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.
