Friday’s Wrap-Up with Bob: August 22, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday’s Wrap-Up with Bob: August 22, 2025

Hello, this is Bob Barney. Another Friday wrap-up time is here again. Friday, August the 22nd, and we’ll go over the top stories of the week, and we’ll go over some of the ideas of what’s going to happen this weekend, what shows we’re going to have up if I have them all done here .I’ll check that out in a minute, but the first story I wanted to get to was the story, of course, about the summit last weekend with Trump and Putin, which when you watch TV, there was all kinds of high fives and that Trump did a great job, and that there was a peace in our time type thing. And this whole week, we played some episodes about the, first of all, the growing rise in the threat of a Germany that is going to the far fascist right, like it did in the 1930s after the Great Depression. And I think you’re going to start seeing some of that happen again.

That is what we have been predicting on The Plain Truth now for many years, and the people before, the Armstrongs, when they had their Plain Truth magazine, nothing to do with us, by the way, were a news site. They were more of a religious organization, but they predicted accurately since the 1940s that there would be a common market that would turn into the EU, that would turn into a United States of Europe, and they’ve been predicting that, and they’ve been on target because they understood who the players of the Bible are. They understand that the modern nation of Germany, for example, is Assyria in your Bible, and so the Assyrians play a role in future prophecy, and we’re seeing that the king of the north comes out of the Holy Roman Empire, and it’s the only answer possible when you take Daniel and Revelation and put them together.And so I knew going into this summit that Putin really wasn’t caring about making a deal. He’s still not caring about making a deal. He’s pulling Trump along, and Trump is falling victim to, in my opinion, to his ego, because he does not want to admit he can’t solve this problem, because Vladimir Putin does not want to solve this problem until he takes all of Ukraine, and then he takes all of the former Soviet Union satellite states as well, and probably even Poland, and maybe he has eyes on East Germany, which if he does, he’s got a big surprise coming, because what’s going to happen in East Germany, in West Germany, now they’re one country, is there is going to arise in that nation a dictator, in my opinion.

It could not be. It could actually be a dictator out of Italy. It would still fit biblical prophecy.But I personally believe we have a World War II scenario with an Adolf Hitler type all over again, except this time around, unlike Adolf Hitler, this king of the north, this Antichrist figure, will actually join with the Catholic Church and sort of fight them as Adolf Hitler did. But we’re going to see the rise of a very militarized Germany, and I remember a long time ago, I visited Garner Ted Armstrong after he had moved to Texas in 1978, it was, and it was December of 1978, and I had a pretty long talk with him before I started writing some articles for him, and I was a young man at the time, and I remember, never forget, he sat in his office and he was telling me things that he said he would never say if there was a third person in the room, but one of the things he was telling me was just how stupid world leaders were at that time, and that if you knew, as he knew many of them personally, how absolutely terrible they are, you know, brain-wise, that they weren’t very clever, they weren’t very smart, that you couldn’t go to sleep at night because you would be fearful of your life. Well, if he saw what was leading the world today with Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia, he would even have to say that on steroids, because the truth of the matter is, these leaders that are running these two nations are actually playing in the hands of Satan the Devil, no wonder why, because this is Satan’s world, but they are making sure that their enemies or their perceived enemies or their former enemies are going to be ready for them this time when they try to do some evil things.

Japan is going to rearm just like Germany is rearming. Are you aware, and you can look this up, what nation in the world has the fourth largest military expenditure? What nation spends the fourth amount of the most money on defense and armaments? Do you know what nation that is? Well, you might be surprised, you might think it’s France, you might think it’s England. It is actually Germany.Number one is America, number two is China, number three is Russia, and a close number four is Germany. Did you know that? Many people don’t realize that the so-called peaceful Germany is rearming, and the next country that’s going to be doing the same thing is Japan. And if I was China, I would not be very happy when Japan ends up with the nuke, because they will end up with the nuke.And we are seeing players in the field today lining up what the Bible predicts will be the end-time world governments that will be the key players. And the key players in the end time is the King of the North, which is Central Europe, allied with the Holy Roman Empire, or the Catholic Church, and the King of the South, which is a United States of all Islam countries across Africa and through the Middle East. And then they’re probably the third most powerful power broker talked about is whoever that army of the 300 million in the East is, and that’s probably China.

But I think by that time it may be China that is under the domination of Japan. And we don’t know where Russia plays here, but for the most part Russia will have a role. But Russia’s real role, which their Gog and Magog of the Bible, Ezekiel 37 talks about Gog and Magog, and people believe that is for today.Actually Ezekiel 37 does not happen until after Christ comes back to this earth and actually rules for a thousand years. And then the Revelation tells us that the devil is released for a little time from his bottomless pit, and what happens is this nation of Gog and Magog, which is really Russia, will attack the peaceful Jerusalem and the King of Kings, Jesus Christ, and of course they’re not going to do very well, they’re going to die by the mass, and that is at the end of the millennium. Present-day Israel is simply not, and I want to repeat this, present-day Israel is simply not the nation of Israel. Present-day Israel, real name according to the Bible, is Judah. You get any good Bible concordance or Bible dictionary, and you look up the word Israel, ancient Israel, and you look up the word ancient Judah, and you will see they are two separate nations of different tribes. And wherever Ephraim and Manasseh were, which is the tribe of Joseph that was split into two, the name Israel goes. And wherever Judah goes, or the Jews go, the name of the country is Judah, after their forefather Judah. It’s that simple. Wherever the people of Dan would migrate to, name that area after their father Dan. Hence we have Danmark, and that’s how it’s spelled in that country, because they know they’re the mark of Dan. The Danube River, the River of Dan. The Dnieper River, again the River of Dan.

Dan placed names after wherever they traveled to during their captivity, after their father Dan’s name. But that is simply not known. But we have to watch out with this so-called peace. You know, another thing that I remember Garner Ted would always say when he was broadcasting back in the day, back in the Worldwide Church of God days and the, what was it, the World Tomorrow Program, he would always say, when you hear the words peace, we have peace, prepare for war, because you know war is coming. And when we hear the president and all these people on TV talking about how we’re going to have a peace, we’re not going to have a peace. What’s going to bring about this world changing event? What one thing will bring about where countries will start electing, yes, electing dictators and fascist dictators of that, the King of the North, the King of the South, tyrants in Japan, tyrants all over the world. What’s going to be the cause of that? Well, what was the cause of it in 1930? What brought Hitler to power? Well, what brought Hitler to power was that a Great Depression happened in the whole world. We know the Great Depression in America started in 1929 with the crash of Wall Street, but that took the whole world down with it, and the whole world went into a depression, and poverty and disease and starvation basically decimated the world at the time of the 1930s. And the people of Germany, you can look this up, you can see where people needed a wheelbarrow of money to buy a couple of groceries because they actually printed a billion dollar, a trillion, no, a billion dollar coin because their coins, their monetary system became worthless with this big inflation.

America may soon find what’s going to happen when they keep adjusting and playing with the economy as we are today. One of the things that we had on the Plain Truth Message Board Thursday was the fears that the AI bubble now is going to burst. You can’t get on TV, you can’t go to a news show, you can’t go to a business show and not hear everything to ad nauseum about AI and how AI is going to rule the future. Well, AI might be like the great tech crash of 2000. AI may foster in it before it becomes what people think or fear it’s going to be, could cause a major worldwide depression. Are you aware, I mentioned this last week in a show, are you aware that seven stocks on Wall Street, seven stocks, which is Meta, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, the chip company NVIDIA, those seven companies are 60% of the total value of all the different companies on Wall Street stock exchanges. Something happens to those seven companies if they were to go down in this big tech AI bubble, it would bring the entire economy of America down. I have a friend of mine who tells me he travels the whole world, he’s going to be a partner of ours, and he’s going worldwide venture we’re doing for Tamco. He told me the thing that many Americans don’t understand is that when America sneezes, Europe catches a very bad cold, but the third world like Africa and South America gets pneumonia and dies and then starves to death. That’s the plain truth. We don’t realize how interconnected this world is and just how important America is to this world in ways we do not comprehend most of the time sitting here in America, not understanding how the rest of the world depends on both a strong economic America and a strong military America because we don’t go around conquering the world, contrary to what liberals want to tell you. We’re not colonizers, we’re not empire builders, and the third thing that the world looks to us for is morality.

The United States has always been a country of morals in the past. Well, I think lately that might be a problem, but going on to another story about the tech crash we’re talking about that could happen, that would bring economic chaos to the world and it could actually bring the entire world order down, and then you have people in Germany, you’ll have people in Japan who’s upset with what’s going on, and guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to look to a person. They’re not going to look to God.They’re not going to look to Jesus Christ to help them. They’re going to look to a person to help them, and that person is going to be somebody like an Adolf Hitler type, and then we have a problem, and then we have aggression, and we have aggression between Europe and Russia, for example, that’s going to lead us into wars and rumors of wars, and then there’s going to be, according to the Bible, problems between the king of the south, which is the Arab nations or the Muslim nations to the south, and that’s going to probably lead us to a world war in which we see in the book of Revelation that up to a billion to two billion people are going to die in a single hour or day in what appears to be a nuclear strike between the Tigris and Euphrates River in the Middle East. That implies that almost a billion or more Muslims are going to die in a nuclear exchange, probably with Europe and themselves, that they’re going to lose a lot of people really quickly. That’s what Revelation says. You can believe it. You can scoff at it, but it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen, maybe not in the way we understand it yet, but it’s going to happen, and after the fact, when we look back, we’re going to see, oh yeah, we should have seen that. That’s right. We should have seen that. Isn’t that what happens? I mean, right now there’s a story, again, we have on the message board. North Korea has a long-range missile that could cause a potential nuclear threat to the continent of the United States. Well, that’s been there for a while.

Now, one missile, you say, what can one nuke missile do to us? Maybe to get rid of one of our liberal cities, but worse than that, if they were putting over a major area of the grid, they can take the entire power supply down in America. One or two bombs could do that, and if you took down our power supply, the grid, there are reports, and we’ve had it on the plain truth, you can go look for yourself. There’s been reports that up to 20 million Americans or more could die in the first three weeks after such an EMP strike. Another story we covered today, this last week, was Israel is beginning their occupation of Gaza, and I don’t believe that’s going to end well for anybody involved. I had suggested maybe somebody with some goodwill could get behind some Arab nations, mainly Muslim nations, I really should say, maybe people like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and even Kuwait and UAE, and maybe get them to bring in troops to Gaza and clean up Gaza. I know they don’t want to do it.I know they hate the Palestinians probably more than the Jews do, but I think a good diplomatic relationship with these countries with some promises to do things for them, I think that maybe would be the only possible answer to clean up Gaza in the short run. But again, you know, the Bible tells you the Middle East is always going to be in your future, so I would not doubt that prediction of the Bible becoming true. One of the stories we’ve been talking about when it comes to the tariffs and it comes to the ICE, you know, the immigration problem in America, I’ve been talking about a very under-reported story about workers, migrant workers, not going to the fields and picking crops in America, and there are literally billions of dollars worth of crops rotting in California, Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico fields right now, and it’s just not simply being reported, and people do not realize that vegetables are going up at a tremendous rate.

I read one report, I don’t think it made it to the plain truth, but I read one report that in the last month alone, certain vegetables have increased by 38 percent, 38 percent inflation on certain vegetables that are now only found in America. You realize we are, again, when it comes to our food supply, we are in a global food market. It’s not like when I was young, where you couldn’t get peaches and plums and nectarines, for example, in February. You only could get what crops were locally available, and in the winter, none were, except potatoes and things like that, and so you had to have apples or pears that you picked in the fall, and you kept them in your basement, or the stores kept them in warehouses and had that kind of fruit for the wintertime, but you couldn’t get the fruit that you wanted to have, like plums, peaches, nectarines, and stuff like that, and grapes and cherries, they weren’t available, but today, because we are in a global market, when wintertime comes here, it’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, and so we start getting our grapes and our cherries and our nectarines and our plums first from Argentina and Chile, and then it goes to Australia and to the Pacific area as growing seasons change around the world, and then a lot of our produce comes from China. Again, something that people don’t realize with these tariffs, how much we depend on Chinese goods because we, as a country, have decided in the last 40-50 years to basically not invest in our country. We have not invested in our superstructure.

We have not invested in our railroads, our highway systems. We have not invested in alternate forms of energy, and I’m not talking about windmills and solar panels. I’m talking about technology that we talked about a couple weeks ago of nuclear energy, and not just what we have today with nuclear energy, which we need more of, but the ultimate nuclear energy called fusion, where you actually have something the size of your fist that could light a city for a thousand years. That’s the truth. That’s what fusion, fusion is the power of the sun. We are working on it, but we should be working on it as like a Manhattan project. We should be working on it like there’s no tomorrow, because there may not be a tomorrow for many, many people. This is where we should have, for the last 40-50 years, invested our money, but no, we invested our money in welfare programs that kick back to the politicians and their families the money that was supposed to go to poor people. You know, there’s an old saying, you know, you can feed a guy food and that food will only last until it runs out, and after it runs out, guess what happens? He starves again, or you can teach that guy how to plant a crop and plant his own garden, and he can continue making his food long after what you gave him would run out, and we don’t do that in America. No, what we do is we want to hand out everything to welfare recipients, and what we did is turn people into lazy bums. We took the proudest people of the world. In my opinion, there is not a prouder people in the 1800s than the American Indian, and we took a proud American Indian, all the nations of the of the West, and under government welfare programs and running reservations for the Indians, we took a proud people, maybe the strongest, proudest people that most people will ever know in their life, and we turned them into a bunch of drunken welfare recipients that can’t get ahead.

This is what welfare policies do, and the people that did it have destroyed the backbone of this country. I don’t believe it’s coming back. I believe between the 50% of the people who don’t even pay into taxes and the laziness of the American population today, I believe we’re the modern Romans, and I believe we have a problem coming, and this problem is not soon going away. Well, we’re still waiting, and probably next Friday we’ll be talking again about what’s going on between Ukraine and Russia, and I don’t know if there’s going to be any really good answers. We should know maybe by the next week or two, will the Fed lower interest rates, and I believe the Fed is going to lower interest rates this time around because they’re being bullied. They’re being bullied by the Trump administration, but I think that what they’re going to find out when they do so, they’re going to also find out it doesn’t help. You can’t help a country that’s spending itself into oblivion and refusing to cut a single penny from their budget. They can’t find one thing they can really cut. Every time you hear they’re going to cut this and cut that and cut this, it never seems to happen, does it? We are a country that is like ancient Rome. We are a country on the way down, and I don’t see us pulling ourselves up, and now we’re fighting under this administration. We’re trying to fight everyone in the world, and believe it or not, we’re not going to win against a lot of those countries we’re fighting in the world. Well, I’m going to get a little early here and get into the weekend and some of the things for the plain truth today.

One of the things we’re starting on Wednesday, it did not happen this past Wednesday because there was so much news, I ran out of time and ran out of programs, and I have stuff already scheduled for next week on some of the YouTube stuff we put up, but we started on Wednesday two weeks ago, and it was called Western Wednesday Night, featuring old-time classics, be it short stories that are read or TV shows from the 19, mainly 1950s, early 1960s, that were only a half hour long, and we’re going to have that scheduled again back next week, and I think a lot of people who do not remember or maybe never lived through the golden age of television, where you had really good scripts, you had some bad shows, and you had some bad scripts too, don’t get me wrong, but you had some really good scripts and some really good morals, and tomorrow night, for example, on the Sabbath 7-11 p.m. show, we always, on the Sabbath night, we always put up, unless there’s some world-shaking event, but we always put up either a short story or some kind of a short video or an old TV show of any genre, but tomorrow night is going to be another Western, because we didn’t have one Wednesday, this last Wednesday, we will the coming Wednesday, but the one I believe we’re having tomorrow, there’s two Westerns we’re going to have back-to-back, really. Saturday, the Sabbath 7-11 p.m. show is going to be a Zane Grey theater Western, and so is next Wednesday’s show that we are scheduling and I already put up for next Wednesday, and they’re two very, very good moralistic and really meaningful half-hour black-and-white, I’m sorry to say that, black-and-white TV shows from the 1950s. One of them is about a woman who is pregnant, and she finds out her husband is dead.

She went to see him, and she found out he was killed, and this blacksmith turns out he’s a gruff old guy, played by James Whitmore, really didn’t want to get involved, but he becomes her knight in shining armor, and it’s a very good show about taking care of people that are strangers, and how that is what we’re supposed to do. And the other show we have is called Honor Bright, and it might be the one tomorrow night, I forgot which one I’m doing, but that one is Danny Thomas, and if anybody remembers Danny Thomas, other than just St. Jude’s, Danny Thomas was a very big TV star in the 1950s and 60s, and his daughter Marlo Thomas, who was a very pretty girl in her day, I mean, she was that girl in the 1960s, well, it will be the first time she ever was in a TV show or a movie or anything she’s introduced in this Zane Grey Western called Honor Bright, and it’s the only time, or the first time, I should say, not the only time, that she actually not only was on TV, but she starred with her very famous at the time dad. It’s a very sad story, again, a very good moralistic story, the things that we used to have in our TV, instead of all of these reality TV stuff, and all of these fake TV things, and bad stories about sex and violence and murders and everything today, that is just destroying the childhood. Anybody watching these with a young mind, you no wonder why they get depraved. But that’s going to be the story tomorrow night, and following Wednesday, on the Wednesday Western special time we have, Wednesday nights. The tomorrow’s program Sabbath show, I, last week we did a very, very good Garner Ted Armstrong, and I usually don’t follow up with like two of the same type shows from Saturday to Saturday, but I think I’m gonna have, and I already have it in my mind, which one I’m gonna do.

They’re less than seven minutes, 11 seconds long, sometimes a little longer, but some of them are mine, some of them are what we get off of YouTube, and that’s Monday through Friday three times a day. Of course, like I said, on the Sabbath day, it’s 7-Eleven in the morning, and that is always a Sabbath-type religious show of some sort, and then the 7-Eleven p.m. short story or TV show or some kind of a video. Once in a while, we do even a complete movie, very seldom because most people are not going to even bother watching a movie. I really hope you watch these two Westerns tomorrow night and next Wednesday night, and I think if you don’t get emotional watching it and see the moral of the story and how good it was written and acted, by the way, I just think you’re just too used to trash TV. So, I hope everyone has a blessed Sabbath day. I hope you have a great, safe weekend, and I hope that everyone remembers there is a God.

God is the news. We don’t see that on mainstream news, but the plain truth brings you this. God is the biggest newscaster and news event maker that will ever happen in your life. God is controlling your life, if you know it or not. You don’t have to believe it to know it’s true or to have it to be true. You can deny it, but that doesn’t make it not true, and so keep God in your plans and keep thinking what God has to say, and the best way to do that, not even listening to me or anybody else, is to get the Bible in an easy-to-read format at first and start reading it from cover to cover over and over again and start to know the mind of God, and once you know the mind of God, you’re going to become a friend of God, and God will become a friend of yours. Well, until Monday, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today. Thank you all for listening. We appreciate you, and until then, like I said, bye-bye.