A New Resistance Is Rising

A friend of mine, an early activist in the Christian Democrat party in El Salvador, told me a story that I have been thinking about lately. Before I had ever gone to that country as a missionary, the parish school building served as a polling place. When they were setting up for an election, my friend was witness to something she could never forget. The ballot-boxes were being unloaded to place in the school; one fell off the truck and was split open. Mirabile dictu, it was already full of ballots. That’s how the ruling party ensured a comfortable margin of votes for their candidates. As in some parts of the United States these days, no one compared the number of votes with the number of registered voters for the district.

It is to me much more plausible to question the victory of the Biden-Harris ticket in some disputed areas than to have held that the Russians conspired with President Trump in his 2016 election campaign. The media is trying to present the election results reported by the Associated Press as a fait accompli. This is the same media source that tried to trash the Catholic Church about the Payroll Protection Plan. They’re responsible for a vicious attack on Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s person, faith, and family. Whatever the AP is selling, I’m not buying it. The French phrase that might be appropriate is coup d’état.

The lining-up of endorsements of the election results (prior to certification by responsible authorities) recalls for me the attempted coup described in the Bible when Adonijah, with the help of Joab the military leader and Abiathar the priest, tried to succeed to David’s throne instead of Solomon. The Establishment, including the tech tyrants from Silicon Valley, the “legacy” media outlets and “influencers,” Democrat stalwarts, and token Republicans have paraded before us to give the impression that any disputing of the election results is undemocratic or even unpatriotic. I suppose there will be bishops who now declare that we need “a peaceful transition” and will participate in the dubious gambit of making “peace at any price.”

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The protests for Trump are underplayed and discounted by censoring the news. We are used to that from the way the “media” covers the Pro-Life March every January. And people are prepared to do anything to avoid conflict these days. Out of sight, out of conscience.

There were certainly many votes for the Democratic ticket. It does not particularly shock that the popular vote would go that way, although there are questions of voter identification that have never been resolved. Monkey See-No-Evil would apply to many Catholics. In reality, he’s only a Catholic by accident, and he’s paired with a staunch anti-Catholic. Still, there are among our co-religionists what the French used to call bien pensants: people who don’t enjoy thinking and so automatically accept ideas that have become conventional.

The bien pensant Catholics who voted for Biden are like the good woman who told me she wears a mask even when she drives alone because “you know, you can’t be too careful.” She was under the impression that the election was about wearing masks and was proud to vote for Biden. The bien pensants were not upset about Biden’s embrace of state-sponsored abortion, nor were they concerned he would tell Catholic schools they could go out of business, nor that he was in favor of eight-year-olds undertaking certain gender-bending “lifestyle choices,” nor that he was against the confirmation of Justice Barrett, nor that he chose as running mate a woman who thinks being a Knight of Columbus disqualifies a man for public service.

The bien pensants watch CNN and read The New York Times. They listen to the Masters of the Universe who reside in their palaces on the West Coast and control social media. They are concerned about clergy who are “conflictive” about issues like abortion, same-sex “marriage,” and gender confusion. They are the seamless garment types, who seem less than attentive to major contradictions of candidates who claim they are Catholic or Christian. They are the very definition of bien pensant, blindly and narrowly conformist in opinions according to what is politically “correct” and endorsed like a popular brand in the marketplace of clichés.

But, even with the bien pensants, I doubt some of the election results. The orchestrated, “let’s get all of this past us” publicity campaign makes me doubt more. There’s too much smoke and too many mirrors for me not to think something is afoot. The dubious nature of the results should cast a shadow on Mr. Biden’s presidency if his insurgency prevails. Perhaps that will serve as a brake on the Gadarene descent to chaos promised by his genuflections to radical lib ideology during the campaign and in the platform of his party.

We heard much about “resistance” from the Left in the last four years, and yet the conservatives’ part is more than defensible.

[Photo credit: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images]

Author

  • Msgr. Richard C. Antall

    Monsignor Antall is pastor of Holy Name Parish in the Diocese of Cleveland. He is the author of The X-Mass Files (Atmosphere Press, 2021), and The Wedding (Lambing Press, 2019).

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