Category: Strategic Planning

Pornography, Hollywood, and Politics: An UnholY Trinity

11/8/2022

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”
---Matthew 5:30-31

American film and music account for nearly one-third of entertainment produced on an annual basis worldwide. Combined, they are one of America’s largest exports and they influence culture around the globe to a considerable degree. That said, much of the entertainment produced within the United States has become nihilistic and corrosive in recent decades.

It’s not surprising really. Hollywood and pornography happen to go hand in hand. Pornography is a byproduct of the film industry and the products both industries produce largely serve the same purpose for the media moguls that back them. They slowly erode Biblical teachings and open doors to temptation resulting in lustful pursuits of the flesh.

Most people have no idea the pervasive impact film and video have on American culture. Like music, film is a narcotic form of media. and the values movies and video montages espouse trickle into our lives whether we realize it or not. This is particularly true for poor and working-class men as well as the women in their lives.

Within dysfunctional and broken households, the effects of all three forms of media are most profound. Especially with young, impressionable children. Film and television oftentimes become surrogates for parenting and proper education, and they tend to have lasting and blinding impacts.

Similarly, music oftentimes becomes a motivational tool and emotional crutch. The tone and tenor of popular music within a given geographic region is somewhat indicative of the rising generation’s prevailing attitudes. The songs and lyrics that resonate with teens tend to last their lifetimes.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for decades. I for one, grew up in a highly dysfunctional home in a blue-collar town in the 1970’s and 1980’s and music and television greatly influenced my beliefs and value systems.

Musically, I tended to gravitate toward songs and artists that told a story and painted vivid pictures within the lyrics. The types of music I listened to varied with my mood and the given household circumstances I experienced.

Through television, baseball and football became passionate childhood interests. Throughout my adolescent and teen years, both offered escapes from the abuse I suffered at home. Both sports provided me a sense of balance and focus as well as hope.

Similarly, during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, ABC television ran a feature film every Sunday night. The network occasionally showed World War II epics and James Bond films and I made a point to watch them when they aired. Those films inspired me and profoundly influenced the career decisions I would eventually make.

I was drawn to the films and aspired toward a career in the military after I graduated from high school in part because of them. A capable student, I set my sights on attending one of our nation’s service academies. Consequently, I buckled down in school and made good grades. I wound up receiving appointments to both the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy during my senior year in high school. That said, I never attended.

During my interviews, I was persuaded to forgo my Academy ambitions by agents of a foreign intelligence service and accepted the offer. The branch of intelligence I served opened the doors to Princeton and I followed them through. I was enticed with visions of becoming a 007-type of operative and imagined my life unfolding in a similar fashion.

To a certain extent this was true, but the realities of the life were far different than Ian Fleming’s novels described or the Bond films portrayed. I spent 33 years within the intelligence community. The first 20 as a double agent for Great Britain’s GCHQ, and the remaining 13 associated with the American CIA in a black ops capacity. All in all, it was a lonely, grueling, and empty existence.

When I was first recruited, the United States was engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. I had an Eastern European heritage and had taken Russian language courses in junior high and high school. Consequently, I was originally supposed to be assigned a post in within the Eastern Bloc to conduct espionage and take out high-value targets upon graduation. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was reassigned to a Clandestine Operations unit based on U.S. soil instead.

To a degree, the James Bond lifestyle became a way of life during college and into the early years of my career. I was a heavy drinker, used tobacco on occasion, and became a womanizer.

Some of the womanizing went with the territory. I infiltrated Cosa Nostra and Bratva criminal syndicates on behalf of the GCHQ and fornicated with women I was introduced to in order to fit in with the criminals I had friended. The encounters also allowed me to extract information about individuals whom I was assigned to gather intelligence. On the side, sexual encounters became a way of releasing the stress of leading a double life.

My life changed in an unexpected way in 1994. I was living in Kansas City at the time and met my soulmate. I had gone out for drinks with some coworkers on a Friday night and she waited on our table.

Despite the fact that I told lies for a living , I was so struck by her that I could barely speak when she asked for my order. My associates could see that that I was lovestruck, and they liquored me up to get me to talk. Even so, it took all the courage I could muster just to ask her out.

She met me at my apartment for our first date. When I opened the door, she took my breath away. I looked into her eyes, and I knew she was the one.

We went out for dinner and the night flew by. I happen to have an eidetic memory, and I cannot tell you where we went or what we ordered that night. I was so focused on what she had to say that the rest of the evening is a blur.

She happened to have a daughter from a previous relationship. As things between us became serious, that weighed heavily on my mind. I loved my soulmate's daughter as an extension of her, and knew I couldn’t be a suitable father figure to her given my vocation.

Resigning my commission was an impossibility. I was in deep and did not want my activities to risk the welfare and safety of my soulmate or her daughter. I had concealed my espionage activities from her for her safety as well as the security of my missions. After I stopped to consider just how much she meant to me, I decided to break off the relationship .

Within a year, I was engaged to be married to another woman I had met. The marriage was mostly a cover, and I was miserable. She happened to be an artist, and she was good for dinner parties. Other than that, there was no depth or substance to the relationship.

We only conversed on the surface, and she had no idea of my covert activities. Consequently, my drinking accelerated, and I turned again to pornography to release stress.

Needless to say, the marriage didn’t last. She ended the relationship within three years. I had no desire to meet other woman after the relationship ended and didn’t entertain the idea of a date for the next seven years.

During that seven-year time period, my activities became much more dangerous and I routinely turned to pornography to relieve the stress. Rather than pay for the product, I visited sites that offered free pornography over the Internet.

As I was nearing the end of my service obligations, I dated a couple of women for a short time and never felt a connection. I also briefly dated a woman I was introduced to when I was recovering from the first assassination attempt on my life. After that relationship ended, I realized that I would never date again. If you happen have a soulmate and are no longer with them for some reason, then you know where I’m coming from when I say this.

After my service obligations were competed, I engaged in black ops activities for a few years and again returned to pornography to relieve stress. That said, that pattern of behavior became distasteful as my faith in Christ grew. As I began to take stock of myself, I surveyed trends and patterns I had observed in the pornographic content I had visited online over the years and recognized a gross metastasis in the level of perversion.

If you’ve been wise enough to steer clear of porn, you’re probably unaware that feature style films went out of style in the mid-1990’s. Instead, sex scenes are generally filmed in 25 to 40-minute clips and bundled into themes. Over the years, once taboo subjects have now become mainstream on these sites. Most notably: adultery, incest, rape, and extortion.

The increasing level of perversion within the themed content is deliberate. And through my professional experiences I know that two primary sources are driving the strategy: The first being organized criminal syndicates beholden to Satan; and the second being deliberate destabilization efforts orchestrated by national governments hostile to the United States. Both these statements are true and neither is an exaggeration.

Both sources frequently collaborate with one another and their ties to Hollywood are indisputable. Foreign intelligence services including Great Britain’s GCHQ and China’s Ministry of State Security frequently fund porn producers and porn content aggregators to facilitate subversion efforts. The American CIA does much the same. Oftentimes, Hollywood shell companies are formed to funnel and launder money into the hands of the criminal syndicates that front these companies.

Some of the largest and most widely known companies in the porn industry are heavily influenced or greatly controlled by some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals and institutions. For example, Phillip Anschutz presently controls Pornhub through a combination of shell companies as well as extortion of the company’s minority shareholders.

Pornhub happens to be the world’s largest producer and distributor of pornographic materials as well as one of the most sophisticated players in the market. He also happens to control Brazzers and that company's network of 33+ websites in much the same fashion.

Similarly, the British Crown and the GCHQ control Naughty America and plot the direction of the company’s thematic content. That company openly promotes adultery as a way of life and has taken direct aim at the American family by playing up themes of incest within divorced and remarried households, sexual trysts between male students and their teachers, and the sexual trysts mothers and their teenage daughters with random strangers.

Prior to World War I, Great Britain used similar tactics to destabilize the Ottoman Empire to great effect through print media and they did much the same within China prior to World War II. The Chinese Communist Party learned from their efforts and have facilitated the production and distribution of pornography within the United States and other Western adversaries to a great degree in recent decades.

China’s Ministry of State Security has staked pornographic ventures through Anschutz and his business associates as well as the Weinstein Brothers, and the Rockefeller family. The nature of the content funded by the Chinese through these three sources happens to be more graphic than ventures funded by the British Crown and the GCHQ. It is arguably more deviant as well.

Evil Angel, Extreme Associates, and Reality Kings are three of the biggest names funded in part by the Chinese government, and the content these companies produce is downright misogynistic. Oftentimes, they frequently hire young women with low IQ’s to perform in their features and then proceed to humiliate and debase them as they perform in front of the cameras.

China and Great Britain’s efforts to destabilize American society through pornography are disturbingly effective and infectious. The free flow of X-rated images and films through online sources has numbed the public to the insidious effects of viewership and also allowed the perpetrators to quietly tear at the heart of American culture by lowering moral standards and tricking smut into mainstream entertainment and advertising.

Hypersexualized content and the normalization of perverted sexual activities such as cross dressing, pedophilia, and genital mutilation are regularly glorified and promoted by media companies funded and supported by foreign entities hostile toward Western civilization’s Biblical foundations and the American way of life. As with pornography, Great Britian’s GCHQ and China’s Ministry of State Security consistently fund mainstream entertainment projects at destabilizing American culture. Both intelligence agencies are aided by wealthy and powerful individuals sympathetic or beholden to the worldviews these intelligence agencies tasked with fulfilling.

For example, individuals within the Bilderburg Group openly fund film ventures that support pedophilia, transsexuality, and abortion with their own funds or through private equity firms under their control. In effect, they are a real life version of Spectre as portrayed in recent James Bond films.

Ironically, Bilderburg owes its founding to the British Crown. The collective actively works to establish a One World Government bent on conquering the heavens through slavery and the establishment of a “New Roman Republic” of sorts. Debasing Western civilization through the erosion of established Biblical values and principles is a means toward achieving this end.

China has employed similar tactics through a different approach. In addition to financing films that glorify Communism and disparage Western values through venture capital companies like Hollywood’s Slated, their Ministry of State Security has poured tens of millions of dollars into nihilistic American popular music in recent years. The growth in popularity of trap music within urban American ghettos owes much of its success to dark money funneled through American drug trafficking facilitated by China’s Ministry of State.

American bureaucrats and politicians are either blind to efforts by the Chinese Communist Party, the British Crown, and various criminal enterprises to destabilize American society through pornography and popular entertainment, or they are willfully complicit in facilitating these efforts. Aside of issue of Internet censorship, scant attention has been given to American media and entertainment by the Federal government in recent decades.

The United States Federal Communications Commission was originally formed to combat subversive media activities. The agency was formed during the height of the Great Depression and Communism was a very real threat at that time.

The Communications Act of 1934 chartered the FCC: "for the purpose of the national defense" and "for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications.” The agency was largely neutered prior to the advent of the World Wide Web and its authority has been weakened even further in recent years.

As the motion picture and radio programming industries grew during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and early 1950’s, the FCC closely monitored entertainment to ensure public content met basic ethical and moral standards and did not implicitly undermine values and principles outlined in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For the most part, the system worked, and film, radio, and television became staples of American life largely because of it.

Flash forward to today: The World Wide Web is much like the Wild West. Unregulated and largely unchecked it is a playground for organized criminal syndicates and America’s foreign adversaries. And while Federal bureaucrats and our elected officials are culpable for the erosion of America’s national security, much of the blame for the inaction with regard to pornography rests in the hands of the United States intelligence officials.

The CIA is very much beholden to the America’s Federal Reserve and the Catholic Church as well. Both have cozied up to China and hedged their bets on a policy of appeasement and the CIA abates both their wishes. The Chinese Communist Party has leveraged this to their full advantage as have European royalty, royal banking interests, and the politicians and bureaucrats beholden to them.

The National Security Administration is in a similar position to that of the CIA. The NSA owes its allegiance to holdovers of the George W. Bush’s Presidential Administration, and they have also blinded themselves to China to a considerable degree. Both sold the nation out years ago as they too are banking on the formation of a New World Order. Like European royalty they view ordinary citizens much like chattel.

As for American military intelligence, there seems little hope under present leadership. Since Barrack Obama’s first term as President, there has been a consistent purge of Christian servicemen from military personnel, particularly within the leadership ranks. Furthermore, the upper echelons of the nation’s military leadership, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have become increasingly politicized in recent years.

To fight a war and defeat an adversary, its necessary to rely on wisdom and constantly outmaneuver your opponent. American military and intelligence officials have chosen to forgo wisdom and instead embrace “woke” values that have metastasized through years of gradual declining moral standards and the silent tolerance of evil.

2 Timothy 3 teaches us that in the last days, “men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.”

Open tolerance and acceptance of pornography and of nihilistic popular entertainment exemplifies this teaching. The failure of America’s intelligence top officials to trumpet the intrinsic threats both pose to national security threat both pose and push Congress for action is a grave and glaring professional oversight. Their dereliction in this matter has allowed hostile actors to effectively pump heroin into the bloodstream of Western civilization through the Internet for nearly three decades.

“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

---Matthew 26:41

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting

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It's Time To Rethink American Advertising

3/6/2022

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“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
---George Orwell (British author - 1936)

Martin Luther King’s vision for America was fulfilled in 2008 when Barrack Obama won the Presidential election. That is, until American advertisers and marketing professionals mucked it up. Like sycophants, they embraced the tower of babel and jumped on a buzzword bandwagon filled with meaningless political jargon.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion became religious cults thanks largely to amoral advertisers seeking to connect people to their products through demagoguery, deception, and outright lies.

Art in advertising has largely vanished. In the digital age, marketers have become purveyors of pornography. Instead of appealing to the needs of their customers, they prey upon their wants. In a society that has largely abandoned Biblical teachings for hedonistic pursuits, stray sheep are being enslaved by nihilists.

Rather than find common ground with the whole of their audience, advertisers are utilizing the basest form of illusion to generate sales: they lure minority audiences toward their products and services with lookalike images. Alcohol and tobacco companies had done this in impoverished urban areas for years; and the trend went gangbusters across the corporate spectrum after the Obama administration took office.

Television advertisers began to aggressively pander to the black, Latino and Asian communities shortly after 2008. At first, in wholesome, family friendly ways. Shortly afterward, the diversity, equity, and inclusion cults infiltrated corporate boardrooms and polluted the messaging.

Their first attack was upon the family. They emasculated the American male in family and couple-oriented commercials; making him appear oafish before his wife and his children and portraying him as a fool to their audiences.

Next, advertisers inserted multi-ethnic families and bi-racial couples into the bulk of their family and couple-oriented ads. The over-portrayals buck conventional wisdom and run counter to demographic realities.

Soon after, advertisers began normalizing and encouraging homosexuality in commercials. A blatant disregard for the Ten Commandments and Christ's teachings.

And lastly, advertisers have effeminized American men in the bulk of their commercials. A direct attack upon God the Father and Christ Jesus.

Advertisers have employed these same tactics within the digital arena as well. Design teams slap images and videos with a plethora of diverse people of all throughout their websites. Mostly to satisfy diversity and inclusion cultists, and also to keep the equity cults at bay.

Instead of focusing on their products and services, a wide body of digital advertisers tout diversity and inclusiveness as their key selling points. So much so in fact, that they have begun to give way to demons including transsexuals, pansexuals, pedophiliacs, and dysphoric hedonists.

It should come as no shock to anyone that our nation is deeply polarized. Given the narcissistic lens corporate advertisers have placed on our society for years, this was a natural progression.

We’ve effectively trained our youth to strut around like peacocks on parade and tout their immutable qualities instead of refining their character and challenging them to reach a higher calling.

Corporate advertisers who have succumbed to the diversity, equity, and inclusion cults are doing the devil’s bidding. We’ve effectively trained our youth to strut around like peacocks on parade and tout their immutable qualities instead of refining their character and challenging them to reach a higher calling.

The Obama administration is largely accountable for the declining state of our nation at present. They ushered in a rendition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm with illusionary promises like Universal Healthcare and no-cost cellular phone services paid for by the government. They lowered standards for citizenship by bypassing education requirements for political refugees and advocating amnesty for illegals. And, they declared a war on women and children with their advocacy of transgenderism.

That said, the erosion of our morality started well before his Presidency. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been starving for a common purpose. Consequently, consumerism went rampant during the Clinton Administration. They gave us the Internet and quickly abandoned its promise to pirates. The rampant commercialization of the web has only deepened the hole.

George W. Bush’s administration only made matters worse. Under the guise of National Security, they deregulated information technology and opened the door for the Big Tech oligarchy following 9/11.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the nation for a short period, but the sense of unity was short lived. Profiteers extended the war in Afghanistan into perpetuity and stratified the nation along political lines.

The fortunes amassed out of both the Afghan war and the digital tech revolution sent consumer spending into hyperdrive, distorted our thinking, and skewed our foreign and domestic strategic priorities.

Embracing false idols and choosing to ignore the divine nature of our existence has cost our nation plenty since the turn of the millennium. In aggregate, we have enabled unscrupulous heretics to blind us toward true evils and divide us against ourselves.

Sinful pursuits have nearly become all consuming. We arrogantly equate happiness with the accumulation of material goods, career achievements, fleeting fun, the avoidance of pain, our outward appearance, sexual conquests, celebrity, and the like. By overindulging in these pursuits, we are assuredly evoking God’s wrath upon our nation.

As the book of Revelation tells us, those who are willing to sell out their brethren for a handful of silver, a pile of rocks, or a patch of sand will have nowhere to hide come judgment day.

May corporate leaders, advertising professionals, government bureaucrats, and our elected officials willfully atone for their sins of avarice before that day arrives. Lest they suffer eternal damnation.

And He told them many things in parables, saying, “A farmer went out to sow his seed. And as he was sowing, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun rose, the seedlings were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.
Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the seedlings.
Still other seed fell on good soil and produced a crop—a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold.
He who has ears, let him hear.”
---Mark 4:3-9

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting

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Wrangling Fear

12/5/2021

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Wrangling Fear Outlaw with a gun venture capitalist shooting entrepreneur

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
---Franklin D. Roosevelt (March 4, 1933)

I grew up in a blue-collar town and my dad was a vile and abusive man. He abused both my mother and me, and she turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism. Fear and uncertainty were staples during my formative years because life at home was a nightmare.

One of my greatest fears happened to be financial insecurity. I never knew where my next meal was coming from; and I imagined I might end up homeless. I’ll share about that in this article.

WRANGLING MY OWN FEARS
My dad’s job required him to travel three weeks out of every month for eight months of the year. Every time he took to the road my mom would pick up a liquor bottle as soon as he was out the door. Many a day, she would pass out drunk sometime during the afternoon, which left me to fend for myself. Consequently, I spent a lot of time on the streets as a youngster; and I devised schemes to keep my pockets full so I wouldn’t go hungry.

I was blessed with an above average intellect, and I viewed my education as a way out of my awful situation. As a result, I buckled down in school. I also competed athletically to improve my chances at earning a scholarship. Through the grace of God, scouts took notice and I made my way into Princeton. Once there, I thought I’d never look back.

After graduation, I made a decent living. I built a nest egg and planned for my retirement. That said, the feelings of fear and uncertainty relating to money followed me for years. They clouded my vision and impaired my judgment. So much so, that I was oblivious to very real dangers my business interests had surfaced.

I ran afoul of some very wealthy and powerful men, and they contracted killers to terminate my existence. In June of 2013, I was attacked by two men on an elevated bus platform at Denver International Airport while traveling on an assignment. They threw me off the four-story platform, and it nearly cost me my life.

The attack put me into a coma, and I spent over five months in the hospital. My insurance eventually ran out and the bills started to come due. Before the accident, I had begun a new business venture and my savings were already stretched. I was unable to work, and I had little money coming in.

After I was discharged from the hospital, I had a year and a half of physical rehabilitation ahead of me. At one point during that period, I thought my situation was hopeless. Things became so bad that I imagined I’d never be able to work again and might even wind up living on the streets. Many a night, I cried myself to sleep and called out to God in despair.

In that period of darkness, Jesus took the reins. My expenses were miraculously covered; and shortly afterward he opened the door to a couple of new consulting engagements.

Our firm was reborn, and my career headed in a completely new direction. In addition to branding, business analytics and strategic planning engagements, we started assisting entrepreneurs in their efforts to secure venture capital. This has become our core practice area in recent years, and we find these assignments to be our most fulfilling engagements.

As odd as this may seem, the attempt on my life happens to be the greatest blessing of my life. My reliance on Our lord and savior has grown by leaps and bounds since that day. I’ve been set free of the fears of becoming homeless and going hungry; and I have a much truer sense of purpose.

The adversity I’ve faced has now become somewhat of an asset much like Proverbs 17:17 describes. I now realize that all I am afforded has been conferred upon me through God’s grace, and I’ve earned a degree of humility. For Christ alone grants us pardon so we may carry out His will.

Meditation and prayer have become staples in my life in the years since the attack. I turn my care and will over to Our lord and savior Jesus Christ every morning and ask for his guidance and direction as I plan out the day ahead.

During these quiet times together, the Holy Spirit has revealed much to me about myself. I’ve channeled back to lessons in life that I had shelved in the back of my mind; and I have recalled the tutelage of mentors and instructors who honed my skills and helped forge my character.

One of the greatest lessons I have recalled is that you can train yourself to recognize fear. Both within yourself and within others. When you're under fear, your survival instincts begin to kick in, and your body gives off telltale signs when they do.

That said, there are two distinctly different types of fear. Some fears are sheep, and others happen to be wolves. The keys are first knowing which you’re dealing with, and then roping those fears into submission.

When I start to feel fear, my mind begins to race; and my pulse begins to quicken if I don’t nip the racing thoughts in the bud. Before I know it, I’m fidgeting in my seat and the world around me becomes cloudy. At that point, fear has the advantage. And like wagon train settlers on the American frontier, I become easy prey for outlaws, marauders and desperados whenever that happens.

When fear takes hold of me, I must remind myself that I've been afforded a sheriff's badge, and that’s it’s my duty to confront the perpetrator. That means tapping into the fear and shining light upon the source with the truth.

Wrangling fear entrepreneur sheriff sheep roping in venture capital

This isn’t as easy as it sounds because fear happens to be a shape shifter. It takes many forms, and most of them are slippery suckers.

Sometimes my fears appear as a strongman outlaw with the gift of gab. If I happen to be hungry, angry, lonely or tired when the strongman disturbs my peace, I’m in for a fight. If I manage to wrestle it down, it starts to plea bargain with me. It reminds me that it’s a long ride back to the jail and offers me a bribe to dismiss the criminal offense.

If I take that bribe, I’m in for a world of hurt. Because that strongman outlaw usually doesn’t travel alone. It’s generally tied in with a gang of marauding fears hiding all along the trail. The strongman has a horse that’s lot faster than mine, and it knows where its compadres are positioned. Before I know it, they’ve got me encircled; and they begin to pick me apart in short order.

They go after my scars. Wounds from the past that haven’t quite healed. They’re armed with sharp tongues and they’re deadly accurate with their aim. If my anger flairs, they smack me upside my head with resentments and leave me to rot on the trail. A tasty morsel for roving desperados that often follow in their wake.

When that strongman starts to offer the bribe, I’m learning to simply go about my business. I do my best to keep my mouth shut and not say a word. Instead, I hog-tie the strongman with my rope, blindfold it, stuff a bandana in its mouth, and drag it straight back to the jail behind my horse.

It isn’t my job to dispense justice. Rather, it’s my duty to keep the peace. I say a prayer for the outlaw and hand him over to Christ for redemption. I try not to look back once I have. Instead, I return the trail and go about my business. I know the verdict will be swift and that’s sufficient. The truth always prevails. Light always vanquishes the darkness.

CONFRONT YOUR FEARS EARLY ON
Confronting fear is an imperative, especially for entrepreneurs. Business is oftentimes warfare, and it’s necessary to keep a clear head in order to remain true to your mission. If you avoid your persistent fears, they tend to surface at the least opportune times. Our unholy enemy senses fear and uses it to his advantage.

You jeopardize everything you’ve worked for unless you rope your own fears and hand them over to God. For example, employees can sense doubt and uncertainty. It often breeds worry and concern. When patterns of the two begin to emerge, your top performers are likely to jump ship. Oftentimes, to your competitors.

Similarly, investors can sense desperation. Most won’t touch you when you smell of it. You’re simply a bad gamble and the risks to their portfolio are too great. And those who will entertain your ideas when you smell of desperation are oftentimes wolves. Some will listen to your pitch just to pick your brain. They’ll steal your ideas in order to sell them off, or even start a business of their own that mirrors yours.

Other wolves will intentionally wrangle you into a deal that becomes a no-win situation for you. They’ll deliberately structure the terms of the contract so that it’s nearly impossible to diversify or retool. Perhaps worse, they may plot to dilute your holdings over time; to a point where you have no say in the company.

Last but certainly not least: you’re likely to make unwise decisions if you’re not cognizant of your own fears. The Enemy is cunning, baffling and powerful. Before you know it, you’re responding to his minions rather than the voice of reason. If that happens, there's a good chance you'll wind up getting cocky, going bent, turning flaccid or becoming greedy. You may even compromise your company’s mission without even realizing it.

ENTREPRENEURS: FOR YOUR JOURNEY AHEAD

I waited patiently for the LORD;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the LORD.
---Psalms 40:1-3

Wrangling fear entrepreneur kneeling at a cross on the American frontier

May God grant you clarity of vision and purity of thought as you move toward your purpose. Confront your fears, rope them down, and turn them over to Our lord and savior Jesus Christ. Like the mustard seed, your vision will take root.

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting

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The Time Has Come to Gut the American Education System

10/24/2021

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“The American Dream is a term that is often used but also often misunderstood. It isn't really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that."
---Marco Rubio (American Politician)

Education in the United States has nearly rotted to the core because we have allowed it to rot. As a nation, we’ve largely forsaken the principles that hold us together: that we are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These are our God-given rights. And guaranteeing the pursuit of happiness does not imply that we have a right to have all our fantasies fulfilled.

Our world turned toward hell after Adam & Eve took a bite out of the apple, and the evil that stained the Earth after the original sin has largely consumed the spirit and purpose of the American educational system. We are no longer focused on forming young minds to set their ambitions high and think for themselves. Instead, we lead them astray by focusing on feelings and telling students what to think.

Our schools have largely become breeding grounds for the seven deadly sins largely because we have banished our divine Creator from our classrooms and replaced Him with a slew of demigods. What we refer to today as diversity, equity and inclusion are nothing new. They are simply Marxist slogans rebranded for two generations largely ignorant of world history and lacking guidance.

Hate runs rampant in their lesson plans. Courses and materials derived from Critical Race Theory are a good example. It is an envious premise that produces nothing but jealousy, contempt and mistrust. The unholy doctrine ignores a universal truth: that no one has a choice over the circumstances of their birth.

Some people are born into wealth and luxury, and some into abject poverty. Similarly, some are born into abusive homes and others into nurturing environments. No matter, we are all equal in the eyes of our divine Creator at birth. What we decide to do with the time we are afforded here on Earth, and what we accomplish with that time are what truly matter.

No other nation on Earth affords its citizenry the guaranteed liberties and freedoms that we are afforded under The Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution. With the blessings of our divine Creator, every one of us is free to employ our God-given talents to their very limits.

This is the true essence of the American Dream; and our future will be stolen out from under us unless we eviscerate the American education system and rebuild from ground up.

There is no secret that our nation is presently divided against itself, and you can place much of the blame for this on our school systems. Teachers and administrators who develop and promote false doctrines like Critical Race Theory are a cancer within our nation and the whole of Western civilization. Rather than equip our children with necessary survival skills, they prepare our lambs for slaughter.

Much of the root of our nation’s current sickness can be traced to a 1947 U.S. Supreme Court decision: Everson v. The Board of Education set precedent that the establishment clause of our First Amendment applies not only to the federal government, but also at the state and local levels as well. This case paved the way for decisions like Engel v. Vitale in 1962.

That case ruled that organized prayer in our public schools is unlawful and effectively shut God out of the classrooms. Our Supreme Court rendered unto Cesar a sovereign right afforded every citizen by our divine Creator: freedom of expression. The standards and curriculum within the public schools have eroded since that point.

Apostates capitalized on this opportunity to infuse an unholy agenda into our public schools. Specifically, organizers behind the Red for Ed movement: a Marxist organization hell-bent on poisoning the minds of our nation’s youth and overthrowing our Constitutional Republic.

Abject lies are told to our children within our public schools every single day by heretical teachers. Take for instance the myth of gender identity: a belief that our divine Creator could mistakenly assign a soul to the wrong body at birth; and that our lustful sexual urges are genetic.

Another example is the egalitarian theory of social justice: an envious and deliberate attempt to bind people to their immutable characteristics; and blind them to the truth about the power of faith, hard work and perseverance.

These heretics divide our nation and blind us to the truth: that the Marxists behind all this have unholy spiritual agenda. They are attempting to corrode young minds with distorted narratives about the origins and history of our Constitutional Republic and the whole Western civilization much like the Book of Timothy 2 describes:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

The 1619 Project is one such myth. This drivel wrathfully focuses on the ills of American slavery to sow racial division for political ends. It ignores our nation’s virtues, fails to mention that slavery was and still is a world-wide occurrence, and bends the facts.

The Marxists pushing this propaganda are covetous. They sow seeds of division and pull the wool over the eyes of our children with one hand, so they can steal the fruits of our labor with the other. And sadly, some school districts throughout the United States have already injected this treasonous venom into their daily lesson plans.

Parents deserve much of the blame for allowing this evil to propagate. We allowed Congress to dump our children into the hands of organized labor in 1979 under the Carter Administration; and they have been progressively poisoning their minds ever since.

Rather than equipping our flock to become productive members of society and think for themselves, the U.S. Department of Education instead prepares lamb for wolves. Specifically, money lenders that fund the rising costs of college tuition and a corporatocracy that profits from the wages of sin.

Our nation’s founders drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with a Biblical framework. Judeo-Christian values birthed our rights, and the Ten Commandments established our rule of law. Nearing the end of the Cold War, we largely began to ignore this fact. Consequently, we have allowed lustful, gluttonous and prideful agendas to eat into the roots of educational institutions.

To be clear, the rot we speak of goes beyond our public k12 schools. Most of our nation’s colleges and university are past the moral tipping point. This is especially true at the Ivy’s. In general, developing discipline, character and integrity are no longer paramount concerns for the faculty and administrators at these elite schools. Instead, they horde grant money, act much like country club resorts, and wave the middle finger at the God written into their charters.

Take Harvard University for example. America’s oldest academic institution once rooted in Puritan beliefs had the audacity to hand the reigns of their chapel over to an avowed atheist earlier this year. When asked of his philosophy, Chaplain President Greg Epstein pridefully boasted: “We don’t look to a god for answers…We are each other’s answers.”

The same was true under the Chancellor of Germany’s Third Reich Adolf Hitler. The leaders of the Nazi regime perverted their country’s schools during the 1930s, and then spawned death and destruction across the European continent in the 1940s.

Princeton University’s response to last year’s nation-wide riots provides another example. Following the George Floyd incident, University President Christopher Eisgruber issued a gluttonous and prideful statement condemning his own institution as racist to students, alumni and faculty. In his letter, Eisgruber also wrathfully convicted the officers involved in the incident prior to their jury trial.

The fact that a man chartered with leading one of our nation’s top universities is willing to cast stones at the students and faculty he claims to shepherd bares true testimony to how sick and perverted our schools have become. It belies the need to gut our entire education system and build again from scratch. For our nation to flourish once again, this is a strategic imperative.

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting

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Counting Sheep

10/14/2021

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Why You Should Add Prayer and Meditation to Your Arsenal of Weapons

“The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.”
---Jocko Willink (Author & former U.S. Navy Seal)

Over the course of my career, prayer and meditation have become great assets. The blessings He has bestowed are beyond measure. Jesus Christ is the foundation of our firm. We owe everything to Him. Truly.

In 2013, I was intentionally thrown off an elevated bus terminal at Denver International Airport. I broke numerous bones including my skull; and severely damaged my internal organs. Miraculously however, despite falling from over 40 feet, my spine and my neck received no damage.

That’s because angels sent from heaven guided my descent into darkness. In fact, they protected me from further harm before the paramedics arrived.

The emergency care team rushed me to Denver Health Medical Center in an ambulance in the dead of the night, where the trauma care team decided to induce a coma. I was in the coma for nearly two and a half weeks, and it was a hellish ordeal.

I do not recall going to the hospital in an ambulance in the dead of night. My body may have taken that journey, but my soul went elsewhere.

They flew me to a serene looking treatment facility by helicopter on a bright sunny day. They’d strapped me to a gurney much like a wounded Vietnam combat soldier being evacuated off the front lines. The door was open, and I looked out as we descended.

The facility itself was far from serene. The sins of my life had caught up with me, and they were taking me to what Italian author Dante described in The Divine Comedy as Purgatory. Quite literally, they were delivering me to the very Gates of Hell.

I was isolated and tortured for those two and a half weeks. The pain was excruciating, and the mental anguish almost unbearable. During my last hours there, the devil’s minions tormented me as they prepared to open the Gates and send me into the depths of Hell.

As I lay there cowering in fear, a human figure approached my bed. At first, I thought He was death personified: a sinewy muscular figure most awesomely terrifying. So much so, that I turned away from Him and curled up in a fetal position.

Some time passed without incident. So, I glanced back at Him not knowing what to expect. There and then, I found Him sitting on the floor near my bed, and my fears subsided.

After that, I woke up in Denver Health’s ICU unit. I spent the next five months at that hospital, and another year and a half in outpatient rehabilitation.

This tragedy turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. Jesus Christ had delivered me from Satan himself; and my relationship with Our lord and savior has grown closer since.

In this time of healing, I have begun to realize how impactful our thoughts truly are. Every thought we spawn goes out into the universe to some effect. Meaning that every idea we have produces energy through the Holy Spirit.

Consequently, meditation and prayer have become invaluable tools in my daily regimen. Through meditation, I’ve begun to distinguish my wild thoughts and my crazy thoughts from my sane thoughts. And through prayer, I give thanks for the blessings in my life and ask God the Father for clarity of vision, purity of thought and a true sense of purpose.

When meditating, I begin with a prayer and then clear my mind of all thought for as long as possible. As my thoughts manifest, I start to picture a narrow mountain top pathway. To my left is a cliff, and to my right is a thicket. Upon that pathway, I imagine my thoughts as sheep.

My goal during these sessions is to guide every sheep gently down that narrow pathway into the loving arms of the Shepherd who awaits His flock. From there, He’ll tend to them and take them to market.

That said, it’s a difficult exercise to master. All sorts of temptations creep in, and I eventually wind up breaking my concentration. That’s when wild and crazy thoughts occur.

Every wild thought I have fattens my sheep. The longer I hold on to them, the fatter they become. Eventually, they waddle off the cliff, blurting out a hopeless last “Baaaa!” before falling into the vast unknown below.

As harrowing as that sounds, the fate of my crazy thoughts is often worse. Those thoughts send my sheep running into the thicket. If I become panicked and set off after that sheep without stopping to ask God for guidance, my lamb will become tangled up in the underbrush.

More and more, I am learning to rely upon Jesus to guide my sheep safely down the path toward their happy destiny. He alone ensures that my flock doesn’t wander off the cliff or end up prey for wolves in the thicket. And when my efforts are fruitful, he expands my resources to grow more sheep.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, the same should be true for you. Abandon your ambitions and channel your hopes, dreams and goals toward Our Father. Set your sights on Godly pursuits and follow the path Jesus walks. He’ll guide us well beyond what our limited imaginations ever thought possible.

“And He said to them, Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.”
---Matthew 17:20

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting

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