AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
On September 11, 2001, Michael W. Smith released an album called Worship. Reunion Records. It went double platinum.
I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m asking you to look at the file.
Track one doesn’t start with music. It starts with Smith’s daughters reading Psalm 57. Verse seven, then verses nine through eleven.
Nine. Eleven.
Read aloud to a crowd of nine thousand people inside a building called Carpenter’s Home Church, in a town named Lakeland, which contains both a lake and a land and therefore nothing.
Recorded June 1.
6/1.
Flip it.
1/6.
January 6th.
I’ll let you sit with that one.
Smith had also founded a record label called Rocketown. I’m simply going to state that fact and move on.
Rocketown.
Track four: “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.”
An instruction to look away.
Track five: “Open the Eyes of My Heart.”
A request to see using an organ that has no eyes. Ask yourself what you’d be doing with your actual eyes for the next several hours.
Track six: “Above All.”
Not beside.
Not below.
Track nine: “Agnus Dei.”
Lamb of God.
A sacrifice.
Not metaphorically. That’s the whole point of the lamb. Something dies so something else can be saved.
I’m not drawing a line.
I’m noticing one was already there.
Now the part they scrub from the retrospectives.
Eight months earlier, January 2001, Smith sang “Above All” at George W. Bush’s inaugural prayer service.
He was in the room.
After September 11, Smith wrote “There She Stands,” a song about the flag standing in the wreckage, and later performed it at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Again, I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am arranging facts in the order they presented themselves to me.
You may notice that every fact continues to present itself.
People will tell you September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday and that albums were routinely released on Tuesdays then.
Of course they were.
That’s exactly the sort of explanation you’d expect to find ready.
I know how this sounds. I was trained for it. Church basement, 1989, a youth pastor with a turntable and a Led Zeppelin record he played backwards while forty of us held our breath. He was right about Zeppelin. He was right about the Procter & Gamble logo. He put the method in my hands and I have never once set it down, and it has never once failed to produce a name.
It produced this one in twenty minutes.
At some point, we have to say the obvious thing.
Thousands of people should not have had to die for Michael W. Smith to have an album go double platinum.
The album is still on Spotify.
I check every morning to see whether it’s been taken down.
It has not.
Remember 9/11,
If this felt a little too accurate, there’s more where that came from.
The Tribulation Survival Guide
— same world, fewer guardrails.
Or skip the algorithm →
Want to know how you’d actually survive the end times?
You Missed the Rapture — find out how you die
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