Rod Dreher's Blog, page 60

EU: Every Knee Shall Bow To The Pride Flag

How fanatical are European elites about LGBT? Look:

Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, said Hungary either “must leave” the EU or repeal the law, which bans TV shows and other content seen as championing LGBT lifestyles for the under-18s.

However, some eastern European governments refused to join 17 of the bloc’s 27 countries in a rare joint statement condemning a fellow member state.

The Hungarian government hit back against what it called the EU’s “shameful” interference in its domestic affairs.

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, said the law was about “defending the rights of the kids and the parents” and claimed to be a fighter for gay rights when Hungary was under communist rule.

“Homosexuality was punished, and I fought for their freedom and their rights,” he said as he arrived at the summit. “So I am defending the rights of the homosexual guys. But this law is not about that.”

More:

While the EU has no power to force a country to leave, this could be achieved “step by step”, Mr Rutte told reporters in Brussels. “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue,” he said.

“They must realise that they are either part of the European Union and this community of values, which means that in Hungary… no one can be discriminated against and [everyone] can feel free on grounds of sexuality, skin colour, gender whatever.”

Read it all. 

I wonder if Europe’s Muslims support the Hungarian law. If they do, is there no place for them in the European Union? Someone should ask the Dutch prime minister.

This is really extraordinary. A country that has been part of Europe for a thousand years is now regarded by other European leaders as unfit for their company because it bans a kind of sexualized material aimed at children — a ban that probably would have been supported by majorities in every European country forty or fifty years ago.

R.R. Reno reads the rainbow-hued handwriting on the wall:

The rainbow flag has taken on special significance in our regime. It is the flag of our globalist elites, symbolizing “diversity and inclusion,” principles that they regard as the source of their right to rule.

“Regime” is a technical term in political philosophy. It refers to the source of political authority. A regime defines essential matters about which “we all agree.” This agreement establishes the boundaries of legitimate political contestation, and it treats as traitors, rebels, and revolutionaries those who overstep and transgress.

America’s regime has long been that of a constitutional republic. We litigate, organize, and in some cases protest. Politicians exploit procedures to angle for advantage. Elections are contested. And all of this is supposed to operate under the limits imposed by our rule of law. But our regime is always more than constitutional provisions. It also concerns what counts as a legitimate opinion in public life, and what is beyond the pale. In this domain we have undergone regime change.

Yes, even the pro-life Catholic conservative Democratic governor of Louisiana takes a knee before the rainbow flag. He vetoed a bill that would have protected female athletes from trans competitors.

The regime change is even more pronounced in Europe. More:

So it’s not surprising that our elites have embraced the rainbow flag. It flutters over our universities and is featured in the windows of global corporations. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street—drivers of globalization and the breaking of boundaries—wave the pride flag.

The rainbow flag represents the regime that our globalized elites intend to sustain. As a regime, it treats dissent as illegitimate. Those who object to the rainbow flag and what it represents are not fellow citizens concerned that society cannot function without clear social markers of the differences between men and women. They are “haters” and “bigots.”

… America spawned the open-society consensus, which over time evolved into the open-border, open-trade, diversity and inclusion regime now pressed upon us as so self-evident and non-controversial that it is obligatory. Our country invented the rainbow flag and our embassies export it to the entire world. But populism bids fair to strengthen rather than weaken. It challenges the hegemony of our globalized elites and the regime they insist must determine public life. I predict that the time is coming, perhaps soon, when our elites will suppress the American flag and wave all the more insistently the rainbow substitute.

Read it all. 

The rainbow flag is the “Workers Of The World, Unite” sign from the Havel’s Greengrocer Myth. Viktor Orban is Havel’s greengrocer. American conservatives, pay attention!

This letter came today from a Hungarian reader:

I see you’ve written about our soccer woes, but I’m not sure the events surrounding the Germany-Hungary match reached you. It’s not just the whole “lighting up the stadium in rainbow colours” row. The German authorities behaved really shamefully:1, They didn’t let Hungarian consuls accompany the supporters to help mediate with local authorities2, Several groups of supporters were detained for hours, and only let go after the Hungarian government intervened (the Germans later explained that they received information about “problematic” groups infiltrating the Hungarians)3, I read on fora that even “regular guys”, so not the organized, black-clad supporter groups but normal, balding, 40-ish dads with kids were pushed to the wall and searched, multiple times4, A pitch invader with a rainbow flag ran into the field during the Hungarian national anthem5, Around the 80 minute mark, military police officers lined up in front of the Hungarian supporters, who weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. in a few minutes, the Germans equalized…This is truly outrageous. I don’t care about the rainbow lights, the rainbow flags, the Germans are entitled to their own opinion in these matters. I do think it’s misguided, as Orbán wasn’t even there, so who were they protesting? Whatever, let Germany virtue-signal themselves to death for all I care. But treating innocent supporters like this is insane.And then came Mark Rutte, who said publicly that we “must kneel” in the matter of the recent laws regarding homosexuality. These guys are not even trying to mask their efforts to dominate us into submission.But if they think that this will defeat Orbán, they are very much mistaken. On the contrary. Many Hungarians are on the fence about the government, but when they hear such words, they will surely turn out and vote for Orbán. Hungarians prefer someone who stands to someone who kneels.

So does this American.

UPDATE: The European Parliament has approved the Matic Report, which defines abortion as a human right, and essential to democracy. It has thereby defined all faithful Catholics and pro-lifers of any confession as a threat to democracy and human rights. More:

Speaking in the debate, Matić said: “Tomorrow is a great day for Europe and the entire progressive world. Tomorrow we decide on positioning Europe as a community that chooses to live in the 21st or the 17th century. Don’t let history remember us as the latter ones.”

Read the signs of the times.

UPDATE.2: From Le Parisien, this comment from French President Emmanuel Macron about the Hungarian law (I have translated it from the French):

“It’s a terrible setback. It is a cultural, civilizational battle that we must wage. We will not give in to it.”

Think about that. The president of the French Republic believes that defending the “right” of children to receive trans propaganda is a “civilizational” battle. And you know what? He’s right — just not for the reason he thinks. Understand, reader, what this means: this is an attack on Christianity and the traditional family. Macron believes that Christian teaching on sexuality and gender, and the right of a society to decide what is appropriate for its children to learn with regard to sex and gender, is incompatible with civilization.

This is a precursor to actual persecution of Christians. Päivi Räsänen awaits criminal trial in Finland for having tweeted a verse from Romans that criticized homosexuality, for something she wrote 15 years ago defending the Christian position on homosexuality, and for criticizing the Finnish Lutheran Church’s stance on Pride. This is the “cultural, civilizational battle” that power-holders like Emmanuel Macron are waging against Christians and other heretics.

UPDATE.3: Here is an op-ed by Judit Varga, the Hungarian justice minister, that Politico Europe refused to publish:

For almost 10 years, indisputable declarations about the death of Hungarian democracy have been published in the international press on a regular basis. And yet, despite crying wolf over and over again, there has never been any wolf – unfortunately, those crying out also never seem to tire of their deceit.

This time it is declared that Hungary adopted a discriminatory, homophobic law. No one cares that the declaration signed by several member states contains false allegations and falsifies the merit of the Hungarian law by suppressing essential parts thereof. No one cares to notice that the focus of the law is the protection of children from any kind of sexuality – hence it cannot, by definition, be discriminatory. The signatory member states did not even bother to ask for an official explanation from the Hungarian government before issuing their joint letter. Criticisms instead have generated an artificial conflict between the rights of children and the rights of LGBT. Is this really the embodiment of the loyal cooperation enshrined in the Treaties?

The new law focuses on guaranteeing the rights of parents and protecting minors from accessing content that may contradict the educational principles their parents chose to teach them until they become adults themselves. Until that time, however, all other actors – be it the state or schools – shall respect the rights of parents to decide on the sexual education of their children. This is what Hungary’s new law is about.

It should also be noted that Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union states that the right of parents to ensure the education and teaching of their children in conformity with their religious, philosophical and pedagogical convictions shall be respected, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of such freedom and rights.

The Hungarian law does not apply to the lives, sexual identity or practices of adults over the age of 18 — nor to how said adults wish to express or present themselves publicly.

Sexual orientation and gender identity fall under strict constitutional protection in Hungary. According to Article XV paragraph (2) of the Fundamental Law, Hungary shall guarantee fundamental rights to everyone without discrimination. Since 2004, the Equal Treatment Act has clearly stated in Article 1 that all persons in the territory of Hungary must be treated with the same respect and explicitly forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The provisions do not exclude any activity in class or organised otherwise for students relating to sexual culture, behaviour, development or orientation — as long as it does not promote or propagate such topics. It merely expects that only qualified experts depict these highly sensitive issues to the children in an age-appropriate and evidence-based manner, thus contributing to their proper upbringing with appropriate direction and guidance from their parents and legal guardians.

In Hungary, everybody is free to express their sexual identity as they see fit, as Hungarian legislation guarantees fundamental rights to the full extent for each minority. It is no contradiction that it also guarantees the right and obligation of parents to educate their children. There is nothing discriminatory about this.

This is not the first time, however, that the Europeanness of a Hungarian law has been interpreted by some who choose to prejudge without first requesting the facts. The political declaration condemning the new Hungarian law is shameful, not only because it runs against loyal cooperation but also because the declaration incorporates a biased political opinion without a previously conducted, impartial inquiry.

This is also not the first time that Hungarian legislation has been labelled as discriminatory. However, the truth is, implying that this law is anti-EU discriminates solely against those who, in line with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, adhere to their right for the education of children to be decided upon by their parents.

You see this over and over and over again in the US, regarding transgenderism and children: progressive school authorities claiming the “right” to form children’s sexual identity separate from the desires of their parents, and even secretly in contradiction to what their parents want (e.g., through formal policies of not telling parents when their child expresses, in school, a different gender identity from how they were born).

The post EU: Every Knee Shall Bow To The Pride Flag appeared first on The American Conservative.

Joe Biden Vs. The Catholic Bishops

Superb Ross Douthat column on the dilemma facing US Catholic bishops over the fact that the Catholic American president is fanatically supportive of facilitating the execution of unborn human life (a designation that, even if you don’t believe it, is nonetheless taught as a fact by the Catholic Church to which Joe Biden belongs). Excerpts:

Which points to the second problem — that a direct attempt at a communion ban will inevitably be interpreted as a partisan intervention, at a time when the partisan captivity of conservative Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, is a serious problem for the witness of the church.

By this I mean that however reasonable the bishops’ focus on abortion as a pre-eminent issue, in a polarized nation it created a situation where Republicans can seemingly get away with a vast accumulation of un-Catholic acts and policies and simple lies — many of them on display in Donald Trump’s administration, which was amply staffed with Catholics — and be perpetually forgiven because the Democrats support Roe. v. Wade. Which, in turn, makes a pro-life church seem complicit in right-wing evils — from the treatment of child migrants to the pardons for soldiers accused of war crimes to the months of mendacity about the 2020 election — in ways that undermine its credibility with the many Catholics who understandably did not cast a vote for Trump.

This is, I assume, the view of Pope Francis’ circle in Rome, which has been distinctly cool to the American bishops’ potential communion document. It’s a view that assumes that the church’s authority needs to be restored before it can be used, and that what Catholicism needs is a kind of strategic patience, in which — after so many scandals, so much disillusionment — religious faith and pastoral credibility are gradually renewed together.

That’s a reasonable concern. But Douthat is not done:

But the difficulty with that strategy is that there is another set of actors here: the Catholic Democratic politicians themselves, who are not simply holding steady with a kind of moderate pro-choice, “safe, legal and rare” politics, but rather following their party and the wider drift of liberalism in a more radical direction.

Douthat says — correctly, in my view — that Catholic politicians don’t even anguish, as Mario Cuomo once did, over the supposed conflict between their Catholic consciences and what they believe in politically. More:

So to return to my opening question: Is there is any evidence that the Catholic politicians of the left, the next generations of Joe Bidens, will stand firmly against any of these looming, more-than-just-abortion trends? I think the answer is no: There is just too little daylight now between secular utilitarianism and liberal Catholicism in its political and partisan form. Left-leaning Catholic intellectuals may write regretfully or critically about the commodification of human life or the spread of suicide, but on the evidence of the past few decades, Catholic Democratic politicians are likely to go along with whatever secular progress or individualism is supposed to require.

Thus the dilemma for the American Catholic bishops in the year 2021. There are many good reasons to avoid a political confrontation over communion and abortion right now, many reasons to expect that any effort will backfire or just fail.

But if, over the next few generations, we move into a world where the liberalism of Catholic politicians requires them to support not just abortion rights but a brave new world of human life manufactured, commodified, vivisected and casually snuffed out — well, then the bishops of tomorrow may look back on today and wish they’d found a way to say “enough.”

Read it all.

It’s not my church, but I believe the Catholic bishops should deny communion to Joe Biden. The slippery slope Douthat identifies is real. The difference between an ordinary Catholic supporting abortion, and a powerful politician doing it, is meaningful. In the 1950s, when Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans excommunicated Louisiana politicians trying to prevent Catholic schools from desegregating, he did not punish all Louisiana Catholics who supported segregation. He punished lawmakers who were deliberately trying to limit the liberty of their own church. And he was right to do so. He did not have the power to stop them from doing what they wanted to do, but he did have the power to withhold the Eucharist from them, and to excommunicate them from the Church. Segregation is a serious moral matter, but not nearly as morally serious as protecting the unborn (which is literally a matter of life and death).

I don’t know how Orthodox bishops have reacted in similar situations. I do know this: that in the Orthodox Church, when I’ve been traveling, I have been refused communion by priests who did not know me when I presented myself for communion. This is how I learned not to do so unless I have been able to speak to the priest before services to let them know that I am an Orthodox Christian who has had a recent confession. Generally speaking, Orthodox priests are zealous about what they call “guarding the chalice”. They do this because of their high view of what Holy Communion is — a view shared by Catholic teaching. They do this in part to protect the laity from receiving communion unworthily. You might not get this, but if you believe what Orthodoxy and Catholicism says about the Eucharist is true, then it should make logical sense to you.

Even slavery is not as serious a moral issue as abortion. If Joe Biden supported slavery as he supports abortion, the Catholic Church would not simply withhold the Eucharist from him, but also excommunicate him without a second thought.

The dilemma the Catholic bishops face comes down to this: is the Catholic Church meant to be a part of society, marching along with it, or is it meant to stand in the middle of the road, telling society to STOP? I think this question is at the heart of the division I observed among French Catholics when it came to my book The Benedict Option. Older Catholics there — Catholics my age (54) and older — tended to think the book was too radical. Younger Catholics, by contrast, understood it and accepted it. (This wasn’t universally true; I’m generalizing.) The difference, I think, has to do with how they see the Church’s relationship to the modern world. The older Catholics had not accepted that if the Catholic Church is true to itself, it will be hated by the modern world. The younger ones had, and had cast their lot with Catholicism, contra mundum.

It comes down to this: in this moment, is the Church (not just the Catholic Church) called to be prophetic, or therapeutic? I think that only by being prophetic — calling the world out — can it be therapeutic, and heal the world of its brokenness.

I’ve been in Slovakia this week, and that means I’m thinking a lot about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the prophetic Croatian priest who escaped Nazi agents in Zagreb and hid in a teaching position at the Catholic university here in Bratislava. He told his students that the Germans were going to lose the war, thank God, but that the Communists were going to be ruling their country when it was over — and that they had better prepare for persecution. The Slovak bishops chastised the priest for being too alarmist — but he was right. Those who listened to him laid the groundwork for the underground church, which became necessary in 1948, when the Communists took over. I dedicated Live Not By Lies to the memory of Father Kolakovic, because we are living in another Kolakovic Moment.

The world is on fire. We don’t have need of religious leaders trying to pretend like nothing is happening. Douthat is right: if the Catholic bishops won’t draw the line with Catholic politicians on the sanctity of human life here, where and when will they?

The post Joe Biden Vs. The Catholic Bishops appeared first on The American Conservative.

Winston Marshall Lives Not By Lies

Winston Marshall explains why he has left the popular band Mumford & Sons. Back in the spring, he tweeted congratulations to Andy Ngo for writing a book about antifa that he (Marshall) enjoyed. This unleashed unshirted hell onto Marshall and his bandmates. Marshall apologized at the time, but now regrets his apology, saying it in some way participates in the lie that there was something wrong with his opinion in the first place. Excerpt:

I have spent much time reflecting, reading and listening. The truth is that my commenting on a book that documents the extreme Far-Left and their activities is in no way an endorsement of the equally repugnant Far-Right. The truth is that reporting on extremism at the great risk of endangering oneself is unquestionably brave. I also feel that my previous apology in a small way participates in the lie that such extremism does not exist, or worse, is a force for good.

So why leave the band?

On the eve of his leaving to the West, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled ‘Live Not By Lies’. I have read it many times now since the incident at the start of March. It still profoundly stirs me.

“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”

For me to speak about what I’ve learnt to be such a controversial issue will inevitably bring my bandmates more trouble. My love, loyalty and accountability to them cannot permit that. I could remain and continue to self-censor but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning.

The only way forward for me is to leave the band. I hope in distancing myself from them I am able to speak my mind without them suffering the consequences. I leave with love in my heart and I wish those three boys nothing but the best. I have no doubt that their stars will shine long into the future. I will continue my work with Hong Kong Link Up and I look forward to new creative projects as well as speaking and writing on a variety of issues, challenging as they may be.

Read it all.  He’s really sacrificing something important to him to live in truth. Brave man. Much respect to him. When your time comes, be like Winston Marshall — who failed at first (by apologizing), but who has reclaimed his dignity and courage.

The post Winston Marshall Lives Not By Lies appeared first on The American Conservative.

EU Big Lies About Hungary LGBT Law

Here is European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen lying about the new Hungarian law:

This Hungarian bill is a shame.

It discriminates people on the basis of their sexual orientation & goes against the EU’s fundamental values.

We will not compromise.

I will use all the legal powers of @EU_Commission to ensure that the rights of all EU citizens are guaranteed. pic.twitter.com/RzWPpue0CD

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) June 23, 2021

Watch that short clip. She characterizes the law as being contrary to a European Union “where you are free to be who you want to be” and “where you are free to love who you want.” But the Hungarian law does not ban homosexuality or transgenderism! It only restricts the advocacy of homosexuality and transgenderism to children and minors. You can certainly oppose that if you wish, but that is a very different thing than opposing outlawing homosexuality or transgenderism. Ursula von der Leyen is equating protecting children from having drag queen story hour to tolerating in law adult homosexual love (as Hungarian law does, though it does not have same-sex marriage, only civil unions).

This is a smear. But it’s easier to get people angry at the Hungarian government if the EU Commission convinces them that the Hungarian law is aimed at oppressing all gays and transgenders across the board, instead of narrowly targeted at advocacy aimed at kids. Von Der Leyen is claiming that defending the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade and Drag Queen Story Hour is a matter of “fundamental human rights” — but not the right of parents to protect their children from this kind of advocacy.

That the president of the European Commission chooses to frame the conflict like this tells you all you need to know about how the EU bureaucracy regards the traditional family, and religious belief. A Hungarian government spokesman said today:

“We stand ready to debate the law with those who have spoken out against it,” he told the BBC on Tuesday. “The law is strictly about the protection of children. It says that for minors under 18, sexual education has to be appropriate and what we don’t want is the intrusion of so-called LGBTQ+ lobby NGOs and pressure groups walking into kindergartens and schools to explain to children why it’s a great idea to have hormone treatments and operations to change their sex before they’re 18. These are not acceptable practices.”

Why are these acceptable practices? More to the point, why aren’t Hungary’s democratically-elected lawmakers permitted to decide what is permitted for Hungarian children to receive? The contempt is breathtaking.

Here is a link to the actual text of the law, in Hungarian.

Most of the law deals with pedophilia and child pornography. I’ve run the relevant excerpts — that is, the parts that are controversial — through Google Translate. Here it is. I welcome correction from Hungarian speakers:

Act XLVIII of 2008 on the basic conditions and certain restrictions of economic advertising activity.

Section 8 [§ (4)] of the Act shall be replaced by the words “and such” shall be replaced by the words “further
the following paragraph 1a is inserted:

“1a. Advertising made available to persons under the age of 18 which promotes sexuality shall be prohibited.
self-serving or deviating from self-identity corresponding to gender of birth, gender and promotes and displays homosexuality. ”

So no advertising aimed at children that promotes transgenderism and homosexuality. It is unclear if this affects all advertising that might be seen by children (which is to say, all advertising), or just ads aimed at kids.

More:

In the child protection system, the state protects children according to their gender of birth
the right to self-identity. ”
(2) A Living. the following 6 / A. The following section is added:
„6 / A. §
In order to ensure the purposes and rights of the child contained in this Act, persons under the age of eighteen are prohibited pornographic as well as make content available that is sexually self-serving deviates from the identity corresponding to the sex of birth, the gender and promotes and displays homosexuality. ”

Translation: no material aimed at kids promoting gender ideology and homosexuality. I don’t know what “promotes and displays” means — that is, the limits of the law. Perhaps it is clearer in the Hungarian. My guess is that this refers specifically to material produced for an audience of children and minor teenagers.

More:

§ 11
(1) Act CXC of 2011 on National Public Education. Act [9. § (8) of the “In this in the case where the institution maintains “is replaced by” In this case, if maintainer of the institution ”.] (hereinafter: Nktv.) Section 9 is replaced by the following (12) the following paragraph is added:
”

(12) For students, information on sexual culture, sexuality, sexual orientation and special attention should be paid to the development of a session on sexual development XVI of the Basic Law. Article 1 (1). These occupations should not be aimed at birth gender identity deviation, gender reassignment, and homosexuality to promote it. ”

(2) The Nktv. Chapter 7 is replaced by the following 9 / A. The following section is added:

„9 / A. §
(1) An employee of the educational institution employed in his / her own teaching position and concluded with a school health care professional in the institution and with the institution a person or entity other than a public body with a cooperation agreement sexual culture, sexuality in the context of lessons or other activities for students, sexual orientation, sexual development, the harmful effects of drug use, the Internet, occupational hazards and other physical and mental health hereinafter referred to as “the program”) may only take place if it is a body designated by law registered.

This bit is really messy. As far as I can tell — again, this is a machine translation of a document written in legal language — this part of the new law requires that pro-LGBT sex education is banned, and that those who undertake sex education must be officially approved by the state. 

I completely understand why this offends progressives. But I also completely understand why Hungarian lawmakers who voted for this are tired of the propaganda aimed at their children. And I support them. I would welcome clarification to the law to guarantee that parents who wanted to teach pro-LGBT lessons to their children would be able to do so legally, however.

Look, I spent part of this evening participating in a live forum with Paivi Rasanen, the Finnish MP and traditional Christian who faces a criminal hate crimes trial for having tweeted a verse from the book of Romans, critical of homosexuality. Here is a Christian woman who might go to prison for two years simply for publicly endorsing what it says in the Bible, despite it offending some homosexuals and their allies. And I’m supposed to worry about little Magyar kids having to go online to watch Kermit the Frog hosting a Pride concert alongside a drag queen, as opposed to watching it on Hungarian TV? I’m supposed to worry that seven-year-old Hungarians are not going to be told that having penises doesn’t mean that they are boys? Forget it.

Ursula von der Leyen is not being honest about the Hungarian law. If it were prohibiting all speech about LGBTs, she would have a point. It doesn’t. It only covers speech aimed at children. It would prohibit something like this filth presented by a state-sanctioned teen workshop in Boston 21 years ago:

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.

The parents who exposed this were made into scapegoats, and really suffered. In Hungary, despite what Ursula von der Leyen says, you are free to love who you want, but you aren’t free to tell kids about it in the classroom or on TV, and encourage them to do the same. Hungary isn’t Massachusetts, thank God.

The post EU Big Lies About Hungary LGBT Law appeared first on The American Conservative.

View From Your Table

That’s a schnitzel at Zylinder, a Habsburgiana restaurant in the heart of Bratislava. I am back in the Slovak capital, a place that became dear to my heart when I was researching Live Not By Lies. It is here that I first learned about Father Tomislav Kolakovic. It is here that I first learned about Dr. Silvester Krcmery. It is here that I met some leaders of the second generation of the underground church, including Jan Carnigursky and, below, Frantisek Miklosko (left) and Vladimir Palko:

It was my honor to present both men with copies of my book (which will not be published in Slovak until the fall). At the lunch table today, I introduced my son Matt to both of them, and told him they were both great men. Frantisek, for example, helped organize the Candle Demonstration of 1988, which was the first major demonstration against Communist power since the 1968 Soviet invasion. Here is some video of it.

Thousands of Slovak Christians gathered in the rain to sing hymns and pray. The police, caught by surprise, attacked them with water cannons. At lunch today, in a restaurant on that very square, Vlado Palko told my son the story of how he decided that he had to risk everything to take a stand that day. Frantisek had been detained by the police, and could not be there, though he was an organizer.

These men. This place. This is where it happened. Come to Bratislava if you can, and see for yourself. It’s incredibly powerful. I am so blessed to be here again, in the company of such men.

The post View From Your Table appeared first on The American Conservative.

Soccer For Soccer’s Sake

Here is a long, illustrated letter from a reader about Woke Righteousness and German sports. Really amazing stuff, how the Woke have managed to politicize sports. Totalitarianism is a system in which only one ideology is allowed … and everything in life is ideologized. Politicizing sports is a manifestation of soft totalitarianism. If you don’t think the Left, and its friends the Woke Capitalists, are politicizing sports, read on:

As you’re probably aware, the the UEFA Euro 2020 soccer tournament is going on right now and Hungary is a part of the tournament. Tomorrow, they face Germany, in a match they (Hungary) are widely expected to lose. That really should be all there is to the story, but, unfortunately, as all things in this day and age, it’s not.

The match is taking place at the Allianz Arena in Germany, the home field of soccer titans FC Bayern Munich. The Allianz Arena has been lit up in rainbow colors in celebration of “Pride Month,” but the lights will be turned off for tomorrow’s match, I’m assuming, to avoid any sort of controversy with Hungary, which, as you’ve covered extensively, takes a different view on “Pride.” Personally, this appeared something of a magnanimous move. After all, Germany, like many European countries today, adheres to a belief that there’s no worse crime or trespass than to offend someone, especially of other (re: Muslim) countries.

But the FC Bayern Munich president wasn’t taking this sitting down:

Statement from FC Bayern President Herbert Hainer. pic.twitter.com/vya5GNTnSB

— FC Bayern US (@FCBayernUS) June 22, 2021

There are two things to observe here. One, Allianz Arena is regularly lit up in various colors for many different observances. They’ll light up the stadium in red, white, and blue, for example, during many U.S. holidays, in a show of solidarity of their extensive American fan base. However, Pride Month is the longest celebration this club observes. The stadium is lit up in rainbow colors for the entire month. So, when they club says “open-mindedness and tolerance” are the fundamental values of their club and society, they mean LGBTQ is the foundation on which everything is built upon.

Second, if FC Bayern and Germany says the right things, they certainly don’t practice them. For one, Qatar Airways is a prominent sponsor of FC Bayern. There’s not a whole lot to say here, other than that Qatar Airways is a state-owned company of a country that takes a more conservative and oppressive view of LGBTQ than Hungary does. Yet, the team and Germany, as a whole, seem to have a permissive attitude towards Islamic attitudes than they do non-Woke European countries, which still have a lot more in common with Germany than any Islamic country ever will.

This comes on the heels of UEFA reviewing and, ultimately, deciding not to take action against Germany for their team captain, super-goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, wearing a rainbow armband during the first two matches (undoubtedly, he’ll continue to wear this armband, at least until the end of the month). UEFA has a rule stating that political messages are prohibited from being displayed on the pitch, but, apparently, the Pride rainbow isn’t a political message (more on that in a minute).

I find it utterly bizarre, however, that in a major international tournament, the captain’s armband isn’t that of the country which they represent. Instead, it’s that of the LGBTQ community. Talk about having lost the thread, completely. It’s almost like Germany has adopted a secondary national identity in the rainbow, though it slowly appears to be becoming the de facto national identity. The Woke will undoubtedly say, “Why can’t you represent both?” To which, I say, “This is a tournament among nationalities. Which nationality matters most, to you? The one that represents all the people of your country? Or the one that represents only those who aren’t straight, male, or female?

This bring me back to the point about politics. LGBTQ is political, there’s just no way around it. Take a look at what the Toronto FC Bayern Fan Club had to say:

In the wise words of our friends at @FCBayernKC: “Know your clubs values”. @FCBayern, in their own words, “stands for tolerance and diversity”. Get to know the club values before you call yourself a supporter.#SKTonTour #MiaSanMia #FCBayern #FCBayernUS pic.twitter.com/KxKOOp5bfW

— Südkurve Toronto (@SuedkurveTO) June 22, 2021

In other words, “If you aren’t a full-throated supporter of Pride, you cannot be a fan of this club.” Imagine if someone had said, “If you aren’t a full-throated supporter of Germany, it’s history, and Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity and Justice and Freedom), you cannot be a fan of this club.” That would undoubtedly viewed as political and squashed on the spot. Even one of the German players (who also played for FC Bayern), Leon Goretzka, very openly campaigns against the nationalist right-wing party Alternative for Germany, once calling it a “disgrace” to the country. Granted, he doesn’t do it on the pitch, but, I don’t think I’m wrong to say that his actions would be regarded very differently if he campaigned against Die Linke. [The Left]

When the message is, “We welcome all who think a certain way, reject those who don’t,” it’s political. It’s gone far beyond simply policing actions or even speech.

I really have to wonder what the players themselves actually think about this. Are they fully in line with all of it? Have they all been brainwashed into being true believers in this madness? Or do they go along with it, knowing the alternative is to not have a career in professional athletics?

All I know is this – some of us just want to enjoy the game. But there really are no distractions any longer and nowhere to hide anymore.

 

Sorry to bombard you – here’s a story that provides more context. This is UEFA’s explanation for why they’re not allowing the stadium to be lit up in rainbow colors:

UEFA explains its reasoning behind the decision. pic.twitter.com/bG6I7Z2jAM

— DW Sports (@dw_sports) June 22, 2021

Here’s another story that confirms, without a doubt, that lighting up the stadium in rainbow colors was entirely political and, at least in part, a protest against Hungary’s LGBTQ laws, which you recently talked about:

Munich mayor Dieter Reiter had said he wanted to light up the stadium in the colours in protest against a new law in Hungary that bans the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change. #Pride | #Euro2020 https://t.co/d771KGjEy4

— Sportstar (@sportstarweb) June 22, 2021

The mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, is a member of the left-wing Social Democratic Party of Germany. Important to know.

All I have to say is, if it bothers them that much, Germany should just refuse to play the match against Hungary. Put your money where your mouth is.

Again, I have to wonder what the German players and the German people really think about all this…

Thanks, Reader, for that commentary. Meanwhile, check out what Frank Furedi had to say about the match in Budapest between the Hungarian national team and France last Saturday. Excerpt:

As I arrive at the fans’ zone, I see a bunch of guys holding a banner challenging the gesture of taking the knee. The banner has an image of someone taking the knee with a cross through it — a clear statement of rejection of this practice of abasement.

I talk to Gergely and Sanyi, two of the guys milling around the banner. They tell me why they think it’s right to take a stand against the Anglo-American gesture of taking the knee. Sanyi tells me, ‘We are not like them, we are a proud people who refuse to bend ourselves to anyone’. Standing near us is Orsolya, who says the ritual of taking the knee has nothing to do with being against racism. ‘It is a new form of piety. It makes us sick.’

Almost everyone I talk to tells me that we Hungarians have decided to take a stand against all this crap. They are still angry that when they booed the Irish for taking the knee in a recent game, the Western press denounced them as racist. They feel that they are continually lectured by the Western media as if they are colonial subjects. And they are not having it anymore.

Talking to these supporters was like being enveloped in commonsense sanity. Their buzz was infectious. I got a really strong feeling that freedom was in the air.

 

The post Soccer For Soccer’s Sake appeared first on The American Conservative.

Escape From Woke Metropolises

Last weekend in Chicago, there were 54 shootings, five of them fatal. This was one of the fatal shootings. Warning: it’s graphic:

Chicago shooting of Gyovanny Arzuaga and Yasmin Perez on June 19 as they drove with their flag, 1 killed, 1 critically wounded in Humboldt Park pic.twitter.com/p9YcaZJmWU

— Shavo (@d_shavo) June 20, 2021

Look at these two dirtbags, just standing there filming it:

 

Last week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is black, declared that racism is a “public health emergency” in her city, and diverted $10 million in federal Covid funds to fight racism.

Clearly, Chicago’s mayor has things well in hand, and has no problem at all facing reality. The Chicago Bears are thinking of relocating to a suburb for a bigger stadium, and Mayor Lightfoot seems more concerned about that than mass murders.Two years ago, she blamed Texas gun laws for Chicago’s killing sprees. But Chicago’s police superintendent said that same summer that the problem was that the cops keep re-arresting the same thugs, whom the criminal justice system recycle back onto the street.

This is what happens when you elect Woke Democrats to run your city. By the way, Chicago’s DA Kim Foxx was backed by leftist billionaire George Soros, who has been pouring his money into electing progressive DAs in big cities. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin is a Soros acolyte, as is Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby. All those cities are overrun by crime. Reader Jonah R., who lives in suburban Maryland, left this comment:

On Thursday four young black men drove to a public elementary school in the mostly white, affluent DC neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where they fired more than 40 shots at the school in front of nearly 150 witnesses, hitting two construction workers who were renovating the building and fortunately not hitting any children only because they were in nearby trailer classrooms because of the renovation. The police chased them and caught them when they crashed their car. So far there appears to be no explanation for it other than four black dudes wanted to go randomly shoot up a white school. Let me know if this makes the national news where you live. I’m sure it won’t. But this is what happens when criminals feel emboldened by anti-policing rhetoric.

In Baltimore, where the DA has implemented a policy of not prosecuting misdemeanors and low-level crimes, criminals are starting to enjoy a free-for-all environment. The tourist/bar/restaurant neighborhood of Fells Point has seen multiple shootings in the past couple weeks, with one triple shooting occurring just 25 feet from a group of police officers. Some local businesses are refusing to pay their taxes and are putting the money in escrow instead. The neighborhood, already a place for a fun night out at the bars, has been looking like Mardi Gras in recent weeks, but without the cops enforcing laws like they do in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. There’s footage of drunks jumping on police cars while the cops just watch. About a week ago, someone went into Fells Point late at night and just randomly shot a bunch of cars. Some restaurants whose owners had been desperate to reopen are closing at 9 p.m. so their employees can get home safely. Some businesses are hiring private security. Police are not enforcing open container laws, parking and traffic regulations, or laws against people openly selling drugs and liquor on the streets. Only in the past few days have the cops come in, but in pointlessly massive numbers, and they’ve closed streets and manned checkpoints, going to the opposite extreme, as if to spite the neighborhood peons who complained.

I haven’t checked the news from Minneapolis lately. Is the community of activist hobos that formed around the site of George Floyd’s death still illegally “occupying” the site and inviting anarchy? There were three fatal shootings there in their “autonomous zone” in 2020 and one fatal shooting so far this year.

How about a year of activists trying to burn down federal buildings in Portland? Plus, staffing of the Portland police is at its lowest in decades, and there’s been a huge surge of brazen gang violence. According to the AP, Portland disbanded its special unit dedicated to curbing gun violence because activists believed it disproportionately harmed black people.

This is what happens when the “defund the police” chant–which is, yes, a fringe activist fantasy–becomes policy because people are too afraid to stand up to aggressive activists. I live in a safe multicultural suburb, so I’m fine, but my friends and relatives in cities like DC, Baltimore, and New York are freaking out. You can’t for a minute pretend that the rhetoric of the past year didn’t play a role in this surge of violence in our cities.

 

The post Escape From Woke Metropolises appeared first on The American Conservative.

Who Is Viktor Orban, Really?

It is no secret that my time this late spring and summer in Hungary has made me a fan of the country. Whenever I’m online, or traveling abroad (as I have done a bit this summer, promoting my book), and I hear someone bashing the country or its government, I ask them what they know about Hungary, and how they know it. Inevitably it’s based entirely on what they’ve heard in their media.

So I invite them to come to Hungary with an open mind to see for themselves (when Covid is over, I mean; you still can’t travel here as a tourist). There is plenty for liberals to criticize about the Orban government, but I’ve found that much of the criticism from both liberals and conservatives is based on a seriously distorted idea of what this country is like, and what its government does. This is very much on my mind after a couple of conversations I had last week in Spain with people who are conservative, and upon finding out that I live temporarily in Hungary, came out with the usual complaints about how oppressive the country is. When I challenged them, it turned out that they were only parroting what they had been told by the media.

I’ve mentioned several times in this space the conversation I had with the local university prof and government critic who is critical of the Orban government for its stance on gay rights, but who is himself not an advocate of trans rights. He said later in our conversation that he can stand in his classroom and say whatever he wants, and nobody from the government will do a thing about it. I pointed out to him that if he said the same thing in a US college classroom — that he favors gay rights, but not so much on trans — the government wouldn’t do anything to him either, but his students would raise hell and demand his firing — and the university would probably agree to it, and he would never work in academia again.

That doesn’t mean that the Orban government is correct on its gay rights stance, but it does put things in perspective when considering the relative freedoms in each country. All I’m saying is that the situation is much more complex than you ever hear about in the US and European media.

Over the weekend, I had coffee with a Hungarian friend who spent a lot of time in America as a kid and teenager, because his father is an academic. He has a critical view of the US system because of its tolerance for economic precarity for so many. He supports the Orban government, and agrees with me about how totally biased and distorting the news media are, based on the kinds of things that middle and upper middle class reporters care about. For example, said my friend, in the long wake of the 2008 global economic crash, Viktor Orban’s government passed a law forbidding banks from expelling people who had defaulted on their mortgages from their homes. “Barack Obama didn’t do that,” said my friend. And then we talked about how with the US left, as long as you fly the rainbow flag and say “Black Lives Matter,” you can do whatever you want with the economy, and you won’t hear a word of protest from the supposed champions of the little guy versus Capital.

Again, none of this makes Orban right on this or that policy … but it does make the situation far more complicated than many outside this country understand. I was in a bookstore in Budapest on Saturday afternoon talking to a man who has complaints about this government, but says he plans to vote for it because the opposition “has no program,” and he expects that if they get in, they will rubber-stamp whatever Brussels tells them to do. If you agree with the progressive Eurocratic view of the world, and think that George Soros is a great-souled man, then you’ve got no problem with that. But if not, you have no alternative but to vote for Fidesz. Take a look at this English-language translation of Prime Minister’s Orban speech about the European Union given the other day. He offered a strong, substantive critique of the undemocratic ways of the EU bureaucracy, and a defense of the relative sovereignty of EU member states. Whatever else it is, it’s not the speech of a thuggish autocrat, which is how he is portrayed in the Western media.

Over the weekend, a French newspaper reported that a group of top corporate leaders in France have come together to advocate migration to France as good for business. This is what the European political and cultural establishment believe. It’s what George Soros believes. It is not what Viktor Orban and his party believe, because they hold a nation to be something more than an undifferentiated collection of individual economic actors. If you agree, then Orban is your champion. If not, then you are on Team Brussels.

Anyway, I want you to read this piece by my Danube Institute colleague Tamas Orban (no relation to the PM), explaining what the new law restricting LGBT media and educational content to minors is, and is not. You may have read in the Western media that Hungary has banned pro-LGBT speech across the board, or banned movies that feature positive portrayals of gay characters. Well, read what Tamas Orban says. Excerpts:

Let’s start with the media representation argument. The law specifically says that it refers to commercials, films and shows that promote gender transition and homosexuality, not everything that has minor gay or bisexual characters in it. And let’s be honest, the shows and movies that portray sexuality and sexual acts as important parts of the narrative are already made for adult audience. The shows that are explicitly made for children and teenagers rarely portray any of the things that would fall under this law, one or two LGBT characters do not count if the whole thing is not about their sexual identity. To be frank, why would any kind of film intended for children include sexuality, be it homo or straight? Let kids be kids, for God’s sake.

The most frequently heard argument in most critical articles is that TV channels will not be able to air Harry Potter or Friends anymore in prime time. It took me ten minutes to check if these two are really in the great danger every leftist media tries to convince me. There are only two LGBT characters in the whole Potter-verse for instance, and the whole issue only appears in one film—which is not even part of the original eight, but in one of the prequels—and not even directly, but merely implied during the ending sequence. As for Friends, it does have a small number of LGBT episode-characters, but are generally rare and unimportant. One of the main characters is implied to be bisexual (despite having exclusively straight relationships), but there is no episode with her sexuality in the focus. Therefore, I think both Harry Potter and Friends are pretty safe in these regards and will not be banished from television anytime soon. And, by the way, there is also a minor issue that everybody has seemingly missed, namely that kids and teenagers do not watch TV anymore. Everything is accessible on the Internet, and this generation already watches most (if not all) of their media online, so virtually, this law will change almost nothing. But thank you for your concerns.

The sex education issue is different, of course. These classes are important parts of students’ curriculum as it is quite important for teenagers to know about safe sex, birth-control methods and STDs. No one is denying that. But the question whether different sexualities and the process of gender transition belong in the sex ed. classes is entirely a different matter. Discrimination against homosexuals or people with genuine gender dysphoria would never be okay, but entirely discarding the issues of sexuality and gender in the curriculum is not discriminatory in any way, as it does not promote straightness or cisgender identity either. Schools should not promote any kind of sexual or gender identities for that matter — and there are very good reasons for that.

More:

Neither sexual nor gender identity of kids is something that adults should try to influence. Most teenagers are generally in the process of figuring out who they are, building up their—sexual and other kinds of—identities bit by bit and constantly developing their views of the world and themselves. To question everything, especially themselves and their own identity is a very normal and healthy thing at that age, but it also makes them quite vulnerable to outside influences. If peers and teachers try to sway them into taking different paths, even with good intentions, they can easily adopt views and positions about themselves that might not be true and only feel so in that moment.

An adventurous and playful teenage girl would have been called a perfectly fine tomboy just a decade ago, but now many teachers, psychologists and sex educators are eager to tell such a girl that “he” is suffering from gender dysphoria and the path to happiness starts with hormone therapy and mastectomy. In other words, dangerous and irreversible changes that lead many into deep regret in just a few years. Think about it. If people are not considered mature enough to drink or drive until they are 18, why should they be old enough to consent to life-altering decisions before? No, no one should be encouraged to take on a path that could ultimately turn out to be just a phase they will find themselves unable to grow out from.

By leaving sexuality out of school, we remove only one of these factors of influence, but a big one nevertheless, and let kids decide for themselves—fortunately when they can assess the full weight of the situation. But how much could the school’s and—in general—society’s irresponsible acceptance effect gender transition actually? A 2018 study found, for example, that just between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for biological females has quadruples in the US, while the rates of gender dysphoria among British girls have gone up 4,400 per cent over one decade.

The Hungarian government is just using common sense in trying to prevent the kind of madness that has overtaken the UK and the US from conquering the minds of Hungarian youth. One more excerpt:

So, the bottom line is that no, the Hungarian government does not link pedophilia to issues of sexuality and gender because it wants to criminalize LGBT people in the eyes of the public, but rather because protecting children does not end with stopping sex offenders, but should also include the protection from potentially harmful influences as well until children are old enough to make the best decisions for themselves.

Read the whole thing. 

Does that sound like the law as described in Western media reports?

Just now, a Hungarian friend sent me the text of an interview Orban gave to a Croatian Catholic newspaper recently. If you read it in Google Chrome, it will translate it into English. Excerpts below are translated by Google:

The Eucharist is at the center of the visit of the Pope to Hungary. Although Calvinists and Catholics do not treat the Eucharist in the same way, they share many Christian values. In your opinion, what are the key values ​​that can be strengthened after the September meeting with the Pope?

We Calvinists also have worship, we share bread and wine, but our liturgy is primarily remembrance. However, I live and understand the beauty of the Eucharist because a Catholic woman is my wife. In our culture, when spouses belong to different denominations, children follow their parents, namely according to their gender. Thus

I have four Catholic daughters – which means I live with five Catholic women under one roof – and a Calvinist son. This is how Catholics and Calvinists live together in us, in a community of love.

In addition, one of my daughters married the son of a Greek Catholic priest. Here, Catholics say, “The problem is that the mantle of our Lord Jesus Christ has been torn to pieces.” There are many of us who desire the realization of Christian unity. Of course, I am thinking not only of West Latin Christianity, but of the whole, which includes Orthodoxy.

We will send a message to the Holy Father that in Hungary Christianity is not a matter of choice, but of pre-determinedness. It does not require any reasoning, it is so, it has been ordered. The world around us is hostile to all of us, to you Catholics, and to me, the Calvinist. There is currently a cultural, even civilizational struggle going on; the struggle for the soul and future of Europe is here, it is happening here. It is often said that belief disputes are rarely held in trenches as we are all attacked. That is why we need prayer for full Christian unity, including the Orthodox, because without cooperation we cannot keep Christianity in Europe. Allow me an example close to me. When we won the election, I was still working in the Parliament, where my office was. I was preparing for the oath and my first speech, I walked out the door, and a priest from Medjugorje met me, who said: “I came to bless you before the oath.” Listen: a Croatian priest from Medjugorje came to a Calvinist Hungarian prime minister to bless him! We prayed together, then I took my oath. So in the Christian world, such things happen if we let them happen.

You mentioned the soul of Europe, the spiritual struggle. Would current politics actually be a materialization of the intellectual struggle going on in the background?

Politics takes place on three levels at the same time. The first level is practical: it is about power issues, adopting the budget, appointing people, maintaining order. I would call the second level a vision because every national community needs a vision. What about the Hungarians, not tomorrow morning, but in five to ten or twenty years? However, there is also a broader dimension behind everything, the world of transcendence. We also live in this dimension, it is also a part of life. In Hungarian political thinking, this is called the problem of majority and truth. We could put it this way: if someone has a majority but is not seeking the truth, why does the majority have it at all? This is just profanation. And if someone represents the truth but is unable to mobilize the majority, how can you act in the name of truth? This is a key challenge for Christian politics that emerges under democratic conditions. To put it more simply, we no longer have sacred, God-anointed kings, so in a democracy we must coexist with majority and truth. This is difficult, but possible. Christian Democratic politics also has a mandate in relation to Christian culture.

Christianity first created the free man. That is why we must first and foremost protect human dignity. Then Christianity created the Christian family. We need to defend the concept of the Christian family.

Hold on right there. In America, we have Disney this month queering Kermit the Frog to make an LGBT Pride special for kids, and Sesame Street featuring a pair of gay dads as new residents on the block. In the UK, a leading LGBT activist is calling on the government to criminalize “gentle, non-coercive prayer” that offends LGBTs. In Hungary, things are very different. Think about this, American conservatives.

More from Orban:

In addition, Christianity has created nations in this part of the world. If we Hungarians had not followed Christianity for a thousand years, we would have disappeared, so we must protect the nation as well. But we must also protect religious communities, the Church. In summary: our task is not to defend creeds, it is the mission of the Church, but the great achievements of Christian civilization.

And when I defend these, I struggle not only with swords, not only with power, but also with arguments. The most beautiful thing about the political profession is that there is no job description. I also have my own definition. I believe that politics is a matter of power, and power is the ability to act together. Political power creates joint action as political action. For example, through elections, the constitution, and other means. However, we must not forget about divine power, because joint action can be realized not only by political means, but also in a spiritual way. This is, in fact, the task of the Church and the servants of the Church: the Church implements joint action by spiritual guidance, and we implement it by political means. When these two sides come into contact, great results are achieved. For this reason, we will never accept the separation of church and state as interpreted in the West. The Hungarian Basic Law states that the state and the church operate separately, which also enables cooperation.

However, how can we explain why the world is loud, the Hungarian state policy, which is so eager to promote Christian values, stops migrants at the border with a wire fence?

In fact, if the Croats want to understand us, recall the thoughts and actions of Miklós Zrínyi [17th century Hungarian-Croatian nobleman best known for fighting the Ottomans — RD]; if they want to place us in their own worldview, they have to think of Hungarians in the context of Miklós Zrínyi. But let’s get back to the issue of migration. Our philosophical view is that migration is an ontologically bad thing. It is bad if we cannot stay and live in our own country, if we cannot find our personal happiness, our vocation, and if we have to leave this area for any reason, especially if it is done under duress. Sometimes someone has to leave their homeland because otherwise they would be killed or enslaved, imprisoned, or starved to death. These reasons are very possible. But even in such a case, if someone left their homeland, the goal is to return home later. Therefore if we want to help someone, we don’t need to encourage them to stay away from their homeland for as long as possible, but we need to help them get back there as quickly as possible.

I take this position personally, and I also recommend it to the European Union: European military action, economic involvement, stabilization and the creation of normal living conditions in these areas. I believe that this position can also be defended in a Christian sense. He mentioned the wire fence. When tens of thousands, mostly young men, appear on the Hungarian border, trampling across the state border in excellent physical condition, and if we want to stop them, they are trampling on us as well, we can no longer talk about migration, but a violation of state sovereignty. This must be stopped. No one can come to your country if you have not allowed this in advance, but if you do, you will have to be pushed out of there, so we will use the fence. We must also say that we are convinced that migration does not happen spontaneously, but in an organized way. This is considered a conspiracy theory in the West, but it is all done in an organized way, along political and business considerations, and the consequence will be that large Muslim masses will end up on the European continent. I believe that those who do not defend themselves will not recognize their country in twenty years. The change is due to an external effect imposed on them.

More:

If it happened that the countries of Central Europe in this region would choose to exploit, as you said: their community of destiny, would it win the support of the whole of Europe and its central institutions?

No, they would be strongly opposed to that. For two reasons that we should not confuse. The first reason is ideological: Westerners have decided they want to live in a post-national and post-Christian world, and we respect that. But they want more than that. They want us to live that way. For this reason, if a spirit of regional cooperation emerges that includes the protection of national, Christian cultures, ideological attacks will come immediately. It is a balliberal attack that starts in Brussels and is linked to American liberal political and economic forces. They want us to be as free as they want to be. For this reason, they oppose Central European co-operation and describe it negatively, such as Polish-Hungarian co-operation.

The other reason is of a power nature. The European Union is organized in such a way that it is made up of Member States that are formally all equal, but of course size matters, facts matter, the two big countries [France and Germany — RD] form an axis and, above all, enforce their own will. This sometimes coincides, other times it is against the interests of Central Europe, sometimes it is good for us, other times it is unfavorable. …If I want to take what has been said so far to a higher level, I would say that we Central Europeans stand up for the nation-states that we want to keep, because we believe that democracy can only take place within a national framework. Western Europe prefers a Brussels-based empire. This is, in fact, at the heart of our disagreements over Europe.

And:

Aren’t you afraid of fear when you keep at it? Not afraid?

Anyone who is afraid of political struggle is better off choosing a different path. But I am afraid the way Christians are afraid. I don’t want to condemn you. There are temptations and mistakes, but we need to strengthen ourselves every day so we don’t get lost. Hungarians used to say: I fear God. Once we all have to stand before God and give an account; no one can avoid that.

Read it all. I quoted him at length because nobody in the Western media ever does. They just villainize him, and his country.

One more time, let me be as clear as I can be here: Viktor Orban is not a saint, but a statesman and a politician. He is not a liberal secular globalist, but a conservative Christian nationalist. It is perfectly fine to criticize him, his political beliefs, and his performance (e.g., his controversial opening towards China, building a university campus here that will almost certainly be a Beijing espionage center). The point is, you should know what you’re criticizing, and don’t simply assume that the US and Western European media have informed you fairly and accurately about what’s really happening in Hungary.

I know you regular readers must be tired of me writing in defense of Orban and Hungary, but dammit, I have grown fond of this country, and I feel compelled to stand up for it when it is slandered.

The post Who Is Viktor Orban, Really? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coming Race Crack-Up?

An Asian-American reader who is a regular correspondent writes:

I don’t know if you follow Karlyn Borysenko. If you don’t, she’s an “organizational psychologist” who, though politically liberal, disassociated herself with the Left a year or two ago and has since become, if not a conservative, a prominent anti-leftist voice on social media. If you don’t follow her on Twitter or YouTube, I suggest you do, she’s full of insight and wit and nobody’s a better foil against the Left than a former leftist.

Recently, she began sounding the alarm about the emergence of White supremacy in America. Now, we all know President Biden has cited White supremacy as the greatest national security threat to the U.S. We all also know this is politically-motivated and is effectively a means of ensuring ideological uniformity in the country. Using things like Critical Race Theory (CRT), the Biden administration is trying to guarantee that proceeding generations will, without the slightest bit of skepticism, come to accept Democratic Party platforms and left-wing ideologies as the norm in this country. We’re already kind of there, if you ask me.

However, reading her threads makes me wonder if White supremacy will become a bigger concern going forward. Up front, I have to say this should concern everyone on the Right – it plays directly into the hands of the Left. If you want to convince people that White supremacy isn’t the biggest problem in America, what you absolutely don’t do is become the monster you claim doesn’t exist. But certain elements of the Right don’t get this. Either they’re just that cynical or stupid. Whatever the case may be, this isn’t good for us and it’s not good for the Right.

Here’s Borysenko sounding the alarm. The entire thread’s worth reading, but I want to bring your attention to these three tweets:

This is not theoretical. It’s happening. And there are major influencers on the right supporting it and parroting the language.

I think this is bigger than people think, and I also think it’s dangerous.

This should scare everyone.

— Karlyn Borysenko, most dangerous knitter alive (@DrKarlynB) June 20, 2021

Maybe joe Biden is right when he says white supremacy is the biggest threat, but I don’t think he’s right for the right reason.

They’re focused on nonsense systemic racism.

What I’m talking about here is ACTUAL racism.

It was bound to happen, I suppose.

— Karlyn Borysenko, most dangerous knitter alive (@DrKarlynB) June 20, 2021

I wouldn’t be harping on this if I thought it was just happening in the dark corners of 4chan.

This is making its way into the mainstream.

I have seen the same language show up repeatedly at in person events.

The people using it don’t know where it’s coming from.

— Karlyn Borysenko, most dangerous knitter alive (@DrKarlynB) June 20, 2021

The reader continues:

Keep in mind – opposition to CRT isn’t limited to Whites. It’s actually a rather diverse movement:

https://campusreform.org/article?id=17673

While there’s no denying that anti-Whiteness is a core element of CRT, couching opposition to it strictly in terms of that limits our ability to fight CRT. It not only threatens to displace the hard work done by these ethnically/racially-diverse parents to fight CRT, but also totally misunderstands why CRT and leftism in general has went on such an incredible winning streak: it exploits the history of our country, which undeniably involves abhorrent racism, and because it continues to exploit the sensitivities of people, including Whites, to racism.

But it didn’t do this at the point of a gun (though that looks set to change real soon). It did it surreptitiously and subversively. “Soft” power is always more effective than “hard” power, which is what the Right doesn’t understand. It’s always trying to use the most blunt tools and language possible and effectively exposing their position before they have a chance to take a shot. If what Borysenko is saying is true, then what’s going to happen is that the Right will sell the case of White supremacy as America’s greatest national security threat for the Biden administration. Everyone, including White leftists and independents/moderates, will go along with it and we’ll have lost the fight completely.

Bear in mind – I’m not saying the Right needs to tell lies in order to win. That’s another sure way to hand the Left a victory. But the Right needs to prepare for the long struggle and focus on winning hearts and minds. Any other approach will lead to failure.

To be sure, even if Borysenko’s nightmare scenario comes to pass, I don’t see the White supremacists going on the offensive. Rather, I see them doing more of what they’re doing now – withdraw, isolate themselves, and prepare to defend their people and way of life. But this is precisely what balkanization is and exactly what we’re all trying to prevent. Besides, do you think our ruling class will leave them alone? Of course not – be it the State, ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, whatever, they won’t leave these people alone. They’ll go after them and blood will flow. It’s what’ll happen because that’s what always happens. Maybe we’re all ultimately meant to live among our own peoples, how ever we’ve been divided. But something about that isn’t all that assuring.

For example, where do I go? I’m not White nor Black. I hear from lots of emigres, particularly from Europe and Asia, who are thinking about heading back to their homelands. But I’m already in my homeland. Blood and soil is real, Rod. Even the Left knows it, which is why they’re fighting so hard for this land – because they think it’s theirs and that “their people” have spilt blood for it. So what do you do when everyone else thinks this land belongs to “their people?” Humans cannot survive on their own, they can only survive within some form of society. The only part of society I see myself belonging to are the seemingly dwindling few who recognize the incredible danger this country’s in because of the Left, but don’t want to see an authoritarian reactionary regime from the Right emerge, either. But, one day, we may be outnumbered and become enemies of all.

As a man without community, this keeps me awake at night.

I don’t follow Karlyn Borysenko, so this is news to me. And yes, if this is happening, it is beyond alarming — and it’s not at all surprising. If you’ve been reading me for any time, you know that I have been yelling for years that all this insane neoracist crap from the Left was bound to call up white-power demons from the Right. You cannot have one without the other. Both make us blind with hatred. Tribalism is the normal condition of human societies. If this were to happen in America, God forbid, we would only be reverting to the historical norm.

In Spain last week, I was telling one of my interlocutors that America managed to achieve something pretty spectacular in the bloody history of mankind: a society that actually made good on the idea that race should not matter, and that one stands equally before the law. By “made good,” I don’t mean “eliminated racism.” We will never eliminate racism this side of Paradise, I’m afraid, for the same reason that we will never eliminate sin. I once visited an intentional community in which everyone was the same race, and held to the same religious faith, but which had become informally divided into two camps, based on true microdifferences (if I told you what they were, you would laugh, but these were super-serious there). This is human nature. We are tribal creatures.

But in America, we have gone farther than any other nation to fight back against this stuff, and to make progress on Dr. King’s dream. You don’t believe me? Go to France, or any European country with a sizable Muslim minority. Many of these Muslims are unassimilable. Partly it’s a function of the rigidity of those native societies, and partly its a function of Islamic attitudes (I spoke to someone else in Spain who has had direct experience of the contempt many Muslim immigrants have for the natives). Whatever the causes, and in whatever proportion, the point is that America has been much better at assimilating migrants from the world over. This is an incredible achievement. The melting pot concept is not perfect, but it has largely worked. Whenever I am back in my hometown, and I see blacks and whites eating together at the same table in restaurants, as if this was perfectly normal, I sometimes recall that in the year I was born there, 1967, this was not only impossible, it had only recently become legal. 

People who say there has been no meaningful progress on race are pig-ignorant of history. But so are people who think that white power is a relic of a distant past. It was kind of traumatizing to learn as a teenager that some of the white men I grew up respecting as solid citizens had been Klansmen in the 1960s. I have written before about a white near-riot that occurred on the courthouse lawn in my hometown in 1963, when a lone black pastor registered to vote. The fact that this knowledge would genuinely shock white kids of my generation, and subsequent generations, is testimony to how dramatic the break with that shameful past was. But the fact that it is so close in history also means that it isn’t as irrecoverable as we would hope.

Glenn Loury is right:

God help us here in the US should the ordinary Joe and Jane who happen to be “white” start to think about themselves primarily in terms of their “race”. Why then are we encouraging them to do so? pic.twitter.com/K8kkUp7pCE

— Glenn Loury (@GlennLoury) June 16, 2021

This would be a catastrophe, and the end of America as we know it. And yet, should we be surprised that it might be happening, per Karlyn Borysenko? You cannot tell people over and over and over again that they are evil by virtue of their skin color without provoking this kind of reaction. You want to seed a white power movement? Keep doing things like this:

You want to see a white power movement? Then keep pumping comments like this from a Truthout interview with Robin D.G. Kelley, a black man who holds an endowed chair of History at UCLA:

Reparations carry their own contradictions, which we can save for another conversation. Certainly, how we proceed with repair depends on how we remember. But reparations are easier than decolonization, which is the answer to the question of where do we go, how to exit. In the United States, where the structure of colonial domination is completely shrouded in liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal homilies about freedom, colorblind discourse that undergirds criminalization and white supremacy, enabling 400 years of state-sanctioned serial murder to continue with impunity, power cannot be unseated merely through violence. (Of course, the very utterance of the word impunity reveals a contradiction, in that the point of law for the colonized is not protection but containment, discipline, and in some cases, genocide.) But we have no choice if we want to save the planet and free ourselves from liberal humanism. Decolonization, however, requires the abolition of all forms of oppression and violence. It means disbanding the military/police, opening borders, opening the prisons, freeing the body from the constraints of inherited and imposed normativities of gender and sexuality. It means ending war entirely, and that means the end of America as we know it.

This isn’t just talk. Last week, Eric Garcetti, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, announced that George Soros — of course — has expressed interest in funding a reparations program. I doubt this means that Soros is going to distribute his billions in reparations; I rather suspect this means that Soros is going to use his money to create a mechanism by which the monies of others are extracted to pay reparations. Never, ever forget what Czeslaw Milosz said in The Captive Mind (quoted by me in Live Not By Lies) about the foolishness of believing that intellectual radicalism won’t affect the Real World:

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

You want to seed a white power movement? Then keep allowing peer-reviewed journals — in this case, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association — to publish racist garbage like this excerpt from a recent paper (that seems to have been pulled since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago):

If you have had any exposure to German medical propaganda of the 1920s — that is, of the pre-Nazi era — the word parasitic will jump out at you there. This is the very same word German physicians and academics began to use to describe Jews. As we know, they eventually went beyond that. This kind of language, though, used by elite specialists, helped condition Germany to accept the Holocaust.

No, I don’t believe in the “white genocide” garbage. Whites in America are not a small and vulnerable minority. To the contrary, today whites are a majority, and will be a plurality for decades to come. But whites are, on balance, a heavily armed minority. What I worry about is interracial violence. If you aren’t worried about this too, you have not paid enough attention to history.

Why don’t white liberals speak up against this demonizing language? Why don’t normie conservatives? I think Milosz has their number. From Live Not By Lies:

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

American liberals — and some normie American conservatives — are stoned on the pill of Murti-Bing. They don’t see what’s happening all around them. They take the pill to avoid dealing with the bleeding obvious: that this leftist neoracist philosophy our corrupt elites have embraced is going to destroy our society by legitimizing racial tribalism.

Once white supremacy manifests itself openly, in large numbers, it’s probably going to be too late to stop it. We on the Right have a particular responsibility to speak out against it when we see it. No, I don’t believe any single one on of us has the capacity or the responsibility to monitor every corner of the Internet to denounce every single manifestation of it (nor do I believe all on the Left have a parallel responsibility on their side). Whataboutism is tiresome on both sides. But we do need to be conscious of it, and not hesitate to denounce it when we see it. I appreciate my Asian reader drawing my attention to Borysenko on this issue.

That said, people on the Left have the more important job, because while white supremacist rhetoric may flourish on the fringes, open neoracist discourse dominates American elites. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have done more for white racialist consciousness than any right-wing figure. If you are on the Left, please, I beg you, get out of your bubble and realize how the kind of racial rhetoric that has been completely normalized in your circles sounds to those who don’t exist within them. Critical Race Theory is the acid that will dissolve America, no question. If you want to keep this country together, and make it possible for us to live peaceably together, and continue the long, slow work of making progress towards loving each other more perfectly, then you had better fight CRT, whatever your politics. We on the Right who want to keep white supremacy down had better find ways to collaborate with good-faith liberals who oppose CRT. The country itself is at stake. It really is.

Back in 2017, when I wrote a series of posts about then-Texas A&M philosophy professor Tommy Curry, a radical black man, I drew attention to Curry’s rhetoric endorsing revolutionary violence against whites (for example, in this post). The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long piece sympathetic to Curry, making me into a white conservative villain who drew hatred onto Curry by the act of — wait for it — quoting publicly what he has actually written and said. This strategy was so revealing about how many on the Left think: believing that to be alarmed or offended by a left-wing person of color talking about how black folks may need to think about killing people who look like you, in the name of racial justice, is itself an act of racism.

This is the kind of elite moral idiocy that is feeding the odious white supremacy movement. I will end by repeating this quote from my Asian-American reader:

The only part of society I see myself belonging to are the seemingly dwindling few who recognize the incredible danger this country’s in because of the Left, but don’t want to see an authoritarian reactionary regime from the Right emerge, either. But, one day, we may be outnumbered and become enemies of all.

Well, reader, for what it’s worth, there will be two of us. I imagine there were people like us in pre-Civil War Spain too. But in the end, not enough to matter. It can happen here too.

The post Coming Race Crack-Up? appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Venezuelan’s Warning

I received this letter today from a Venezuelan exile I met in Spain this week, doing publicity for Vivir Sin Mentiras, the Spanish-language version of Live Not By Lies. She gives me permission to post it:

When I got here I felt the way Jonas Mekas explains in his film about his memories from his own exile: he got to New York and saw people sitting in the park, or drinking coffee, and all he could think was “we’re being killed over there” and people were just sitting there peacefully minding their own business. That’s great to me, the fact that people can live like that, because it usually means they’re not in a totalitarian dictatorship. I get that now, the fact that people don’t want to hear about these things. It’s not something you can relate to or even assimilate. In Spain they do pay somewhat attention because of Podemos [the Communist Party, in the coalition government — RD]. But at some point the “Venezuelan warning” became old, worn out. People didn’t even want to know about it, it made them uncomfortable, they would get annoyed. I stopped trying to tell people about this, you can’t talk to someone who doesn’t want to listen. I get it now, it’s very annoying. I used to get very angry, I still do but not so frequently, because well-educated people I’ve met, that I would consider not to be leftists, would say in extreme pride It Can’t Happen Here (I finally understood that education has nothing to do with it). I used to tell people that they should be saving up to get their kids out of the country if necessary, not right now, but to have it in the background as a future option just in case, and that I don’t want them to have their kids resent them because they didn’t realize that something needed to be done then, that they weren’t paying enough attention to the signs and then it’s too late, they’re stuck in a totalitarian regime. I didn’t tell you this, but I was born here in Spain, and my parents returned to Venezuela when I was a child. That’s why we fled here, me and my husband. We used to work together at Penguin Random House in Caracas, he’s Venezuelan too. He is a very good editor, so good that he was the only employee from PRH Venezuela who was relocated to PRH Colombia when it got shut down. I left with him to go to Bogota for two years (at that time it wasn’t quite an “exile”, because it is so close to home and the company would fly me or him out to see our families) and we came back to Venezuela when the president died.We saw everything fall apart VERY quickly. By this I don’t mean things were good before that; they were not. But it all degenerated even more. No water. No food. No electricity. No medical assistance, pills, anything like that. People would die from not being able to find antibiotics except on the black market, and people can’t afford that. It’s a constant state of fear. It is not easy to comprehend, I know. One time I was at a drug store and a man came in and asked for something, some pill, the lady from the pharmacy told him they’ve been out of those since she could remember, and the man lost it and yelled out “what is this, do these people (meaning the government) want all of us to die?!” Yes, I thought. That’s exactly what they want.“Look”, I say to people here to explain what goes on over there, “what do you do when you get up in the morning? Do you go to the bathroom and brush your teeth?” Well, imagine there’s no toothpaste (I found out just after leaving the country to come here that they had started to sell toothpaste not by the tube, but by the amount that your toothbrush can fit, because it was so scarce and whole tubes were so expensive). When you turn the water on, there’s no water coming out. So you start saving up water when it comes; everyone over there knows this: you get as many containers as you can and you fill them up (the water used to come out brown in color, so you would have to boil it if you had a gas-powered kitchen, if you had an electric one, you’re pretty much screwed). Of course, you tried to take a bath using the water in the container, but soap was scarce too. And shampoo. Doing your laundry or the dishes became a matter of saving as much water and soap as you could. And I’m talking about the lucky ones that get the water at least once a week, some people go without any water for fifteen days or a month, or more. Living like this of course leads to many health problems (it is very hot all year long, and mosquitoes are a very serious plague; malaria is back, for example), not to mention the hygienic problems. When people got really bad colds, and the equivalent of Tylenol, or any other over the counter medicine for fever wasn’t anywhere to be found, the government announced on TV that people should grow their own “fever-dropping herbs” like moringa and others at home. They said it with a smile on their faces, like it was a breakthrough, proudly, like saying “you don’t need big capitalist pharmaceutical companies”. So, let’s say you’ve done all this and you have to leave for work. Ok, there’s a shortage of gasoline. You don’t have any in your car (for those who own a car) and the lines to get it are a day (or several days) long. So you take the subway (at least in Caracas, the only city with a subway) because most bus drivers don’t have gasoline either. Well, if you’re lucky enough to get there when the electricity is working, you have to be SO aware of everything going on around you, it is very, very dangerous to live in Caracas. The percentage of impunity is 99%. I’ve seen people get murdered (and I lived in a “good” neighborhood). My friend told me about a co-worker who was on a bus when armed robbers got on and one of them raped a girl on the floor of the bus while the other ones pointed their guns at the rest after taking everything they had with them. Even when inflation made it impossible for anyone to carry around large amounts of money on them, there were these gangs that got on the bus with a POS terminal and made everyone put their credit cards in it, they emptied the accounts at gunpoint. These situations are very common. Going to the police to report any of this is a laughing matter (seriously, policemen will laugh in your face; they’re as scared as a regular citizen, these gangs rob them, beat them, take away their guns…). Neighbors have had to organize themselves through WhatsApp groups to alert each other if robbers or the State police are coming, and they’ve figured out all these barbaric ways to defend themselves, like having a pot full of hot oil or water to drop on them if they try to enter people’s homes. I know this is horrible but I understand it and I would defend myself and my loved ones too. We took what we saved up from being in Colombia and decided to come here, because here we wouldn’t be illegal citizens and it would be easier to open up a bank account, get a job, a place to rent. Many of our friends and family fled anywhere else they could: Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Miami, Colombia, Ecuador. I haven’t seen any of them since, or my own mother for that matter. I’m not trying to be a victim, I am very lucky. I’m not that poor girl from North Korea on the news. If you read this you’ll see https://www.abc.es/internacional/abci-pista-alma-venezuela-sobrevive-colombia-202104232336_reportaje.html what Venezuelans who flee on foot to Colombia are going through. They live literally on a pile of garbage. And they say they’re better off like that than back in our country.So this is how it works: the government (meaning the State, the Executive, the judges, the Socialist Party, it’s all the same) came up with this law that forbids you from having other currencies besides the local one. You could go to prison for this. Of course, there’s the black market, and everybody knows about it and sells and buys American dollars. But as a private company, let’s say one that makes shoes, for instance, you can’t get the dollars yourself to pay for the piece that broke off the machine you use to glue the shoes together (for example) because that piece is imported, so you have to ask the government for the money by filling out a form that says you need whatever amount for this, and they will pay the seller abroad for you instead of giving you the dollars. Then the company pays the equivalent in local currency to the government. This means that companies never actually have foreign money, all of it is in the State’s hands, which of course is a perfect gateway to steal from everybody. They control who can import things (they can refuse to approve the money for you), they control how much money to approve, they control what things can be imported. So let’s say companies import 10% of what they used to, and sell things much more expensively than before, and so scarcity begins. The companies who refuse to do this, and manage to get their things elsewhere or whatever, get an intervention from the State and usually get shut down, bought, or “expropriated”, a euphemism for stolen, of course. I have a family member who used to be a pig farmer, and was kidnapped for almost a year. They wanted money in exchange for letting him be. And because things are scarce, the government says something like (as Lenin and as every socialist after him said) “we need to intervene. Fascists hoarders are to blame for the scarcity, they don’t want poor people to be able to buy things”. They tell the military to take control of the distribution on companies and supermarkets and stores. And so lines are hours long, just to see if you can buy a single milk carton. Sometimes, like in Ukraine and East Germany and so on, people stood there even when the store was closed, “because you don’t know if or when they’re getting something new”. You would see the stores that sell bread with signs that said “NO BREAD” and a huge line outside. People just waiting to see if the store would get bread out sometime during the day. And you had to be there first, because if bread did come, it would be a little amount of bread, so the last in line would probably go home empty-handed.In here, the ones who are most concerned talk about the tragedy “approaching”, I tell them no, it is already happening, they’re here, and they are patient (as you know, evil is very patient) and they will destroy everything if given the chance to do so. And I’m scared, again. It’s not like I didn’t know Spain was socialist before we came here, I just wanted out, I lived in constant fear for my husband’s life, my mother’s, my friends’. And here I hit the switch and the light turns on (if I’ve paid for it of course, like anywhere else), and I go out and there’s plenty of food for me to buy, so anything is better than being back there. But I know the signs are there, I am very aware of them all the time.Anyway, this email is already very long. I will stop now. Thank you again for listening, reading, and for saying the things you said because people might listen now that it is you saying them. God bless you.

We have been warned. We are being warned.

The post A Venezuelan’s Warning appeared first on The American Conservative.