Rod Dreher's Blog, page 13

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Threats In Tucker’s Brain appeared first on The American Conservative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Titus:

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

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

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

Read it all. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Viktor Orban Or Joe Biden? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s the address I gave at the National Conservatism Brussels conference a couple of weeks back:

Along those lines, here are two inspirational NatCon Brussels speeches by my friends Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Alex Kaschuta:

And this stirring presentation on the persecuted church abroad by Father Ben Kiely:

Lots more good stuff from NatCon Brussels over at the NatCon YouTube channel.

The post Calling Europe Back To The Christian Faith appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Fidesz faithful usually gather on Election Night at a Budapest convention center called Baina — The Whale. In the belly of the Whale early last evening, the mood was cheerful but tense. They all knew the pre-election polls showed Fidesz, the political party co-founded by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, out ahead of the opposition by a few percentage points, but nobody wanted to be over-confident. “Polls have misled us before,” one Fidesz leader told me.

Mostly, though, the reticence came because they all knew they weren’t supposed to be on the verge of a fourth Orban victory. When I left Budapest late last summer, my Fidesz friends were not hopeful. It wasn’t anything in particular, but mostly the fact that in a democracy, people over time grow weary of leadership by one party. Fidesz has been in power since 2010. The general feeling was that 2022 would be the opposition’s year. Last fall, the opposition parties closed ranks and, in a primary vote, selected Peter Marki-Zay, a Catholic mayor of a small city, to be the united opposition’s standard-bearer.

When I returned in early February, the Fidesz mood was very different. On the campaign trail, Marki-Zay — or “MZP” as they call him here, a country where last names are stated first — had proven to be a disaster. Last night at the Whale, I listened as Hungarians regaled foreigners with stories of MZP’s haplessness. There was the time he bragged about opposition unity, saying “we’ve got everybody from Communists to Fascists in our coalition” — something that was true, but not something to boast of. On another public occasion, a journalist called out a question to him, and he rushed over to the reporter and had a massive freakout on camera. He seemed to be trying to capture some of the Trump energy from making the media the enemy, but he just looked deranged.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine, upending everything. Viktor Orban is well known to have been the closest to Vladimir Putin of any European leader. Would this bring him down now that Putin had launched a war on neighboring Ukraine? The Western media seemed to think it would.

Orban’s handling of the political challenges of the Ukraine war is a master class in political strategy. According to polls, nearly all Hungarians side with Ukraine against Russia, but a strong majority of them do not want Hungary to get involved in the war. Over and over for the last two months, I had conversations with Hungarians who talk about how terrible the 20th century wars were for Hungary, and how they don’t want their country dragged into another conflagration that will get a lot of them killed, and the country’s infrastructure destroyed.

One man in the Rudas baths, an Ottoman-era thermal bath at the base of the Buda hills, told me and a visiting Englishman who had been talking about the beauty of the capital city, “You should know that this is something that only happened in the last ten or fifteen years. Before then, things were a mess, and we didn’t have the money to fix them up.” Buda had been badly damaged in some of the worst fighting of the Second World War, as the Red Army fought house to house to dislodge the besieged Germans. Forty years of Communism left the state too poor to repair much of the damage.

Hearing stories like this, and stories by Hungarians talking about how their family members suffered in the Second World War and its aftermath, would make me angry when I would read in the Western media, or online, facile condemnations of Hungarians for not getting on board the hate-Russia train. As one well-informed Hungarian told me last night, “You can’t be Hungarian and love the Russians. But you have to be sensible about what’s in your country’s best interests.”

Aside from war, there is the matter of the Hungarian energy supply. The country gets 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The Hungarians prefer not to freeze in the dark next winter for the sake of Ukraine — a country with which they had sometimes-difficult relations before the war broke out, owing to what they regard as the Kyiv government’s mistreatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in far-west Ukraine.

So, Orban withheld Hungary’s veto from European Union joint action against Russia, opened the borders to Ukrainian refugees, and sent humanitarian aid. He also criticized Russia’s invasion. But he would not allow NATO weapons to transit Hungary on their way to Ukraine, saying that he did not want to give Russia a casus belli for extending its war into Hungary. Though the Western media then, and this morning, are smearing Orban as “pro-Putin,” this was exactly the position that most Hungarian people supported. As usual, the liberal journalists mistake the opinions of their own class for the vox populi (a poll last month showed that the only demographic in Hungary favoring a more aggressive stance against Putin was — surprise! — educated professionals).

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, a darling of the West, has been calling out PM Orban for not doing enough to stand with Ukraine. It is understandable that Zelensky would want maximal commitment from the West, but he really overplayed his hand, earlier accusing Orban of the equivalent of complicity in the Holocaust. Zelensky kept up the smears even on election day yesterday:

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking early Sunday in his capital, Kyiv, described Mr. Orban as “virtually the only one in Europe to openly support Mr. Putin.”

Asked about Mr. Zelensky’s assessment after casting his vote in Budapest on Sunday morning, Mr. Orban said curtly: “Mr. Zelensky is not voting today. Thank you. Are there any other questions?”

A perfect answer! With that, the prime minister telegraphed that he will not be morally blackmailed by Zelensky, and that his responsibilities are first and foremost to represent the will and interests of the Hungarian people. As I said, today the Western media are reporting on the victory of “pro-Putin Viktor Orban,” which is the same kind of biased b.s. that has kept Western journalists from understanding what’s really happening here in Hungary. Orban was not voted back in yesterday because he is pro-Putin; he was returned to office because he is pro-Hungarian.

It is not often that the head of a right-wing party gets to run for re-election as a peace candidate, but that’s what Orban did, and it paid off. Over and over, talking to people in the streets, in pubs, in taxi cabs, I heard the same thing from people: however ready they might be for a change in government after twelve years of Fidesz, this opposition is incompetent, and besides, nobody wants to change leadership in a time of national crisis.

And then there was the LGBT media law referendum. Last summer, the Fidesz-controlled Parliament passed a law prohibiting certain expressions of pro-LGBT information aimed at minors. It caused a huge uproar among European leaders, who called it rank bigotry. Orban decided to put the questions to voters in a referendum yesterday. Hungarians were asked to approve or disapprove of the following questions:

Do you support the promotion of gender reassignment treatments for minor children?”Do you support the display of media content showing gender reassignment to minors?Do you support the unrestricted depiction of sexual-themed media content to minors that affect their development?Do you support holding sessions on sexual orientation for minor children in public education institutions without parental consent?

It was a smart political move, because it meant that those who agree with the government would be more likely to turn out to vote. The opposition, knowing that they would lose the referendum, called on its voters to spoil their ballots, knowing that the referendum would be non-binding if fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

In one sense, the opposition strategy paid off. Though 90 percent of those who voted in the referendum sided with the government, just under half voted for the referendum, making its result invalid. Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter, because the law remains in effect. Now, though, European leaders know that the government’s policy has strong popular support. And, for an opposition that loves to claim that Orban undermines democracy, urging people to void a national referendum via spoiled ballots was not a good look.

Well, as you will have heard by now, Fidesz won a massive victory, by even greater margins than predicted. Marki-Zay, who lost his own voting constituency to a Fidesz candidate, whined that it’s impossible to beat Orban, on the grounds that the prime minister gamed the election. This is the Left’s version of the Democrats blaming “Russian collusion” and other trickery for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. I expect this will be the line that American commentators take in the days to come — anything to avoid the fact that the Hungarian opposition ran a lousy campaign, and that Viktor Orban’s policies, however unpopular they might be in the Brussels, Washington, and among the media, really do represent the views of most Hungarians. At the Whale last night, the Fidesz faithful were over the moon. None expected such a big victory: a fourth landslide in twelve years.

What next? The prime minister faces immense challenges in this term. The economic effects of the Russia-Ukraine war will be overwhelming for Europe and the world — and Hungary is not a wealthy country with reserves to help absorb the coming economic shocks. The Hungarian health system is underfunded (a big reason why the Orban government took a hard line on Covid vaccinations), and needs help. Plus, Orban has to deal with a hostile European Union, which might ramp up punitive actions against Hungary — though now Brussels must know that the Hungarian government has the strong backing of its people, and that if pressed, Hungary could exercise the veto power EU member states have over collective action. Europe would do well to reset its relationship with Hungary, but a political class that views Hungary’s national-populist government as illegitimate — especially on LGBT questions — may not be in a mood to compromise.

What does this mean for American conservatism? You have to be careful not to overdraw the lessons. Hungary is a small, ethnically homogeneous country, with a particular history that sets the boundaries on politics here. For example, the Left opposition is still run by former Communists who profited immensely in the 1990s, using their connections with the former order to get rich off the sale of state-owned assets. As one Fidesz voter told me last night, if you go into the wealthy part of Buda, you will find many villas owned by former Communists who, despite their role in enslaving this country to the Soviet Union, made out like bandits in the aftermath of Communist dictatorship. We have nothing quite like that in the United States.

Nevertheless, there are some lessons to be drawn. The first one is already underway in the US. Orban does not shy away from fighting the culture war. In Hungary, gay couples have the legal right to form civil partnerships, and there is broad tolerance of gays and lesbians. But most people here reject transgenderism, and they especially reject the gender ideology propaganda liberal elites and their supporters in schools and media direct towards children. In my six months here in Budapest over the past year, whenever I talk to Hungarians about what has become routine in the United States regarding media, educational, and woke-capitalist indoctrination aimed at kids regarding transgenderism, they visibly struggle to believe that what I’m saying is true. But of course it is true. As we know from Christopher Rufo’s publication of videos from an internal Walt Disney Company session, Disney has been inserting pro-LGBT messaging into its children’s programming for years, and plans to double down on it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new law forbidding propagandizing children aged nine and under in schools with this stuff is a pale shadow of Hungary’s law, but it’s similar — and it is very popular nationally, even among Biden voters. Last week the Biden administration released new federal health guidelines on transgender “care” for children — and in them, openly laid the groundwork for the possibility of the state seizing children from their families to submit them to hormones and surgeries.

Orban has shown now that going against elites in the media, corporations, and foreign governments to protect children is a big winner. It is time for Republicans to be more faithful to the people they claim to represent than to the donor class on this issue.

Plus, Orban shows that national-populism is not dead. The liberal internationalist class has been hoping that Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine, and the apparent resurgence in Western alliance and resolve, would once and for all put an end to Trumpist populism. Hungarian voters showed them otherwise. Orban has made it clear that until and unless there is a populist victory in one of the bigger EU states, he and his Polish allies will be in a precarious position. However, if a nationalist-populist GOP president comes to power in 2024 with a GOP Congress behind him, and they realize that Hungary is poised to be a great ally to a national-populist America, things could change.

I have been saying for the past year that US conservatives should come to Hungary to learn from Orban and Fidesz. Orban is not a small-government Anglo-Saxon conservative. He believes in using the power of the state to strengthen families, the basis of any health society. But the most important thing US conservatives can learn is how to use political power to fight the culture war — and not in the most obvious ways, such as with the referendum. Orban is a country boy who knows very well how the Left dominates culture here in Hungary, especially cultural institutions. And he understands, in ways that elude American conservative politicians, how the soft power wielded by the Left in those institutions changes society in progressive ways. This is why for all the political victories the GOP has racked up over the past few decades, the broader society and culture has continued its accelerating drift leftward.

As I wrote last month, quoting the political scientist Eric Kaufmann and his research on American society, conservatives absolutely cannot afford to be complacent here, and mindlessly observe the old liberal habits of keeping the government’s hands off of non-political matters. As Kaufmann pointed out, the younger generation in the US is so far to the Left, and so hostile to old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and tolerance of diverse opinions, that if conservatives don’t find a way to stop or reverse these trends, there will be no place for us to exist in the America of the near future.

The call now among some Republican commentators for the state to take action against Disney, to revoke its special privileges on copyright to retaliate for its indoctrination of American children, is a pure Orban move. We need to see more of it. Republicans have been so prostrate before Big Business that they have sat there like idiots while Woke Capitalism organizes to turn conservative values of faith and the traditional family into pariahs among the young. Either we on the Right will learn from Viktor Orban how to use politics to fight this, or we will be defeated.

The Disney/transgender controversy in America now is a tremendous opportunity for conservatives to fight back against the liberal elites. The LGBT lobby controls the Democratic Party, and Biden’s HHS rules last week show how out of touch he and his party’s leadership class is from the concerns of ordinary Americans. When the Left is coming after your kids — and it really is — we cannot afford to stay out of the fight. And we cannot afford a Republican Party that mouths the right things, but when in power, does little or nothing to roll back the Left’s gains.

This Scotsman is telling the truth. Viktor Orban speaks for him. How many American GOP politicians do?

The Peril Of Conservative Culture-War Complacency

I tweeted this last night, when I got home late from the event:

Make no mistake: #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 3, 2022

It’s getting badly ratio’d on Twitter, which I expected. And true, it was said in a moment of exuberance. But I stand by it. Any Western conservative who understands that we are caught up in a civilizational struggle must understand that Viktor Orban is our champion.

The post Viktor Viktorious appeared first on The American Conservative.

Yeah, yeah, squall about it all you want, but that’s exactly what the Democratic Party is, if you take seriously the Biden Administration’s newly released guidelines on health care for trans youth. Take a look:

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs released a document Thursday titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People.” The same day, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network – another subset of the HHS – released a parallel document titled, “Gender-Affirming Care Is Trauma-Informed Care.”

The HHS documents describe what it calls appropriate treatments for transgender adolescents, including: “‘Top’ surgery – to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts;” and “‘Bottom’ surgery – surgery on genitals or reproductive organs, facial feminization or other procedures.”

More:

“For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system,” the NCTSN wrote in their release. “It may include evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones.”

The NCTSN document goes out of its way to assure the public that the use of gender-affirming methods such as surgery and hormone replacement are not child abuse – most likely in response to recent policy decision in Texas that made such treatments illegal.

Here is a link to the fuller HHS document stating the administration’s position. Excerpts:

There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care. The decision for the child welfare system to become involved in the lives of families, potentially to the extent of removing children from their families and homes, should be wielded with the utmost care, grounded in evidence, and always prioritizing the well-being of children and preservation of families.

That ought to send a chill down everyone’s spine. The Biden Administration is laying the policy groundwork for the seizing of minor children from parents, for the sake of jacking those children up with hormones, and mutilating their bodies with surgery!

 

Got that? It is US Government policy that you must affirm, always affirm. There is no controversy here. None. Along those lines:

I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children may be removed from their families so that their bodies can be altered by the state.

This is the Democratic Party at work. This is what it means to have a Democratic government. Does having a Republican government mean reversing all of this? One hopes so.

Folks, they really are coming for our children. It’s right there on the government website. They are propagandizing doctors to act as agents of the state in the seizure of kids. Read the document yourself!

UPDATE: This is one issue on which I don’t believe it is possible to be too radical in pushing back. This stuff is absolutely intolerable. I remind you: they are talking about seizing children from families to put them through sex reassignment. Could that possibly be more dystopian?! Sure, they say that they are going to be careful about it, but the fact is they plan to do it at all. This is outrageous. People should be in the streets protesting this.

The fact of the matter is our ruling class have decided that there is no reason anyone could possibly object to this without being the moral equivalent of a Klansman. They will continue to push and push for this with the full support of the Cathedral (= media, academia, law, medicine, government, NGOs, et alia). No, these positions aren’t popular with voters, but if you want to gain access to professional circles, including accreditation required to gain access to our non-hereditary aristocracy, you had better affirm this malicious garbage.

Wake up, folks: institutional capture by the radical Left has gone so far that businesses, educational institutions, and others are appointing the contemporary equivalent of commissars (Soviet political officers) under the guise of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Meanwhile, we on the Right can’t run a bakery or a floral shop without being hunted down. Until these institutional advantages are negated, the Left will keep pushing the boundaries, and keep winning.

This is why it should become the most important priority of a new GOP Congress, should it come into being after this fall’s election, to roll back Disney’s copyright extensions. That would be an atomic bomb dropped on the heads of Woke Capitalism, and cause these corporate titans to think long and hard before involving themselves in the culture war. Conservatives have to understand that we are not in the 1980s. Big Business is the enemy of families, and of anything traditional. They want our kids. If the Republicans in power cannot pull off a rollback of Disney’s extended copyright protection (which it bought by having standard US copyright laws changed for its benefit), then all the posturing about being a pro-family party is just that: grift.

The Walt Disney Company’s executives bragged on video about inserting messages about queerness surreptitiously into children’s programming, and about their plans to increase trans visibility and the like in its programming going forward. One of them bragged that they have a blank slate in the minds of children. The Democratic Party is 100 percent behind this, at the leadership level. None of this is right-wing propaganda. We have the evidence, in those Disney videos, and in black and white, in this HHS memorandum.

If we on the Right cannot fight this, and win, we might as well head for the hills and plant cabbages, because we are done as a meaningful political force.

The post Democrats: Party Of Child Mutilators & Kidnappers appeared first on The American Conservative.

I know some of you are tired of reading about Viktor Orban and Hungary, but have faith: the election will be held on Sunday, after which there will be much less posting on the topic, probably. I’m headed home to the US on April 30.

I want to share this long Politico piece about the election with you, because it’s such a classic example of how the Western media simply do not get Hungary and Orban, and misinform their readership. Should Orban win on Sunday, people like this reporter will assume that it’s because Orban cheated, or something. Their worldview cannot abide any other explanation. The URL for the piece gives the game away: https://www.politico.com/news/magazin... — “Hungary Minority Parties Take Down Orban”. The election hasn’t even happened yet, and Politico has declared Orban taken down. Right.

To be sure, Orban and his ruling party face their toughest election since coming to power in 2010. As regular readers of this blog know, when I left here late last summer, almost everyone I knew in Fidesz was really anxious about the 2022 election. Twelve years is a very long time for a political party to be in power in a parliamentary democracy, and most Fidesz folks figured that they had had a good run, but things were coming to an end.

It’s been eye-rolling for me to read since then the standard speculation in the Western media that Orban The Autocrat would not leave office were he to be defeated. They simply cannot imagine that Orban really is a democrat, and if he were to lose the election, there would be no hesitation on his part to do his constitutional duty and step aside. In a true autocracy, leaders don’t worry about elections. I don’t know the prime minister, but I do know a lot of people around him, and last fall, they were sweating out the coming April 3 vote.

But when I returned in February, I found my Fidesz friends surprisingly hopeful. Why? The united opposition, led by Peter Marki-Zay, had proven to be characteristically inept at campaigning. People regaled me with stories of Marki-Zay’s campaign-trail missteps and gaffes, including saying once that Covid would give the opposition an advantage by killing off Fidesz’s elderly voters. It turns out that Marki-Zay, as mayor of a small Hungarian city, was fined multiple times by courts for shooting his mouth off in a libelous way. This is not a man who has control over what he says, and it was hurting the opposition in the polls.

Now, in the Politico piece, you get none of that. None. Trust me on this: you cannot understand this election campaign without understanding how bad the opposition has been. When Westerners like me get together, we talk about conversations we’ve had with ordinary Hungarians who go on and on about how much they hate Orban, and/or are sick of Fidesz, but who say they’re planning to vote for Fidesz because this opposition is incompetent. I had a conversation like that with a middle-aged woman on a train ride just this week back from the southern city of Szeged. It occurs to me that the Western media is missing what’s happening in this election in a similar was as they missed the 2016 Trump victory: the liberal candidate seems so obviously correct to them, and the conservative so obviously wicked, that they are blind to the serious flaws of the liberal.

In the Politico piece, you don’t find out until thirteen paragraphs in that the opposition is running significantly behind in opinion polls. Until then, it’s all been about what an awful man Viktor Orban is, and how heroic is Peter Marki-Zay. You can be forgiven for thinking: wait, what? You could also be forgiven for expecting after that point reporting on how the opposition is blowing it.

But you don’t get it. Instead, you get loads and loads of liberal hopium. Look at Orban, a Putin stooge! How can you expect liberals to fight a campaign when there are so many refugees coming in to distract our compassion?! Et cetera.

Nowhere do you see even a mention that polls show that Hungarian people overwhelmingly oppose Russia’s war on Ukraine, but also strongly back Orban’s policy of helping refugees but keeping Hungary out of the conflict as much as possible. One of the reasons the opposition hasn’t been able to capitalize much on Orban’s closeness to Putin is because most Hungarians fear that an inexperienced opposition government, one eager to please Brussels and other European capitals, would get them into a shooting war with Russia. Shouldn’t Politico‘s readers be told this fact?

You also read nothing about how heavily dependent Hungary is on Russian natural gas. They get between 80 and 85 percent of their natural gas from Russia. Hungarians aren’t fools. They don’t want to be left in the lurch because Russia has cut them off. They know that Orban knows this, and is looking out for them. Now, Westerners might think bad of the Hungarians for not being willing to freeze in the dark next winter for the Ukrainian cause, but things look a lot different from the country where people are actually going to vote on Sunday — especially given that there is no love lost for the Ukrainian government among Hungarians, given how the Zelensky government has treated the Hungarian ethnic minority in far western Ukraine.

Again: these details matter. They help explain why voters are likely to vote they way they are. But Politico ignores them. Know what you also don’t learn from the article? That the United Opposition includes the No. 2 party in the country, Jobbik, which until very recently was openly anti-Semitic. I get why the leftist parties agreed to ignore that for the sake of defeating Orban … but why does the Western media? You also get a line about how Orban “demonizes” LGBT people, without any explanation that the LGBT media and education law passed last summer is likely to be approved by national referendum on Sunday, and that many Hungarians, maybe a majority, resent the hell out of EU politicians condemning Hungary for exercising its moral right to decide how to educate its children.

You also don’t learn that the opposition is still dominated by Ferenc Gyurcsany, the unpopular former Socialist prime minister, who represents the former Communist ruling class. Gyurcsany was a Communist youth movement leader who got very, very rich in the 1990s, after his totalitarian party lost power. Orban beat Gyurcsany in 2010, with the Hungarian economy on the brink of collapse due to mismanagement. People’s living standards here have grown remarkably over the last decade. It is not surprising that Hungarians would be reluctant to hand power back over to the Gyurcsany-dominated Left — particularly since the Orban-Gyurcsany rivalry reminds voters who lived under Communism and its immediate aftermath what they hate about the way the well-connected former Communists not only failed to answer for their crimes, but did quite well in the aftermath of dictatorship’s fall.

Granted, a relatively short election piece can’t cover all the bases, but shouldn’t it at least try to cover some of those that help explain why Fidesz is doing remarkably well for a party so long in power? The only Fidesz-friendly voice in the whole piece is a pro forma quote from the top government spokesman. Take a look at this anecdote, which is a perfect example of how the Western media cover this country:

Bolla got involved with Nyomtass Te Is after spending Election Day 2018 as a poll worker in the countryside. After interacting with so many friendly voters, she was optimistic the opposition parties could make real gains — but when she counted the votes at the end of the day, nearly all the villagers had voted for Fidesz. “I thought, what’s happening with these people? We all live in the same country,” she told me as we drove toward Fehérvárcsurgó, stacks of newsletters nestled next to me in the back seat. The difference between her and them, she deduced, was in their lack of independent information.

Ah, of course! Stupid hicks who don’t know what’s good for them. What’s the matter with Fehérvárcsurgó, anyway? Bunch of bitter clingers, sounds to me like.

The final graf pre-absolves the opposition of failure:

Márki-Zay acknowledged the tough odds his movement faces, even as he said he was hopeful the voters would come through for him and his movement. “Obviously, there’s no level playing field for the two sides,” he told me after his campaign speech. “It’s very difficult to win under such circumstances, when people’s hearts are poisoned.”

Well, okay, I understand why a beleaguered opposition candidate would say and think such a thing. But why would a professional journalist — not an opinion journalist, but a reporter — be so willing to buy it? The answer is throughout the story: the writer, Emily Schultheis, knew the story she wanted to tell before she set foot in Hungary, and looked for facts to fit around the narrative. And so, should Fidesz win on Sunday, the liberal media already have their answer for why: Orban poisoned people’s hearts. Maybe they’ll even say it was Russian disinformation. Anything but facing the fact that the opposition has had twelve years to get its act together, and still can’t perform.

That’s the opposition’s problem. What’s the Western media’s excuse? It is really quite something that they keep misreading the world, and yet never, ever once seem to question their own biases. They think anybody who disagrees with them has to be illegitimate. They keep doing this and doing this, but never learn.

The post How Do You Say ‘Bitter Clingers’ In Magyar? appeared first on The American Conservative.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: I really like Anne Applebaum’s histories of the Soviet world. But man, her chronic neoconnery is awfully hard to take. Here she is in The Atlantic, talking about how if the world’s democracies don’t defend themselves, autocracy will destroy them all. Excerpts:

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

Wait … what?! If a country doesn’t agree with Davos-Man liberal democracy, it is “at war” with us, and must be treated as an enemy nation?! Even Hungary, a European nation and a democracy which, if it were a real autocracy, would not have to care about this weekend’s elections. If Orban is a shoo-in, nobody has told my Fidesz friends, who are on pins and needles. Is Hungary not a democracy because people here don’t vote in the way Anne Applebaum wishes they would?

Look, Belarus is not my idea of an ideal country, but do we have to be at war with it? With Nicaragua, which the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega has turned into a shithole, but which is not at war with us — so why should we consider ourselves to be at war with it? “Potentially many others” — good grief, these people. They really are revolutionaries, ready to make war on the entire world to establish the sole legitimacy of one way of governing a nation.

This morning in Budapest I had a long breakfast with a visitor from western Europe. This man, whose name I won’t use because he’s something of a public figure, and he follows international economic and sociopolitical trends for a living. He had the expectation that we were speaking privately, generally talked about his expectation that we in the West are headed toward an economic collapse sometime in the next three years. And when economic collapse happens, he said, we are going to see exactly the cost of the rot we have sunk into over the past decades.

“Have you seen a map of which countries are not sanctioning Russia?” he said. “It’s most of the rest of the world, outside the West. They hate us. Well, maybe it’s not the case that they hate us as much as it is that the hate what we have become.”

He talked about his years of working in Africa, and how the Africans, for all their many problems, look at us and think we are crazy. We spoke of the civilization-destroying triumph of gender ideology. I had not yet seen this, but I wish I had done, so I could have shared it with him:

Today is #TransDayofVisiblity–Check out @UnderSecAF Jones talk with Lt. Col. Bree Fram, highest-ranking openly transgender @DeptofDefense officer, about her role as the Deputy Chief of Acquisitions Policies and Process Division for the @SpaceForceDoD.https://t.co/cT1AOZmp4H pic.twitter.com/971RJIgGp6

— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) March 31, 2022

We talked about the Cathedral (though not using that neoreactionary term), the relatively small group of Westerners who run the world. Silicon Valley is one of the Cathedral’s heartlands, of course, but not everybody in the Cathedral is wealthy. I have no idea how much Anne Applebaum is worth, but she is an important chorister in the Cathedral. I wouldn’t say that she is woke, exactly (though she may be), but she is certainly a very significant voice for neoliberal/neoconservative ideology. I honestly don’t understand these people anymore. I have zero interest in living in or defending the undemocratic systems she criticizes (though of course I strongly reject her slander against Hungary), but I cannot for the life of me understand why she and people like her insist that we have to be at war with the whole damn world.

I believe Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine, but let’s not pretend that Ukraine was a nation full of sanctified innocents, and let’s really not pretend that the US wasn’t up to no good there (as Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other evidence, will attest). Don’t they get sick of these costly and stupid wars to convert the rest of the world to their ideology? Look at this piece from the Washington Post about how the Russian military’s failures in Ukraine have given the Pentagon new “swagger”. Excerpt:

But one month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, senior Pentagon officials are brimming with newfound confidence in American power, spurred by the surprising effectiveness of U.S.-backed Ukrainian forces, Russia’s heavy battlefield losses and the cautionary lessons they believe China is taking from the war.

“Let me put it this way,” said one senior Pentagon official of America’s standing in the world. “Who would you switch places with? Seriously, who would you switch places with?”

It’s a stunning shift in tone for a department that in August ended a 20-year war in Afghanistan with a chaotic withdrawal as an ascendant Taliban returned to power. Even though the U.S. military has not played the primary role in the American response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, senior Pentagon officials are quick to tout the still-unfolding war as proof of America’s economic, diplomatic and military strength.

The senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that the last few weeks have shown that the United States can marshal its “primacy in the global financial system” and its network of allies “in ways that can absolutely pummel aggressors.”

Just like that, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, tossed down the memory hole. We have nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine. And if it’s not, send the lantern-jawed tranny lieutenant colonel to sort the evildoers out.

If you talk to some Hungarians about the kind of militant “democracy” Applebaum advocates, they see partisans of a narrow, secular, socially liberal model that is highly intolerant of any dissent, and that demonizes those who disagree. The Hungarians passed a law last year trying to protect their children from the kind of horrific indoctrination into gender ideology now sweeping the West — and for this unforgivable crime, the Applebaum class condemns this country as a rogue Putinist state that doesn’t belong in Europe. It tells you something that the straw that broke the camel’s back with the EU was about protecting children from gender ideology.

Ryszard Legutko, the Polish philosopher, has rightly written about the “totalitarian temptations” within the Applebaum-Davos model of liberal democracy. Here is Legutko, in an excerpt from his excellent The Demon in Democracy, discussing the strange similarities between the Soviet barbarians who took over Poland, and the softer, more sophisticated ones that moved in after the fall of Communism:

Their strikingly loutish manners and coarse language did not have its origin in communism, but, which many found astonishing, in the patterns, or rather anti-patterns that developed in Western liberal democracies. Of course the new order was different and had different mechanisms, but despite the differences it was directed against the social forms, types of conduct, norms and practices to which the old order had been also hostile. Life underwent further vulgarisation; the few practices and social norms that survived the previous invasion of the barbarians were subject to new attacks by the new forces of barbarism; the ugliness of communist Poland did not disappear, and beauty was as much a rarity as it had been before. The new barbarians could hardly be called Bolsheviks or Soviet thugs, but there was something in their attitude that led to seeking similarities with their predecessors.

Their vulgarity was, so to speak, of the second order, as opposed to that which we had seen in the communist Poland and which had had something primordial about it. What happened in liberal democracy did not result from the absence of culture, and there was nothing primordial or natural about it; nor did it come from outside of the realm of civilisation. In that it differed from the vulgarity of the communists who, before they captured the power in Poland, had lived in environments  practically  unaffected  by  Polish  culture.  Having  been  long exposed to the Soviet influence they felt an intense instinctive antipathy towards the West as such, not knowing exactly what it was, and in particular for all forms of civilised conduct and of propriety, which they thought both decadent and perfidious. The new barbarians of liberal democracy, on the other hand, were the products of the West which at a certain stage of its history turned against  its  own  culture;  the  respect  for  its  achievements  was  gone,  being replaced by contempt, and the rules of civility and propriety derided. To put it simply, the vulgarity of the communist system was pre-cultural while that of liberal democracy is post-cultural.

One may wonder why the new barbarians in Poland (and, I imagine, also in other former Soviet-bloc countries) appeared so rapidly and in such a great number. A major reason would be, perhaps, that what happened happened through mimicry. Hundreds of thousands of people started imitating, voraciously and almost piously, the behaviour, language and mental patterns of what they observed in the Western liberal democratic countries, and what they believed to be the essence of the modern society and the natural expressions of freedom. This alleged ambiance of modernity was so overwhelming that society meekly surrendered to the new tastes. The society did not have the will to oppose them, nor did it have a sufficient confidence that it should. The new barbarians easily took over public space and established its dictatorial rule. Twenty years after the fall of the communist regime, the chances of pushing them out are as slim as ever.

In both systems, man compensated his commonness with the image of a large, well- functioning system: communism in one case and liberal democracy in the other, which, through the pursuit of collective goals – such as equality for all, peace, prosperity, etc. – released him of a necessity to seek personal excellence and to aspire to the ideals that from the perspective of the political system might look redundant. A dream of greatness and a fear of downfall which the pursuit of greatness generated were thus transferred to the respective political system: the greatness of man was the greatness of the system, and his downfall was conceivable solely as caused by the forces hostile to the system. Hence, he did not feel his mediocrity and even if he did, he was not ashamed of it. The vulgarity he quite often indulged in was a tangible symptom of his sense of superiority as the only authority to set rules and standards, and this sense did not come from his own extraordinary qualities – those he obviously lacked – but from a powerful political and ideological mechanism that backed him up.

It is therefore hardly surprising that just as “communism” (or “socialism”) was the favourite word of the communist man, “democracy” has been such a word for the liberal-democratic man. The former liked to say that “but in communism”, “because in socialism”, and suchlike, and the “argument from communism” was always the most ultimate of all ultimate arguments and by definition irrefutable. The latter loves saying, always with due piety mixed with a touch of audacity, that “but in democracy”, “because in democracy”, and the “argument from democracy” refutes all others. The number and frequency of the words “communism” (or “socialism)” and “communist” (or “socialist”) in the ancien régime are equal to the number and frequency of the words “democracy” and “democratic” in the new regime. The eagerness to use these words as trumps was not thought by the users to be a symptom of intellectual and moral capitulation, but rather, and quite sincerely, a manifestation of independence, courage, assertiveness and autonomy. To a mediocre man, an organic assimilation with the system was the easiest way to develop a conviction of being exceptional.

It is striking to see how Applebaum used the word “democracy” to mean “what my international managerial class in the West believes to be a just order,” as if this were uncontestable. She writes:

Take democracy seriously. Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. Few of them have existed across human history; many have existed for a time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, too, by divisions and demagogues.

Democracy? I had a conversation recently with a businessman from a western European country, who told me that one of his kids — a 15-year-old daughter — can’t decide if she is a girl or a boy. He knows that she’s going through what most girls do at that age: a struggle with the effects of puberty and burgeoning sexuality. And she has the misfortune of growing up in a civilization that has lost its mind, and tells kids like her that normal middle-school anxiety over sex and physicality is a sign that you might need to lop off your breasts and jack yourself up with testosterone, so you can be your “true self.”

The beleaguered father said to me, “As a parent, you feel like you have no chance to help your kid. It’s just you against this whole wide world.”

Yep. The blessings of liberty, I guess, include watching helplessly as your children’s minds and bodies are stolen by Disney, woke educrats, and the media. If this what democracy has become in the West, no wonder much of the rest of the world is skeptical. The Western democracies have become societies where the anti-liberal ideology of wokeness has become the successor ideology to liberalism, but people like Applebaum speak and write as if nothing has changed. The dispossession and marginalization of large numbers of people on the basis of their race, or their moral or religious opinions, is of no matter. For example, Applebaum says conservative opposition to Critical Race Theory signifies a conviction that “schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America” — an incredible claim, but typical of the blindness even an intelligent, sophisticated observer like herself has to the radicalization of what used to be liberal culture. I am a small-d democrat, for sure, but if democracy means having to surrender yourself and your family to what Paul Kingsnorth rightly calls The Machine, then to hell with it. Kingsnorth:

Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of the Nietzschean will—­dissolves the glue that once held us. Fires are set around the supporting pillars of the culture by those charged with guarding it, urged on by an ascendant faction determined to erase the past, abuse their ancestors, and dynamite their cultural ­inheritance, the better to build their earthly paradise on terra ­nullius.

I do not see the rival ideologies, or autocracies, as ideals or leaders worth following. But what would Applebaum have us defend? What culture, what civilization? What order are they fighting for? Seriously, I do not understand these people, these Davos Men And Women, but I do know this: their wars are not my wars. They want to invade the world, eternally. And they never, ever learn.

The post Davos Woman And Her Wars appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s a fantastic essay from Gary Lucia, a gay Disney employee who says he’s sick of the lies surrounding the Florida law, which he supports. Excerpts:

The purposely misleading nickname“Don’t Say Gay” was a Trojan horse. It drew people in and got them all fired up because they thought the bill was attacking gay people. In a headline or quick soundbite, it seemingly told you all you needed to know. This was done intentionally—there has been an outcome of support and acceptance from the public at large since Gay Marriage was made legal, so those fighting the bill knew any attack on gay people would be met with outrage. The detractors of the bill used this to lure you in, but they wanted to hide the gender ideology part of the bill, which is what people should really be concerned about. The public was being played, and gay people were being used as pawns.

Any gay adult man who felt a kinship with that little boy dressed as Tinker Bell should be made aware of this: It is a very different world from the time you grew up—even from the world ten years ago. In today’s culture, that little boy would not be told it is OK to be gay; he would be led to believe he is ‘really a girl’. Across the nation and the world, gender non-conforming boys and girls are being pushed into believing they are trans. THIS is what is at the core of teaching ‘gender identity’, and it is a form of CONVERSION, just as contemptible as those religious groups that attempt to ‘pray the gay away’.

As a gay man and employee of Disney, I support the Parental Rights in Education Act and feel the need to go on record that I do NOT agree with the Disney ‘LGBTQ+’ leaders and groups that purport to speak on my behalf. I also feel the need at this time to make a statement that I do NOT consider myself a member of your ‘LGBTQ+ Community’ and I object to any assumption that I am included. I REJECT this ‘community’ and refuse to participate with or be subjected to any of its declarations.

Why?

He explains his reasoning, then talks about the big online Disney “community” meeting — the one leaked to Chris Rufo, with all the damning quotes from Disney executives about how they’ve been queering children’s programming for some time. More from Gary Lucia:

We were promised a conversation in which Disney would ‘get real’, but I watched the event and did not hear a lot of reality being discussed. I did not hear the biological reality of sex mentioned. I did not hear any acknowledgment of the social contagion currently happening in which there has been an astonishing increase in the number of teenage girls who are identifying as trans. I did not hear any acknowledgment of adolescents who are gender-nonconforming and identify as trans that eventually desist and go on to be gay and lesbian adults.

I did hear the word ‘queer’ thrown around a lot. I heard from an ESPN contributor about the support for Lia Thomas and trans athletes in women’s sports (which I do not agree with). I heard the bill being called ‘hateful and discriminatory legislation’. I do not believe this is true.

I didn’t hear any discussion about the impact of social media and how that is likely a contributing factor in the increase in kids identifying as non-binary, trans, queer, etc.

I didn’t hear any discussion about woke homophobia among today’s youth, in which ‘cis gay’ is used a slur and being a lesbian is not ‘cool’. If you have teenagers in your life, go ask them how many kids they know who identify as gay or lesbian compared to how many identify as trans, non-binary, queer, pansexual, or one of the multiple other ‘new’ and ‘unique’ choices.

I didn’t hear any honesty about what is meant when people say ‘LGBTQ kids are being denied gender affirming healthcare’. Here is what the phrase ‘gender affirming healthcare’ means: A child learns about the world of gender identity and decides she is really a boy. She tells her doctor/psychiatrist/therapist she is a boy. This is ‘affirmed’, no questions asked. No discussions, no talk therapy, just affirmation. She is treated like a boy, with a new name and new pronouns from then on. This can lead to breast binders and puberty-blocking drugs. All of this can happen at school with school administrators, keeping the parents completely in the dark. Which is why this bill is so important. I believe in protecting children and that begins with making sure their parents can be their protectors from this abuse. Detractors who have pounced on the idea that the bill will not protect kids from potentially abusive parents have missed the point—what this bill is attempting to do in Florida is protect kids from an already abusive ideology they are being exposed to in schools throughout the country. If your concern is parents who are abusive to their kids, there are already laws in place requiring teachers to respond to that. And it is the job of ALL OF US, not just teachers, to report any abuse we think is happening to kids from relatives, coworkers, and neighbors. (You know, ‘it takes a village’ and ‘see something, say something’?)

This guy is brave. Very brave. He’s taking a real risk. More:

In short, the Conversation did little to reassure me that the situation at Disney was going to get better. Rather, it ignited a fire in me to speak out because I could see it is going to get much much worse. It was made clear to me that Disney is planning to go even HARDER with gender ideology. And the more Disney pushes gender ideology, the more I am going to push back. I have been advised by people close to me to keep my mouth shut; just go along with it; it’s like this everywhere; this is the world we live in now. But I just can’t accept this. I feel really disgusted with what is happening.

One more word from Gary Lucia:

I’m writing this for anyone who feels like the world has gone crazy and they don’t know what is up and what is down anymore. You are not alone.

I’m writing this for my conservative coworkers at Disney, who feel silenced. While we have often disagreed on issues, on THIS issue of safeguarding children, I am in agreement with you. I want you to know YOU have allies in a lot of gay people, as not all of us have drunk the Gender Ideology Kool-Aid. Disney should be a place for EVERYONE to enjoy, and you should make your voices heard.

I’m writing this because I have been monitoring this for a few years and I see the writing on the wall, and the writing is getting bigger and more aggressive every day.

Read it all.  Thank you, Gary Lucia, for your courage. May you inspire much more of what you are showing in this essay.

Y’all, we have got to speak out. If you want to know why, read Lucia’s entire piece. This stuff is poison. This might be our last chance to do something meaningful about it. The same culture industry that manufactured consent to all kinds of woke priorities is working on this (again, Disney executives openly admitted, and even boasted, of how they’ve been trying to queer the minds of children). Most people are uncomfortable with gender ideology now, but a generation or two raised on woke Disney, and all of woke Disney’s allies in the Cathedral, will likely have been tamed, co-opted, and groomed.

If you don’t think so, explain why not, given what we have seen over the past decade?

Remember that cultural change doesn’t happen because the masses accept a new way of thinking. Cultural change happens because elites and elite networks come to agree on a new framework, and make accepting it the cost of admission into those same circles. If you wonder why so few Republican politicians have been willing to take a firm stand on this stuff, it’s because they too want to be part of those circles. You can be in favor of regressive economic policies, and nobody in the Cathedral cares. But if you are wrong on racial or sexual issues, you will never penetrate the Inner Ring.

You know what would stop Disney? Not a boycott, which won’t do anything. Going after its copyright exemption would. Disney’s lobbying of Congress protected its copyrights on characters that should by now have gone into the public domain. 
They’ve gone after our children; we should go after their copyright protection. There’s no reason Disney should have been given this by Congress, other than it paid a pretty penny in lobbying fees. Disney has proven itself hostile to the interests of American families. Mickey Mouse is a groomer. Make Disney pay, and thereby send a message to all Woke Capitalists that you cannot socially engineer children. Making Mickey Mouse pay for having his hands down the figurative pants of our children would be a successful rallying cry for populist politicians.

The Left is very, very good at playing hardball with corporations. The Right is terrible at it. Any wonder that Big Business sides with the Left time and time again?

If the Republican Party doesn’t mount a serious effort to attack Disney’s copyright protection, giving how the entertainment giant is abusing its unparalleled authority in an effort to corrupt the imaginations of American children, then what good is it? If we don’t want Woke Capitalists screwing with the minds and morals of our kids, then we have to hit them in the only place they’re vulnerable: their economic bottom line.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence, who, as Indiana governor, backed down in the face of Woke Capitalist threats in 2015, has released his “Freedom Agenda” ahead of announcing for president in 2024. Yawn. Tax cuts, strong defense, “spreading American values,” the usual. There’s almost nothing here that George W. Bush, circa 2000, would have disagreed with.

UPDATE: A great comment by a reader explains why I’m not going to back down on using the term “groomer” to describe these people:

I see some folks on this comment thread saying that calling this behavior “grooming” isn’t right, and that this isn’t an appropriate response to it.

I’m a Boy Scout leader. Every year I have to take Youth Protection Training. And it sucks. We hear stories from adults of how they were taken advantage of as kids. You hear gut-wrenching stuff. It’s awful. The case studies are cringe-inducing. We send the kids off to watch a video (Star Wars Rebels is great!) while we sit through the class.

One of the key points they make in that training is that one of the strategies that abusers use is to expose kids to sexuality at an age before they are emotionally ready to deal with it. And another is that they tell kids to hide abusive behavior from their parents. Offering access to pornography to underage children is another desensitization strategy.

Every one of these behaviors that our gracious host (rightfully) calls out in the trans ideology is characteristic of predators grooming children for abuse. And while the Disney and the school systems Rod points to may not be intending to do so, they are creating a culture and a system within which abuse will flourish because they are enabling them.

The post Gary Lucia: Gay Disney Dissenter appeared first on The American Conservative.

The nonpartisan polling firm Public Opinion Strategies has just released results of polling on the Florida education law falsely derided by liberals and the media as the “Don’t Say Gay Law” — and the news is awful for Democrats. Look:

Three days ago, the Miami Herald reported on the president’s reaction to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the bill into law:

Biden said every student deserves to feel safe and welcome in the classroom.

“Our LGBTQI+ youth deserve to be affirmed and accepted just as they are,” he said. “My Administration will continue to fight for dignity and opportunity for every student and family — in Florida and around the country.”

I remind you that Joe Biden tweeted this during the campaign:

Today, on the high holy Transgender Day Of Visibility, Biden said:

“Visibility matters, and so many transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming Americans are thriving,” Biden said. “Like never before, they are sharing their stories in books and magazines; breaking glass ceilings of representation on television and movie screens; enlisting — once again —to serve proudly and openly in our military; getting elected and making policy at every level of government; and running businesses, curing diseases, and serving our communities in countless other ways.”

Well, guess what? Most Americans do not want their little kids groomed by woke classroom ideologues to embrace a queer identity. The Democrats have done to the wall on this issue. Great — let them own it. Let the American people understand that Joe Biden and his party are the people who want children to be catechized by queer activist teachers, and want schools to be able to keep parents in the dark about it. This is not a blogger on a right-wing website smearing the Democrats. This is who they are, and are proud to be.

It’s not working with the American people. Americans are broadly tolerant of trans people, but they correctly draw the line at grooming children. I hope that the suits at the Walt Disney Company, the leading corporate groomer of children, are soiling their pants over these poll numbers. It turns out that Hollywood and Woke Capitalism are not in touch with the country on this crucial issue.

Here is gay Florida teacher Amber Mercier saying that she will defy the law:

Florida elementary teacher says she will still hold back information from students’ parents about them coming out pic.twitter.com/DuJUDN5ux3

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 29, 2022

Great. Drag her in to the principal’s office, and if she doesn’t retract, fire her on the spot.

This is a powerful issue for Republicans — gutsy Republicans like Ron DeSantis, not squishes like the governors of Utah and Indiana, who want to appease the media and Woke Capitalism, even at the cost of protecting children and families. If we as a country and as a society cannot protect our children from having their minds colonized by these groomers, what use are we?

About the term “groomers”: it’s usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not specifically be to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take on a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm. And it’s working:

Kids are getting this in school, and they’re getting this from the media. Here’s a new video from a Disney executive pointing out that the media really are indoctrinating kids, and that they should recognize “there’s a lot of power in that”:

NEW: Disney production coordinator Allen March, who says his team is committed to “exploring queer stories” and promoting “trans,” “bisexual,” and “gender nonconforming” characters, says kids are “getting all this information from the media” and “there’s a lot of power to that.” pic.twitter.com/rgxXgcIEwA

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) March 31, 2022

It’s very, very important that Chris Rufo is broadcasting these excerpts from the big online Disney meet-up to mollify angry wokesters within the company. If people like me point out that the media are doing this, half the conservatives say I’m alarmist, and all the liberals say that I’m bigoted and alarmist. But in that whole series of Disney executive clips, over and over top Disney people not only say that they do it, but the boast of it to shore up support from the woke Disney workers.

And this:

For #InternationalTransDayofVisibility, @Nickelodeon– who make content for children, is celebrating a trans 12 year old and all trans kids. TRANS KIDS.

Stop letting your kids consume content from woke corporations who want to push their LGBTQ agenda on them. pic.twitter.com/Dfb3Rds3U0

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 31, 2022

It is super-creepy that so many adults — especially adults in power — are fixated on queering children. It is past time for the backlash. You would never know it from media coverage of the Florida law, but this poll shows that Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature are on the side of the people — even Biden voters.

I heard today that the DeSantis people got the idea from Hungary’s (far more sweeping) law governing the presentation of sexual orientation and gender identity propaganda to children. On Sunday — Election Day here in Hungary — that law will go up for approval or rejection by Hungarian voters in a referendum. Here are the questions Hungarians will be voting on:

Do you support the teaching of sexual orientation to minors in public education institutions without parental consent?Do you support the promotion of sex reassignment therapy for underage children?Do you support the unrestricted exposure of underage children to sexually explicit media content that may affect their development?Do you support the showing of sex-change media content to minors?

How do you think Americans would vote on these questions? Most of us would probably support them. Predictably, the international media coverage is massively biased against the referendum — for example — but unless the opposition can invalidate its results through spoiled ballots, it will pass easily. From that hostile story:

“We are united, and this is why we will also win the referendum to stop at Hungary’s borders the gender insanity sweeping across the Western world,” Orbán said at a rally mid-March.

“We shall protect our families and our children, a father is a man, a mother is a woman, and leave our children alone,” Orbán told the crowd.

I bet that would be a winning message in American campaigns too.

It’s time for people to stop falling for the sky-is-falling propaganda from LGBT campaigners and allies. The Western media stories about the referendum in Hungary are full of quotes from LGBT activists in Hungary saying the referendum is going to increase anti-gay bigotry here, and so forth. This is what campaigners have been saying for at least two decades now: that if you don’t give them every damn thing they demand, then you will have LGBT blood on your hands.

Take Biden’s claim today that transgendered people “continue to face epidemic levels of violence, and 2021 marked the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans.”

Epidemic levels! The deadliest year on record! Here is the list of trans Americans killed in 2021, according to the gay rights lobby Human Rights Campaign. The list contains every trans person murdered, but says nothing about the context of those murders. They want you to believe that these people were killed for being transgendered. It’s propaganda — propaganda repeated by the President of the United States.

Tyianna Daverea Alexander — a male-to-female trans murdered in a drive-by double homicide while sitting in a car with another man at 5 a.m. No indication that Alexander’s trans status had anything to do with the shooting.

Samuel Edmund Damian Valentin — a female-to-male trans found shot to death in Puerto Rico in the middle of the road. Police could establish no motive.

Bianca “Muffin” Bankz, a MtF trans, died in a murder-suicide. Was Bankz romantically involved with the man who killed him and then himself? Was the man a trick Bankz, a former street person, picked up, who panicked when he realized Bankz was male? We don’t know. But HRC and other activists claim it was a transphobic killing. Yet the police said that the killing “was not random and is not a threat to the public.”

Dominique Jackson’s body was pulled from a wrecked car. Jackson, a MtF trans, had been shot. Police arrested Branden McLaurin in connection with the killing. I could not find out more information, because some websites are blocked in Hungary. Judging by some online commentary, McLaurin might have shot Jackson after discovering that he (Jackson) was male while meeting for sex. Murder is murder, but if Jackson was doing sex work — and to be fair, I could find nothing that suggested that he was — then that is extremely risky. Again, I could find no contextual details on this killing, but why should we automatically assume that it was driven by hatred of transgendered people? It might have been, but the assumption seems unwarranted.

Fifty Bandz, a MtF trans in Baton Rouge, was shot and killed by a male boyfriend. The two had been seeing each other for a while, say those who knew them, and had a volatile relationship. This was partner violence, not an anti-trans murder.

Alexus Braxton, a MtF trans in Miami, was murdered in his home in a vicious attack. I could find no evidence that police had made an arrest, nor could I find a suspected motive. Yet this is assumed by activists to be a transphobic attack. Braxton was a former prostitute, according to a friend who did sex work with her, and at the time of his killing was planning to set up an OnlyFans account to share erotic content with paying subscribers. I’ll say it again: if you get into this line of work, you are going to run a non-trivial chance of meeting up with some scummy, violent people.

Chyna Carillo, a MtF trans, was beaten to death by a man she had been dating, who was shot and killed by police in the violent act. Because the man and Carillo were both killed, it’s impossible to find a motive, but the killer had previously been convicted of murder for having killed his wife.

Jeffery “JJ Bright and Jasmine Canady were trans and non-binary siblings murdered by their mother, who was sentenced to two life terms. No motive was disclosed, though the killer had been struggling with mental health issues since her military discharge, and had recently been hospitalized for bipolar disorder. Was this a hate crime? Maybe. We don’t know. A family member said that the killer mom supported LGBT rights.

Jenna Franks was murdered for unknown reasons. Franks, a MtF trans, was a homeless drug addict, a hard demographic to survive in. But activists claim this was an anti-trans killing.

Diamond Kyree Sanders was killed in a robbery in Cincinnati. Police said the killing was about “greed,” not Sanders’s trans status.

Rayanna Pardo was struck and killed by a car in Los Angeles as the MtF trans was allegedly running to get away from a group that was harassing him. I could not find police comment on the case, but if this is true, then it seems fair to me to include that as a bigotry-related death. But then again, people get harassed on the street all the time. If Pardo was being harassed for being trans, how would we know?

Jaida Peterson and Remy Fennell were MtF transgender prostitutes who were shot to death in the North Carolina hotel rooms where they took their customers.

Aidelen Evans, a MtF trans, was a homeless transient. Police do not know why Evans was killed.

Dominique Lucious was shot by a man the MtF trans met on a dating app. According to the person with whom Lucious was staying, Lucious “may have been involved with sex work.” It is certainly possible that this was a killing motivated by trans hatred, it is also the case that prostitution is an extremely dangerous line of work. According to police, Lucious asked the man arrested for the murder how much of an unnamed drug he could give to Lucious in exchange for a sex act.

Tiara Banks (MtF) was shot to death while sitting in his car alone in Chicago. No killer or motive was ever found.

Jahaira DeAlto Balenciaga (MtF) was murdered by a houseguest with a history of mental illness.

Natalia Smüt (MtF) was murdered by a lover of several months.

Iris Santos (MtF) was shot to death by an unknown assailant while sitting at an fast food restaurant table. Police have no idea who did it, or why.

Jermaine “Tiffany” Thomas (MtF) was shot dead after midnight at a car wash in a rough part of Dallas. No motive or arrest has been made. If you are outside at a car wash in a violent part of town after midnight, you are not in a place of optimal safety, whatever your gender identity.

Keri Washington (MtF) was killed by his longtime lover. They had a violent relationship, a relative of the victim said.

Thomas Hardon (MtF, though he used the name Thomas) was killed by a former lover, a violent man wanted for homicide in four states. The man was homeless and had been living in the woods.

Whispering Wind Bear Spirit (non-binary) died after being shot trying to foil a home robbery attempt.

Sophie Vasquez (MtF) was killed outside his apartment. Police arrested a suspect in the case, but at the time didn’t believe the killing had to do with Vasquez’s trans status. I couldn’t find updated information.

I’ll stop there, at 25 killings, about the halfway point. I find that I’ve been working on this post for two hours now, and don’t want to do it anymore. Of those 25, I could find only one — Rayanna Pardo — who likely met his death because of bigotry (if it’s true that he ran into a road in front of a car to escape a mob). Many of them were killed by lovers or ex-partners. Some were involved in prostitution, one of the most dangerous kinds of work. Some were killed for reasons we may never know — but that is no reason at all to assume that they died because someone who hated transgendered people wanted them dead.

These lists from activists inform the news media and the Democratic POTUS, all of whom want to believe that there is an “epidemic” of anti-trans hatred that is causing the streets to run with blood. According to the HRC list, there were 57 killings of trans people in America in 2021. Know how many people overall have been murdered in only the city of Chicago, just this month alone? Thirty-five. 

Where’s the presidential denunciation “epidemic” of homicides in Chicago? All murders are evil. But those that don’t serve a progressive Narrative don’t get attention.

You should know that we are all being gaslighted by the President, by the Democrats, by the news and entertainment media, and by Woke Capitalism. Why? Who benefits? Other than alienating children from their parents, their religious traditions, and even their bodies, what is the end goal here? We ought to find our voices and demand answers.

By more than two-to-one, Americans favor modest bills like the Florida law that takes grooming power away from schools and returns to parents authority over their children’s psychosexual development. Republicans should make the Democrats defend their groomer-protection proclivities, and should stop being so afraid to take commonsense measures to protect children and families. Call the media’s bluff on these phony statistics and sob stories. The “human rights” activists in Hungary are claiming that LGBT blood will flow because of this weekend’s referendum — this, in a country where gay people are allowed to form domestic partnerships. It’s all gaslighting and crybullying. Viktor Orban is not intimidated by it over here, and neither is Ron DeSantis by the same thing over there. Good.

I’ll say it again: if we are not willing to protect our children and the rights of parents from those who want to colonize their minds, where do we draw the line? Conservatives have no power in culture to fight this stuff. We do have some power in politics. We should use it with confidence, while there is still a strong majority of Americans who are sick of this garbage being pumped into the minds of children by Disney, the media, and the Democratic Party.

UPDATE: Check out this piece in Quillette by Bernard Lane, reporting on the campaign by gender ideologues to get to kids while they are young. Excerpts:

In the debate about the wisdom of medicalised gender change for the young, there is a common refrain meant to expose the moral panic and ignorance of sceptics. No young person, we are told, gets any medical intervention before puberty. This may be true, but it obscures the more telling fact that very young children at school are exposed to influences that may put them on a one-way path to lifelong medicalisation.

In a Canadian primary school, a six-year-old girl was reportedly upset and puzzled after her teacher showed the class a YouTube video entitled He, She, and They?!?—Gender: Queer Kid Stuff #2. The video stated that “some people aren’t boys or girls.” Another day, the teacher asked the children to place themselves on a gender-spectrum diagram. The six-year-old put herself at the “girl” end of the spectrum, only to be told by the teacher that “girls are not real, and boys are not real.”

The girl’s family say school authorities refused to take any action over these lessons, which were given in 2018. Although the family moved the daughter to another school, they say the disorienting effect of having her foundational identity as a girl undermined has been “severe and long-lasting.” A human-rights complaint brought on the girl’s behalf finally reached a full tribunal hearing this month.

In England, a six-year-old boy reportedly came home confused because his school was allowing another boy to identify as female and wear a dress. The six-year-old’s parents say they were warned by school authorities that anyone who “could not believe” that boys identifying as girls were actually girls, or anyone who refused to use female pronouns, “would be viewed by the school as being transphobic.”

At a middle school in California, a sixth-grade girl called Jessica was allegedly influenced by teachers to join an Equality Club, where she was told she might be transgender and bisexual. Her mother’s lawyer says the teachers “told these kids, do not tell your parents, and specifically Jessica’s mom, do not tell them, they cannot be trusted.”

“They gave them reading materials about transgenderism,” the lawyer says. “They secretly changed the pronouns, but when in front of the parents, referred to their children by their birth pronouns. Behind the parents’ back, in the school, [they] used their new identity. All this was done secretly.”

More:

When gender ideology looms large at school and online, the young may be primed to interpret a sense of not quite fitting in, of a bodily disconnection, a feeling of a somewhat feminine boyhood or boyish girlhood, as signs of a trans identity. Autism Spectrum Disorder may go undiagnosed or untreated, and stirrings of same-sex attraction may be reframed as trans.

Read it all. 

The post Democrats: Party Of Groomers appeared first on The American Conservative.

 

A Disney ‘imagineer’ writing under a pseudonym describes the powerful company’s moral collapse in the face of woke militia who have captured it. Excerpt:

In less than two weeks’ time, the company had moved from principled neutrality to open advocacy. This new messaging, intended to mollify the company’s internal critics, accelerated Disney’s meltdown instead. “Brave Space Conversations” are now held at regular intervals—an absurd euphemism for struggle sessions designed to allow activists to vent their frustrations while drowning out dissenting voices. All regularly scheduled company meetings are cancelled to make room for these meetings, and park leadership opens the floor to hours-long performative recitations of grievances by hand-picked cast members. They conclude with grandiose statements about inclusion and fairness and understanding pain and listening, but not a single nonconforming viewpoint is heard, either from those who support the bill or those who think Disney has no business getting involved in this dispute in the first place.

“At Disney,” the company’s website promises, “inclusion is for everyone. We reimagine tomorrow as our way of amplifying underrepresented voices and untold stories as well as championing the importance of accurate representation in media and entertainment.” But, as usual, “inclusion” only protects those who think like DEI activists. “Fairness” only applies to historically oppressed people groups. The only pain worth understanding is that felt by the subsection of LGBT cast members who believe that sex education ought to begin in kindergarten. Listening and seeing is restricted to the approved narratives, and even excludes those LGBT cast members who support the Florida legislation. I know many of them personally, and nearly without exception, they are all parents.

The writer says that there are very many Disney employees who don’t agree with the activists, but they have been intimidated into silence by the aggressively work minority. More:

For a company that claims to listen to the voices of their cast members, the Disney corporation has spent the last couple years ignoring vast swathes of its own workforce. In recent months, they have gone further, actively supporting one group while actively suppressing or simply ignoring the other. We have changed our core ethos, and our storytelling has suffered under the litmus tests required by DEI requirements. I have been personally involved in no less than five projects that had their creative visions dimmed by the dictates of profoundly uncreative DEI functionaries: Replace that Christmas song, it’s too Christian. Don’t “culturally appropriate” that visual design, we don’t have a member of that ethnicity on the project team. Send this script to a “sensitivity reader,” the voice is too male. Remove “ladies and gentleman, boys and girls” from all park announcements, it reinforces the gender binary.

Time will tell whether or not Imagineering, and the Disney brand overall, can survive this internal revolution. But current trends are not encouraging. Some of us throw sand in the gears of the DEI machine when we can and produce the same exceptional experiences we always have. The capture is thorough, but Disney has survived periods of darkness before. I encourage everyone to ignore the bloviating of Disney executive leadership, from CEO Bob Chapek all the way down to park VPs. These people are not thought-leaders or cultural revolutionaries. They are cowards held hostage by the prevailing narrative, and they will run in whichever direction that narrative dictates. They do not represent the members of the Disney parks and resorts division. We are as diverse as the country itself, and the company’s attempts to use us as a bloc to push their political agenda is intolerant, exploitative, and profoundly un-Disney.

Read it all. 

This controversy is a major turning point in the culture war. The broader question is whether or not Disney, a company whose influence over the culture (via its influence over the moral imaginations of the young) is without parallel, is willing to serve the majority of people who just want to enjoy life without every damn thing being compelled to serve a narrow woke agenda, or if it will capitulate to these cultural terrorists.

The decision lies with the Disney leadership. But it also lies with the tens of millions of families who are customers of the Walt Disney Company. Disney is led by a pack of unprincipled cowards. Are the rest of us willing to make them pay a price? We know from the internal videos leaked by whistleblowers within Disney that the company has given free rein of the woke activists to insert woke cultural messaging into children’s programming. Does this not piss you off? If it does, what are you prepared to do about it?

If nothing, then they win. They, and their media allies, get our kids. The writer says that older gay Disney employees who have kids agree that it’s not right to subject little children to sex education in public schools. Do you agree? If so, then you cannot sit back passively and let Disney get away with this.

UPDATE:

It’s amazing how every single argument for gay rights circa 2000-2010 has gone out the window.

“How does it affect you?”

“Why do you care what consenting adults do?”

“People just want to be left alone.”

You’d have to be stupid to still take what activists say at face value.

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 30, 2022

Try to imagine if in 2005, Pat Robertson told his followers that soon kids would be calling themselves ze and xir and zonk and this would be taught in public schools. It would’ve been too much for the 700 Club, they probably would’ve forcibly retired him.

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 30, 2022

Imagine Pat Robertson in 2005 telling his viewers that Disney was soon going to start embedding pro-gay, pro-transgender messaging in children’s programming. They would have hauled him off to the looney bin. But now Disney senior executives not only admit doing so, they brag about it!

The post ‘Institutional Capture’ At Disney appeared first on The American Conservative.