Top 10 Stream Originals From 2016

By The Stream Published on December 30, 2016

2016 was a wild year, full of controversial topics and, of course, the polarizing Presidential election cycle. As the year comes to a close, let’s look at the top stories, as told by the most-read Stream articles.

#10 — Interview: Ben Carson Explains Decision to Support Trump

James Robison Ben Carson - 900

By James Robison

James Robison: Dr. Carson, we’ve been friends since we met shortly after you spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, and you’ve been on LIFE Today more than once, and spoke at our conference. Do you see your role as an ambassador and witness for Christ as the highest calling?

Ben Carson: That is by far the highest calling. A real evangelical is someone whose life is centered on Jesus Christ and that becomes the most important thing in their life. That really helps to determine their relationship with the world and with everyone else.

 

#9 — To Those Christians (and Others) Who Can’t Vote for Trump or Clinton

By Frank Turek

There’s a new bumper sticker that says, “I already hate our next president!”

Indeed, many folks can’t see enough good reasons to vote for either Trump or Clinton. While I don’t endorse candidates (because people then think you agree with everything the person says or does), I do endorse the ideas and policies that certain candidates advocate. With that in mind, there are actually several good reasons — maybe even thousands — to vote for or against one of them.

 

#8 — Baby, You Stole the Life I Wanted

Mother With Baby Suffering From Post Natal Depression

By Jennifer Hartline

Marie Claire magazine recently published one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. It’s one of those pieces where all the names have been changed because nobody wants to admit to what they’ve just admitted: child-regret. Mothers, feeling doomed by motherhood and wishing they’d never had kids.

 

#7 — Hey, ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye: Come Out of the Ark and Face the Flood of Evidence Against Darwinism

By Douglas Axe

Bill Nye, host of the popular 1990s kids’ program Bill Nye the Science Guy, has become a celebrity spokesman for science. Nye’s hero status got a major boost in 2014 when he debated young earth creationist Ken Ham. I couldn’t bear to watch, knowing their shared tendency to replace scientific argument with appeals to authority (a form of Biblical authority for Ham and the authority of scientific consensus for Nye). Several million people did watch, though, and millions more have since then.

Nye has been back in the headlines recently after paying a visit to Ham’s new Ark Encounter theme park, promoted as a full-size replica of Noah’s ark. Reporters ate it up.

 

#6 — The Entire ‘LGBT’ Narrative Just Crumbled

By Matt Barber

If your daughter, sister, mother or friend “identified” as a fat person trapped in a perilously emaciated body — if she truly believed she was obese, but, in reality, suffered from anorexia — would you affirm her “fatness” and get her liposuction, or would you go to the ends of the earth to help her bring her subjective (and mistaken) identity into alignment with objective reality? When someone is engaged in demonstrably self-destructive behavior, it is not loving, but hateful, to encourage persistence.

It was, ironically, lesbian activist and writer Dorothy Allison who once wrote, “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” In validation of this truism, a series of new peer-reviewed studies have just been released that serve to utterly debunk and deconstruct key “progressive” homosexual-activist talking points.

 

#5 — Christian Author Max Lucado Has Stayed Out of Politics, But He Has Something to Say About Donald Trump

By The Stream

“I would have absolutely no right to speak up except that he repeatedly brandishes the Bible and calls himself a Christian,” said preacher and best-selling Christian author Max Lucado, explaining why he publicly criticized Donald Trump in an item on his personal blog. He doesn’t even put a candidate’s bumper sticker on his car, he said in an interview with Christianity Today, and this blog item was only the third time in 30 years he’d spoken on a political matter.

 

#4 — Female Army Colonel Illustrates Why No One Should Listen to Army About Marine Standards

By Jude Eden

It’s always funny to Marines when people from other military branches say our standards are too stringent. Funny in a “how embarrassing that you opened your mouth” sort of way. Too late for Army Col. Ellen Haring who wrote an opinion piece for the Marine Corps Times to admonish our Infantry Officer Course (IOC) standards, again. This is not new for Haring, who in 2014 opined for War on the Rocks that IOC’s Combat Endurance Test (CET) was merely “an initiation rite and not a test of occupational qualification.”

In question this time is whether the IOC requirement to carry “up to 152 pounds for 9.3 miles at a 3-mile-per-hour pace in order to graduate” is realistic testing and training for officers, when enlisted Marines test on 60 pounds to complete Infantry Training Battalion and work up to 152 later. She quizzed a handful of Marines who bolstered her doubts (no details on whether they had infantry combat deployment experience, and had she named them they’d bear the same humiliation as she). She found the answer she was looking for and missed the truth she’s studiously ignoring.

 

#3 — The Left is Busily Planting Fake Red-Meat Conservative News Sites

By Rachel Alexander

Almost all of us have been a victim of accidentally spreading fake news at one time. A trusted friend emails you a link to an article that is red meat for the conservative base; it sounds legitimate, and the name of the site even sounds official. You forward the article and post it on Facebook and Twitter — and then the backlash is embarrassing. Multiple people point out you’re wrong, and you feel like an idiot. But how were you to know, especially in this information overload, social media era? It has become normal to quickly skim articles and headlines. And why would you suspect your most trusted, intelligent friends would be sending you false news?

 

#2 — Astroturf ‘Outrage Machine’ of Paid Trolls Floods Social Media to Counteract Negative News About Hillary Clinton

By Rachel Alexander

A significant portion of online support for Hillary Clinton is manufactured by paid “astroturf” trolls: a large team of supporters who spend long hours responding to negative news on the internet about her. The Clinton SuperPAC Correct the Record, which is affiliated with her campaign, acknowledged in an April press release that it was spending $1 million on project “Breaking Barriers” to pay people to respond to negative information about Clinton on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Twitter. That amount has since increased to over $6 million. The trolls create a false impression that Clinton has more support than she really does, because one supporter will frequently create multiple anonymous accounts.

 

 

And the most-viewed Stream-original article of 2016 is…

 

#1 — A Call for National Civil Disobedience to Obama’s Public School Transgender Bathroom Mandate

By Michael Brown

There are times in history when obedience to God means disobedience to man. This is one of those times.

Now that the Obama administration has announced that public schools must allow boys who identify as girls to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms — meaning, in effect, that teenage girls must undress and shower in the presence of biological males — it is time to say, “With all respect to the authority of the federal government, we refuse to comply with your mandate.”

Across the nation, parents, school boards, principles, administrators and teachers must say no to President Obama and his administration. They must do it for the sake of the children. They must do it for the sake of moral sanity. They must do it to honor the Lord.

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