Rod Dreher's Blog, page 15

Why Doth The Bigot Resent?

Long day on the road from the Sihăstria Putnei monastery at the base of Romania’s Carpathian mountain range, just south of the Ukraine border. Am in Cluj tonight (or, for you Hungarians, Kolosvar). I have so much good news to tell you about what I saw and heard at the monastery, but I’m going to have to first transcribe these interviews. Too exhausted tonight. But you know I can’t let this next bit pass before I zonk out.

Four certified New York Times lefties are freaking out because Self cannot get on board the groomer train. Excerpts from “Four Opinion Writers On How The GOP Fringe Took Over American Politics” to follow, but first, isn’t it obvious that if any faction has “taken over American politics,” they might not be a fringe? On the other hand, trans people are a fairly tiny percentage of the US population, but thanks to having become religious icons for the elites (like, say, NYT opinion writers), they and their concerns have taken over American cultural politics. Anyway, look, here’s Ezra Klein’s framing:

And so if you can create the next culture-war kernel by passing a really brutal piece of legislation — and these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help — then you can catapult to the center of the national debate.

“Just ordinary kids who need some help” — yeah, help deceiving their parents, who would like to know that they consider themselves to be a different sex, and are lining themselves up to take hormones and maybe even get their breasts lopped off. Really amazing the way Ezra frames this — as if there were no possible valid objections to any of this.

Here’s Jane Coaston:

Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.

I guess I just keep thinking, like, I saw the movie “Mannequin” once when I was a kid. And that was it! It just did it. I saw Kim Cattrall and that was it, I was off to the races.

But I also think that for as much as Trump held a Pride flag and made some bones out of performatively not caring about the “debate” about L.G.B.T. rights and L.G.B.T. people, that’s not to say that people within the conservative caucus stopped caring. They are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell.

For people who are troubled by trans rights, and specifically the rights of trans kids, I think that you’re seeing a lot of people who are like, “Oh, you’re just being homophobic. You’re yelling at teachers who mention that they’re gay. You’re very upset about gay and lesbian kids, gay and lesbian parents.” That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.

I am sure she really believes this, but it’s cope. She’s trying to convince herself that people being pissed off about schools and Disney pushing trans propaganda onto kids is really about conservatives hating all gay people. Oh? Then how do you explain this?

Democrats nationwide support the Florida law by nearly a two-to-one majority. Not Republicans, Democrats. Earlier in the piece, Jamelle Bouie speculates that conservatives are living in a bubble by making an issue of this. Really, he said that, and again, I’m sure he believes it as strongly as Jane Coaston believes that this targeting of children is really about opposing all things gay (this, despite that fact that a strong majority of Americans favor same-sex marriage).

More from that fascinating insular conversation among four extremely out-of-touch liberal journalists:

Jane Coaston: It’s a secular fundamentalist religion. It’s QAnon, but they’ve taken — you don’t hear talk about traditional marriage anymore. You don’t hear talking about sincerely held religious beliefs. This is not the RFRA fight of 2015, 2016. This is QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.

Ezra Klein: Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else.

And so this is just one of the dimensions of it that I find really unnerving. Countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes in their political parties. And the Republican Party is so unbelievably bad at doing it. And every two years you think they can’t possibly be worse at not keeping out the worst elements of their party. And they show you, no, no, no, no, they’re going to bring those people into the core, too.

I mean, where do you even start with this? The “worst elements” of the Republican Party, according to Ezra Klein, are those who (checks notes) strenuously object to teaching kindergartners about gender fluidity. If you talk not to Four New York Times Opinion Writers, but rather to the first four randos you pull off the street in an non-coastal city (and in non-fashionable zip codes of coastal ones), and ask them on the transgender education in schools issue, which of the two parties is bringing in its “worst elements of their party into the core,” they’re going to say the Democrats, who cannot say no to whatever pervy thing the LGBT activists demand next.

This weirdo will probably be leading the Pledge of Allegiance to the rainbow flag at the 2024 Democratic National Convention:

Trans non-binary elementary teacher says 3 year olds are old enough to learn about gender identity, sexual orientation, and pronouns. These are the people teaching your kids. pic.twitter.com/fylE9jCQrF

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 10, 2022

One more from that conversation:

Jamelle Bouie: An example of this, pulling from what we’ve been talking about, is if Joe Biden were to, on Friday, give a national speech — from the Oval Office, from the Rose Garden, wherever, a big national set piece speech denouncing the Republican Party as embracing gross homophobia, this would be controversial. People would get upset. But it would seize the agenda. It would reorient things toward talking about these issues on ground that might be more favorable to Democrats. And I see no indication that Democratic leaders are even thinking in those terms.

Oh do it, Joe Biden, please do it! Please attack the GOP for being a bunch of gross homophobes for getting all up in the faces of activists, teachers, and educrats trying to come between parents and children on matters having to do with sex. If Democratic leaders are not thinking in those terms, it’s probably because they know better than Four New York Times Opinion Writers how the American people feel about this stuff.

This brings us to my friend David Brooks, with whom I disagree more than I wish I did, given how much I like and respect him. Here’s his latest essay, about the “global culture wars”. Excerpts:

The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.

First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.

Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the U.S., Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.

Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.

More:

Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.

With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.

Brooks cites this chart to show how very far much of Europe has grown from the rest of the world, culturally (obviously elite coastal US culture would be right up their on the woke peninsula):

Finally, this passage, which, I think, gives the author’s game away:

To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments in order to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

Read it all. I can’t speak about the right in France, India, Russia, Brazil, or Italy, but I do know something about both the Trumpian right in the US, and the Hungarian right … and I find Brooks’s analysis to be weirdly blind and self-serving (weirdly, six years after Donald Trump was elected). That these leaders give voice and force to resentment is true. But what Brooks doesn’t seem to consider is the possibility that the people who support them have good reason to resent what the people of Brooks’s professional and social class have done with their power. 

In Hungary, for example, part of the pro-Orban vote was resentment over the fact that European countries seek to punish Hungary economically for asserting its right to raise its children according to Hungarian values, not the values of the Davos class. Plus, Hungarians resent what they regard as the EU’s unjust violations of their sovereignty. Why shouldn’t they? I mean, if you don’t believe they have a case, that’s one thing, but to be befuddled because Hungarians don’t understand that Brussels wants what’s best for them is just weird at this point.

Similarly, Hungarians voted for Orban in part because they trusted him to do a better job keeping their country out of war with Russia than they did the opposition, which was falling all over itself to assure Brussels it would be on side. Does Brooks blame Hungarians for being resentful, hence their vote for the peace candidate, Viktor Orban? Should they have wanted to raise the risk of entering the war, because that’s what all right-thinking neoliberals and neoconservatives think is best for Hungary, and all of Europe?

Similarly in the US, the idea that Trump voters and their resentments are nothing more than an expression of false consciousness is bonkers. The liberal institutional elites — including woke capitalists — are moralistically browbeating half the country into accepting a neoracist ideology that stands to dispossess whites of their history, status, and job prospects, solely on the basis of their skin color — and they can’t figure out why people would resent that?! Their agents are busy in schools and in the corporate and creative suites at Disney, figuring out how to queer children under the noses of parents, and these five Times writers cannot grasp why anybody would resent the hell out of that?!

I’m sure all five of those writers would be perfectly fine with this below, given their social and professional class, and geographical location. What is really interesting is that they all genuinely seem to be unable to wrap their minds around the idea that more than a few Americans find it wildly inappropriate for first grade, and that those people are not evil or crazy:

.@BrookeSchool 1st grade teacher records an “identity share” zoom call with K-2 grades where he spoke about being trans.

“When babies are born the dr looks & makes a guess on whether the baby is a boy or girl. Sometimes the dr is wrong. If they are right, the baby is cisgender” pic.twitter.com/qYGFm9B7rF

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 10, 2022

Tonight, before getting to the hotel, we stopped for dinner at a Romanian family’s house. They had some neighbors over when we rolled up. We ended up talking about global politics and the culture war. These Romanians seethe over what they (correctly) regard as US cultural imperialism, and how they all feel shat on by the West. Yet one of them, a high school teacher, said that the younger generation in her school is becoming radicalized on sexual orientation and gender identity questions by social media. She has no idea how to stop it. Of course no one anywhere does. These people are watching their children and their culture taken away from them by technological and social forces that they can’t understand or stop. But they’re supposed to be okay with all of this, because the arc of history bends towards queerness, or something?

In San Antonio, a hippie couple — a biological male and a female-to-male transgender — had a baby when the biological woman (who has a beard) got pregnant. A local TV story did a piece on it. Here’s how it framed the story:

A Loving Journey. Here are the loving journeymen:

The Bearded Lady, Her Hippie Lover, And Their Baby — all normalized by a San Antonio TV station. The media never, ever explore any dissenting opinion from stories like this. Anybody in The New York Times newsroom who has the slightest twinge of objection to any of this has learned by now to keep his or her mouth shut, or prepare to be driven out of the office. Therefore, I’m pretty sure none of those NYT opinion journalists have much or even any significant contact with people who find this stuff repulsive. Their (our) judgments therefore strike them as inexplicable, aside from sheer bigotry.

I don’t think there is any reasoning with them anymore. Just resistance, via the vote and intense activism.

The post Why Doth The Bigot Resent? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The ‘Don’t Say Groomers’ Law

I just finished dinner in Romania with a group of Orthodox priests. It will never get old, watching the faces of people in this part of the world when I tell them what is now normal in American life, regarding sex, gender, and children. It will never get old because the fact that they are visibly shocked is a sign that there is still some hope that they can build defenses against the decadence that has consumed the United States.

Back in my room, I saw this story, sent to me by a friend. Excerpt:

The Illinois chapter of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has slated a gay porn star to be one of its speakers and presenters for its annual Pre-K and Kindergarten Conference. The ASCD claims to have 125,000 members in more than 100 countries with a primary focus on professional development for educators.

The Illinois ASCD has slated Tell Williams IV to be a presenter during the virtual conference scheduled for next week. Williams, who has become famous on the social media platform, TikTok, for posting videos talking about being a gay preschool teacher, also has a large following on an adult site called Onlyfans. Williams has nearly 200 explicit videos and photos of himself masturbating and showing his genitalia on that site and has actively posted new explicit content this year.

According to the Illinois ASCD website, “Mr. Williams will be discussing what real and effective self-care items look like, how we can better advocate for ourselves and our colleagues both in and out of the classroom, and ways we can help normalize and humanize teachers.”

After this exposé, the education group cancelled Tell Williams’s scheduled talk. Just another day in American Babylon, where groomers are going after kids. I don’t apologize for saying “groomers,” especially as someone on this site pointed out that we routinely talk about Islamic radicals “grooming” young people into embracing Islamic radicalism.

But if you call this filth out for what it is, you have to be prepared to be denounced by American elites, including media elites. Here’s part of a Christine Emba column in the Washington Post:

Psst. Have you heard? Mickey Mouse is a groomer.

So wrote American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher, one of many on the far right who lately have wielded accusations of pedophilia and child sex abuse to slime opponents (real or cartoon) of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, more broadly known as the “don’t say gay” bill.

This was part of an extended salvo: “About the term ‘groomers,’” Dreher later clarified, “it’s usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society.”

Ostensibly, then, this reckless deployment of a highly charged accusation is meant to keep kids safe from sexual confusion and harm. But the “groomer” discourse isn’t really about safety. It’s about control. And it could end up doing much more harm than good.

The “far right”? Mmm-hmm. The only people who could possibly object to this stuff are those not just on the right, but on the faaaaaaaar right, where the crazies and the wack jobs keep company. I wonder if Emba has consulted the polls on the Florida law, for example? One from the nonpartisan Public Opinion Strategies says:

I’m sure inside the Washington Post newsroom, and within Christine Emba’s social and professional circles, only “far right” people react strongly to this LGBT groomer education stuff. Her op-ed colleague Michael Gerson is more worked up that some GOP politicians are riding the emerging wave of anti-groomer populism than he is about the sexual exploitation of the imaginations of children by activist educators and the Walt Disney Company. Outside the bubble, though, it looks rather different. If you read her whole column, it’s whataboutism mixed with concern trolling — that is, expressing concern that calling them groomers is going to leave kids more vulnerable.

Right.

In other Groomer News:

New Jersey’s new sex curriculum points elementary students to watch videos from Amaze. This is one of their videos. They are telling 9 year olds to watch porn. Groomers. pic.twitter.com/9GrXYmJsNl

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 8, 2022

This polyamorous genderfluid witch is a preschool teacher in Florida. She’s so proud of herself that she discusses her gender and sexuality with 4 year olds pic.twitter.com/XOuuX6by4w

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 7, 2022

It’s really something that some top journalists are more worried about the language that people like me, Chris Rufo, Libs of Tik Tok, and others use to call this evil out than they are about this evil. As I wrote the other day, twenty years ago, in Massachusetts, the media, political, and judicial elites covered up for groomers who did their thing under state education auspices, teaching adolescents about fisting (shoving a hand up the rectum of a sexual partner for pleasure) and other sick practices as part of LGBT-friendly sex ed. Now it’s the whole nation. Remember your Law of Merited Impossibility: it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

The post The ‘Don’t Say Groomers’ Law appeared first on The American Conservative.

Bucharest & Bukovina

Hello from a monastery guesthouse in Bukovina, only a couple of miles south of the Ukraine border. This is the heart of Romania’s Orthodox monastery country. I just settled into my room, and am drinking a glass of house wine made by the monks at this particular monastery (I’m skipping dinner — just too tired to eat).

On the all-day drive up from Bucharest, my friends and I stopped at the Voronet monastery, a jewel of a church built in 1488, and the most famous of the painted monasteries of the Bukovina province. It is jaw-dropping. Here is the external wall with a fresco depicting the Last Judgment:

Notice how the Last Judgment wall has withstood over six centuries of weather, but not the adjoining wall.

Here is a look at another exterior wall of the monastery. They call this intense blue “Voronet blue”:

We motored onward north, hoping to make it before sundown to the monastery where we are going to spend the weekend. We pulled in just past dusk. The night air here at the edge of the Carpathians is clean and cool. Catalin and Ninel, my traveling companions, put their bags in their room and went down for dinner at the monastery guesthouse, but I’m just too worn out. Catalin kindly brought me a glass of monkish wine from the dining room, to help me sleep. Before I drift off, I want to share a few things with you.

I am here doing research for my forthcoming book about the re-enchantment of the world. I will be interviewing Orthodox monks and startsi about spiritual practices that can make us more attuned to God’s presence in the world. I flew on Thursday to Bucharest, where I gave a talk last night about The Benedict Option, which was recently published in Romania.

I had a number of meaningful conversations in Bucharest. One thing I learned was that Romania, though standing firm against Russia and with NATO over Ukraine, has a population that’s fiercely divided over the war. I learned that very many people are scared to death that the war will spill over onto Romanian territory. They also do not want to be dragged into war over Ukraine, a country that a lot of them resent as much as they do Russia. (“This war is like watching two coyotes fight over a piece of meat,” one man told me last night.) I knew none of this before coming here. It was explained to me that the Bukovina region, where I was headed the next day, used to extend into what is now southern Ukraine. Here is a current map of Bukovina; you can see that the Romania-Ukraine border bisects it:

Northern Bukovina was annexed in 1940 by the Soviet Union, and is now part of Ukraine. Many Romanians resent the hell out of this. You can read all about the region’s very complicated history here. It’s not my place to take sides, of course, but I tell you this to help you understand how damn complex this war is. Last night at the dinner table, I listened to the story of a professor whose father escaped Chernowitz/Chisinau, in northern Bukovina (today’s Ukraine), during World War II. He was a baby carried by his parents, who somehow eluded the Germans and the Russians and made their way to Bucharest. They thought they would be safe, but then in 1944, the Americans bombed the Romanian capital, given that the Romanian government was then fighting as a German ally. They killed thousands of civilians, mostly refugees from the northern Moldavian region. Here is a diary recollection of the aftermath:

“Yesterday afternoon I went to the neighbourhood of Grivita. From the railroad station to Basarab Boulevard, no house was left unscathed. The view was harrowing. They were still taking out the dead from under the rubble, three women were wailing, yanking their hair and rending their clothes, mourning a smouldering corpse freshly taken out of the rubble. It had rained in the morning, and the entire neighbourhood was smelling of mud, soot, burned wood. An atrocious, nightmarish view. I couldn’t get beyond Basarab, I went back home with a feeling of disgust, horror and powerlessness.”

My interlocutor’s father, as a baby, was caught up in the bombing. When one bomb landed in the back garden of the house where they were staying, the baby’s father took him into his arms and ran into the crater, figuring that the odds of a second bomb landing in the same place would be high. A second bomb landed next to them, and covered them in dirt — but they survived.

The man across the table telling me this is in his early 40s, and he did so with a tight smile. He is a professor; he knows that in war, these things happen. But he also knows that in war, innocent civilians die, sometimes at the hands of the people who think of themselves as the good guys. Of course in World War II, versus the Nazis, we Americans were the good guys. But we bombed Romania to help out our allies the Soviets, who, after winning the war, instituted Communist slavery in Romania. History is complicated.

Several Romanians over the day talked about how the Zelensky government in Kyiv oppressed the Romanian minority in Ukraine. I mentioned that Hungarians say the same thing about Zelensky with reference to the Hungarian ethnic minority in Ukraine. There is no love lost for the Ukrainian government in Hungary either. You may not know this, but Hungarians and Romanians tend to dislike each other too, over — what else? — land. Transylvania is now Romanian territory, but it was Hungarian until the 1920 Treaty of Trianon reshuffled the borders, shrinking Hungary (which was one of World War I’s losers) by two-thirds — including giving Transylvania to Romania. After discussing all the ethnic and historical resentments of the region, one of my Romanian interlocutors said, with a laugh, “You can see where the term ‘Balkanization’ comes from!”

Indeed. One thing I’ve observed in watching the Russia-Ukraine war from Hungary this spring is how utterly inadequate our American way of viewing these conflicts is. We can’t help ourselves. We have to simplify everything, and make every war about Good vs. Evil, drawing absolute lines despite having little real understanding about the peoples and the interests in play. Don’t misunderstand me here: I’m not at all defending Russia, which is in the wrong in this war. But come on, this war is deeply complicated; if you don’t believe me, find a random Hungarian or Romanian and engage them in conversation. Both of them hate the Russians … but that doesn’t mean that they love Ukrainians.

One thing I’ve heard consistently in the two days I’ve been in Romania, and having talked with a number of people, is how much they fear and resent the United States and woke culture, especially gender ideology. They feel that it is being forced on them, and that Americans have no respect at all for their culture and traditions, considering them to be backwards people who need to be tutored. What can I say? They’re right.

One man who came to my lecture last night told me afterward that he works in the Bucharest office of a Western multinational corporation, and that the corporation has become obsessed with “what you Americans call ‘wokeness’.” He said that some of his co-workers are aping progressive positions because they know that’s what you need to do to get ahead, but others, like him, stay silent because they are afraid of being outed as “bigots” by the persecutorial human resources culture. This man said to me, “You Americans are always talking about how we have to bring our whole selves to work, but there is no way that people like me could do that.” It’s true. We are humiliating these people, and they hate us for it. All I could tell him was that woke capitalism is doing it to us too.

Today on the drive to Bukovina, I played this clip of the Disney CEO Bob Chapek reciting his apology to Disney employees for not having been a sufficiently woke ally to the LGBT community:

NEW: Disney CEO Bob Chapek grovels, apologizes, and pledges to “be a better ally for the LGBTQ+ community.” He delegated the company’s moral authority to the “LGBTQIA+ Advisory Council” and now those internal activists have taken him as an ideological hostage. pic.twitter.com/efOSOmb47a

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) April 7, 2022

One of the guys in the car said, “This is exactly like the self-criticism sessions from the Communist era. We grew up with it. ‘Comrades, I promise to be more faithful to the Revolution.’”

I suggested he read Live Not By Lies, which is in Romanian. Immigrants to the US from Romania and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc see all this garbage, and know exactly what they’re looking at.

Along the way, I kept seeing lots of big, ugly concrete-block houses in various states of construction, most of them looking like they hadn’t been worked on in years, or, if finished, never lived in. Look:

I must have seen at least a hundred of these things, sticking out like sore thumbs in peasant villages. At least that last one looks lived in, but where on earth did the money for them come from? One of the guys in the car said that this part of the country, Moldavia, has been heavily depopulated of its working-age demographic, who have all moved to western Europe (within the EU), where they can make a lot more money. They have a habit of coming back to their hometowns and deciding that they really need to show off to the rest of the village that they’ve done well. The best way to do that is to build a big, gaudy house. But it’s often the case that they don’t have enough to finish the concrete-block monstrosity, which sits unused for years, decaying. Or, if they manage to finish it, they return home and find that village life is intolerable compared to what they left behind in western Europe. So they run back west, but can’t find a buyer for the tacky palace, so it just sits there unoccupied.

At first I laughed at these architectural grotesques, but after a while I started to see them as monuments to displacement and exile. One of the guys in the car told me that these places are actually pretty sad. The villages have been home for many generations to families, but nobody wants to stay there anymore, so young people either go to Bucharest, or abroad, where they really don’t know who they are anymore. The villages are becoming ghost towns.

As the sun set on a Friday night, and we drove through one of the towns, I asked the guys what there would be for a young person to do in this town tonight.

“Read Facebook. Play video games. Watch Tiktok. Read Twitter. Maybe go out to the bar to hang out with other bored members of your crowd,” said one of my friends.

If I were living there, I would do the same thing. Hell, I pretty much did the same thing in the 1980s, back home. The world is passing through our fingers.

Off to bed now. I have monks to interview tomorrow.

The post Bucharest & Bukovina appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jen Psaki, Groomers’ Spokeswoman

Watch this. Seriously, you have to watch this. This woman is speaking for the President of the United States:

Psaki Says Sex Reassignment Surgery, Puberty Blockers for Kids Is ‘Best Practice,’ States Preventing It Will Be Held Accountable pic.twitter.com/ZmboFDFIYx

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 7, 2022

Here is what she said:

Across the country, as we’ve talked about a bit in here, Republican elected officials are engaging in disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids for purely partisan political reasons.

Today, in Alabama, instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, Covid or addressing the country’s mental health crisis, Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target trans youths with tactics that threatens to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary life-saving health care for the kids they serve.

Just like the extreme government overreach we’ve seen in Texas, where politicians have sent state officials into the homes of loving parents to investigate them for abuse just to harass and intimidate the LGBTQI+ community, today’s vote in Alabama will only serve to harm kids. But Alabama’s lawmakers and other legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and the federal law.

To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is the best practice and potentially lifesaving. All of this begs an important question: What are these policies actually trying to solve for? LGBTQI+ people can’t be erased or forced back into any closets and kids across our nation should be allowed to be who they are without the threat that their parents or their doctor could be imprisoned simply for helping them and loving them.

President Biden has committed, in both words and actions, to fight for all Americans and will not hesitate to hold these states accountable.

Evil. This is evil. These people, the liberals and the baizuocracy (= the bureaucracies staffed with liberals), are waging total war on parents and their children. They run a system where, in many schools, they pump the children’s heads full of gender ideology, then, when the kids begin doubting their sexual identity, encourage them in their delusions, and work systematically to hide it from parents.

You might think I’m a broken record here, but this is exactly the kind of thing the Communists did: worked hard to separate children from their parents by discrediting parents in the eyes of their offspring. Here is a 1920 essay from the Bolshevik social revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Excerpts:

But even if housework disappears, you may argue, there are still the children to look after. But here too, the workers’ state will come to replace the family, society will gradually take upon itself all the tasks that before the revolution fell to the individual parents. Even before the revolution, the instruction of the child had ceased to be the duty of the parents. Once the children had attained school age the parents could breathe more freely, for they were no longer responsible for the intellectual development of their offspring. But there were still plenty of obligations to fulfil. There was still the matter of feeding the children, buying them shoes and clothes and seeing that they developed into skilled and honest workers able, when the time came, to earn their own living and feed and support their parents in old age. Few workers’ families however, were able to fulfil these obligations. Their low wages did not enable them to give the children enough to eat, while lack of free time prevented them from devoting the necessary attention to the education of the rising generation. The family is supposed to bring up the children, but in reality proletarian children grow up on the streets. Our forefathers knew some family life, but the children of the proletariat know none. Furthermore, the parents’ small income and the precarious position in which the family is placed financially often force the child to become an independent worker at scarcely ten years of age. And when children begin, to earn their own money they consider themselves their own masters, and the words and counsels of the parents are no longer law; the authority of the parents weakens, and obedience is at an end.

Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility.

More:

Communist society wants bright healthy children and strong, happy young people, free in their feelings and affections. In the name of equality, liberty and the comradely love of the new marriage we call upon the working and peasant men and women, to apply themselves courageously and with faith to the work of rebuilding human society, in order to render it more perfect, more just and more capable of ensuring the individual the happiness which he or she deserves. The red flag of the social revolution which flies above Russia and is now being hoisted aloft in other countries of the world proclaim the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.

They never change, the progressives. Never. Do you see now why I wrote Live Not By Lies? The surge towards soft totalitarianism is gathering force. Some conservatives have called these kinds of liberals “groomers,” appropriating the harsh pejorative that usually refers to those Pied Pipers trying to convince children to submit, eventually, to sexual exploitation. Do I find the term inappropriate? Not in the least. These people are sexually exploiting your child. Imagine that your kid is being introduced to these sick theories at school, without your knowledge, and that she decides that she is a boy. She tells her teacher, who reports it to the guidance counselor and principal, triggering a process by which the school actively deceives you and your spouse about what’s going on with your child.

The US government supports all of this. And last week, the Biden administration published medical care guidelines that broached the possibility that children could be removed from their families by the state for the sake of transitioning them.

Groomers? Oh hell yeah. I don’t care how loud they howl, this is purely evil, and ordinary people have got to wake up to what schools, the Walt Disney Company, the medical profession, the media, the Democratic Party, and the President of the United States are doing to children and families. They can howl all they want about how mean and demagogic we are for calling them groomers. I think of Hannah Arendt’s line: “One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Call them what they are: groomers. And come out to fight them with all you have. This is what they want to turn your daughter into:

The left, who can’t define the word woman, tells us that men can get their period. But we know the truth pic.twitter.com/b22YwLhDZh

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 8, 2022

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Won’t Get Fooled By Groomers Again?

This is making the rounds right now. Watch the clip:

Dennis Prager is mocked on Bill Maher when he describes the now mainstream leftist belief that “men can menstruate”

This is from Nov 2019.

Queer Theory and Critical Race theory ideology are so radical and incoherent, one risks looking crazy pointing them out. @wesyang pic.twitter.com/89cgalW9fD

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) April 6, 2022

Prager was absolutely right then, but you need to watch the clip to see how Maher and his guests think Prager is just a right-wing crackpot for saying this.

Now, it’s People magazine saying it.

It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying it.

It’s the ACLU saying it.

This is what is conventional liberal wisdom today:

 

This is how it always, always goes with the Left, on sex stuff. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility in action: “Men can’t menstruate, and when they can, you bigots will deserve it.”

I don’t know what else normies need to know about how the Left works before they realize that these people really, honest to God are groomers. Not necessarily “groomers” in the sense of “they all want to have sex with kids,” but groomers in the sense that they want to get inside the heads of children and screw their minds up completely about sex and gender.

The must-follow Twitter account 4thWaveNow — seriously, if you don’t follow it, you really must start — which tracks the gender madness from a critical point of view, points out that there are well-funded organizations that have been mainstreaming this stuff in schools for a long time — even giving advice for how to deceive parents:

Gender Spectrum on how to deceive parents.“Change attendance sheets to reflect student’s chosen name, but not alter the entry in the district’s student information system so any written communication w/ the parents uses the student’s name as reflected on the birth certificate.” https://t.co/wt4YMjXcN1 pic.twitter.com/ERCFJeeoBY

— 4thWaveNow (@4th_WaveNow) April 6, 2022

Twenty-two years ago — yes, that far back — I wrote a freelance piece for the Weekly Standard about “Fistgate”. It was about Brian Camenker and Scott Whiteman, two Massachusetts fathers who got into a world of trouble simply for trying to expose what LGBT activists were doing in public schools. Excerpts:

Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”) is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, “challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools.”

The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line–that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.

The event, backed by the state’s largest teachers’ union, included such workshops as “Ask the Transsexuals,” “Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not,” “The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum” (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), “From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum,” and “Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools,” in which the “Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented.”

Whiteman sat in on a “youth only, ages 14-21” workshop called “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class.” If “they” didn’t tell you about this stuff, it’s probably because “they” worried they’d be sent to jail.

The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher,an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they’ve had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.

“If that’s not sex, then the number of times I’ve had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!” squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: “Don’t be shy, honey, you can do it.”

Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about “fisting,” a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with,” and praised it for putting one “into an exploratory mode.”

Gaucher urged the teens to consult their “really hip” Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste “sweeter if people eat celery.” On and on like this the session went.

Camenker and Whiteman transcribed the tape and wrote a lengthy report for Massachusetts News, a conservative monthly. Then they announced that copies of the recorded sessions would be made available to state legislators and the local media. GLSEN threatened to sue them for violating Massachusetts’ wiretap laws and invading the privacy of the minors present at one workshop.

The tapes went out anyway and became a talk radio sensation. On May 19, state education chief David Driscoll canned Abels and Netherland and terminated Gaucher’s contract. But Driscoll also insisted that the controversial workshop was an aberration that shouldn’t be allowed to derail the entire program. Abels fumed to the press that the education department had known perfectly well what she had been doing for years and hadn’t cared until the tapes had surfaced. Camenker, ironically, agreed.

That same weekend, a day after the Boston Globe editorial page editorialized against Camenker and Whiteman, thousands of New England homosexual youths marched on the Massachusetts State House in a scheduled “pride” rally. David LaFontaine, chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, denounced Camenker and Whiteman: “The hatred we’ve heard on the radio and smeared across the TV in the last week … is the prejudice that simmers beneath the surface [which] has now bubbled up into the open in all of its ugliness.”

Then, state Superior Court judge Allan van Gestel issued a gag order prohibiting the Parents’ Rights Coalition, the news media, and the entire state legislature from disseminating or even discussing the tapes–though the conference had been in part sponsored by the state, and had been conducted by and attended by state employees. One might think lawmakers and the local media would have been outraged.

Not in Massachusetts. Nary a peep of protest issued from the legislature, and aside from a Boston Herald editorial denouncing the move, the news media were as silent as the grave. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a gay-rights supporter who is not most people’s idea of a conservative, took to the airwaves to blast the ruling and the establishment’s indifference to it.

“Sometimes civil libertarians become ambivalent when the First Amendment clashes with their liberal agenda. I’ve been fighting that for years,” Dershowitz told me. “It’s a situation where the political correctness of the Boston news media has caused it to take a back seat,” says Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate. “Of course, what will happen is, in some other case in which the news media will have more of an interest, where one of their darlings will get restrained, then suddenly they will find they’ve allowed a precedent to be set. It’s a perfect example of the news media not rushing in and protecting [free speech] no matter whose ox is being gored.”

The Boston media virtually blacked out the story. This is standard operating procedure for nearly all the US media: there is only one narrative allowed on any story having to do with LGBT. More:

“The whole idea that [gay activists] have been trying to suppress this has been helpful. Nobody listened to us beforehand,” says Whiteman. “Everybody thought we were making it up. The fact that they’re trying to cover it up proves that they have something to cover up. We’ve caught them red-handed.”

But will their expose ultimately make a difference? GLSEN/Boston boasts the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation. As goes Massachusetts, in time, so may go the rest of America. Camenker and Whiteman are on the front lines of a battle likely to spread to school districts from coast to coast, as the powerful GLSEN organization, with sponsorship money from American Airlines, Dockers Khakis, and Kodak, presses its radical agenda under the innocent-sounding guise of “safety,” “human rights,” and “suicide prevention.”

“That money goes down a rathole to fund gay clubs in schools, and gay rallies and conferences,” fumes Camenker. “None of the people who get the money are legitimate suicide prevention groups. They’re all these gay groups.”

GLSEN will be holding its annual leadership training conference next month in San Francisco, to be preceded by a two-day workshop teaching students and educators how to push the gay agenda in local schools–even at the kindergarten level–as a human rights issue. Books available from the GLSEN website include Queering Elementary Education and Preventing Prejudice, a collection of elementary-school lesson plans built around themes such as “What Is a Boy/Girl!” and “Freedom to Marry.”

Schools’ surreptitiously introducing this material to students, says Whiteman, “puts kids at risk and puts parents completely out of the loop with the sexual identities of their children. The schools take this elitist attitude that they know best.”

The point of this activist drive, warns Camenker, is to desensitize children to gay sex at a very young age and counteract moral instruction to the contrary given by their parents and religious leaders. If you protest, he warns, be prepared to be stone-walled and sneered at by school officials, smeared in the press, and denounced as a hatemonger and a bigot by gay activists.

Yet what choice is left to parents but to fight? “We’re facing an incredible evil here. It chills you to the bone,” says Camenker, an Orthodox Jew brought closer to his faith by this struggle. “The only way we’re not going to get run over is if people wake up to what’s happening to our children.”

“These people are bullies,” he continues. “People are afraid of them, afraid of being called homophobes. I don’t enjoy this, but this is America, and I’m not going to run away.”

I wonder what happened to these brave men. They were prophetic. They were on the front lines before anybody else. What they dealt with over two decades ago in Boston is now nationwide.

Are we still collectively afraid of them? Are we really willing to sacrifice our children to them, still? This activism only goes one way, you know. They lie to parents about what they want to do to kids, and then depend on allies in government and media to cover up for their exploitative lies. They have been doing this for at least twenty years, as the Boston story shows. They are not going to stop until they are made to stop by parents demanding strong action from elected representatives.

Don’t apologize for calling them “groomers”. That’s exactly what they are. The Democratic Party supports them to the hilt, and not (yet?) enough Republicans stand up to them. Woke Capitalism adores them. You will be laughed at by the Bill Mahers of the world, but you will be correct, as time will show.

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Your UFO & Paranormal Encounters

Hello from Bucharest, where I am going to be giving a public talk on Thursday night about The Benedict Option, which was published earlier this year in Romanian:

I don’t know any details about the talk, but I bet if you check the Facebook page of Contra Mundum, the publisher, you’ll find what you need.

I don’t have any time tonight for further blogging, but I wanted to throw something fun out there. The British tabloid The Sun got results from a Freedom of Information Act request of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released 1,500 pages of documents about UFOs to them. Excerpt:

The document features a “useful database” which listed the biological effects of UFO sightings on humans and their frequency, compiled US-based civilian research agency MUFON.

This includes bizarre occurrences such as “apparent abduction”, “unaccounted for pregnancy”, sexual encounters, experience of telepathy and perceived teleportation.

There have five reported sexual encounters between UFOs and humans, says the study.

The report – prepared for the DIA – goes on to say UFO sightings can leave witnesses injured suffering radiation burns, brain problems and damaged nerves.

It warns that such objects may be a “threat to United States interests”.

Humans have been found to have been injured from “exposures to anomalous vehicles, especially airborne and when in close proximity”, it reads.

The report noted that often these injuries are related to electromagnetic radiation – and links them to “energy related propulsion systems”.

It lists injuries such as heating and burn injuries from radiation, damage to brain, and the able to impact people’s nerves.

It doesn’t appear that the paper got anything that spectacular from the document haul (aside from further confirmation that the intelligence agencies have been taking UFOs very seriously for some time). Still, I like the question in this tweet:

Have you ever had a paranormal experience or a UFO experience/sighting or both ?. Myself have had both, paranormal incidents in my younger years and now in later life I’m having UFO sightings and some other strange occurrences.

— Adam read (@Adamrea23499297) April 4, 2022

I’ve had a few paranormal experiences — ghosts, mystical occurrences — all of which will be familiar to regular readers, so I won’t go into them again. The only UFO thing that ever happened to me was once in the summer of 1997, I was visiting my mom and dad in rural south Louisiana, and outside at night on the phone talking to my fiancée. I glanced up at the sky and saw a configuration of lights stationery in the sky, at a strange height. It’s hard for me to estimate altitude, but it seemed to be at about the lowest altitude that jetliners usually take when they are cruising. I assumed it must be an airplane of some sort, though the configuration of lights didn’t look like a plane. But it remained stationery for a few minutes. It simply did not move. It hovered. It was far too high and bright to have been a helicopter. It gave me the creeps, and scared my fiancée, who asked me to please go back inside. Which I did.

So, no big whoop — but I still have no idea what that thing was. I have not been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

How about you? Any UFO encounters, or paranormal experiences? Let’s start a thread. Be as detailed as you can. Did these things change you in any way — that is, your way of seeing the world?

(Please somebody have a Bigfoot story!)

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Trans-forming Society

You see the new Adidas pseudo-men playing in women’s athletics ad? It’s in heavy rotation on ESPN right now:

It’s so brave that men use their biological privilege to dominate and destroy women’s sports — and woke capitalists like Adidas praise it.

This is how it works. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

These powerful corporations are part of the well-developed network of cultural elites who are pushing hard to make transgenderism normal. Even the Walt Disney Company, once beloved and trusted by American families, has become toxic.

This informal network includes some prominent religious leaders:

Becoming transgender is “a sacred journey of becoming whole”, the former Archbishop of Canterbury has said, as the Government’s U-turn on conversion therapy sparked a boycott of its LGBT conference.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth made the comments in a letter to the Prime Minister, along with a number of other senior bishops urging him to ban trans, as well as gay, conversion therapy, calling it “a wrong-hearted notion of care”.

He said: “Conversion to Christianity is the event or process by which a person responds joyfully to the glorious embrace of the eternally loving and ever-merciful God.

“It has nothing to do with so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – pressure put by one person on another to fit their expectations; the attempt to induce vulnerable and isolated people to deny who they truly are.

“To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole: precious, honoured and loved, by yourself, by others and by God.”

Lord Williams signed the open letter to Boris Johnson, along with senior clergy, including the Bishop of Buckingham, the Right Rev Dr Alan Wilson; the Very Rev Dr David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s; the Very Rev Andrew Nunn, the Dean of Southwark; and the Very Rev Rogers Govender, the Dean of Manchester.

In the open letter, obtained by ITV News, they added: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.

“It is a wrong-hearted notion of care and a wrong-headed understanding of conversion. Every church should be a safe space that affirms people in being who they are, without fear of judgment. We see no justification for the ban on so-called ‘conversion therapy’ excluding trans people.”

If the former Archbishop of Canterbury and these other senior Church of England clerics have their way, to try to talk someone out of going on this “sacred journey” to lopping off their breasts or their todgers in an effort to change their sex would be against the law. Think about that.

And look at these top US government bureaucrats:

A handful of Biden administration federal agencies were unable to define the meaning of the word “woman” – in some cases, even in relation to their own uses of terms such as “women’s health” – when asked by Fox News Digital.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons were all contacted by Fox News Digital requesting a definition of “woman.” None of the agencies provided their definition or criteria for an individual to be categorized as a “woman,” despite each boasting entire initiatives aimed at helping women and DOJ declined to comment.

Fox News Digital also reached out to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to request the organization’s definition of “woman” in relation to terms such as “women’s rights” and “women’s healthcare.” NIH describes itself as “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation,” and its purpose as “[seeking] fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems.”

You could say that these agencies did not want to participate in what they regarded as a “gotcha” question from Fox News. Maybe that’s so. But I bet you would get the same kind of response if these agency heads were brought before Congress and asked the question directly.

Madness. It’s all madness. If you had said to just about anybody in 1965 that in just over fifty years, a former Archbishop of Canterbury would be describing sex change as a “sacred journey,” and lobbying the British government for legislation that would prevent attempts to dissuade people from undertaking this pilgrimage, they would have assumed that by then, British society would have lost its moral minds. But now this is barely noticeable.

It is going to a very, very bad place. The destruction of the gender binary, and of the legitimation of total gender fluidity, entails the total destruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. Back in 2016, Camille Paglia (of all people!) called medical intervention to change a minor’s sex is “child abuse, a crime against humanity”. She goes on to say that from her historical studies, she observes that “the move towards androgyny” occurs in late phases of culture — that is, before “heroic masculinity” comes roaring back, in destructive ways. She says that the emergence of androgyny is a sign that civilization no longer believes in itself. Watch:

We are going to see this. Most people alive today are going to see this happen. If, or when, we have a major economic collapse, the decadence that has permeated the structures and institutions of Western civilization will be violently borne away. At this point, I doubt very much it can be stopped. Better to prepare yourself and your house to survive it. Those useless Church of England clerics, and simply-divines like Germany’s Cardinal Marx — run the other way, because they are lost, and will take you down with them.

The eminent Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman was not a religious man, but in his 1940s classic Family And Civilization, anticipated Paglia’s claim — this, from his study of history:

We have entered a period of demoralization comparable to the periods when both Greece and Rome turned from growth to decay. Divorce, premarital sex experiences, sex promiscuity, homosexuality, versatility in sex, birth control carried to excess, spread of birth control to every segment of the population, positive antagonism to parenthood, clandestine marriage, migratory divorce, marriage for sex alone, contempt for familism, even in the so-called educated circles —  all are increasing rapidly. In spite of our virtuous words, and without even the intellectual honesty of the Greeks and Romans, we have gone as far as they, and it would appear that we are going even farther.

Zimmerman said these things were not causes of advanced decline, but symptoms of it. The cause was a collapse in the ideal of the family, and the abandonment of familism, the belief that the family is a sacred institution upon which a strong society is built.

In the 1940s, surveying the social science evidence, he concluded that we in the modern West were further advanced than even Greece and Rome as those societies were declining towards collapse. Adidas, the Church of England clerics, government bureaucrats, and all those among the elites who are pushing transgenderism — they are doing nothing more than accelerating the process.

The Benedict Option has just been published in Romania. I’m leaving for Bucharest on Wednesday, and will be giving a lecture there in the evening on the book. A lot has happened in the five years since it was first published. Maybe the book will give the Romanian Christians the information they need to prepare themselves for what is rapidly coming to them. Maybe those Christians in the West who dismissed the book at first, or who have not yet read it, will find it helpful in the face of the undeniable.

UPDATE: Duke Divinity School is one of the most prestigious in the United States. And now, obviously, poison:

Praying to “the Great Queer One,” students at United Methodist-affiliated Duke Divinity School proclaimed God’s acceptance and support for LGBTQ relationships in a Pride worship service March 22.

Divinity Pride, a student group affirming the “dignity, faithfulness, and strength of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and gender/sexuality non-conforming Christians,” sponsored the worship service.

“Strange one, fabulous one, fluid, and ever-becoming one,” prayed second-year Master of Divinity (M.Div) student Caroline Camp in opening the service. She stated that God is “mother, father, and parent” and “drag queen, and transman, and gender-fluid.”

If Duke Divinity were actually a Christian institution, it would expel these heretics, so they could continue their “sacred journey” elsewhere. But, hey, they’re really worshiping Baphomet. Those with eyes to see, see.

And read this infuriating story about how a mom had to go to war with her emotionally disturbed daughter’s school district in a futile effort to get them to stop encouraging her transition. Excerpt:

The school principal told her that he couldn’t control how the students referred to her daughter. “And he said, ‘Well, there are some teachers who would like to respect your daughter’s wishes.’ And I said, ‘While I appreciate that they want to do that, that’s not my expectation at this point. This is a medical condition. I have control over what sort of medical care my child gets. And she will not be referred to with a different name or gender at school,’” Theresa said.

The principal suggested that Theresa hold her daughter out of school another day. A day later, she said, he called back. School leaders would not abide by Theresa’s expectations. Instead, they would honor her daughter’s wishes to be called Leo and a boy.

Theresa said she was told that if the school district didn’t identify her daughter by the name and pronouns of her choice, they could be accused of discrimination because of new Biden-administration executive orders about gender and sex.

The child went to a different school, and is fine now. Notice, though, that everyone from the government to the school administration — the authorities who ought to be on the side of parents — conspired to ruin the child’s mind and negate parental authority. This is why we should understand the trans-formation of society as an attack on the family, and familism.

The post Trans-forming Society appeared first on The American Conservative.

Are There Any American Orbans?

More Hungarian election fallout. Here’s a great analysis by Jeremy Carl, who spent five weeks in Budapest this spring on a research fellowship. Excerpts:

Simply put, Orbán offers the most prominent example in the world of a conservative politician who has unapologetically and effectively used the state for right-wing ends, something that the American Right has been almost wholly ineffective at accomplishing, and is often unsure it even wants to try.

While much of the GOP establishment (and establishment think tanks) talk airily of our high principles, the Left has run roughshod over us, subjecting traditionalist Americans to indignities that could never even have been imagined by our forefathers. If we are being brutally honest, we could not have imagined these indignities ourselves just 10 or 20 years ago.

As a result of his success, the Left and our left-wing media brands Orbán a “strongman” a “dictator” and an “authoritarian,” though Hungary regularly conducts free elections and Orbán is subject to scathing criticisms in many press outlets freely available in Hungary. The lists of the so-called abuses by Orbán from the Left are amusing because, for the most part, they amount to left-wing frustrations with being unable to achieve the things they have carried out so effectively elsewhere.

He points out, correctly, that what the Left sees as Orban’s hatred for democracy is just restoring some semblance of ideological balance to public life in a country whose cultural institutions and media were thoroughly dominated by the Left. When I was here last summer, I asked a public media reporter about the charge that Orban unfairly used his power to force conservatism on the media. He told me that if not for Orban, there would be zero chance that any conservative voices would ever be heard in media that is paid for by the Hungarian taxpayer. In his excellent election wrap, National Review‘s John Fund, who is definitely not an Orban fan, said:

Critics claim that coverage of the election campaign was dominated by a pliant media. Tortoise Media claims “80 per cent of (Hungary’s media) is controlled by the state or oligarchs close to Orban.” But opposition figures privately admitted to me that when one measures media influence by the size of its audience rather than the number of outlets, the opposition had plenty of access.

This is something you never see in the Western media reports: the anti-Orban media reach far more people than the pro-Orban media do. American liberals pull the same stunt when they act like the existence of Fox News somehow matches the media firepower of all three networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and other national media.

More Carl:

Second, Orbán ran and won on an explicitly realist foreign policy that refuses to fall prey to the Ukraine mania that has afflicted so many other right-wing politicians in the West. Despite the fact that Hungary has welcomed 140,000 Ukrainian refugees, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had explicitly attacked Orbán for failing to go all-in with the most aggressive sanctions and military assistance to the Ukrainians. Orbán, in contrast, has counseled what he calls “strategic patience,” and accused his opposition of attempting to foment war with reckless rhetoric. Hungary has a long history with Russia, most notoriously a 1956 invasion by the Soviets that crushed democratizing forces. Orbán seems to have won heavily on the Ukraine issue, with voters appreciating his singular focus on Hungarian interests over and above the airy and simplified pieties of many U.S. and Western European leaders.

Today I received an e-mail from a Romanian friend I expect to see later this week on my trip there. He said he hopes I don’t get drawn into any conversations about the war when I’m in the country giving speeches. He wrote that there is a big gap between elites (identified by him as politicians, journalists, and social media influences) and the general public. The elites are promoting escalation of the conflicts, but the Romanian public is against amping up Romanian involvement. “We don’t want to go to World War III for Zelensky and NATO,” he said. He explained that Romanians favor NATO, but they are against “this hysteria, emotional idealism, and warmongering disguised as moral righteousness that we see in the media so much nowadays, that can lead to uncontrolled escalation.”

This is pretty much where the Hungarian public is — and Orban represents that. I talked to a Hungarian friend who knows Romania, and relayed my Romanian friend’s comments. Yes, he said, that’s how it is in Romania, “moreso than in Hungary. The Romanians are far more vulnerable to Russian military attack than we are.”

Carl goes on:

Fourth, Orbán unashamedly focused on delivering for his voters, overwhelmingly Hungary’s middle-class families and small-town denizens. Hungary’s pro-family policy is almost certainly the most aggressive of any advanced economy in at least a half-century, providing continuous benefits for Hungarian families far beyond those even contemplated in the United States. Family has been at the center of Orbán’s public policy efforts—not just talking a big game about social conservatism, but actually delivering it.

Further, a proposed child protection law appeared on the ballot at the same time as the parliamentary election, helping to drive more conservative voters to the polls. This proposed law, which has played out almost identically to Florida’s Parental Rights Education Bill in the United States, caused a firestorm of criticism and threats from Brussels—showing that the right to promote sodomy and transgenderism is more important to many European leaders than the Democratic rights of Hungarian voters to protect their children from adult-oriented content.

More:

In sum, Orbán won overwhelmingly with a campaign and record that was conservative, nationalist, anti-immigration, pro-traditional family, and firmly against military intervention in Ukraine. There is a lesson there for the GOP, should they be inclined to learn it.

Read all of Carl’s piece. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in the English language media about Hungary’s election.

I was hanging out talking to some Western reporters who are still in the city, but headed home soon, including TAC’s Bradley Devlin. They had not been to Hungary before, but told me that in their week or so here, they kept hearing from Hungarians that the Western media simply doesn’t know how to cover Hungary. That’s not a big surprise to me; the American media doesn’t really know how to cover Alabama. They struggle mightily with anything that doesn’t confirm their prior beliefs — such as, the concept that Hungarians really like Viktor Orban and his policies, and really don’t like the Left.

I was reminded today by a Hungarian friend of just how bad Peter Marki-Zay was as a candidate. Marki-Zay actually told this joke on a Facebook video (in Hungarian here). “Well, there’s a cute joke,” said the opposition standard bearer. “When they ask Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, according to the joke, what it’s like to be blind, he says, ‘Well, it’s better than being black.'”

This is the kind of thing that made people think that Marki-Zay is not fit to run the country. But did you read about that in the US media coverage? No, you read about how the “pro-Putin” Orban won re-election — this, even though recently retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel was every bit as pro-Putin as Orban, and maybe even more. Germany has been Russia’s most important partner in Europe, with the past two German chancellors pushing for the Nordstream pipelines. Orban and Hungary are getting all the blame for not wanting to sanction Russia on energy, but Germany is the big kahuna on this policy. But it’s easier to blame Orban.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long:

The European Union executive started a new disciplinary procedure against Hungary on Tuesday in a step that could lead to freezing funding for Prime Minister Viktor Orban for undercutting liberal democratic rights.

Hungarians cannot be trusted with the ballot. The European Union must make them pay for not voting the correct way. This is called democracy.

Dear France, nice EU funding you have there. Sure would be a shame if you voted Marine Le Pen in as your next president.

UPDATE.2: My friend Gergely Szilvay, a Budapest journalist, shoots down the shibboleth about Orban controlling the media. Excerpt:

What, then, is the media market in Hungary, a country of 10 million?

According to media research, 6.8 million Hungarians turn to conservative outlets for information, 6.7 million to liberal sources, with 6 million reading both. Most major media companies across the political spectrum are profitable. It wasn’t always this way. When Orban and his conservative government came to power in 2010, there were 33 left-liberal media outlets, mostly foreign-owned. Now, there are 43, mostly Hungarian-owned. There are also five new, right-leaning, anti-Orban outlets. Together, they represent 45% growth of the anti-government, politically relevant media on Orban’s watch.

Is that what a government takeover of the media looks like?

All top media outlets are liberal. Out of 29 left-wing and 11 conservative online news portals, three liberal outlets — 24.hu, Telex, 444 — consistently rank highest in readership. There are three conservative and two liberal TV stations. As elsewhere in Europe, there is a major state-owned Hungarian television network, the MTVA (“Royal TV”), run by government appointees. The left-leaning RTL Klub TV attracts the most viewers. In radio news, five stations lean conservative, four are liberal, and one centrist. In print, there are five conservative and three liberal dailies on offer — left-leaning Blikk and Nepszava have the highest readership. Among the weeklies, out of four conservative and six liberal titles, anti-government HVG and Magyar Narancs enjoy the biggest audience.

Despite the Hungarian media market’s dynamic growth over the last 12 years, there have been losers, too. Before 2010, the ownership was predominantly foreign, mostly German. Following a flurry of domestic acquisitions, media companies are now 95% Hungarian-owned, although the 5% remaining in foreign hands represent one-third of the market by income and profit.

Ironically, the government-takeover-of-the-media narrative comes not from the oppressed Hungarians, but from foreign-owned outlets whose control over Hungary’s media market was successfully challenged by local players after Orban’s Fidesz came to power.

The result? In Hungary, you can criticize migration, Islam, or the LGBT-movement; you can question liberal pieties. And/or you can openly and loudly oppose the conservative government.

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The Threats In Tucker’s Brain

I find myself really irritated this morning by the Washington Monthly article about the supposed threat to liberalism posed by me and other “postliberal” thinkers. Aside from the errors of fact in the essay, it doesn’t grapple with the substance of our general critique. Contrary to the essay’s claim, I don’t consider myself postliberal in the sense that I believe in a system of government other than classical liberalism. One major difference between me and, say, the Catholic integralists, is that I cannot envision a system that is preferable to classical liberalism given the diversity of the American population. I am “postliberal” in the sense that I believe liberalism, as it exists today, is incapable of responding to its failures. I’ll explain a bit more below.

Most of my critique of what liberalism has become has to do with the fact that the woke Left, which dominates all our institutions, has abandoned liberalism. I would be satisfied — not happy, exactly, but satisfied — if we lived in a liberal society. But we don’t. In fact, the woke Left has marched through our formerly liberal institutions wearing liberalism like a skin suit. We are fast moving beyond liberalism into a tyranny of wokeness that I call “soft totalitarianism.” The essay by Gabby Birenbaum and Philip Longman never once deals with the problems of contemporary classical liberalism, preferring instead to land superficial blows against postliberals.

For example:

Yet the title of Deneen’s book was Why Liberalism Failed, not Why Liberalism and Conservatism Together Failed. Rather than emphasize a fusion of left and right in common cause against the excesses of corporate monopolies and a captured administrative state, he railed against a strawman version of liberalism that reduced it to libertarianism.

But as any reader of Deneen’s book knows, he uses the term “liberalism” to mean not the politics of the Democratic Party, but rather classical liberalism, which has iterations on both the Left and the Right. In that book, Deneen doesn’t offer a replacement for classical liberalism, but only observes that it has failed because it has succeeded at “liberating” the individual from any unchosen obligations, and from any transcendent framework of meaning. This is a serious, fundamental crisis in liberal countries, but Birenbaum and Longman choose instead to dismiss the critique on its face as wrong, allegedly because Deneen is only going after the Left. Anybody who reads Patrick Deneen knows that he is very hard on the establishment Right too. He might be wrong in his assessment of classical liberalism’s failures, but this essay gives no indication that its authors have understood his critique.

Similarly, they dismiss The Benedict Option as merely recommending “monastic retreat”; I would bet my paycheck that neither has read the book. And they ignore my more recent book, Live Not By Lies, which extends and deepens my analysis of what liberal society has become under wokeness. If you’re going to hold me and my ideas up for ridicule, shouldn’t you at least know what you are criticizing?

The authors are baffled that us postliberals won’t work with the Left to address problems that we both identify, even as they cite examples of some of us doing exactly that! It’s a strange piece from a liberal Washington magazine, an essay that seems to exist solely to bolster its Democratic establishment readership’s conviction that there is something icky and frightening about postliberals. For example:

Since Rod Dreher wrote his first book questioning the Republicans’ inflated faith in markets, he has been on a journey that has included first recommending monastic retreat, then praising Putin’s use of propaganda to promote cultural and religious conservatism, and most recently traveling with Tucker Carlson to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and serving it up as a model of what the United States should be.

As I mentioned yesterday when I wrote about this, it’s just lazy. The Benedict Option recommends that Christians double down on deepening our roots in the faith, and build communities and institutions capable of being resilient in the face of the disintegrating forces of modern life. This is “monastic retreat”? I did not “travel with Tucker Carlson” to Hungary; I was already living here, and besides, I have been very clear that the US is a different society than Hungary, so we couldn’t and shouldn’t try to replicate Orban’s Hungary in America. Still, I have said that there are aspects of Viktor Orban’s political leadership that Republicans would do well to study and figure out how to adapt to American conditions. I can understand why this alarms American liberals, but it’s not the same thing as saying that we should recreate Hungary in North America. If the authors had read my stuff on Hungary beyond what someone said about it on Twitter, they would know this.

And the Putin thing is decontextualized slander. I praised Putin’s criticism of gender ideology and wokeness in the context of saying even our enemies understand how insane this stuff is. But the authors wanted to smear me with Putin poo, I guess.

Liberalism, it seems to me, only works within a culture in which people broadly share the same fundamental worldview. To sharpen the point, it seems to me that it can only really work within a culture that shares the Biblical (Judeo-Christian, if you prefer) idea of how the cosmos is constructed — and in particular, what human beings are. We are losing, and in some places have definitely lost, that, hence the crisis of liberalism. In the US, the neuralgic points of wokeness exist because the postliberal Left — again, which now controls elite discourse and institutions — conflict directly with what the West, informed by the Bible, believes human beings are.

The woke view of race relations, for example, depends on a reductionist conception of race and identity. The woke view on sex and gender identity depends on the belief that sexual desire is at the core of the human person’s identity, and that maleness and femaleness is entirely plastic, and can be changed via technology and legal fiat. Many Christians (and others) believe this is wrong — not merely morally, but scientifically and metaphysically. And on race, Martin Luther King-style liberalism is indeed a fulfillment of liberalism’s fundamental conception of the human person; what has displaced it is anti-Christian, and illiberal.

This is not a coincidence. As the (non-believing) English historian Tom Holland writes in his great book Dominion, most of the things that proper liberals cherish in terms of political and social values come from Christianity. Liberalism, with its human rights discourse and the rest, is a secularized form of Christianity. There is a reason that liberalism emerged in the Christian West, and nowhere else. Can we have liberalism without Christianity (or, if you prefer, a value system based on the Judeo-Christian tradition)? That is a question that we are now living out, and the answer seems to be negative. Liberalism without Christianity, and its anthropology (e.g., What is man? What is man’s purpose?) devolves into woke tyranny, which regards basic liberal principles like free speech, freedom of religion, and equal justice before the law as covers for evil.

The Washington Monthly essay reads like cope for establishment liberals who are afraid to face the profound weakness of their position. By far the greater threat to classical liberalism comes from the Left, not from a motley assortment of right-of-center thinkers who point to liberalism’s failures to serve the common good by creating conditions under which people within society can thrive. As the scholar Eric Kaufmann points out from his research, the prime threat to liberalism comes from Generation Z, which favors cancel culture over traditional liberties. 

How did that happen? What do classical liberals of the Left, like (presumably) Birenbaum and Longman, propose to do about it, to rescue liberalism from the young Jacobins? This, I submit, is by far the more urgent question than how to think about people like Tucker Carlson, Patrick Deneen, and Self. But it’s also a harder question for conventional liberals to answer.

It’s much easier to sling around lies, such as that Hungary has an established church (it does not), than to grapple with the substance of what postliberals are saying. I suppose the authors must have assumed that Hungary has an established church because Prime Minister Orban is forthrightly Christian, and governs by Christian principles. In fact, Hungary is roughly three-quarters Catholic, and one-quarter Reformed (Orban and Hungarian president Katalin Novak are both Reformed). An established church is impossible in Hungary, and from my perspective it’s a good thing — for the church! (This is another area where I diverge from the Catholic integralists.) In any case, Great Britain has an established church, feeble though it may be, but nobody claims that it’s not a liberal democracy. So what is the point of Birenbaum and Longman? Or are they just throwing what they can at the wall to see what sticks?

Old-fashioned Democratic liberalism is being dismantled in front of the eyes of Washington Monthly editors by leftist radicals that have taken over institutions, so naturally they turn their critical gaze to a group of outside thinkers on the Right as the real threat (“Should we also be terrified? Emphatically, yes!”). I suppose it’s much easier to go to Washington social events having declared yourself as opposed to Tucker Carlson and his minions than it is having laid into the illiberal Left, in the name of defending liberalism. But it’s not honest, and it does relatively little to defend classical liberalism.

It’s fair to criticize me for not offering a replacement for liberalism (though as I’ve said, I would be happy with old-fashioned classical liberalism), and the other postliberals for offering unrealistic options (e.g., Catholic integralism). But what do Longman and Birenbaum offer? Do they really believe the system as it exists today is liberal? Do they really find the woke-ification of formerly liberal institutions and communities to be no threat to liberalism? If so, then I would say they are badly out of touch. But if they do find wokeness, which Wesley Yang has rightly called the “successor ideology” to liberalism, to be a threat to liberalism, then they have more in common with postliberals of the Right than they seem to realize. Dealing with that would require them to work harder than merely taking cheap shots at postliberals.

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Viktor Orban Or Joe Biden?

Here’s a great short essay by the Romanian writer Titus Techera on Viktor Orban’s win in Hungary, and why so many Western liberals have this inexplicable, obsessive hatred for this small Central European country. In it, he quotes this Hillary Clinton tweet:

It’s always the same with these people: it’s only “democracy” when people vote the way they want them to. People did “go vote” — and they returned Orban and his Fidesz party to power by margins that even Fidesz did not expect (trust me on this — I was there last night at Fidesz HQ, talking to people as the numbers came in).

Here’s the response of Peter Marki-Zay, leader of the opposition, to Hillary’s tweet:

Titus points out that Marki-Zay didn’t seem to realize how unpopular American liberalism is in his home country. More:

Briefly put, this mayor of a small town has lost his own election & his grand coalition opposing FIDESZ has collapsed at the polls. Already, liberals are claiming the election was stolen… It’s not democracy, if the wrong people win, in short. Now, back to this small-time politician who’s popular online & in the capital, Budapest, but a complete bust in the rest of the country. He’s a Catholic, married, with seven children—also, he’s pro-LGBT & wants to introduce gay marriage into Hungary. A man of contradictions, to be sure, but also a good show of how our progressive liberalism corrupts souls & threatens the ruin of countries.

The problem with Hungarians, according to US and European elites, is that they are Europeans who want to be European, but who don’t want to be progressives. This is one form of diversity that liberals never, ever tolerate. In fact, same-sex couples in Hungary can have civil unions, but they can’t call it marriage. Moreover, Marki-Zay, whom the Western media loved to call a conservative Catholic with seven children, opposed the law forbidding the teaching of transgender ideology and the like to schoolchildren. Did you see any of that in the Western media’s reporting on Hungary and its election?

More Titus:

Stated in its fundamental terms, liberals see in Hungary the specter of right-wing politics, which they hoped they had banished generations back. So long as human beings have a sense of shame, there’s a basis for right-wing politics, however, so it must be dealt with in some drastic way.

Accordingly, liberals at various institutional levels, including through diplomacy, economics, &c., have behaved most shamelessly to Hungary, with a cruelty only fanaticism inspires &, in inspiring, not only excuses, but justifies. Poland is also treated in a similar manner, but somewhat less badly—it is the other Catholic, conservative gov’t in Europe. [Note: Hungary’s government is not Catholic; Orban is Reformed, as is the new president, Katalin Novak. But the government contains many Catholics. — RD]

I believe this is why conservatives, in Europe & America, have over the last decade gradually come around to embracing Hungary & PM Orban, treating him sometimes even as a champion. This is a sign of desperation, in a way, since, as I said, it’s a small country of no strategic importance. But that does inspire especially in Christians a certain hope—if this one PM can stand tall against so much hatred & abuse, if he can stay in office lo these twelve years in which so many careers have been made & unmade, so many strange, unpredicted political changes have taken place—the Trump election, Brexit, the Afghanistan catastrophe & retreat, & now war on the outskirts of the European continent—maybe there’s hope for Christians in politics.

Read it all. 

Titus is correct: Orban shows how a muscular right-wing populism can work, and how a conservative government can use state power to even the odds with the Left, which controls all cultural power. Not everything that the Hungarian government does can or should be done in America, but as I keep saying, there are lessons to be learned here. I’ve been told that the Florida law banning gender ideology and sexuality talk in public schools below the age of ten was inspired by the far broader and more restrictive Hungarian law.

Republican governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan are apoplectic over the Florida law, but you know what? It’s popular nationwide — even with Biden voters!

Orban is working with a more culturally conservative electorate than we have in the US, but he shows that if you are a conviction politician, you can run on common-sense culture war issues, against the elites of the Cathedral, and win. In a post earlier today, I talked about a conversation I had this afternoon with a taxi driver who supports Orban, and said that he is sick and tired of being called a homophobe, transphobe, and racist because he believes in things that were “normal” just yesterday.

Viktor Orban is his champion. We cultural conservatives in America have very few champions like Orban. Maybe that will change soon. Gov. DeSantis gives me hope.

In a tweet last night, I said that Viktor Orban is the leader of the West — or rather, that section of the West that remembers what the West is. What did I mean by that? A short explanation:

Orban believes that the West is a coherent civilization composed of a multitude of different peoples, united by a common religion. He thinks that civilization and its culture is worth defending. He believes that the best way to do so is to prize the sovereignty of its nations. He also believes that mass migration is a mortal threat to the existence of that civilization.Viktor Orban also believes that the religion of the Bible is true, and the basis of Western civilization. He believes that the traditional family is the bedrock of this and any civilization. Consequently, he believes that the state should be governed to help and defend the traditional family — not the interests of international capital, of liberal billionaires, of activist NGOs, or anybody else. He looks out across the West at what contemporary liberalism in power has done and is doing to civilization, and is determined to do everything he can to prevent his own country, Hungary, from falling into the same decadence.He recognizes that liberalism, as it has evolved in the West, has become its own solvent. This is the Patrick Deneen thesis, in Why Liberalism Failed: it failed because it succeeded so well in “liberating” the choosing individual from every unchosen obligation, and freeing him up to follow his desires. Yet Orban, who grew up under Communism, and who fought it as a student leader, has an acute appreciation of the totalitarian temptation inside contemporary liberalism. It’s no coincidence that his arch-opponent in Hungarian politics, former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, is a former Communist youth leader who became one of Hungary’s richest men in the 1990s and early 2000s, and who is on great terms with liberal leaders in the European Union.As an outsider who grew up in the country, he understands the power an unelected and unaccountable liberal elite controlling cultural institutions has over the direction of society — and is determined to use political power to keep liberal/progressive cultural power in check.He is a capitalist who understands that globalist capitalism is a threat to the integrity of the nation-state. This is why, in his first term, he worked hard to repatriate Hungarian industries that had been sold off to foreigners in the immediate aftermath of Communism. Orban understood that as long as Hungary’s main industries were in the hands of foreigners, the Hungarian people had less power over their own destiny.

That’s basically it. The man is committed to defending his own country as an outpost of traditional Western Christian civilization (though his government has been very generous to Jewish groups and organizations here, and is close to Israel). He is committed to doing what he can within the limits of politics to engender the rebirth of Christianity in Hungary, a faith that was left on its back after forty years of Communism. And he is firmly, implacably dedicated to fighting wokeness and gender ideology as threats to the integrity of the traditional family. This entails opposing woke capitalism too, and even plain old capitalism if it’s not in the family’s interest. Unlike Anglo-American conservatives, but like standard continental conservatives, he does not hesitate to use the state to defend what he considers to be the common good.

And he doesn’t apologize for himself or his beliefs. He holds them confidently, even pugnaciously. And, unlike Donald Trump, he reads books and is a master strategist of power, and how to use it.

I hope that those American conservatives who are so certain that Orban is a Putinoid devil, that Hungary is proto-fascist and in need of a Color Revolution, can trouble themselves, in the wake of Orban’s fourth landslide election, to come to Hungary and see for themselves what it’s like. God knows it’s not paradise; no country is. But it is not the country that our liberal media have told you it is. I’ll be going home at the end of this month, and anyway, the election is over, so the Hungary posting will fall off sharply here. I just want to offer a counter to the lies and propaganda US academic, media, and political elites are telling themselves and the world about what happened yesterday in Hungary. They never understood the Trump phenomenon, and they don’t get Orban either. Maybe it’s because they don’t understand themselves, and how not everybody in the world wants to be a Western liberal, and to have the things that they love, and that give them meaning in life — their country, its culture, their religion, their families — taken away from them.

Last week, the US president’s administration posted policy guidelines stating its view on what “gender-affirming care” for young people, including hormones and surgeries, and saying explicitly that child welfare authorities need to be thinking “potentially to the extent of removing children from their families and homes” for hormones and surgeries. If you don’t believe me, read this. It’s all there. 

You tell me: would you rather live in a society governed by Viktor Orban, or Joe Biden, who once called Orban a “thug”? Because if we on the Right don’t get an American version of Orban soon, it’s going to be Bidens (including Republican Bidens like Larry Hogan) all the way down to the society’s dissolution.

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