The Leviathan State

Reminder: If you are new to my blog, start here with my initial post outlining the many links between Donald Trump and the biblical figure known as the Antichrist.

 “8 If you lay a hand on it,

    you will remember the struggle and never do it again!

9 Any hope of subduing it is false;

    the mere sight of it is overpowering.

10 No one is fierce enough to rouse it.

    Who then is able to stand against me?

11 Who has a claim against me that I must pay?

    Everything under heaven belongs to me.”

-          From Job chapter 41

 

“Homo homini lupus” (Man is a wolf to man)

― Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan

 

                In Revelation 12, Satan is described as being a great red dragon: “3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born….9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” 

    The etymology of the word ‘dragon’ is described here.

                The Greek word drakon refers, then, to a serpent or a “giant seafish.” When Satan inhabited the stealthy serpent in the Book of Genesis, he took on the appearance of a creature that was relatively small, secretive and seductive to Eve. In the last book of the Bible, Satan appears instead as a huge, terrifying monster that is said to “lead the whole world astray.” (The Greek word diabolos, meaning "slanderer," is where we get the English word devil from; notably, Donald Trump is a master of slandering his enemies on social media). When John the Revelator mentions that Satan’s tail “swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth,” he – according to many scripture researchers – is potentially referring to the fallen angels who aligned with Satan during his rebellion against God (a rebellion memorably imagined in John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost).

                The 41^st chapter of the Book of Job describes a creature that would come down to history, known as Leviathan. The author of Job emphasizes the huge strength and fearsomeness of this sea creature, who is only able to be defeated by YHWH Himself (the God of Israel). No mere man can try to struggle or fight with Leviathan. No violence waged against it has any hope of succeeding; if you try to go that route you'll quickly get destroyed. Herman Melville, in his novel Moby Dick, took inspiration from this chapter as he described the white whale that would eventually take down Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod. The author of Isaiah (chapter 27) describes YHWH flaming forth in the end times to hand Leviathan its ultimate and final defeat: “In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword— his fierce, great and powerful sword— Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.”

                The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes named his main work of political science after the biblical Leviathan. Hobbes used the term to refer to the all-powerful, indestructible nature of his ideal commonwealth, ruled by a monarchy which would have no restrictions placed on its ability to maintain the peace through means of repressive violence. Hobbes justified giving so much unchecked power to the monarch’s Leviathan state by claiming that, were people to lack such a draconian government, their innate penchant for causing chaos and anarchy would upset the applecart of society to the detriment of each individual’s rights and wellbeing. Traditionally this has been the opposite of the liberal viewpoint – we get the word ‘liberal’ from the root word ‘liberty,’ and the liberal has historically viewed the allowing of more liberties to individuals as a way to promote reason, fairness and mutual dialogue as underpinnings of a commonwealth’s stability. The conservative viewpoint, in contrast, has historically tended to view individual rights with skepticism, as it tends to distrust people’s reasoning abilities, thus preferring to limit individual rights so as to squelch the potential for anarchy emerging from peoples’ alleged inability to use their liberties wisely. Later influential thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison disagreed with Hobbes, pointing out that allowing unchecked authority to the state would result in a state of tyranny, where the monarch would be totally free to abrogate individuals’ freedoms by claiming that those freedoms posed an unacceptable danger to public safety. Of course, they saw, a corrupt monarch working solely in the interests of his own cronies could claim some legitimate authority to rule by lying and portraying himself as the public's protector. Hence, the American system was founded on the principle of checks and balances, whereby authorities representing competing state interests – in our case, the judiciary, the elected legislature, and the executive branch – would strive to maintain a balance of power and root out such destructive corruption. A system of distributed power, based on popularly elected representatives who are theoretically driven by the interests of their constituents, thus became the American alternative to the sort of royal autocracies that had governed European nations for hundreds of years.

                In Revelation 12, the seven heads of the great red dragon, and the ten horns on its heads, match up with the seven heads and ten horns on what John calls in Revelation 17 the scarlet beast. The scarlet beast of Rev. 17 has seven heads which represent seven mountains or seven hills (depending on which translation you use). Ancient Rome, in John’s day, sat on seven hills, and the Roman empire during and after the reign of Nero destroyed Herod’s temple, killed Jews in Palestine, and persecuted and tortured Christians – perhaps including the apostles Peter and Paul, who many claim were executed in Rome during Nero’s reign. John the Revelator presumably wrote the Book of Revelation at some point in the final decades of the first century, and he therefore knew what Nero and the Roman empire thus represented to the suffering Body of Christ of his day – and of course the recounting of Jesus’s crucifixion by the Roman representatives was by John’s time of exile on Patmos well known, too.

By juxtaposing the red dragon of Rev. 12 (which is specifically referred to as the devil) with the scarlet beast of Rev. 12 (which is a world-powerful political entity headed by and summed up in the person of the man known as the biblical Antichrist), we are able to connect three conjoined aspects of what these two monstrous images depict:

-          Satan’s rule as the “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and his ability to exert authority over (at least some of) Earth’s rulers

-          The Roman empire and the globally powerful end-times governmental entity that would seem to be controlled from within the city/nation referred to as Mystery Babylon

-          The double prophetic fulfillment of the ancient Roman empire serving as a template for Washington D.C.’s globally exerted power and influence thousands of years later

    Remember that Washington, D.C. was originally named Rome and it also famously sits on seven hills. Much of the street layout and architecture in Washington comes from ancient Roman influences. For example, this article explores how “a tour of Washington’s most prominent landmarks makes it clear that the American city was the product of a deliberate, concerted effort to emulate the capital of the Roman empire.”

    If I am correct and if the mentioning of the 8^th king of Revelation 17 is an obscure reference to the Nero Redivivus myth, then the ultimate transformation of the American republic into an empire won’t occur until the returned Nero attains complete control of America in the same way that ancient Roman emperors controlled their empire. Remember that Rome also had a long, proud history as a republic before the people lost their rights subsequent to the nascent dictator Julius Caesar’s military aggrandizement and the civil war which followed his assassination. Up to this point, America still has a system of checks and balances, but the walls of separation between our three branches have become shakier and much more porous now that the GOP controls all three branches and the party has been remade in the image of one fascistic demagogue. We are not yet a Hobbes-style unchecked monarchy wherein the state has free rein to exert draconian powers of repression, but we are barreling in that direction as each day passes. Once the revived Nero makes his way on the scene (or if, as I posit, he is already here and on his way to attaining his ultimate level of power), what has historically functioned as a republic will be then officially transformed into a revived Roman empire. And that is what I see represented in the Trump administration’s actions during Trump’s second term.

                Trump’s public rhetoric demanding unchecked authority by a repressive state - as crude, bumbling and ignorant as it sounds - nevertheless mirrors exactly the sort of logic used by Thomas Hobbes. This is the line of reasoning that is being fed to the public on a daily basis under this administration: A draconian state with unchecked powers is necessary because the republic has begun to decay from within due to the presence of internal anarchy. This anarchy is seen in mass illegal immigration; sporadic terrorist violence; a ballooning prison population; mass unrest as seen in public responses to flashpoint media events; school shootings; stagnant wages; a plague of drug use; rising inflation; and other problems.

                That line of thinking was precisely what motivated the Heritage Foundation's creation of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump's 2025 takeover. What the public needs to realize is that many MAGA voters secretly – and in some cases even openly – are yearning for a new emperor to take power and address what they claim is the chaotic liberal decadence that is sapping the lifeblood out of what used to be a stable society. Part of what makes this tyrannous logic so convincing to MAGA voters is that there are indeed some grains of truth in what they are pointing out: Yes, illegal immigration and associated problems like human trafficking are problems. Yes, we do have a large incarcerated population, far out of proportion to our basic population numbers when you compare our situation to that of other developed western nations. Yes, multinational corporations have left American workers in the dust as they have spread overseas and taken manufacturing jobs with them. Yes, drug overdoses continue to wrack both urban and rural America.

However, just because demagogues raise some legitimate grains of truth at certain points, don’t take your eyes off the ball: At heart, they are more interested in amassing their own unchecked powers than they are in truly addressing societal problems and social conflicts. Indeed, as we’re seeing in the Trump administration’s response to the Charlie Kirk assassination, tyrants prefer to stoke conflicts rather than tamp them down. Historically, they have preferred to incarcerate people – not just violent criminals, but also intellectuals, professors, health professionals, journalists and other critics of their regimes – than to see them walk free. MAGA leaders are appealing to white nationalist bigotry so as to break through legal barriers that have historically stopped our government from repressing the rights of people of all ethnicities and backgrounds. White nationalist MAGA voters who have been duped will wake up one day to find that the rights that they denied to Latino immigrants – a group that exists in a penumbra of legal vagueness, where they lack the full legal rights that U.S. citizens have historically had, thus leaving them open to the state's erosion of what few rights they do have under the law – have now become the rights that will be denied to them by an out-of-control executive branch that is devoted to repressing not just immigrants or minorities but to silencing all critics who pose a threat to their grip on power. This is the internal logic of fascism, and it has played out before in Germany, Italy, Spain and in other countries.

                The American people were warned. They chose their own fate. And now the red dragon is poised to rise to its ultimate end times height of power. When it does, no fighting against it will succeed. It will clamp down on Big Tech platforms to shadow-ban critics of the policies it implements. It will nab people off the streets and put them in unmarked vans, destination unknown. It will deport innocent people to third world countries as a way to terrorize its bourgeois supporter base into continued silence and complicity. It will eventually openly murder critics and not bat an eyelash. And anyone who makes the choice to fight back against it with guns, knives or bombs will end up dead or in jail.

                As the author of Job eloquently put it, there is no human who is able to wrestle with this sea monster. Only God – Jesus Christ – will be able to end its rule when the second coming occurs. And at that time, all the martyred victims of this red dragon’s regime will clap and celebrate in heaven at the downfall of the dragon and the worldwide power it exerted.