Transformational Leaders and Christian Dissidents

by

Gadfly

           Most of mainstream media, Democrats, and others claim former Vice President Joe Biden is “the President-Elect.”  What does this mean? 

The left and anti-Trumpers claim the contest is over.  Biden won; Trump lost. 

Yet, none of the 50 States have “certified” voting results.  The Electoral College has yet to meet, which is the ultimate milestone to determine which candidate scored 270 or more votes.

           Trump has yet to “concede” the contest.  Biden calls this refusal “an embarrassment.”  Of course, tough guy Biden, who wants the mantel of President, does not mind the use of bullying tactics.  As much as one may despise the President of the United States, telling him to “shut up” or calling him “a clown” during a nationally-televised presidential debate does not sound presidential.  Feelings of contempt are difficult to hide, even during a nationally televised debate. 

And lest we forget, Biden was part of a January 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office with President Obama when they (led by the FBI and CIA) hatched a “Russia collusion” conspiracy against President-elect Trump.  The multi-year, multi-million dollar Mueller investigation followed to no avail; and a failed politically-driven impeachment further sought to undermine the Trump presidency.

More recently, a Hunter Biden hard drive surfaced with evidence of criminal activity (involving Ukraine, China, etc.), homegrown pornography, and other incriminating material.  The New York Post broke the story (and unfortunately revealed the name of the whistleblower), followed by extensive coverage by Fox News.  Not intended as an October surprise (I was personally involved trying to get the drive to the right authorities for a year), it was quickly censored by the mainstream and social media.  Worse, the shop owner involved has been slandered as a Russian agent and a hacker. 

Amazingly, this experience reminded me of Walter Cronkite’s prophetic preface in a 1983 Penguin edition of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Here is an excerpt of the preface: 

           “Big Brother” has become a common term for ubiquitous or overreaching authority, and “Newspeak” is a word we apply to the dehumanizing babble of bureaucracies and computer programs.

           Those coinages have passed into the language with lives of their own.  They are familiar to millions who have never read 1984, who may not even know it as a novel written thirty-five years ago by English socialist Eric Blair, who became famous under the pen name George Orwell.

           Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power.  How is that?  Because they were so useful, and because the features of the world he drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar.

           They are familiar today; they were familiar when the book as first published in 1949.  We’ve met Big Brother in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini.  We hear Newspeak in every use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism.  And every time a political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience that mental process Orwell called doublethink.  From the show trials of the pre-war Soviet Union to the dungeon courts of post-revolutionary Iran, 1984’s vision of justice as foregone conclusion is familiar to us all.  As soon as we were introduced to such things, we realized we had always known them.

           What Orwell had done was not to foresee the future but to see the implications of the present—his present and ours—and he touched a common chord.  He had given words and shapes to common but unarticulated fears running deep through all industrial societies.

           George Orwell was no prophet, and those who busy themselves keeping score on his predictions and grading his use of the crystal ball miss the point.  While here is a novelist, he is also a sharp political essayist and a satirist with a bite not felt in the English language since the work of Jonathan Swift.

           If not prophecy, what was 1984?  It was, as many have noticed, a warning:  a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imagination of earlier ages.

           Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984.  But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing.  It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.

           1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass.  That warning vibrates powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computers that can tap into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television program we are watching and how many people there are in the room.  We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioral emotions like aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.

           And we hear echoes of that warning chord in the constant demand for greater security and comfort, for less risk in our societies.  We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost  (bold italics provided for emphasis).

           Biden campaigned with the slogan, “a battle for the soul of the nation.”  By its implications, he flaunts an image of moral superiority.  Yet, keep in mind, Satan also fights for our soul, whether individually or collectively.  Biden represents a political faction that fights for abortion, same-sex marriage, the demonization of those who oppose these notions, and a whole range of policies to give the national government almost total control of our lives—nationwide COVID-19 mandates are simply a dress rehearsal.

           With the context just provided, it is now time to talk about the essay’s title:  Transformational Leaders and Christian Dissidents.  To transform is “to make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of.”  Former President Obama confessed that, under his leadership, his election would lead to the “fundamental transformation of America.” 

Evidence of America’s transformation under Obama’s leadership is already apparent.  While this would sound politically incorrect to the left, a racist nation would not have elected a black man to the presidency.  A survey by The Wall Street Journal revealed “Optimism over race relations in the U.S. has slid since its historic high in January 2009, when 77% of Americans polled—79% of whites and 64% of blacks—described such relations as good. In the new poll [July 2013], 52% of those polled felt that way, including 52% of whites and 38% of blacks.”

So, what happened since the January 2009 healthy view of race relations?

Obama took command of his first term in January 2009. 

The Trayvon Martin incident occurred in February 2012 (Obama told the public, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon”), which spawned the creation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. 

It was not until the Michael Brown incident in 2014 that BLM became a national force advancing the notion of systemic racism. 

The George Floyd incident (May 2020) provided the needed kindling for a political campaign (and the corresponding riots in mostly Democrat-controlled cities) against President Trump, who has been characterized as an obstacle to an “anti-racist” movement.

BLM leaders, and its fellow Marxist faction called Antifa, are set on transforming America.  Their leaders are anti-family and anti-Judeo-Christian. 

Political leaders, such as Biden, have acquiesced to an “instrument” role in advancing this anti-America agenda.  As I discovered from his complicity with foreign agents in Ukraine and China, Biden simply lusts for power.  In the process, the elder Biden prostituted his own son to carry out unethical and illegal foreign dealings for financial rewards.  This is the man who had a foreign prosecutor fired for trying to shine sunlight on Burisma corruption.  This is the man who battles “for the soul of the Nation.”

In the end, Joe Biden might be crowned as America’s President.  He may even enjoy the support of millions who join him in transforming America from the “shining light on the hill” to another political elite-ruled Venezuela. 

He will never own my soul, nor the soul of millions of Americans who believe in a just and merciful God and in the transformational leadership of a nonpolitician who fought to make America great again.

The ultimate transformation here might be spiritual, but not in the way Biden represents.  Many Christians have enjoyed a comfort zone of material plenty.  Now, many of us are recognizing the implications of secular humanism and its atheistic Marxist manifestation.  We have a moral duty to resist this dangerous transformation, to save our souls, to transform the way we live our lives, and to set an example for others. 

Live Not by Lies:  A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher (published this year and recommended to me by “Orville,” a Christian leader and close friend) greatly inspired me along these lines.  I highly commend it to you. 

The most significant take-away from this book is that those who lived under totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century unanimously observe that America in 2020 is manifesting pre-totalitarian conditions.  That is why I wrote this article.  Therefore, I am a Christian dissident.