reasoning ability were the greater part of her excellence. And her super-power was this: she took Satan's lies as voiced through his various liberal mouth pieces among men and women, and she verbally tore them up bit by bit, mocking them almost mercilessly. She exposed them without their makeup. She took off their wig and she called them out on their particulars. She brought a clever and weighty force of reason on behalf of those who hoped they were on God's team to a spiritual battle fought by proxies.
With wit and strongly researched opinions she opposed the bad philosophies of the New World Order with sound ideas given to us by God long ago, but from which we had foolishly drifted. She also openly scorned Satan's doctrines and his foolish and harmful thoughts and behaviors by cruelly and somewhat incessantly mocking them in the public arena. She attempted to show by fact and data, by studies and charts and statistics, and by simple common sense reasoning that a great fraud was afoot in America. She spoke with strong insistence that a very real danger was lurking. And against the odds America began to hear and to notice the encroaching dangers, and we have started to engage our senses to the reality of our surroundings. Other voices preceded hers, and others were heard along with hers, but she had something others did not really have: a nearly universal visa! She was a familiar figure in not just one venue, but many! She made her appeal to save America through radio shows, television talk shows, news shows, political gatherings, college speeches, religious gatherings, and through the sale of and promotional tours for her bestselling books. She has worked through an impressive variety of paths to educate and warn America.
She went into liberal strongholds - liberal universities, liberal talk shows, the sorts of places which hated many of her ideas and seemed to hate her personally also - in cases. She went to them directly and she talked, shining the healthy light that truth and sound reasoning always bring to a situation. Sometimes she seemed to bring God's ideas though she seldom explained things in those terms.
She's been objected to; she's been canceled on. She has often been booed. She's been formally protested. She has actually been banned from speaking in a certain nation. She's had pie thrown at her face while speaking...literally. Sometimes she has spoken to friendly audiences that found much in her words to agree with. At other times she clearly was just out there in the other team's side of the bleachers, brave but vulnerable to the hostile and intentionally hurtful words of the disagreeing crowd. Yet she talked to them there in such places not just once but many times, and I sometimes wondered at it. No one else I knew of did that. Isn't that true? Can you name anyone that has frequently done that? And though there were some commercial gains from it, and some fame, yet those two things could also have been obtained by addressing a friendly crowd. There were plenty of friendly crowds to address. But she so often was speaking to those who would certainly hate her positions. She wasn't running for office. She had a fair income from her books alone. Why put yourself out there as an object of derision, as a lightning rod for bolts of hate, over and again?
Oh, she hawked her books and made some money speaking and obtained some notoriety. But I began to think that she put the nose of her ship into the gale of intellectual hostility and sailed more squarely into that unfriendly storm than anyone else I had seen in my lifetime. She turned head on into such squalls as a regular habit really. (She still does so today.....though now she is less alone.) And she is the first person in the regular American news and talk show culture, so far as I have personally observed, that openly declared that Jesus died for her sins while she was live on cable T.V., and I confess that I was hardly ever prouder of any American Christian woman...ever...than I was of her at that moment. For some reason my heart just swelled inside of me when I watched her that day, just from knowing that Jesus had someone among His servants that was of the strange and singular nature of Ann Hart Coulter. Heckled, verbally abused, physically attacked, cursed at, pilloried in the liberal media, she just keeps going and going and going.
She has been jeered and probably will be still. She would go out there...this girl, this woman, and not afraid to be feminine, to dress and act as a girl or a woman as she did so, and she faced many a lion's den full of misinformed and wrongly led Americans with their souls unknowingly in peril, and she spoke true things to them. Mostly true! She was not perfect, but she was great, and she was sincere, and she did not falter. She did all of this relatively alone. Alone. At least when out there on a stage talking, she was alone, and she spoke - unbeknownst to her hearers - with a sort of Christian love. She was telling lost-thinking humans why they were lost.... she was enumerating the liberal deceptions in their close particulars so that people that she spoke to could see the exact thing she spoke of in the exact light she saw it in. She didn't just call certain things bad, she also carefully explained why they were bad.
It is a brave thing to think you know better and see more truly than those around you, brave but sometimes deluded, right? But she most surely did know better and certainly was righter than so very many that she spoke to and argued with. There are some truths which cannot be argued against using defensible rationale. Sometimes that was the very sort of truths she was expounding upon to her audience, yet to their loudly expressed dismay! Our society genuinely is pretty horribly deluded! But we all should get a chance to save our souls...to hear the truth from God's overwhelmingly more authoritative perspective. And she often provided that to her listeners.
She still fights the same good fight today. I can't help but say that I now believe her to be an actual and true chosen instrument of God. The Bible shows that our merciful and long-suffering God sends people to try to save those among His children who are wrong about much. I can only conclude that Ann Coulter has been used in this way. Used willingly it appears to me.
Women are only women. Men are merely men. Humans are human. But there is only one woman in my times who has completely stirred my admiration in so many ways at so many times. For whatever her reasons Ann Coulter has fought hard on behalf of a dying America with a defiant wit and an intellectually ferocity, an unfaltering belief that the fight was worth it, and that the fight could be won. She spoke with mocking disdain against the deceptive verbal trickeries of Satan such as political correctness grown ridiculous, such as New World Order socialism masked as tender concern for the oppressed.
And here she was.... just this one person at first, it seemed...but time went by, and it began to be that while she had always had her admirers, now there were many more of them. And she had her emulators, now many more of those, and they used her talking points but added their own. They began to gain traction as a group. And she began to gain a measure of respect and admiration even from her intellectual opponents and enemies. And she certainly did make enemies, as courageous people do.
She took her hits. Her popularity waxed some and waned some. A couple of times I thought she probably overreached when trying to stir up controversy and discussion using somewhat cruel sounding humor or insults. She spoke harshly, inconsiderately at times. She said some things which were very hard to defend as literally spoken. Impossible to defend. That's a great danger for those who stir up controversy as a vehicle for airing their views, and she fell victim to it a couple of times. But the larger things that she has spoken against really are as bad as she said they were, so far as I can perceive.
But, that said, she pushed the ball with all of her womanly strength and one day or another it happened: the ball was rolling, America was thinking differently. The enemies' vulnerabilities (God's enemies and America's enemies) became more fully revealed and more successfully opposed. And basic God-fearing people had learned phrases which described or quaintly summed up the slick political manipulations that people were viewing, things which, viscerally, had felt wrong and bad somehow, but the wicked nature of which were hard to precisely define. She talked about these dark sort of social undercurrents which were at work somehow all around us, and we began to take their measure. There were Ann Coulter catch-phrases for various of the stratagems of Satan, phrases which, once they were heard, encapsulated what people saw going on in their nation. It was like her particular way with words acted as a special flashlight that brought out the demons trying to hide in the room.
Democrats pretending to be grieved by something that in truth meant nothing to them but provided some useful political opportunity to them... they might be 'grieferazzis'. Funny...but to the point. Was she the originator of that phrase? I don't know, but I first heard her use it. Top Democrats protect and fund slaughterhouses for the murder of the unborn without blinking an eye. So, of course Democrats are not really in grief at every smallest thing. They merely see faked grief or commiseration as a useful strategy in obtaining their objectives by manipulating public opinion. There were many vilifying phrases that she added to the public lexicon...or which she popularized at least. She did much to change the language of the battlefield, and some of that language peeled back the camouflage of the enemy in a way that left them exposed to the light in a very undignified way. Other well-known Americans might talk about it, but she so often said it best.
Donald Trump won an election, and I do not know what he will do, how good or bad of a President he will be. But I feel it would have been the end for America, without visible recourse anyway, had he lost. And I think a great many people helped bring about his victory, aside from the man himself. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden certainly played powerful though polarizing roles, for instance, and who ever saw that coming? Fox News was central, and quite a few others to be truthful. But, if I was to say that there was one human being more than any other that saved this nation from going over the precipice, that gave it another chance, I honestly think that it was the seeds planted by Ann Coulter. Seeds planted by the voice of Ann Coulter and the books of Ann Coulter and the earnest or sometimes mocking face of Ann Coulter, and the fun of listening to Ann Coulter get the better of her adversaries in debate far more often than not.
Who has been the most influential high profile political women in our age? For America, my nation, she would have to be the first name that came to my mind. Who is her equal in all the land for taking the battle to God's enemies? Who has held the battle standard higher and more resolutely in her own uniquely combative/persuasive odd-voiced way than she?
Her faults? I don't really know them specifically and she's sure to have many, since we all seem to. But again, who else is very much like her? For a while, and still, she holds up "America" as we think we ought to be, the America that tries to be good and do right for their God.
The greatest American political force of our time has probably been Ann Coulter, who is not actually a politician. She didn't seek the power of office. But she also did not merely sit and snipe away (not solely) at those who were in power to bring attention to herself. I speak of the types who speak boldly and with purposeful rudeness to their leaders in public situations just to glorify and draw public approval to their own selves. Some such types try to ostentatiously shame public figures essentially for sport. That's legal, but disrespectful and vulgar. People in power often may be trying very hard to do well for those they serve. The better ones are due far more credit than they receive.
More than anything else Ann Coulter just publicly taught about right path vs. wrong path as well as she was able to see it and she took a lot of flak for doing it and was much hated by many for speaking unpopular truths. But more and more her words did come to be viewed as truths by the average person. I don't know that I am or am not seeing it all clearly, I just have my own headlights to see by. But as I do see it I have to thank God for her work in our nation. What a truly good thing it is for a nation to have an Ann Coulter to guard it and fight for it and uphold it with her frequently crisp mind and her quick and often witty tongue.
In case it wasn't clear, you can count me as one who feels like a grateful beneficiary of her efforts. She is a daughter of Israel flinging her hair back and mocking the enemy to their face, sure of the power of her God to uphold her when she enters the enemy's camp. May God and Jesus bless and watch over Miss Ann Coulter and keep her straight for all of her days.
Daniel Hannan:
I've never met him, but I feel that British Parliamentarian (MEP) Daniel Hannan is, or nearly is, the clearest and most simply put voice of English-speaking reason in our age. I think that he sees the coming dangers of the New World Order and explains the particular points that make them such a danger, so very well and concisely that I believe it would serve any contemplative sort of person well to pull up his speeches and just listen to a few.
I don't know every great voice out there. There are bound to be other very great instructors. But this man has been given a gift of sensible speech (not grand oratory perhaps, but certainly he has been given clear simple keen-sighted speech) far beyond that which a listener might ordinarily hear or see in a lifetime. Is he the greatest speaker of our age or something like that? Well, how would you choose that person? By the force of the truth that they spoke or by their ability to stir a crowd? He might not win such a contest, though perhaps he might; he can be a moving speaker as well as an enlightening one. But in Europe, in English speaking Europe, he seems to me to be a very bright light in our age. I think God speaks truths and wise insights through him in a clear way to a population purposely starved of such great and simple truths as might steer us towards God were we to hear and contemplate them.
I thank Daniel Hannan for many of his thoughts and the effecting way that he conveys them. The United Kingdom has, in him, a thoughtful orator of great and timely importance to this endangered generation of people. What he spoke to Great Britain concerning leaving the E.U. is good advice for all nations that would consider giving up their rights in exchange for a place at a larger but more subservient table. I believe so, anyway. The U.K. has many notables, but I personally rate him to be among the highest order of those. May God and Jesus guide and bless and watch over Mr. Daniel Hannan, as he watches over and advocates for human freedom and independence in his own way for his own reasons.