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January 15, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — During the Obama years, some conservative thinkers began to resign themselves to the Benedict Option — the idea that the culture war was lost and that Christians needed go behind the walls of a small community to preserve the flame of truth.
This thinking came after the Republican Party of the third millennium had thoroughly demoralized conservatives — first, with a globalist Bush administration, where conservative ideas expired the day after the election, and then with failed presidential candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney, who were indistinguishable from Democrats on most moral issues. The Democrat Party, on the other hand, was embracing and enacting its radical leftist agenda at breakneck speed, led by the charismatic Barack Obama; young cultural icons from music, sports, television, and film; and especially with the new post-Christian tech billionaires. Even if a majority of Americans still clung to their Bibles and their guns, the radical left thoroughly controlled the technological, financial, commercial, cultural, and educational institutions and was making good on President Obama’s promise to fundamentally transform America.
Resigned to this post-apocalyptic America, many principled conservatives embraced their roles as keepers of the light and prepared for a long exile from the messy world of politics.
Then Trump happened.
The pro-life movie Bella begins with the protagonist saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
God must have had a hearty laugh that night of November 8, 2016. But some people have no sense of humor, or maybe it is just that they have too much pride.
To those ready to lead the world down the path of the Benedict Option, the fact that an unchurched, thrice-married, bombastic New York showman and businessman had overcome all odds to win the most powerful office in the world was terribly humiliating, and many never forgave him.
The radical left did not react well to having power taken from it. In the streets, leftist mobs rioted in the days following the election. In the halls of the bloated executive agencies, the political appointees of the Obama administration melted into the bureaucracy. In media headquarters, reporters began looking at ways to destroy the new president’s reputation. The most successful stratagems were the never-ending anonymous leaks to discredit and distract the administration as well as the politically weaponized use of the national security agencies and federal law enforcement against the sitting president and his allies.
Amazingly, the president fought off one scurrilous attack after another in his own patented New York street brawler style. At one press conference after another, Trump dished it out to the petulant press corps in a way that most people would only dream of doing.
On one policy issue after another, Trump boldly did what he thought best, without the torturous posturing and subterfuge that usually accompanied the betrayal of the base by other Republicans. He had promised to be tough on China, and he slapped tariffs on that country. He had promised to end the dangerous Iran deal, and he unceremoniously canceled it. The ridiculous Paris Climate Accord, canceled. The trampling of American sovereignty at the hand of globalist multilateral organizations, finished. The funneling of money to international abortion-promoting organizations, kaput. Transgender social engineering in the military — not on his watch. Did he do everything conservatives wanted? No, he clearly didn’t. Did he do more good than any other president in the last generation? Absolutely.
In his own primordial way, Trump showed a massive segment of the population that was resigned to the Benedict option that maybe, just maybe, it was still worth fighting to preserve the republic. The leaders of the Benedict Option had suddenly lost their following.
And that brings us to 2020.
The coronavirus provided the perfect opportunity to destroy the president, and it did. It consumed his last year in office, not only plunging the country into an economic collapse that prevented him from enjoying the benefits of a strong economy, but most importantly giving the Democrat Party machine the holy grail of leftist political organizing: universal unverifiable mail-in ballots.
In a series of coordinated state and federal lawsuits, Democrat successfully eliminated many of the meaningful restrictions on mail-in ballots from battleground states. In some states, officials unilaterally ignored election law, using the coronavirus as an excuse. In still other states, opportunities to cure mail-in ballot errors were offered only in Democrat-dominated counties. Chain of custody laws were completely ignored in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Litigation on the part of Trump attorneys demanding the necessary transparency was vigorously opposed by Democrat state officials and attorneys.
That fraud was perpetrated on a massive scale can be denied only by those who have some motive other than truth. It is simply laughable that a candidate like Biden would beat Obama among black Americans. In fact, Biden did not get a higher percentage of the black American vote on a national level, but he did improve upon Obama’s totals in the big inner cities of battleground states. Consider examples like the city of Milwaukee, where we are supposed to believe that Biden turned out more votes than Obama, even after the registered voter population had decreased by tens of thousands of voters since Obama’s election.
By itself, the comparison of votes in the black American community points to the possibility of voter fraud. When this is combined with the fact that Democrat operatives systematically dismantled the voter integrity laws in those states, the conclusion is inescapable. Furthermore, if we consider that this type of scenario occurred in every single battleground state that the president lost, one can safely say, as the president has, that the election was stolen, that it was fraudulent and Biden was illegitimately elected.
In fact, this is precisely what the hundreds of thousands of protesters who came to Washington, D.C., from all parts of America honestly believed. Yes, there are a lot of conspiracy theories, but what do you expect when free speech is severely curtailed as it has been by Big Tech?
I personally have no interest in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory (which is premised on anonymous internet posts on a message board supposedly being a high-level government official working with Trump), just as I have no interest in stories about how never-before-seen evidence is going to prove all the detractors of president Trump wrong, and that somehow he’s got an ace up his sleeve and is still going to be president on January 21, 2021. I have described the crowd at the January 6 rally on the pages of LifeSiteNews, and I stand by that description. The people there were too diverse to categorize, but several characteristics certainly pervaded: patriotism, religious faith, distrust of the media, opposition to Marxism and globalism, and of course admiration for Trump.
I watched the speech among the crowd of flag-waving, patriotic Americans, and I did not hear a single word of incitement to violence on the part of the president. I challenge anyone jumping on the bandwagon to destroy President Trump to quote from his recorded speech and point out where he directs the crowd to do anything other than protest, as is our constitutional right and civic duty.
Unfortunately, the protest became violent. A police officer was killed, others were injured, and an unarmed American woman who had served her country for half her life was shot at close range. Ironically, a woman who had undoubtedly put her life in harm’s way for the democratic rights of people in other countries was killed for an excess of zeal in her own country. Shamefully, to the press and most politicians, she “got what she deserved.”
There is still a lot that we do not know about the people behind the violence and their motives. Incontrovertible evidence has now surfaced that there were some far-left activists posing as journalists and that they were among the most violent of the protesters. They have gone on CNN to speak about what they saw, but of course the media did not question their motives and labeled all violent actors as Trump protesters.
This was something they carefully avoided with Biden and Harris during the BLM riots.
But none of that matters to those who hate the president, whether on the right or the left. Trump is to blame for the violence. Those who committed it are his followers (even if we already know that some of them were not). Anyone who dares to question the narrative is just a member of the Trump cult.
In one breathless video after another, the leftist press has depicted the invasion of the Capitol as a day of “unprecedented violence.” But was it really unprecedented? Were these breathless reporters on a deserted island all of last summer? In Minneapolis alone, 1,500 buildings were burned down this summer. That’s just one city.
In this case, no conservative is denying that those responsible for violence and destruction of property should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. What we are pointing out is the oppressive double-standard in the American justice system, where almost no one gets prosecuted for injuring 60 secret service agents at the White House, or the burning of 1,500 buildings, or the looting and ransacking of one American city after another, or the weeks-long assault of police precincts, or laying siege to federal courthouses. All of this debilitates the people’s faith in a justice system and results in the loss of the rule of law.
That is not whataboutism. That is cause and effect.
One may disagree and say Trump’s ill manners and character flaws are the cause of all of this frustration and subsequent violence, just as one can make the argument that the violence at the Capitol is “unprecedented.” But that is not a very convincing argument unless one’s mind is in a blur induced by social media or CNN.
When millions of Americans have lost their jobs because small businesses have been unnecessarily shut down by government edicts, while well-heeled corporations are doing better than ever, the claim that a protest at the Capitol is an existential threat to democracy simply rings hollow.
When perfectly reasonable inferences lead one to believe that there has been massive election fraud, people have a legitimate reason to protest vigorously.
When corporations that control the flow of information have put their thumb on the scale of the election and continue to censor views that they do not like, people should be angry.
Some people may follow President Trump out of a cult of personality. This happens with all cultural icons, and politicians are no exception. But it would be a great mistake to believe that the loyalty that Trump-supporters have for the president is born out of stupidity or blindness. No, it is a result of the fact that Trump has fought for all the big-ticket items that the forgotten class, the truly disenfranchised Americans, hold dear.
Most leaders, political, intellectual, and religious, abandon their respective constituencies for the love and admiration of the press and the elites on a regular basis. Trump, with all his arrogance and pride, never did that, and his base loves him for it despite all of his flaws.
For many Trump-haters on the right, their longed-for moment where Trump will get his comeuppance may have arrived. The problem is that the Benedict Option will not work with the BLM Marxists, because they do not want to live and let live. They will want your head, and the heads of your family members, on a pike, and when that moment comes, you will miss the street brawler from New York.
My hope is that after the heat of this election has passed, and after the anti-Trump fever has burned away, the intellectual conservatives will regain his sense and rejoin the fight, not by being secluded in a far-off community, but by fighting and praying at the heart of the battle, where the American patriot belongs.
