Rod Dreher's Blog, page 65

View From Your Table

Breton galette and hard cider at the Left Bank outpost of the Breizh Cafe. While I was there, a real-life manif (demonstration) passed by, making a lot of racket. The spry maitre’d of the restaurant and one of his waiters each picked up a wine bucket and began banging on it and dancing. Ah, Paris…

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The Oyster King Lives

No, not me: Regis, the king of Paris oysters. It’s not just me who says that: Mireille Guiliano wrote a thin, fun little book a few years ago about Paris oysters; at the center of it was Regis, whose last name I can’t remember: the cantankerous genius of this tiny oyster bar in St-Germain, believed by many to have the best oysters in Paris. From the book:

And:

I could go on. I had already discovered this place years before Mireille Guiliano wrote a book about it, but now I realized that this absolute gem of an oyster bar was worthy of a book. Of course it was! If you don’t like oysters, you won’t see the point of this place. No reservations, the place is tiny, the owner is a grumpy perfectionist who doesn’t want to put up with your bullshit, etc.

But if you love oysters — and oh boy, do I — then Huitrerie Regis is the best place on earth. I tell people that if I could only eat one last meal on earth, it would be three dozen speciales de claires at Regis. You can get extremely good oysters all over Paris, but nobody’s are better than Regis’s. I don’t know why. Some things are meant to be a mystery.

I have testified in this space for over a decade as to the glories of Huitrerie Regis, which I visit every time I’m in Paris. For example, there’s this from 2015:

I do two things when I am in this city, without fail: go pray before the shrine of St. Genevieve, and go eat oysters at Regis. That’s how it is. So, imagine my great shock when I read on the Internet not long ago that the great man had retired and sold the business to two new owners, Edoard and Benoit.

Oh Lord, what now?

Well, I took two friends, young lovers who plan to marry, to dinner there last night. Because of Covid restrictions, there are only two tables available, both on the sidewalk, though they did set up two standing tables on the outer edge of the sidewalk.

I am happy to tell you that Regis is as good as ever. This sacred space has passed into good hands. Here is Edoard, having taken up Regis’s spot as the shucker:

And here is Willy, whose mission it is to make sure you have a good time:

It must be such a blessing to know that you work in a vocation that makes people so very happy. And by the way, the grumpiness left with Regis. I didn’t mind it at all — it was part of the oyster bar’s charm — but the new owners are happier to see you.

Well, look: the oysters were staggeringly delicious, as ever. They are the concentrated essence of the sea. The new owners have improved the wine list. Willy, our host, recommended an Alsatian Riesling, which was an unusual choice to my mind, but it turned out to be perfect. Here are my friends Adelaide and Pierre, sitting across the table from me:

We talked of the beauty of French women, a glorious example of which we had at our table (Adelaide doesn’t like oysters, though, which is her only apparent flaw), and we talked about love. They plan to marry soon, though Pierre hasn’t yet popped the question, but that is coming soon, I feel certain. Is there a better way to spend a cool late spring evening in Paris than eating the best oysters in the world, and drinking cold French wine, in the company of two young people who are deeply in love with each other? It was a presentiment of heaven. I mean that literally: this is what paradise is going to be like.

So, one era has passed at Huitrerie Regis, and a new one has begun. Check out their new website, and please, oyster lovers, make a visit here on your next trip to Paris. Some things change, but also never change. Huitrerie Regis, thank God, is one of them. You should be aware that it’s not cheap to eat at the portal to paradise at 3 rue de Montfaucon, but for someone who really loves oysters, this is a spectacularly great value, because honestly, who can put a price on perfection? You will be talking about this place for the rest of your life. An evening at Huitrerie Regis proves that money really can buy happiness. (P.S. Order the speciales de claires No. 3.)

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View From Your Table

Foie gras on toast, and a 2012 Bordeaux, on the first day Parisian restaurants have been open to serve sitting customers in forever. The city is coming alive again, and I, along with my friend Pierre, were here to see it. Our restaurant was on the rue St. Jacques, the oldest street of Paris, which dates back to the Roman period. After we finished, we walked down the hill to the river. Look what we saw. The different colors on the stones of the facade is because of the light of the setting sun:

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Strawberries Off Andrássy Avenue

(A version of this appeared originally on my Daily Dreher Substack newsletter, where I focus on the things that make life worth living, but a number of readers have urged me to share it on the blog. — RD)

It is August of 1985, and I have just moved into an apartment complex just south of the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. I will begin my freshman year in a couple of weeks, but until then, I am cooling off by swimming daily in the building’s pool. Being 18 years old, and assuming that the entire world wants to hear my music, I set up my jambox at the edge of the pool, and start playing some rock or pop.

I notice a thin man with graying temples stretched out on a chaise, scowling at me over his magazine, behind sunglasses. Deciding I would do well to try to make friends, I asked the stranger what kind of music he likes.

“Bartók,” came the answer. It was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted almost forty years.

The man was Béla Bollobás, a Hungarian-born mathematician of world renown. He was (and remains) a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge — and, as is common with celebrated Oxbridge professors, he had brought his star power to the US for a semester to earn a more generous supplemental paycheck. LSU’s Mathematics Department was thrilled to have him and his English grad students, all of whom lived in our building (and one of whom, Imre Leader, now also a Trinity College don, I’ve remained friends with all these years). In Hungary, before they married, Béla’s wife Gaby was a stage actress and performer. When I first met her that autumn, so vivid and alive was this Hungarian dame that I thought she was the most glamorous woman I had ever met.

Béla and Gaby live in Cambridge most of the time, but they also have an apartment in Budapest, not far from the opera house on Andrássy Avenue. Last Saturday afternoon I went over to visit them. I noticed when I walked in that they had on a table a copy of a Hungarian conservative magazine of which I was last week’s cover boy. When we sat down together, I reminded them of that poolside meeting in Baton Rouge so long ago.

“Did you ever imagine that we would see each other one day in a free Hungary?” I said.

I didn’t expect an answer. Of course they didn’t. Who could have? Back then, we were still in the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power for only five months. In just over four years, the Berlin Wall would be gone. It is impossible to explain to people who didn’t live through any of the Cold War how unthinkable this was. Béla, who defected with Gaby in the 1960s, told me today that he had expected Communism to last for five hundred years.

We reminisced about the dramatic journey the young unmarried couple had made out of Hungary, through Yugoslavia, trying to escape to the West. In the town of Novi Sad, they found a Jesuit priest, a Father Kilbertus, who had been ordained just that day. He offered to marry them at once on the grounds that it is permissible in canon law to marry a couple who are on a sinking ship. The fugitives from Communism were in an analogous situation, reasoned the Jesuit, who performed the rite.

Gaby asked the priest how they could write to him. “Don’t look for me,” he warned.

“He told us he was a soldier for Christ,” Gaby said that afternoon, her eyes filling with tears. “My God, I thought that meant they were going to kill him.”

Years later, safe in Cambridge, the Bollobáses celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a party in their garden. There came a call to their home. It was Father Kilbertus, phoning to congratulate them. Gaby recalled that he said how pleased he was that they had stayed together, and how he had prayed for them to make it.

I’m sorry to report that the Bollobáses are very, very downcast about the state of the West today. I’m going to write more about that in a blog post next week. The gist of it is that the civilization they fled to seeking refuge as young Hungarians has now, in their view, begun to destroy itself. They are convinced that both America and Europe are in advanced decline. They remain faithful massgoers, but also grieve what is happening to the Catholic Church. I was struck by the visceral pain the old couple showed talking about these things. At this point, they told me, their only hope is that their homeland can somehow survive.

“Believe me,” said Béla, “nobody hated the Soviet Union more than I did, but I have to say that the West today is a greater threat than the Soviets ever were. At least the Marxists valued academic excellence.” The agony in his voice as he said that was palpable.

We made plans to see each other again this summer. Walking back to my flat through the cool late-afternoon drizzle, I brooded over their pessimism, which is even more intense than my own. I did the other day, when I spoke to someone very old, can’t remember who, who told me that his only consolation in life now is that he’s not going to be here to see the worst of what is to come. My friends the Bollobáses definitely have the same sensibility.

And yet, at poolside that summer of 1985, if a messenger had swum over to us and said to be of good cheer, because in four years, the Berlin Wall would fall, and Communism would soon cease to exist, both of us would have thought him a madman. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Had that madman further said that thirty-six summers into the future, we two, Hungarian and American, would sit at a table in the Bollobáses’ drawing room in a free and democratic Budapest, eating fresh strawberries and talking about old times, we would have laughed at the prophet and his lunacy.

But that’s just what happened last Saturday afternoon. You never know, do you? Maybe things are exactly as bad as the Bollobáses and I think they are. But maybe God has some surprises in store for us all.

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Le Roi Des Huîtres Est De Retour

Hello from Paris. Didn’t think I’d ever get here, but boy oh boy, did Camille Lorthiois, the press attaché for Artège, my French publisher, make it worthwhile. She greeted me in the office with a half-dozen fresh oysters on the half shell from Normandy, resting on a bed of ice. I just about cried. They were so, so good, as good as I remember French oysters. I say the process for Camille’s canonization should begin right now.

I shared a taxi into the city from the airport with a French businessman. He asked what I was doing in Paris, and I told him I was here to promote the French version of my book Live Not By Lies. He told a heavy story about what’s going on in his country. Wokeness is a big problem here, he explained. He finds it very frustrating that so many French people hate it, but almost nobody will speak out. Everybody is afraid. The whole country seems demoralized, he said.

“What about the Manif Pour Tous?” I asked, referring to the big movement some years back against same-sex marriage, and for the traditional family.

“Gone,” he said. “There are politicians who were there at the big march in Paris who today deny it. But they were there.”

Wokeness is a problem, he said, but so is the prospect of civil war. Yes, I said, I had seen that in the press, when the retired French generals raised the question in their open letter. It seems impossible to imagine how that would happen.

Perhaps because our taxi driver was Arab, the businessman didn’t get into it. Later in the afternoon, I was standing outside my publisher’s building waiting for Camille to come down after a meeting, when I struck up a conversation with another Frenchman who was also waiting there. We talked about the civil war possibility. He said it’s not at all far-fetched.

“Back in 2005, there were big problems in the banlieues,” he said, using the French word for suburbs. “Serious violence went on for a long time before it finally burned out. Well, today there are many, many more of those violent Muslim extremists there than there were back then. If they ever decide to kick it off at the same time all over the city, there are not enough police and security forces to handle them. They know that.”

The man told me that he had spoken to someone — I didn’t recognize the name, but he said it’s someone well-known in France as an expert in the domestic terrorism and crime field — who told him that France is one police shooting of a Muslim away from civil war. What’s also different now from 2005 is the existence of social media. “A police shooting, or rather their version of it, which doesn’t have to have much to do with truth, will make the rounds instantly, and everybody will hit the street,” he said. It could happen at any moment. Everybody knows this, he said.

So, it’s going to be an interesting week here in France on the Résister Au Mensonges press tour. The restaurants open tomorrow for outdoor dining. Joy will be unconfined.

 

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The West In Upheaval

I was supposed to be in Paris tonight, but the Hungarian lab that did my PCR test on Friday screwed up, and failed to deliver results. I cancelled my flight, booked one for tomorrow, and went to a different lab. Let me tell you, the Magyars do not play with these tests. After the invasive one on Friday, I told the nurse that as a matter of honor, he owed me a marriage proposal. This morning’s was not nasal, but at the back of my mouth. Six times he provoked my gag reflex such that I made that yacking sound you make when you have dry heaves. Good times, good times. I’m telling you, those results damn well better come in overnight.

Longtime readers know that I really love France, so it is deeply disturbing to me to read this long, thoughtful essay about France’s troubles by N.S. Lyons, on The Upheaval, his Substack newsletter. 

He begins by talking about the recent letter signed by retired French generals, urging the leadership class to gain control of the country before civil war breaks out between the radical Muslims of the banlieues (suburbs) and everyone else. Most French elites dismissed it, but then came a letter signed by over 2,000 active duty soldiers, and then by almost 300,000 French citizens, saying that the generals were right, and the country is falling apart. More from Lyons:

But perhaps my favorite example was that of (retired) General Jérôme Pellistrandi, chief editor at the magazine Revue Défense Nationale, who prefaced his otherwise sharp criticism of the outspoken soldiers with: “Everyone agrees that society is breaking up, it’s a known fact, but…”

What was going on here? Since when do government officials reflexively agree that their country is falling apart? Well, it turns out that a rather shockingly high proportion of the French public seems to agree with the sentiments the letters expressed. The following chart, created from the results of a Harris Interactive opinion poll taken April 29, after the first letter, is in my view one of the most striking statements about the political mood in a Western country that you’re likely to see for some time:

I can’t post that graphic because it’s copyrighted by the Financial Times, which created it. The results say that most French people support the soldiers lamenting the country’s “disintegration.” You can see the graphic on Lyons’s essay. More Lyons:

So, to break this down, not only do 58% of the French public agree with the first letter’s sentiments about the country facing disintegration, but so do nearly half of Macron’s own governing party, the centrist En Marche. Awkward. Nor are those sentiments limited to any one part of the political spectrum, even if the right is more sympathetic overall. Far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon may have quickly declared that the “mutinous and cowardly” soldiers who signed the letter and would all be purged from the army if he were elected, but 43% of his party seem to share their concerns.

But that’s not even the whole of it – an amazing 74% of poll respondents said they thought French society was collapsing, while no less than 45% agreed that France “will soon have a civil war.”

Lyons talks about the many ways both France and the US mirror each other in decline and disintegration, though France is farther along than we are. Lyons goes on:

And, in short, both countries are clearly facing at least one of the defining characteristics of the Upheaval: the collapse of any agreed upon and consistently accepted authority. It is notable that, in both countries (at least until recently) there is only one institution that still garners relatively widespread respect: the military. (And French generals aren’t the only ones trying to capitalize on this with controversial open letters.)

Second, there is the key detail – almost entirely skipped over in the English-language press in favor of focusing on the anti-immigration angle, as far as I’ve seen – of the “anti-racism,” “decolonialism,” and “communitarianism” decried in the two letters as contributing to national dissolution. This is rather unmistakably a reference to the amalgamated, zealously anti-traditional and anti-liberal ideology of the “New Faith” – alternately referred to as Anti-Racism, the Social Justice movement, Critical Theory, identity politics, neo-Marxism, or Wokeness, among other synonymous infamies – that I’ve previously identified as one of the key revolutionary dynamics of our present era.

Let me repeat this proposition again: no revolution has ever remained contained by national borders. The New Faith is a trans-national ideological movement, which can no more remain confined to the United States than it remained confined within the American academy where it matured (it was arguably born in, well… France). And it is more than capable of rapidly adapting itself to and flourishing within whatever national context it penetrates. But, wherever it goes, it’s just as disruptive to the foundations of social and political order.

Read the whole thing. Lyons goes on to say that President Macron and other members of the French Establishment, sensing the mortal dangers to an already fractured Republic from wokeness, have begun to push back. But can they stop it?

Here in Budapest, as I wrote last week, the anti-Orban Left recently erected a mock-up of the Statue of Liberty, holding a table that read BLACK LIVES MATTER, and colored in the rainbow flag. This was sponsored by the city government, which is in the hands of the opposition. Some right-wing men tore it down soon after it was put up. What is so striking about this, at least from my point of view, is how the Left in this small Central European country adopted the symbols and themes of the American culture war to launch their own attack on the government. There are very, very few black people in Hungary. The point of the gesture was to unite the local Left with the global Grand March of Progressivism.

Earlier today I spoke by phone to a British source who was talking about a situation in his country in which the radical cultural Left has taken over an influential institution (I’ll be writing about it later, so I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag). He spoke in great detail about how thoroughly demoralizing the infiltration has been, and how profound the effect is likely to be on the UK. The same dynamic is happening in the US, of course, in our elite institutions. Something very, very bad is going on.

As I’ve been writing here, the current Hungarian government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is increasingly orienting the country away from the West and towards China and Russia. Back in 2014, Orban made his famous “illiberal democracy” speech. Excerpts:

 Yet there is an even more important race. I would articulate this as a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful. As the state is nothing else but a method of organizing a community, a community which in our case sometimes coincides with our country’s borders, sometimes not, but I will get back to that, the defining aspect of today’s world can be articulated as a race to figure out a way of organizing communities, a state that is most capable of making a nation competitive. This is why, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen, a trending topic in thinking is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet making nations successful. Today, the stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia. And I believe that our political community rightly anticipated this challenge. And if we think back on what we did in the last four years, and what we are going to do in the following four years, then it really can be interpreted from this angle. We are searching for (and we are doing our best to find, ways of parting with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them) the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.

I don’t want this blog post to go into a detailed analysis of the Orban speech; you can read the whole thing and decide for yourself what he meant, and how you feel about it. The graf I’ve highlighted above shows the core of his question: which form of government will make a state most successful? Liberal democracy is not an end (he says), but the means to an end, which is national success. Well, what is “success”? If I read the speech correctly, Orban is saying that in some key areas, the liberal model — defined as maximal individual liberty, bounded only by the principle of avoiding harm to others — has failed to produce nations capable of thriving in the world today.

What, then, should a country like Hungary do? Where is the model it should follow? It looks to the West and sees chaos and strife that is the result of liberalism’s own policies. I wrote in this space recently about how concerned I am that the Hungarians are welcoming the Chinese construction of a European outpost of their Fudan University. But I spoke the other day to a Hungarian-born professor who has spent his life teaching in US and British universities, and he told me that the Chinese, whatever their failings, will not export cultural pathology through Fudan University. A Budapest branch of any leading Western university would, he said.

Of course he’s right about that. Seriously, would you really want to invite into your country a vector for the kind of crackpot ideology that is tearing apart American institutions, psychologically harming kids with gender theories, turning races against each other, and dismantling the ability of once-great universities to do what universities are supposed to do? Would you want your country to adopt education policies that punish gifted and talented kids for the sake of “equity,” as California is now doing? Do the people of Hungary, or any other nation that hasn’t already swallowed the poison, really want their children to be taught in school that there are scores of genders, and that they can decide for themselves what their gender really is? The Democrats are trying to write gender ideology into the US Constitution via the Equality Act, which won’t pass this year, or next year, but it will eventually pass. Once that happens, and once objecting to transgender ideology is regarded in constitutional law as the equivalent of racism, there will be no coming back from that.

France is facing the prospect of civil war because it allowed in massive numbers of Islamic immigrants, which it has not been able to assimilate. Back in 2015, in the midst of the migration crisis, the Hungarian PM gave a speech:

Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has claimed Europe is in the grip of madness over immigration and refugees, and argued that he was defending European Christianity against a Muslim influx.

Orbán’s incendiary remarks came as he arrived in Brussels for a confrontation with EU leaders over his hardline policies in Europe’s biggest migration emergency since the second world war.

“Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe,” Orbán wrote in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

“Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.”

More:

Orbán said the razor-wire fence erected on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia was essential to defending the Schengen zone’s external borders. He denied that the emergency was a refugee crisis, but one of mass migration.

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

This is total anathema to liberals and progressives. But Orban was right then, and is right today.

I am new here, and don’t know enough about this government’s policies to say whether or not it has found an answer, or part of the answer. What I can say with confidence is that to step slightly outside of the West — Hungary is a Western, Christian country, but has not (yet) drunk the woke Kool-Aid — and to look at what’s happening at home is to realize that the West is not the future. The West has been the future since the discovery of the New World, but it’s hard to believe that it remains so today. I don’t believe that it is primarily because of liberal democracy. I believe that it is primarily because of its decadent, narcissistic culture, including its abandoning of Christianity. As I see it, the real question Viktor Orban posed in 2014 is whether or not to save the things that made our civilization not only great, but that make it work, requires turning from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy. What would that mean in practice — for the Hungarians, and for us? Is liberal democracy a collective suicide pact?

Near the core of this political and cultural crisis is the fact that we cannot even talk across ideological lines about it. Look at this. Jay Rosen is a major professor of journalism and media critic at NYU; “Sulliview” is Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist at the Washington Post:

The US is going to become “functionally an authoritarian White Christian nationalist state in the very near future”?! Jay Rosen thinks so too, and so, it would seem, does Margaret Sullivan?! Good God. The left controls nearly every major institution of civil society in this country, and corporate America; even the CIA and the US military are going woke. This claim is deranged — but it’s what they are going to keep telling themselves to justify tightening the soft totalitarian grip. The amazing thing I’m seeing after this month in Hungary is that despite its self-serving pretensions, the US is in key ways less liberal and less democratic than Hungary. But that’s a story for another post. As is the question of whether political measures can ultimately keep this Cultural Revolution out of Hungary, or any other country in the world.

UPDATE: The culture war is just a figment of fevered right-wing imagination. Also, here’s the current cover of one of Italy’s two leading newsmagazines. The slogan says, “Diversity Is Richness.” Men cannot have babies. A culture that believes so is morally insane, and deserves what it gets.

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The Bitty-Bug ‘Blessing Of Freedom’

I’ve been here in Hungary for a month now. I’ve had conversations with government officials and academics, but also with ordinary Hungarians — baristas, cab drivers, cleaning ladies, housewives, and so forth. (I had an interview on Friday with a smart, articulate member of the opposition, which I’ll be writing about later today.) Based on my conversations, it is hard to overstate the fear and disgust Hungarians have of the most aggressive currents of American culture. Even the liberal opposition figure I talked to on Friday said he is entirely in favor of gay marriage and gay adoption rights, but he finds baffling transgenderism and the multiplicity of sexual identities that is now central to American culture.

The line I’ve been hearing from “ordinary people” — cabbies, baristas, the cleaning ladies, et al. — is that they are weary of corruption within the ruling party, Fidesz, but they prefer it without question to the Hungarian left, which they believe will open the door to the moral sickness of gender ideology, and destroy Hungary’s ability to govern its own sovereignty, including (indeed, especially) in matters related to gender ideology. One academic I talked to the other day, a man who spent most of his career teaching in US and Western European universities, told me that he welcomes Fudan University from China coming here, because he has confidence that the Chinese will not put up with the ideological diseases destroying Western academic life. And, he said, the Chinese will let Hungary be Hungary.

Is he wrong? Maybe. But that is what I’m hearing over and over and over here. Obviously there is a serious opposition to the Fidesz government — again, I’m going to post later today on my interview with a prominent anti-Orban figure — but as an American, it has been startling to me to find so many people here who affirm their government’s turn away from the West, and towards China and Russia. Let me emphasize that I am not talking about government officials or those who are part of the Fidesz party apparatus. I talked the other day to a young woman who told me she is a student, who said that she supports the Orban government because it matters a lot to her to keep immigrants out, and to make sure transgender ideology doesn’t take hold here. It would be a mistake to say that this is a Christian thing. Unlike Poland, Hungary is not very religious. This young woman told me that she lives with her partner, and ultimately wants to marry and start a family. She sees the moral breakdown in the West over gender as a direct threat to the family she wants to start.

She’s right — and she is far from the only one. I take a lot of taxis here (they’re cheap), and do the Tom Friedman thing of asking the cab drivers what they think. I’ve had a couple who are strong Fidesz supporters, but most of them say they’re tired of what they regard as corruption (e.g., sweetheart deals on government contracts for the party’s supporters). Every single one of them so far, in a month of asking, have said that they intend to vote Fidesz because they do not trust the opposition to resist the EU’s pressure on immigration and cultural issues like gender ideology. They don’t have any fear of China.

But what about freedom? I ask. China is a totalitarian state.

They don’t see China forcing them to accept migrants or affirm transgenderism. Besides, they say, American “freedom” looks like a curse.

This is the kind of thing that disgusts and frightens Hungarians:

This is a crocheted “packer” for little girls who say they are boys, and who want to have a bulge in their crotch. Notice how small they are. “Bitty Bug” is the cutesy-poo name these people have given to a simulated penis and testicles, meant for small children to wear.

This is what America has become. I can hear now, the liberals who read this accuse me of “nutpicking” — that is, identifying extreme examples of some phenomenon and using it to smear the whole. Sorry, I’m now immune to this criticism. Over and over and over we hear the same gaslighting from the Left … and the Overton Window of trans insanity keeps moving. Two years ago, I did a post highlighting a YouTube commentary (since removed) by a little girl talking about the joys of silicone fake penises to put into her underwear. Naturally I got accused by readers of nutpicking. But one reader said:

Those who are saying that this is alarmist don’t have children in urban public schools. I have a tween there right now, and the peer pressure to be trans is significant. We keep hearing that this affects a “very small percentage” of the people in society. How is it, then, that in one class, it’s a fourth of the kids claiming to be trans, in another it’s a third of the kids claiming to be trans, etc.? And more besides claiming to be “gender-fluid” or similar? How is half of a classroom of pre-teens a “small” phenomenon?

It looks, as far as I’m concerned, like peer-pressure of the sort that parents have always warned against. Sex. Drugs. Crime. etc. Only now it’s gender identity, and the system, rather than fighting the peer pressure, is encouraging it, and proposing biological interventions besides.

The number of parents who are buying in is also alarming. Kids are happily being told by their parents that gender is a construct, it’s naturally fluid, you’re free to find your true self, it’s *not* uncommon, doctors can help, etc. And if you’re the parent who tells your kid that this isn’t true? Your kids very quickly come to understand that *you’re* the bigot. They’re out there swimming in that ocean. That also doesn’t play well in the peer pressure arena—”I’ve got the bigot parent who doesn’t accept people for who they are, *le sigh*”

This is not a small phenomenon. And all signs say it’s going to get larger. What is the threshold at which people finally start to worry about this? When 10% of kids are on hormones? 20% of kids? 30%?

I argued with a fellow parent this week who had no problem with those numbers. It’s just helping people to “be who they are,” like hairstyles and fashion choices. They had no problem with it whatsoever. And what can you do? Forbid your kids from socializing with certain other kids? If you’re a parent, you know it’s not so easy to sever social ties on your childrens’ behalves, much less multiple social ties, much less if the kids in question are the “coolest” (i.e. the trans) ones that are the most flamboyant and popular.

How can anyone with a straight face tell Hungarians that there is nothing to worry about, that either this won’t come to them, or when it does, it will be liberating? Don’t forget:

The basic human right to buy and sell crocheted fake penises and scrotums for your little girl “bitty-bug” to put in her pants to pretend to be a boy. This is what our culture has to offer to the Hungarians, and to the world. My interlocutor on Friday said that he’s convinced Hungarian PM Viktor Orban believes the West is finished, and the future belongs to societies like China’s. As an American, I hope that is not true. But the evidence is not encouraging.

UPDATE: Reader James C. comments:

Well. I was in Genoa on Saturday, and I was shocked to see huge swathes of the old town overrun with illegal immigrants, among them many Nigerian, Senegalese, Gambian, Tunisian and other African drug dealers, as well as pimps and prostitutes. Not a pretty sight, and—judging from the daily stories in the newspapers—not a safe one.

I imagined myself as a Genoese resident of the old city, whose family has lived there for many generations. I imagined what it must be like to watch your family neighborhood change horrifyingly beyond all recognition.

Today in Genoa, politicians are holding a ceremony unveiling public benches that have been painted in rainbow colors to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia.

And I can imagine that Genoese resident thinking, “If only we had Orban.”

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View From Your Table

My host tonight was Spanish, and made me a rabbit paella. A Valencian jambalaya! It was fantastic. And look what we finished the evening with: Rodrigo is opening a bottle of Tokaji, the classic Hungarian dessert wine. I had never tasted it. It was so lush and fruity, just ravishing stuff.

 

Off to Paris on Monday for book tour. Watch this space for culinary joy.

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Trump, Truth, And Totalitarianism

Look at this:

Now look at this, from the local GOP elected official responsible for the voter registration database:

It’s a lie. Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it. It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what is real. From Live Not By Lies:

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

More:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Hannah Arendt wrote that a people’s eagerness to believe lies that pleased them was a clear sign of a pre-totalitarian society:

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

… As Arendt wrote about the pre-totalitarian masses:

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Look, I wrote a whole book that describes the left-wing ideological assault on the truth, for the sake of achieving political power. We on the Right are no better than them if we surrender the truth for the sake of power. Donald Trump is not forcing anybody to accept the lie. That is on us. If you are a member of Congress who would rather affirm something you know to be a lie, or should know is a lie, because you are afraid of losing your job, then you have already lost something far more important than your job.

Once again, I want to see a Republican Party that embodies many of the principles associated with Trump: immigration restriction, anti-globalism, cultural conservatism, and so forth. But none of that matters if we abandon the truth. None of it. That is a price too high for honest men and women to pay. Besides which, even if you were prepared to accept a lie for the sake of power, it’s not going to work. From the Washington Examiner:

Another [Arizona] Republican member of the board, Bill Gates, sharply criticized the GOP Senate-led audit, raising concerns that Republicans alleging widespread voter fraud “will do lasting damage to our republic.”

“If Republicans become the party of the ‘Big Lie,’ if we encourage this madness much longer, we will lose credibility with the majority of Americans on issues where I believe we have better ideas,” he said.

That’s a truth that even cynical Republicans are bound to respect, for their own good.

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Every Knee Shall Bow

Well, Baylor University did what it was always going to do, and caved. Screenshots of the document — which you can see in its entirety here — follow. Notice the language they’re using to frame their capitulation to the culture, and to middle-class respectability:

More:

 

Shorter Baylor: “Why no, we are not abandoning our beliefs on human sexuality. But if we don’t act as if we have, LGBT students will kill themselves!”

Truthful Baylor: “We are totally embracing conformity with this post-Christian culture, but we’re going to lie to ourselves and to our alumni about why we are doing it.”

Seriously, the language Baylor’s document uses to rationalize the university’s capitulation is a perfect example of the therapeutic approach that soft totalitarianism uses to institute itself. Is what Baylor doing now “soft totalitarianism”? No, of course not. It’s wrong, from an orthodox Christian point of view, but it’s not soft totalitarianism. But note well: give it a few years, and the next step is to declare that any professors or staffers who hold to the orthodox Christian teaching on sex and sexuality must be suppressed as a necessary step to protect LGBT persons from harm. Six years ago, I gave a talk at a big Catholic university, and was told by four professors there — three of them tenured — that they would not dare to present the Catholic Church’s teachings on sex and sexuality in their classrooms, for fear of their students denouncing them to the administration as harm-bringers, and the university punishing them.

“You don’t feel free to quote the words of Pope Francis about homosexuality in class?” I asked, nonplussed (remember, this was years ago).

“No,” came the answer.

This is going to be Baylor University in five years. You watch.

Meanwhile, look at what’s going down in Toronto, over the objections of the Cardinal:

On May 6 the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which is elected by voters, passed three separate motions: one that proclaimed LGBT Pride Month in June every year, one that required the Pride flag to fly at all schools, and one that required the Pride flag to fly at the school board office. The board’s LGBTQ2S+ advisory committee, whose acronym includes “queer/questioning” or “two-spirited” concepts of sexuality, had recommended the passage of all three motions.

In its comments before the board vote, the archdiocese said that parents make a “clear choice” when they send their children to a Catholic school.

“They rightly expect that trustees, principals, teachers – all partners in education – will ensure that Catholic teaching is presented, lived and infused in all that we do,” the archdiocese said. “In that regard, the appropriate symbol that represents our faith, and the inclusion and acceptance of others, is the cross, which is visible at the entrance of every Catholic school. It is the primary symbol of our Christian faith: it draws us to contemplate the generous and sacrificial love of Jesus, as he lays down his life for all of us.”

“In a world that would crucify an innocent man, Jesus returns love for hatred and says: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ (Luke 23:34) The love represented by the cross is that sacrificial love, centered not on self, but on others.”

Catholic school systems in Ontario are taxpayer-funded and schools are not owned by the dioceses in which they operate. While bishops set catechetical curricula and ensure sacramental ministry in school contexts, they do not exercise control over elected boards. Provincial governments set basic rules for the operation of those schools, while local decisions are made by trustee boards elected by Catholics at the time of municipal elections.

I’m going to write about this in a separate post, but yesterday I had an enlightening interview with a prominent liberal critic of the Orban government. I had asked a local friend to put me in touch with an Orban critic who can articulate his or her objections to the government in non-hysterical terms. The interview was really interesting, and I’ll tell you more about it on Monday. But here, I want to say that we talked about LGBT matters. This man told me that he supports gay marriage and adoption rights (gays have a domestic partnership law here now), but he can’t accept the polymorphous “sexualities” that are emerging in American discourse. He said that he hates how the Orban government whips up anti-LGBT fears.

I told him that he sounds like a reasonable American liberal circa 2010. I brought up how once gay marriage was constitutionally mandated, World War T started. Now we in America are told by the Left that if we don’t affirm everything about transgenderism, normalize it in elementary school, provide hormones to kids, and so forth, that we have blood on our hands. I told him that a pro-gay liberal professor who holds his beliefs would be demonized on many American university campuses today. I told him that even though I don’t know what the government, or government-oriented media, say about LGBTs, I expect that I would cringe at at least some of it. The problem, I told him, is that once in power, and once they have momentum behind them, the sex-and-gender Left gives you absolutely no possibility of dissent, no chance to say, “Here and not beyond,” no possibility of peaceful co-existence. We know this now in the US. And Hungary will find this out if it gives any quarter to this ideology.

Anyway, all churches and church institutions in which middle-class, worldly values are more important than fidelity to the Christian faith will capitulate. Baylor’s surrender was entirely predictable, as was the therapeutic language it would adopt to rationalize it. This is only the first step of the revolution at Baylor. As Neuhaus’s Law tells us, “Where orthodoxy is optional, it will eventually be proscribed.” It’s coming at Baylor, and in most Christian institutions in the West, as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. Read Live Not By Lies and prepare.

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