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To keep their people beholden to a false reality on the glories of collectivism and secularism, propagandists have to censor history. To remain free, the people must speak the truth.
Ever heard of Dong Zehua? Probably not. I hadn’t either until recently.
Yet his story is more than a narrative of personal bravery — it’s a profound lesson in how Marxist movements seek to expunge historical chapters that are at odds with their craven ideology.
This should serve as a crucial lesson for us today, especially with the Woke Left mirroring the commies in their revisionist efforts to secularize America’s past.
First things first, though, which is a review of Dong Zehua’s ordeal.
In June 2019, he was arrested by Chinese officials for the offense of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.”
His crime?
Wearing a T-shirt drawing attention to the Tiananmen Square massacre, where the People’s Liberation Army slaughtered thousands of protestors, many of them students, who were denouncing government tyranny.
The horrors unfolded on June 4, 1989, but good luck learning about it if you’re born and raised in China.
As the Los Angeles Times put it, the “events on that bloody day in 1989 aren’t taught in school or ever mentioned in Chinese media.”
Marxist regimes are supposed to be “oppression-free” utopias after all, unlike those dirty capitalist countries in the West.
Therefore, the need for government censorship — to keep their people beholden to a false reality on the glories of collectivism.
“What they’re doing is to control every Chinese person’s thinking and erase every person’s history,” Mr. Zehua said. “They want to write history themselves.”
So, he organized a peaceful demonstration at the site of Tiananmen Square in protest.
Mr. Zehua was swiftly detained and spent the next 200 days in a tiny jail cell cooped up with 20 other inmates.
The stones on this kid!
How many 28-year-olds do you know who take that kind of risk?
Probably not many.
They got a Netflix show to watch.
But that’s exactly what we need on these shores — a fraction of that courage in opposing the left’s relentless attempts to use media “gatekeepers” to rewrite our own history or delete it entirely if it doesn’t align with progressive aims.
Case in point: The vitriol being directed at House Speaker Mike Johnson because he said that his “worldview” is animated by the Bible.
The Guardian newspaper called Johnson a “theocrat” who is orchestrating a “plot against America,” while the far-left rag Salon included him on a list of people who are apparently the “most dangerous threat to America.”
Salon also called Johnson a “theocrat” (real creative, guys) and claimed that the GOP under his leadership wants to bring back the “Inquisition.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC found a “Christian” professor at Calvin University to tag him as a “Christian nationalist,” the media’s latest scare tactic to describe anyone to the right of John Fetterman.
I have quotation marks around “Christian” because the professor, Kristin Du Mez, rejects biblical ethics on LGBTQIAS+ issues (did I forget a letter?) and was disappointed when the Supreme Court canned Roe v. Wade.
Basically, exactly the type of “Christian” MSNBC would bring on to undermine an actual believer.
Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times dutifully regurgitated the same lazy characterization, also slamming Johnson as a “Christian nationalist.”
In short, the left is having a mental breakdown because Mike Johnson’s thinking has been deeply influenced by the Bible — and he’s open about it to boot!
True to their revisionist form, the press is trying to paint Johnson’s biblical convictions as both unconstitutional and frightening.
The truth, however, is that there is nothing unusual, historically speaking, of how Johnson exercises his faith publicly.
If anything, he’s tame in comparison to, say, the progressive hero Woodrow Wilson, who declared at a political rally that “America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scriptures.”
It’s obvious with even a cursory reading of the American archive that the country’s beginning largely grew out of a Christian ethos, albeit imperfectly (see Woodrow Wilson).
It doesn’t matter.
The press, with the help of so-called “Christians,” embody the Marxist impulse to control narratives and alter the historical record.
Their goal is a monolithic secular state, and they will suppress whatever information disrupts that humanistic objective.
Step One, for us, is not letting this liberal alliance get away with it.
In his book Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, American University professor Daniel L. Dreisbach explains how God’s Word “permeate[d] both the private expressions and public pronouncements of those who shaped the new nation and its civic institutions.”
In fact, as Dreisbach persuasively details, “The Bible was referenced more frequently than any European writer or even any European school of thought” between 1760 and 1805.
Altogether, “the Bible accounted for about one-third of all citations” among “political literature” at the time, and even that number is “significantly undercounted” due to the volume of “political sermons” that never made the survey list.
There are numerous examples that Dreisbach uses to buttress his premise, such as the fact that the book of Deuteronomy was referenced nearly double that of John Locke.
But let’s focus on one that is ignored by the pseudo-historian crowd: The role that Proverbs 29:2 played in the “founding era.”
This verse, as a reminder, states: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked man rules, the people mourn.”
On it, Dreisbach writes that:
“Proverbs 29:2 was a favorite biblical text referenced in public discussions on the qualifications and characteristics of civil magistrates. The distinguished founder, William Paterson (1745–1806), signer of the US Constitution, US Senator, governor of New Jersey, and associate justice of the US Supreme Court, wove the proverb into a ‘most elegant’ and ‘appropriate Charge’ to a newly empaneled grand jury in May 1800.
According to a newspaper account, Judge Paterson told the jurors, ‘Religion & Morality were pleasingly inculcated and enforced, as being necessary to good government, good order and good laws, for ‘when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.’”
What? You didn’t learn that in public school — that someone who signed the Constitution and held positions at the highest levels of government explicitly borrowed from Scripture to frame judicial proceedings?
Remember Dong Zehua’s indictment of the communist mindset, how it seeks to control “every person’s thinking and erase every person’s history” so they can “write history themselves”?
The same goes for the Woke Left.
And that brings us back to Step One, which would entail calmly telling progressives to pipe down every time they offer bargain-bin takes on Christianity and American civic life.
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