Rod Dreher's Blog, page 23

You see the latest terror alert from the US Government?:

Look at number one: “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in US government institutions”.

Can you believe that? The US Government believes that telling “false or misleading” stories that call the public’s trust in itself into account is a precursor to terrorism. Do you see where this is going? Do you?

Good timing, then, that Crisis magazine published this week this must-read essay about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the heroic and mysterious Catholic priest to whom I dedicated Live Not By Lies. The Croatian author of the piece, Matija Štahan, refers to the priest in his essay as “Poglajen,” which was Father Kolakovic’s given name (he changed it to Kolakovic, his mother’s maiden name, to conceal his identity from the Nazis when he fled Zagreb). Štahan writes:

As an unusual personality who had a multitude of pseudonyms in the second half of his life, Poglajen is a member of several traditions. The first of these is the tradition that Christ described anticlimactically as prophets who were not recognized in their own homeland. Poglajen is forgotten in Croatia today, and it would not be surprising if, thanks to Dreherʼs work, he is better known in the English-speaking area than here in Croatia. Another tradition to which Poglajen belongs is that of Croatian Catholic idealists and, many would say, blinded romantics.

What a small shock it was to learn that Father Kolakovic (he will always be that to me, sorry) is unknown in his homeland! I hope I can do something about that. More:

But the part of Poglajenʼs life that served as the inspiration for Dreherʼs book also provides material for raising awareness of the third tradition to which Poglajen belonged. This tradition consists of a small number of people with a double gift—both a prophetic and practical one: the gift of evangelization.

The best example of this practical aspect is perhaps St. Benedict, to whom Dreher dedicated his previous book, The Benedict Option. Just as a medieval saint established monasteries that preserved Christian cultural and spiritual heritage from the devastation of barbarian hordes that besieged Europe, so Poglajen, under the pseudonym Kolaković, on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Slovakia, established the Family, a secret community of believers dedicated to preserving the Catholic truth. The chain reaction in which the members of the Family played a significant role would lead to the death of the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia a few decades later.

Poglajen demonstrated the visionary aspect of his personality on the eve of the Second World War, writing essays on the dangers and deep similarities of all totalitarianisms. “If two men begin to destroy the whole of Christian culture from two very distant starting points, there must necessarily come a time when they will meet on the ruins of a devastated sanctuary,” he wrote in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Essays containing sentences such as “One Stalin hid in Adolf Hitler and one Adolf Hitler hid in Stalin” afforded him only one accolade—his name appeared on the Gestapoʼs blacklist. After the new Croatian state was formed in 1941 in alliance with Germany and Italy, Poglajen changed his name for security reasons and set out to roam the world for almost half a century.

What Dreher is trying to show today is that social tendencies in the West hide totalitarian potential. Correctly referring to several authors ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Hannah Arendt, his view of todayʼs “soft totalitarianism” is worth supplementing with a few remarks. For example, almost all aspects of the totalitarianism that prevailed in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union reappear in the West today. Totalitarianism is not a feature of the Left or the Right, but it is a transideological phenomenon that can haunt liberalism, just as it possesed fascism and communism in the 20th century. Totalitarianism is not the ideology but the spirit which haunts ideologies.

Štahan goes on in this remarkable short piece to talk about the situation in the former Yugoslavia, of which Kolakovic’s native Croatia was a part, and how the totalitarian evil in that Communist country was harder to see because Yugoslavia under Tito was comparatively more liberal than other Eastern bloc regimes. Štahan analogizes this to the West today, saying that we don’t perceive the totalitarian nature of what’s happening in our own societies because it is not (yet!) so sharp, and because we are distracted by material bounty and pleasures.

Just as the core of the Yugoslav regime was hidden by cheap concessions to the people, that is also the case with the ideology of progressivity in the modern West. Today, our passive fellow citizens are not bought with a crumb of freedom but with popular culture, narcotics, and sexual apps. In communist Yugoslavia, where “socialism with a human face” ruled, unlike Czechoslovakia, there were no secret cells of Catholic believers. Luckily, the role of the main enemy of the regime was taken over by the Catholic Church.

But what when the institutional Church fails; moreover, when its influence, as today, vanishes? Then the only resistance can be offered by the laity. Poglajen was aware of that. Let us not allow the new totalitarianism with a “human face” to deceive us again.

Please read the whole Crisis essay and share it widely. 

Štahan sees quite clearly the lesson of his clerical countryman’s life: we cannot afford to be deceived, but have to read the signs of the times and, as the laity, prepare for resistance, placing no confidence in the institutional church. Remember, as I write in Live Not By Lies, the Slovak bishops did not believe Father Kolakovic when he arrived in their country as a refugee from the Nazis in 1943, and began preaching that after the Germans were defeated, the Soviets were going to be left ruling their country, and that the first thing the Communists were going to do would be to persecute the Church. The bishops were complacent, and believed that such a thing could not happen in their country. Father Kolakovic (pron. “ko-LAH-ko-vich”) knew different. From Live Not By Lies:

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

We need to hear the Croatian priest’s prophetic and evangelical voice today! We need not only to hear it, but to act on it. You have to be willfully blind not to see what’s happening in America (and not just America, but the West). You can be like the complacent Slovak bishops, or you can be like Father K. and his followers, who were not willing to sit back and hope for the best. This short passage above, from Live Not By Lies, shows you how to get started. You don’t have to have an elaborate plan for a clandestine network and all that; you just need to start a group in your church or community, dedicated to applying the See-Judge-Act method to analyzing the situation as it develops, and coming up with clear plans of action.

A key thing: do not wait on church authorities to take the lead. It is not likely to happen. Many of them have powerful incentives to believe in the status quo, to not rock the boat, and so forth. They want to think that they have more control than they do. Maybe they want to believe that all will be well if we just sit back and wait, and trust God to sort things out. Well, look, I believe that God sent into the midst of the Slovak church a prophet, Father Kolakovic, to wake the church up and prepare it for persecution! But the leaders of the church did not recognize him. So it goes. But there were others — priests like Father Jukl, and laymen like Dr. Krcmery — who did see, hear, and follow Father Kolakovic. It is because they did that the Slovak underground church survived Communist persecution.

We in the contemporary American church might not be facing something so harsh. I hope and pray not. But the signs do not look good. As you know, I wrote Live Not By Lies because I kept hearing from people who had escaped Communism by emigrating to the West that they were seeing things happen here that reminded them of what they left behind. I was finally convinced that God was using them prophetically, to wake us up. I learned about Father K. on my first trip abroad researching the book. He died in 1990, but Father K. is still preaching prophetically to us today.

Maybe his spiritual grandchildren are wrong, and the totalitarian trial will pass us by. Yesterday in Budapest, I had coffee with a friend from western Europe, who said that he is encouraged by things, like Gov. Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, that indicate wokeness might be waning. I disagree. I hope he’s right, but this malignant ideology is deeply entrenched in the US elite and in elite institutions, and won’t be cast out by a single election. And, the younger generations are much more accepting of it. I certainly intend to vote against wokeness, and to support actions to roll it back. We should not, though, assume that we will win, simply because It Can’t Happen Here.

And you should know this, and know it well: by the time the true face of the enemy shows itself, it will be too late to prepare.

We have now the gift of time, and liberty. In the US, our government is now talking about how telling stories that reduce people’s trust in it — like, maybe yesterday’s account of a morally lawless California court stripping a divorced man of custody of his child and handing the boy over to his mother for chemical castration and perhaps later sexual mutilation — is a precursor to terrorism. Or compare the response of Canadian police to the working-class truckers’ protest to the way PM Justin Trudeau and Canadian police took a knee in reaction to the various Black Lives Matter protests, some of which burned down city blocks, sacked businesses, and the like. In Canada, if you give food to protesting truckers, you could be arrested and charged:

Don’t you see what’s happening? What’s it going to take? What if Father Kolakovic showed up in your church community today, warning about persecution to come, and the need to prepare for it? How would you receive him? Would you receive him at all?

UPDATE: Video of Canadian police arresting and roughing up a 78-year-old man for tooting his car horn to support the truckers.

The little old man — he’s under five feet tall — simply sounded his minivan’s horn to show he was on the side of truckers. They cuffed him. Watch it for yourself.

The post Father Kolakovic & The ‘Terrorists’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Please sit down and devote time to read Abigail Shrier’s devastating report on the case of Ted Hudacko and his son “Drew,” who was torn from him by a court in a divorce proceeding. Drew is 16, and believes himself to be a transgender girl. Christine, Ted’s ex-wife, supports Drew’s choice. Ted is not a particularly religious person, but he believed that Drew might be acting hastily. Here’s how the piece starts:

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”

“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”

“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”

“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”

“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”

“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”

The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son.

But at this point in the child-custody hearings, Ted couldn’t understand what the judge wanted from him. His soon-to-be-ex-wife, Christine, then an executive at the investment firm BlackRock, had already agreed to shared custody of their younger son; no one—not even this judge—seemed to believe that he was anything like an unfit father.

Ted isn’t a particularly devout Episcopalian, and he describes his politics as libertarian. He’s athletic, health-conscious, and takes a keen interest in his sons’ talents. He coached their baseball teams and researched conservatory programs for Drew, already an accomplished pianist. Just one year earlier, Ted had been one-half of a Bay Area power couple with high-status careers and precocious kids. Now, he was one-half of a contentious divorce, presided over by a judge who was referring to Drew as “they” and pressing Ted to accept that his 16-year-old son was actually a girl.

“And do you think that being transgender is a sin?” Judge Hiramoto asked, according to the transcript.

“No, of course I don’t think it’s a sin.”

“So you don’t think that it’s a sin. But you probably think that [Drew], if they are truly transgender, you would prefer that [Drew] not be transgender because in our society transgender people are the subject of a lot of discrimination. Would you agree with that?”

“I agree that transgender people suffer some discrimination and prejudice. I agree with that,” he said.

“I’m sort of going off the parallel experiences that I’ve read about or heard in family court or in family law classes for judges where gay children come out to their parents,” the judge said. “And sometimes it is difficult for the parents because they believe that the identity of being gay or lesbian, in their religion, is a sin. And then some people don’t feel that it’s a sin, but they say—they take a different angle, and they say, I just would prefer my child not to be gay or lesbian because they suffer so much discrimination in our society.

“So I’m sort of asking these parallel questions to see what is your—what I see in the papers is that you think that [Drew] is not truly transgender and that they are merely confused and—”

“He might be transgender,” Ted said. “He might be.”

“Okay. So if [Drew] might be transgender, it’s just to say they might.”

Ted realized his error and corrected himself: he had used the “he” pronoun because he remained deeply skeptical that the boy he’d coached in little league—the son he’d once seen crushing on a cute girl in his fifth-grade class—was actually a young woman.

“They might be,” Ted said. “[Drew]—they might be. Might be. We don’t know.”

While trying to keep an open mind about Drew’s gender, Ted was adamant to the judge that he did not want Drew to begin medical transition. In the 312 days since he had last seen his boy, Ted had done a lot of research on medical transition and gender dysphoria. He begged the court to consider research that suggested puberty blockers could impair cognition and diminish bone density. He knew that Drew, if administered puberty blockers along with estrogen, would be at high risk of permanent infertility. He wasn’t even sure that his son had gender dysphoria. He wanted to see his son—and he wanted this bullet train to slow down.

“It sounds to me that you would prefer that [Drew], when all is said and done, is just going through a phase. Is that a fair assessment?”

Ted evaded the question. Did he prefer that his son avoid a medically risky regimen that would render him permanently infertile and make him a lifetime medical patient? Wouldn’t anyone?

In the three years I’ve spent writing about families with transgender-identifying minors, the story of Ted Hudacko stood out as a case study of how gender ideology has infiltrated family law. It also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals’ fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists. At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable “gender identity,” knowable only to the adolescents themselves.

Judge Hiramoto never disclosed that she has a transgendered child, and that she has expressed sympathy for trans activism online. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. This poor man, Ted Hudacko, was dragged through a Kafkaesque legal system that was utterly against him, and so pro-trans that it beggars the imagination. Seriously, Shrier has the details here. There was never any consideration by anyone representing the court in this matter that Hudacko might have a point, and that transition for Drew might not be the best option.

You should understand that judges are drawn from a social class in which embracing and affirming transgenderism is the expected thing. People who question the trans narrative are monstered by this class. Ted Hudacko and his son never had a chance. Now this teenage boy is going to be permanently mutilated.

Reading Shrier’s story was like reading an account of the show trials in the Stalinist world. The actual guilt or innocence of the defendant was irrelevant. The political verdict was decided before things got underway. What we are seeing here is not just a totalitarian court proceeding, but totalitarianism that comes from the elite social class forcing its highly controversial views on the rest of us, as if they were holy writ. You don’t think it’s a class issue? Here’s how Shrier’s piece ends:

In January 2021, Judge Hiramoto transferred from Family Court of Contra Costa to the Criminal Division. For a year, Judge Wendy Coats presided over the Hudackos’ ongoing proceedings. Last Friday, Ted and Christine appeared before their new judge, Benjamin Reyes II. At issue: the temporary restraining order against Ted.

According to several witnesses, Judge Reyes commenced proceedings by stating his pronouns.

These people, these elites, they hate normality, and they hate people like us. You need to get it clear in your head right now that you too could be Ted Hudacko. You think you’ll be safe if you move from California to Texas? Ask Jeff Younger how that worked out for him in Dallas County, where a judge took his nine-year-old son away from him last year and awarded full custody to the boy’s mother, who is transitioning him to female.

In November 1996, First Things magazine published an extremely controversial symposium on the topic of “the judicial usurpation of politics.” It began like this:

Articles on “judicial arrogance” and the “judicial usurpation of power” are not new. The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The symposium is, in part, an extension of the argument set forth in our May 1996 editorial, “The Ninth Circuit’s Fatal Overreach.” The Federal District Court’s decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government.

This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.

Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.

We are at a new moment in which this topic must be taken up again. We are dealing not only with the judicial usurpation of politics, but with the judicial usurpation of family, and the biological destiny of children. It is hard to find words strong enough to describe the hideousness of what these judges are doing. These judges are not outliers, but key actors in an evil system — a regime — that is fast losing its legitimacy, in my view. Why are we sitting back letting this happen? Why do our elected representatives not care? Why don’t we make them care? Look at what they are doing to fathers like Ted Hudacko and James Younger, and to their minor children!

As you know, I am now back in Hungary, where abominations like this do not happen, because most people here are morally sane. And yet, many in the United States look at Hungary as some sort of semi-fascist state. Hungary is a country where the courts will not take children away from parents and permit them to be jacked up on cross-sex hormones. God bless Hungary! The day may come when carers request political asylum here to escape the gender “gulag” into which American judges sentence their children.

This has to be fought politically, and fought hard. What are we waiting for? The First Things symposium, if memory serves, ended with Richard John Neuhaus concluding that as long as we still had the democratic opportunity to fight the courts politically, we could not in good conscience withdraw consent from the regime. What about now?

You, father, and you, mother, are potentially an enemy of the state, simply because you do not wish to have your children mutilated and chemically transformed into a facsimile of the opposite sex. Think about that. None of us are safe from what happened to Hudsacko and Younger, and their sons. All it takes is an angry, divorcing spouse, and a child who thinks they have gender dysphoria, having been propagandized relentlessly by pop culture and the schools.

Here is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” from which I took the title of my book about building resistance to this new form of totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn says that not everybody has to be a hero, but there are things that all of us must be prepared to do, right now, to refuse to accept the lies of the system. This is the conclusion:

It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

Why offer herds their liberation? 

[For them are shears or slaughter-stall]
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

He’s saying that we can be like the dumb cows of the herd, or we can be men and women. Are we Americans going to allow the state to do this to us and our children? Are we just going to cower, and leave poor souls like Ted Hudacko and James Younger to be destroyed in trying to protect their children?

The times are very dark. Be a light. Be a damn blowtorch.

UPDATE: It was a joke when Monty Python did it. But this is happening at a real university in the UK:

Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.

The University of Bristol has provided guidance for its staff on “using pronouns at work”, urging them to declare in verbal introductions and email signatures whether they use he/him, she/her or they/them, to support transgender students.

But unlike myriad pronoun manuals on other campuses, Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns”, where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation. …

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”

Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.

Here’s video of a Bristol University crew member picnicking at sea:

The post Ted Hudacko Vs. Trans Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

From a Washington Post story about pro-abortion/pro-choice religious leaders:

When the Rev. Kaeley McEvoy began at Westmoreland Congregational in 2018 she faced a question: Should she tell her new congregation she’d recently had an abortion?

McEvoy was already a reproductive rights advocate, and to her the experience wasn’t in conflict with her faith. When the pastor and her then-boyfriend learned in 2016 that she was pregnant, the first place they went was to a cathedral, to pray — and to call doctors’ offices in search of one to do the abortion. Other visitors to the cathedral happened to try to enter the small chapel where McEvoy was on the phone, but her boyfriend turned them away, she remembers, saying “something holy is happening here.”

My God.

McEvoy eventually worked up the courage to tell her congregation about her abortion:

In November, McEvoy, a 29-year-old with a melodic preaching cadence, took the high, white pulpit at Westmoreland and said she had “never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood.” Then last month she addressed a group of Christian abortion access activists meeting in a D.C. church: “Something holy is happening here, friends.”

So: the lady Christian pastor was sleeping with her boyfriend got pregnant, had an abortion, and publicly calls it sacramental.

This is demonic, flat out. A reader of this blog wrote to me to say that if she said in public that she had thrown a sack of puppies into the river, this pastor might well have been leading the pitchfork-bearing mob to her house. But this woman — a Christian pastor! — conceives a child in an out-of-wedlock affair with a man, consents to the child’s murder, calls it “holy,” and proclaims it in the pages of the Washington Post. I hope she repents before it is too late for her soul. But you know, this kind of thing is so clarifying. So clarifying. This is a story about the state of Christianity in the West, in 2021.

The Greek Orthodox archbishop is also in the story:

Last month, the most visible leader of Orthodox Christianity in the country, Archbishop Elpidophoros, said at the antiabortion March for Life that the biblical Mary “freely chose” to bring Jesus into the world, “and God respected her freedom … we march not for coercion.”

Here is the fuller quote, from a prayer the archbishop delivered at the March for Life:

We affirm the gift and sanctity of life – all life, born and unborn. As Christians we confess that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God.  Every life is worthy of our prayer and our protection, whether in the womb, or in the world. We are all responsible for the well-being of children. We are their “keepers,” and cannot shirk from our accountability for their welfare.

At the same time, we also affirm our respect for the autonomy of women.  It is they who bring forth life into the world.  By His incarnation, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ assumed human nature, through His conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary. She freely chose to bring Him into the world, and God respected her freedom. We can and must make the case for life, both born and unborn, by our own example of unconditional love.

We march not for coercion.

We march with compassion,

With empathy,

With love.

And with our arms extended to embrace all.

So am I to conclude that the leader of the Greek Orthodox in the US is in the “personally opposed, but” camp? Wow, an Orthodox archbishop. That’s discouraging. I can understand how one gets to this position, though I think it’s wrong, but the archbishop’s inclusion in a story in the Washington Post about pro-choice religious leaders ought to wake him up — that is, charitably assuming he didn’t know this beforehand — that he opened himself up to being used by the people who wish to keep it legal to exterminate unborn life. Then again, he must have known this.

One of Elpidophoros’s close colleagues, Fordham’s George Demacopoulos, said in response that “Christian moral teaching isn’t black and white.” The Fordham Orthodox are among the Orthodox people I’ve said are not worth dialoguing with on matters of sexual morality. They want to queer the Orthodox Church, in the sense that they want homosexuality to have the same moral status as it does in the Episcopal Church. Which, by the way, look at the altar at the Anglican chapel in an Oxford college:

Chapel of S. John’s Ox. has a) Political statements on its altar b) No respect for fact it’ss highly contested/controversial & tht Latin/Ortho position is tht it’s a disordered condition, a trial that calls for chastity, as well as love & respect for those who undergo the trial. pic.twitter.com/zHjUq1K22w

— Byzantine Ambassador (@byzantinepower) February 7, 2022

That is their god, the progressives. Once again, this is a point of clarification about where we are as a church in the West.

Another example. Yesterday this clip made the rounds of some of my Evangelical friends. This is the senior associate pastor of First Baptist Orlando, a megachurch:

He talks about how the congregation has within it people who like one kind of music, and people who like another. It has old, young, Republicans and Democrats, diverse and diverser, and:

We have transgender, LGBTQ, straight, single, married, divorced, and cohabitating people. These same people attend, listen, serve, grow and give.

Then he gets emotional. “And in the midst of all this, we have one of the most beautiful worship experiences you can possibly imagine.” He finishes by saying that we all come together to celebrate how Jesus “is changing us” and “has set us free from the bonds of sin.”

Wait … what?! He compares people living in what Scripture and the Christian tradition regard as serious sin to those who prefer one kind of music to another? How, exactly, is Jesus “changing” them, if they remain in their sin? No one can object to gay people, trans people, cohabitating people, and so forth, coming to church — but the point of encountering Jesus Christ in church is repentance, and finding new life. From this pastor’s remarks, it’s hard to discern that this Southern Baptist church expects repentance — say, chastity from its unmarried congregants, straight and gay alike. Sounds like everybody is affirmed in certain sins. Those “beautiful worship experiences” are worthless if they don’t lead worshipers — all worshipers, because all are sinners — to repentance and unity with Christ. Maybe the pastor confuses “changing us” with “entertaining us” and “giving us all a big emotional high.”

Here is Jesus Christ, from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 12: 51-57:

“Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?

“Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?…”

We are in a time of discernment, a time of judgment within and among the Christian churches. The Sexual Revolution is cutting right through the heart of every church — and if it hasn’t reached yours yet, it will. You will have to take a side. Read the signs of the times. And don’t be deceived on any side:

One effect of America’s entry into what I call the “negative world” (a negative elite view of Christianity) is that Republican leaders no longer need to even pretend to care about or be morally virtuous people, something we previously saw wrt Trump https://t.co/FkHATS3V2k

— Aaron M. Renn (@aaron_renn) February 7, 2022

The post A Time Of Judgment appeared first on The American Conservative.

The other day I watched a terrific documentary on the work of Iain McGilchrist and his theories about culture and the divided brain (it’s called The Divided Brain, and you can rent it on Vimeo — I strongly recommend it). In it, there’s a line from Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who says that you cannot legislate culture. His point was that when a culture begins to fall apart, you can’t pass laws that restore it. If memory serves, the context of his point was that laws depend on culture for their authority and effectiveness.

This is why we are in a lot of trouble today. The culture that undergirded classical liberalism has deteriorated, possibly past the point of no return. Our media constantly gripe about how this is what Donald Trump did to us, but they downplay or ignore entirely the fact that the Left — both activists and institutional leaders — are leading the charge. Perhaps because they are so immersed in the world of the Left that they don’t see it. They have become soft totalitarians.

Did you hear that AirbnB has banned Michelle Malkin and her husband from using its services because Malkin attended and spoke at the American Renaissance conference, which Airbnb, following the standards of the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers to be a hate group? She wrote about it here. Excerpt:

Airbnb’s ideological witch hunts have claimed an unknown number of victims since 2016 as part of a woke company initiative to root out “bias” and expel anyone deemed an “extremist” with a “dangerous organization affiliation.” Press coverage of previous purges strongly suggests that the aforementioned character assassins of the Southern Poverty Law Center are involved through use of their far left, anti-white, anti-right “Hatewatch” list. Ever since I wrote my first book, “Invasion,” in 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League goons have sought to stifle my voice.

But this latest salvo crosses the line. It’s not enough that I — a “woman of color” (the left’s own descriptive label, not mine) and mother of two multiracial children — was pronounced guilty of “hate” crimes and “promotion” of “white supremacist” ideas for delivering a speech whose full content Airbnb didn’t even bother to obtain from me. The Airbnb bullies also banned my equally nonviolent, nonhateful husband — who did not attend the conference and who is not a public figure or activist.

Welcome to Guilt By Secondary Association.

“As we can see that your Airbnb travels are typically reserved via your husband’s account,” Airbnb’s “Trust team” member “Cedar” told both my husband and me, “we will also proceed in removing his account.” Neither of us had ever had a negative review, complaint, or policy violation of any kind. Are my kids next? Are yours?

This is a jaw-dropping thing, and it cannot be swept under the rug. I haven’t read Michelle Malkin in years, and I wouldn’t speak at or attend AmRen because I have strong philosophical differences with that group. But that is beside the point! Here we have a citizen being denied the use of a service not because she engaged in criminal behavior, but because she associated with people the service provider hates. And not only that, but the service provider has banned her husband! This is truly outrageous, and extremely illiberal.

Where does it stop? Because you know good and well this won’t be the end of it. Are we going to have woke hotels banning Republicans? Restaurants refusing to serve Southern Baptists? (Or, on the other side, hotels refusing to host people who attended Black Lives Matter events, and restaurants refusing to serve Unitarians?) Will left-wing activists start boycotting businesses unless they agree to a written policy refusing to serve conservatives? Again, get this straight: this has nothing to do with whether or not one likes Malkin or AmRen, or approves of their message. This is about living in a diverse, pluralistic country where we have to tolerate people with whom we strongly disagree, as part of what it means to live in a liberal democracy. But Airbnb, in its progressive ardor, is demolishing classical liberalism, which is what makes it possible for us to live together in peace.

You may say: Airbnb is just exercising its right to run its business the way it chooses. And you are probably right. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that if it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of a protected class, they can do what they want. But should they? If I’m running a coffee shop, and someone whose politics I hate comes in, I feel that I have a moral obligation to serve them, and treat them no worse than I would treat anybody else. That approach is what makes it possible for us to live together peaceably. The Left makes it clearer, day by day, that it has abandoned liberalism in favor of a moralistic, censorious, soft-totalitarian progressivism. They want a country in which Christian bakers are compelled by law to provide wedding cakes for gay couples, but the relatives — the relatives! — of conservative controversialists are denied the right to sleep in a rental apartment.

Make no mistake: what they’ve done to the Malkins is a rudimentary move to a social credit system, where access to goods and services depends on your politics. Do you really want to live in a country in which people with Biden stickers on the back of their cars are told that they are not welcome to shop at a small-town Alabama supermarket? That’s what the Left is bringing about. In my hometown, the beloved coffee shop is owned by a kind, caring liberal, and patronized by kind, caring conservatives, and all kinds of people. That’s the world I want to live in, not a world in which public and semi-private spaces are increasingly purified of Wrong Thinkers.

When Republicans gain control of Congress again, and get a Republican back in the White House, can they legislate against this? Perhaps. But this is where Rowan Williams’s comment comes in: the law is only of limited use when the culture has shifted. I haven’t thought about it closely, and perhaps I would change my mind, but I think we probably should have laws limiting the ability of businesses to discriminate on the basis of hating a customer’s politics or religion. These laws weren’t necessary when we lived in a country in which merchants did not wish only to do business with customers it considered to be morally pure, but the Left’s cultural revolution is changing things profoundly. If defending the principle of being free to operate one’s business as one sees fit (within civil rights laws) requires conservatives accepting without protest being excluded from buying goods and purchasing services that left-wing business owners wish to deny them, that is not going to work. Conservatives will not accept being made into dhimmis in their own country by arrogant leftists in power. What I don’t know, though, is whether to defend ourselves against people like them, we have to become like them. That is to say, is there any liberalism left to defend?

This commenter correctly sees the threat in this absurd attack on Joe Rogan:

The success of this organized assault on Joe Rogan goes to show that the right to free speech is meaningless in a society that no longer values free expression, or worse, is terrified by it.

— Lafayette Lee (@Partisan_O) February 5, 2022

It’s the same principle at stake as the Malkin affair: we have here left-wing artists who have suddenly decided that they cannot share a platform with a talk show host who interviews people they dislike. Check this out:

Full text of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s note to staff: pic.twitter.com/3FHlmzV3UW

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 7, 2022

If you read the whole thread, you’ll see that Ek talks of “user safety” — as if hearing words endangered people — and promised to throw $100 million behind producing content for minorities. So basically, a good old Jesse Jackson-style shakedown. In the future, companies like Spotify will be loath to hire figures who stand to get into the crosshairs of leftist agitators. Which is precisely the point.

Again, if we do not have a culture that supports free speech, it’s going to be very hard to figure out how to legislate our way through this. The haughty illiberalism of woke capitalists like Airbnb, and the craven unwillingness of corporations to tell the progressive pirates that they won’t bend to extortion, is going to force the hand of Republican legislators. What the Left is doing, by creating a de facto social credit system based on politics, is intolerable. They are making our country unlivable, all in the name of purity. They don’t actually give a rat’s ass about Joe Rogan, or Michelle Malkin. They simply want to crush opposition. It starts with Rogan and Malkin, but it ends with you and me and our children.

The post Against Conservative Dhimmitude appeared first on The American Conservative.

The NYT reports that Viktor Orban is doing bad, very bad, things by going to Moscow and making nice with Vladimir Putin. Excerpts:

Mr. Orban has long been seen as a political chameleon — and reviled by foes as a brazen opportunist — but he is now pushing his shape-shifting talents to a new level. He has broken ranks not only with Hungary’s allies over Ukraine but also with his country’s own long history of wariness toward Russia as he seeks to reconcile economic populism with the nationalism that underpins his political brand.

Hungary, according to the European Union’s statistical agency, has the lowest electricity prices and third lowest gas prices for consumers in the 27-member European bloc. While prices elsewhere have doubled or tripled over the past year, Hungary has kept them steady, a feat that Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party is hoping will help it defeat an unusually united opposition in elections on April 3.

Hungary gets 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia — but Europe on the whole gets 40 percent. All of Europe, then, is deeply dependent on Russian natural gas. The Europeans know it, which is one reason Germany has been a reluctant partner in the US’s hostility towards Russia over Ukraine. More from the NYT piece:

More important, [Putin] offered Mr. Orban a helping hand with energy, noting that underground storage facilities for gas in Europe are just 40 percent full and “our European partners in Europe will probably face problems next year.” But Hungary, Mr. Putin promised, “will have no problems because we will coordinate additional volumes.”

As I write this, it’s evening here in Budapest, and it’s cold. You could call Orban’s trip to Moscow and his arrangement with Putin cynical, but you could also be grateful for it, given how cold it is outside. More broadly, you could see Orban as recognizing that the Cold War has been over for a generation now, that American power is waning in the world, and that the states of Central and Eastern Europe have to come up with a more realistic relationship with the troublesome giant to the East:

“We had a bad relationship with the Soviet Union for many reasons that I do not need to list here,” Mr. Orban told radio listeners on Friday. “But that era is over, and now we are trying to have a system of relations with this new Russia that is different from what we had with the Soviet Union.”

And:

Mr. Orban’s Moscow visit secured no written commitment of additional supplies and mostly just reaffirmed a 15-year deal signed last September. That deal, which advanced Russian efforts to reduce gas deliveries to Europe through Ukraine by using alternative pipelines, was condemned by Ukraine as a “purely political, economically unreasonable decision.”

Mr. Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, responded that Hungary was not playing politics but simply securing its own economic and security interests. “You cannot heat homes with political statements,” he said.

That’s exactly right. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Hungarian who loves Russia, but Orban is being a realist here. In any case, much of Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas, especially Germany, which shut down its nuclear plants. European leaders know very well that come next winter, Russia could have them on their knees. This is an economic and strategic reality that Americans do not face, but Europeans do.

I am not troubled by Orban’s relationship to Russia, but I am by his relationship to China. Nevertheless, let me explain what I think is the idea behind the strategy. I have no special knowledge of how Orban thinks; this is just based on what I have seen in my time in this country.

Hungary is a small country that is unlucky in its geographical location. It is impossible to overstate how important national sovereignty is to the Hungarians. As I have written in this space before, this is the cultural factor that nobody in the West understands; I certainly had no idea about it until spending time here last year. The Hungarians — even those who support the majority Fidesz Party — certainly, and correctly, consider themselves to be European. But the Orbanists believe that the EU badly overreaches its mandate. Back in 2015, when Angela Merkel threw open the gates of Germany to a million Middle Eastern migrants, Orban famously refused to play along. He also rejects — as, I believe, do most Hungarians (though we will see in the referendum later this spring) — the EU’s gender and sexuality ideology. He believes Europe is committing demographic and cultural suicide, and does not believe that being part of the EU requires the sacrifice of the Hungarian nation.

My take is that Orban sees that the West is sick unto death, and believes that it is his role as Hungary’s leader to assure a future for his people. Plus, the Orban government is unapologetically pro-Christian, and is appalled by the indifference and hostility the US and European nations show towards Christians, both at home and abroad (as I wrote last year, the Hungarians have a governmental agency, working out of the Prime Minister’s office, that helps persecuted Christians). Someone I know was in a group of religious liberty activists who met several years ago with Orban, who told them that he was working with the Polish government to create a Central European zone where Christians will be able to live in peace. I would not be surprised if Orban believed that a Europe without Christianity is going to die as a civilization. I believe that.

Moreover, I believe, and I am sure Orban must as well, that accepting gender ideology in all its manifestations, and the rest of the identity politics package, is a civilizational death sentence. Now, if you believed that, would you bet in the long run on Russia, or the US/Europe? Russia is not socially healthy, no doubt about it, but it hasn’t swallowed this particular poison. I’m not saying that it’s better to bet on the longer-term survival of Russia than the US in its current state, but I am saying that it’s not an unreasonable move — especially if you live not, as I do, in the US, but in a country that’s only 750 miles from the Russian border (that’s the distance between Dallas and Atlanta). And if the Russians invade and re-absorb Ukraine, that means Hungary will once again share a border with Russia.

Geopolitically, Hungary is on the border between East and West. It is a Catholic and Protestant country, so clearly Western-oriented. But it lives in Russia’s shadow, and culturally, for now, at least, the West is alienating it with its revolutionary values. Consider what an older Hungarian friend, a fierce anti-communist, told me last summer when I shared with him my concerns about Orban’s making nice to the Chinese. He said that whatever else you can say about the Chinese, they will never require the Hungarians to embrace wokeness. This man was in the middle of a terribly unjust attack on his business in the West, all having to do with wokeness. He was being victimized in the same way his family had been under Hungarian communism. He believes very strongly that the West, to which he defected during the Cold War, is now bent on self-destruction. At this point, he cares most of all about the survival of Hungary, and as such, believes that Hungary should make an alliance with China to protect it from the West.

Might this be an unwise judgment? Sure. But again, given the facts on the ground, it is not an unreasonable one. 

I’m not trying to get you to agree that Orban’s opening to Russia and China are good news. I’m trying to get you to understand why it might be happening. The EU is driving an ancient European nation into the arms of Russia and China principally by being intolerant of Hungarian difference — especially Hungary’s eagerness to defend its culture and its ancestral religion.

Besides, if you were the leader of Hungary, and you saw this pop up on an official NATO Twitter feed, what would you think about the long-term (or even short-term) future of the alliance?

Here is a clip from the 2019 NATO summary of national reports on the alliance’s approach to gender in the military:

“To integrate a gender perspective is to integrate a force multiplier.” Oh? Like “diversity is our strength”? These woke bureaucrats keep repeating these woke shibboleths as if they were revealed truths. How, exactly, will integrating a gender perspective make it more likely that NATO will be able to defeat the Russian army in a shooting war? I bet you a thousand dollars that any NATO junior officer who posed that question to his superiors would find his career at a standstill. And I bet that the gender perspectives of military women who do not take the woke line are unwelcome.

My point is simply that the West is starting to have a late Ottoman Empire feel to it. If you were the leader of Hungary, you would not have the liberty to hope that all would be well — especially if your country’s Western allies increasingly despised your country because you won’t accept policies that you believe violate your country’s sovereignty and weaken your society. Look, the prime minister of the Netherlands wants to expel Hungary from the European Union because the Hungarians don’t want TV networks to show the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade to pre-kindergarten Magyar children. This is the bright red line for contemporary Western European leaders: the queering of the minds of children, which they favor.

You are not getting any of this context reported in the American media, of course. But it exists, and you should know about it. Anyway, you cannot heat Hungarian homes with children’s Pride parades, nor can you secure a future for your small country by surrendering to woke ideology.

The post Why Is Orban Friendly With Putin? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Over here in the Land of the Magyars, I’m a little behind on the news, so I just discovered that GoFundMe has cut off the Canadian truckers’ support fund, depriving the truckers of $10 million of donations, which Go Fund Me says it will return to donors. GFM says that some trucker protests turned violent, which is why it has done an about face. Did GoFundMe take down fundraising pages for Black Lives Matter-adjacent groups after some of the racial protests in 2020 turned violent?

Seems like we’re on a path where we’re going to have two of everything, depending on one’s political ideology: segregated websites, financial systems, even charitable giving, the result of systematically banning non-liberals. Seems like that leads to a bad and dark place. https://t.co/hJB0QsWiyb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 5, 2022

Recall: @TheRickWilson bilked gullible liberals out of $65k using @GoFundMe for a film that never came. He kept promising to get more money, yet: nothing. Despite this being reported and denounced, @GoFundMe did nothing because “the film was anti-Trump:https://t.co/dVlAd7rVqg

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 5, 2022

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan has publicly apologized after some activists collected a number of times he said the n-word on his podcast. Rogan pointed out that they took them out of context, including a discussion about how black comedians used the world, but he still apologized. In a sane world, he would be able to express publicly his regret having used the word, and that would be the end of it. But we are not in a sane world, and though I wish Rogan hadn’t used the world, I also regret that Rogan has apologized to these trolls. Nothing will satisfy them. Nothing. Now they smell blood in the water.

Notice how Rogan, who is a stand-up comedian and not a political or social conservative — used that word in the past on his show without complaint, but now that the Left sees him as a target, all the things he said before, and that caused him no problems, will be dredged up to try to destroy him professionally.

Hear me: what’s happening to Joe Rogan might happen to you one day. Something you said or wrote on the Internet or in social media that was perfectly fine today might not be fine tomorrow — and activists on the Left will weaponize it against you. This is true:

Bottom line as regards Rogan, GoFundMe, & all the other crap constantly flaring up is this: the questions & thoughts of 1/2 of America are not allowed in the public square, period. Stop pretending otherwise. You do not live in a “free society” & it’s laughable to say otherwise.

— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) February 5, 2022

This means anyone of prominence is forbidden from expressing or advocating for the traditional views of the entire nation, now held by 40-60% of the nation, depending. These views includes the traditional idea of what a nation is and what citizenship. 1917 already happened here.

— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) February 5, 2022

Yes indeed. This is the “soft totalitarianism” that I talk about in Live Not By Lies. The anti-communist dissidents who lived through the Soviet years all see it emerging in the woke West. None of us will be able to predict what will be used against us. You are only safe if you never say anything. We are only a semi-free country.

What are you going to do when banks start denying you checking accounts because you have been identified as a Bad Person because of the things you have said or written, the causes you support, the candidates or institutions you donate to, and so forth? What are you going to do when you are denied a license to practice your profession, or cut off from using Facebook or some other social media platform for ideological reasons, even though you need that access to make your living?

What is it going to take to wake people up to what is happening?!?

And what is it going to take to give the Republican Party a swift kick in its collective backside and make it realize what these rich, powerful, corporate Leftist elites and their illiberal activist stormtroopers are doing to traditional American liberties? Enough with the Trump drama (Trump, who sure made a lot of wokesters mad, but who did very little of substance to defend our liberties). Enough with the belligerence over Ukraine. Look at the clear and present dangers here in our own country now. In one of my recent overseas trips, I had dinner one evening with an expatriated American conservative who had lived abroad for years running his business. He had returned not long before to the US, and told me that he is in despair over what has happened to our country. He said that it was just yesterday, it seems, that we were a light unto the nations. Now, we have turned ourselves into the Whore of Babylon. He was talking about the socially destructive filth put out by Hollywood and other liberal elites — I think we were specifically talking about gender ideology, but I’m not absolutely positive. That conversation came to mind just now, because he would have been justified mentioning this new culture of left-wing censorship and control.

We cannot have America as we have traditionally know her if we do not agree to let those with whom we disagree have their say and make their living, despite the fact that we don’t approve of them. We should all be very reluctant to shun others. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell said they are not in favor of censorship, but only didn’t want their music to be on the same platform that hosts Joe Rogan. This is disingenuous BS. Young told Spotify, publicly, that it could have Rogan, or it could have Young, but it couldn’t have both. He tried to force Spotify to get rid of Rogan. There’s no two ways about it. Why couldn’t he have spoken out against Rogan, but let Rogan share the same space? That’s what old-fashioned liberals would have done. But even the old-fashioned liberals (like Young and Mitchell) have now become illiberal progressives.

You all remember the contretemps at The New York Times a couple of years ago when a bunch of progressive employees forced out James Bennet over his commissioning of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, whose point of view about using the military to stop race riots was supported by something like 50 percent of the country. When I became a professional journalist in 1989, it would have been hard to imagine a quality newspaper where journalists, who make their living in an industry that depends on free, robust speech, would have behaved like that. At every paper I worked at, I would read things in its pages from both liberals and conservatives that made me wince from time to time, but that was fine, because that’s what it meant to work at a newspaper reflecting a free, diverse society. When I was for two years editor of the Sunday op-ed section at The Dallas Morning News, I worked very hard to keep the section politically balanced and interesting. I had to stop being a conservative in that role, and be a professional journalist; had I tried to keep liberal voices out of the paper, I would have been fired, and would have deserved it.

But see, I come from the Before Times.

The Left is pushing us closer and closer to outright civil conflict. Our elected leaders of the Right don’t seem to have any real idea what to do about it, and prefer to spend their time agitating for conflict with Russia over Ukraine, obsessing over punishing Donald Trump’s enemies, and so forth. Meanwhile, we are all watching Woke Capitalists take away our liberties and drive anyone to the Right of Woke into hiding, and tearing America apart.

Don’t like Joe Rogan or the Canadian truckers? That’s fine. But you had better not deceive yourself: today’s it’s them, but tomorrow it will be someone you do like and admire, and maybe even yourself. This is how the Woke operate — and they keep getting away with it.

The day will come when these totalitarians piss off enough people, and they are not going to be able to stop the backlash, which will turn very ugly. I dread the coming of those days. But at the rate things are going now, either that, or a social credit system through which the woke elites control and suppress dissent, is inevitable.

If there’s one thing we should have learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan nation-building debacles is that you cannot have a liberal democratic society without a liberal democratic ethos having been instantiated in the hearts and minds of the people. The progressives in the United States are busy now exorcising the liberal democratic spirit from America’s body politic — and while they have some help with anti-classical-liberal elements of the Right, it is the anti-liberal Left that holds all the corporate, cultural, and institutional power in the US. They are the ones who determine the future of this conflict. People on the Right — and people like Rogan who aren’t even on the Right, but who suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the woke Left — are left helpless, waiting to see who the many-eyed monster is going to target next.

Our Big Brother is Woke Anthony Fremont, from the famous Twilight Zone episode, introduce by Rod Serling like this:

A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines — because they displeased him — and he moved an entire community back into the dark ages — just by using his mind. And the people there have to smile. They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion.

The monster is a six year old with a cute little boy face, and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge.

We only wanted to introduce you to one of our very special citizens, little Anthony Fremont, age six, who lives in a village called Peaksville in a place that used to be Ohio. And if by some strange chance you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk, because if you do meet Anthony you can be sure of one thing: you have entered the Twilight Zone.

One of these days, somebody is “going to take a lamp, or a bottle, or something, and end this.” It’s going to be a bad thing. But not as bad as letting the tyranny expand.

The post The Anthony Fremont Left appeared first on The American Conservative.

I see that the Republican National Committee formally censured Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger for participating in the House inquiry into the January 6 assault on the Capitol. These parts of the censure document are appalling:

And:

“Legitimate political discourse” is the term they use for the sacking of the US Capitol by the MAGA mob. Disgusting. And note in the first part, the party leaders openly and without any apparent sense of irony say that fighting for political victory is more important than anything else. This is wholly unprincipled, but I guess to be expected from the GOP. I never thought I would ever defend a Cheney, but the Republican Party calling the Jan. 6 attack “legitimate political discourse” did the trick.

I wish to associate myself with these sentiments:

“Boy does 2022 look promising. What should we do?”

“Let’s censure two of our members and contribute to a divisive conversation about Trump again.”

“Brilliant!”

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) February 4, 2022

Like these two, I don’t see the point in doing this. Whatever you think of Cheney and Kinzinger’s actions post January 6, to trouble yourself to formally censure them, to have gone on the record declaring that all you care about is achieving political power, not principle, and to describe the shocking sacking of the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse” is to declare yourself morally idiotic, it seems to me — but also politically stupid, as Bo Winegard points out. Why can one not be dedicated to GOP victories this fall while at the same time wanting to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6? Or, even if you think Cheney and Kinzinger should have stayed out of it, why go on record in this way at all? Do they have any idea how this appears to people, including conservatives, who are not communicants of the Church of MAGA? Who would like to see many of Trump’s populist and nationalist ideas translated into law and policy, but who are sick and tired of all the dumbass Trumpworld drama? Why can’t the RNC say that the Democrats’ apocalyptic construal of January 6 is silly, while not legitimizing the event itself?

I guess I’m naive about these things, but I don’t see how the RNC’s move is morally defensible. Some of those barbarians stated that they wanted to “hang Mike Pence” — yet, so mindless is the devotion to Donald Trump that the party’s senior leadership says that seeking to lynch the GOP vice president for not doing Trump’s illegal bidding amounts to legitimate political discourse.

I’m planning to vote Republican this fall even though I believe the January 6 events were a disgrace, that Trump deserved his second impeachment for his behavior on that day, and the Republican Party is a sad, stupid mess. It’s because I believe that the Democrats — the party of militant wokeness — in power would be on balance much worse for the country than the Republicans in power. But please do not tell me that I have to ignore the moral corruption inside the GOP as the price of my vote. People are so blockheadedly binary in their thinking. What was the Democratic entity that censured Sen. Sinema for not following the party’s agenda in lockstep? I get being mad at her, but when you control the Senate by a razor-thin margin, you cannot afford to demonize Senators who vote with you on most issues.

Similarly with Hungary, where I am now, I am told by American critics that to support PM Viktor Orban is to show that you don’t care about the various problematic aspects of his governance. Meanwhile, Fidesz is unexpectedly ahead by four points in the most recent poll. Why? In talking this week to actual Hungarians, I’ve heard that the opposition candidate, Peter Marki-Zay, has been a bumbler on the campaign trail, stoking fears that he is not ready to run the country. Last summer when I was here, I gathered from many conversations with Hungarians who are ready for a change in government (Orban’s Fidesz Party has been in power since 2010) that they worry about whether or not the opposition is competent enough to be trusted with power. The sense I gathered is that they were waiting to see who the opposition chose as its standard-bearer in the campaign. Well, now they know, and they have seen how Marki-Zay campaigns — and that is likely why Fidesz is ahead and widening the gap two months before the voting.

I bring that up in this discussion because it shows that mature voters can see politics with the eyes of realists. They may not like Orban, but they don’t want to hand the country over to incompetent governance. Imagine that: it is possible to hold two somewhat opposed ideas in one’s mind at the same time. I would rather live in that world than in the “Four legs good, two legs bad” world of the Republican and Democratic herds.

Back to the House Republicans: why was it necessary to censure Cheney and Kinzinger? What good was served by it? Again, I believe that it is possible to oppose their stance while at the same time respecting their right to dissent from the majority. This is politics, not religion. We are not dealing here with metaphysical/theological truths. A healthy political party or movement has to maintain a space for internal dissent. But we don’t have healthy political parties now. We don’t have a healthy public square. If you want to know where this thing might end up going before too long, watch the first episode of the 1980s-era British TV documentary about the Spanish Civil War. Watch at least to the point where the old Falangist writes that by 1935, both Left and Right hated each other so much that when they saw each other on the street, they saw demons.

The post GOP Censures Free Thought, Conscience appeared first on The American Conservative.

In my circles, there has been a lot of discussion about Megan Basham’s big piece about how the federal government used some high-profile Evangelical leaders to spread government information — and misinformation — about Covid to the broader Evangelical community. (If you don’t have a Daily Wire account, the piece has been reprinted here, available to all.)

As regular readers will know, I am not an anti-vaxxer, but this is genuinely a disturbing piece. The gist of it is that the feds leveraged the high status the Evangelical scientist Francis Collins has with Evangelical influencers to sell the government’s Covid line to Evangelical churches. Basham begins by citing Wheaton College’s Ed Stetzer, a dean and executive director of its Billy Graham Center, giving a friendly interview to Collins early in the pandemic:

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went beyond simply giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

It may seem strange, given the evidence now emerging of NIH-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, to hear a church leader instruct Christians to “repent” for the sin of discussing the plausible supposition that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. This is especially true as it doesn’t take any great level of spiritual discernment — just plain common sense — to look at the fact that Covid first emerged in a city with a virology institute that specializes in novel coronaviruses and realize it wasn’t an explanation that should be set aside too easily. But it appears Stetzer was simply following Collins’ lead.

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

But the pro-life Christian framing was sure to win Collins a hearing among an audience with deep religious convictions about the evil of abortion. Many likely felt reassured to hear that a likeminded medical expert was representing them in the administration.

During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

It was the same message his subordinate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been giving to secular news outlets, but Collins was specifically tapped to carry the message to the faithful. As Time Magazine reported in Feb. 2021, “While Fauci has been medicine’s public face, Collins has been hitting the faith-based circuit…and preaching science to believers.”

The editors, writers, and reporters at Christian organizations didn’t question Collins any more than their mainstream counterparts questioned Fauci.

Stetzer is a big deal in Evangelical circles. As Basham shows, he was far from the only big-name right-of-center Evangelical to give Collins space to make his case without challenge. Because I am not an Evangelical and don’t really live in that information space, I had no idea that this was going on. How did it happen? Basham writes that its entirely because those Evangelical elites have such admiration for Collins, who late last year announced his retirement as director of the NIH.

But why do they carry so much water for Collins? Basham writes:

Perhaps the evangelical elites’ willingness to unhesitatingly credit Collins with unimpeachable honesty has something to do with his rather Mr. Rogers-like appearance and gentle demeanor. The establishment media has compared him to “The Simpson’s” character Ned Flanders, noting that he has a tendency to punctuate his soft speech with exclamations of “oh boy!” and “by golly!”

Going by his concrete record, however, he seems like a strange ambassador to spread the government’s Covid messaging to theologically conservative congregations. Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat.

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures. When Nature magazine asked him about the Trump administration’s decision to shut down fetal cell research, Collins made it clear he disagreed, saying, “I think it’s widely known that the NIH tried to protect the continued use of human fetal tissue. But ultimately, the White House decided otherwise. And we had no choice but to stand down.”

Even when directly asked about how genetic testing has led to the increased killing of Down Syndrome babies in the womb, Collins deflected, telling Beliefnet, “I’m troubled [by] the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena…But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies.”

When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

To the most holy of progressive sacred cows — LGBTQ orthodoxy — Collins has been happy to genuflect. Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

These are not just the empty words of a hapless Christian official saying what he must to survive in a hostile political atmosphere. Collins’ declaration of allyship is deeply reflected in his leadership.

Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Other than his assertions of his personal Christian faith, there is almost no public stance Collins has taken that would mark him out as someone of like mind with the everyday believers to whom he was appealing.

I once heard an Evangelical say that Collins, by virtue of his scientific brilliance and his having risen to the heights of the scientific bureaucracy in the US, is seen by many Evangelicals as a living refutation of the prejudicial belief that you can either be smart, or you can be an Evangelical, but you can’t be both. In other words, Collins helps Evangelicals get over their cultural inferiority complex, according to this view. Maybe so.

Here is the takeaway from Basham’s piece:

Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic.

This does not mean these leaders necessarily knew that the information they were conveying to the broader Christian public could be false, but it does highlight the danger religious leaders face when they’re willing to become mouth organs of the government.

Read the whole thing. 

This seems to me to be a very important piece, one that all of us, even non-Evangelicals, should take seriously. Why? Because it shows how we can allow ourselves to be used and deceived by those in whom we place authority. Though Evangelicalism is not my world, nor is science, I have for years uncritically assumed that Francis Collins was a Good Guy, was One Of Us, and so forth. Why? Because others I knew and trusted said so. That was it. It really was. That Collins was so useless as a Christian when it came to the ways he ran NIH came as a shock to me when I first read about it last fall. I assumed that because the people I know and trust vouched for him, he must be fine.

We all do this, and we have to do this, because nobody can get through life being radically skeptical of everybody else. All of us have a network of people we trust as authoritative. What none of us really know, though, is whether or not those who have our trust deserve it. This was a lesson learned quite painfully by many American Catholics, who believed for decades that their bishops could be trusted on the sex abuse scandal, when in fact many of them were flat-out liars who had no problem punishing victims and victims’ families, and deceiving the wider church, to protect their own high positions, and sometimes their gay clerical networks. My point is that whether you are Evangelical or some other kind of Christian, whether you are religious or an unbeliever, and whether you are on the Left or the Right, at some point you rely on the personal authority of certain figures — and you may find out that that was a terrible mistake. Grift runs very deep within human institutions.

Today The New York Times published a long essay by my friend David Brooks, titled, “The Dissenters Trying To Save Evangelicalism From Itself”. I’m not sure if David would claim to be an Evangelical, though he has shared publicly that he considers himself to be a Christian, but he certainly is friends with some of the people he profiles in the piece, and there’s no question that he admires them all and shares their ideological point of view. Again, as someone who does not know this world very well, I am hesitant to comment, and as someone who counts a handful of the people mentioned in this piece as friends (including the piece’s author), I want to say emphatically here that nothing I say below has anything to do with my personal esteem for these people. I don’t become friends with someone because I agree with their take on politics or religion, and I certainly don’t cease to be friends with someone over that, unless the situation should become extreme. I have had people walk away from me over my religion and politics, but I make it a practice not to do that to other people. I wish I didn’t have to say that, but I wish a lot of things were different in this world.

Anyway, you can imagine the kind of people Brooks cites as the noble Evangelical pastors, professors, and intellectuals waging a valorous crusade to rid Evangelicalism of Trumpiness, a curse that includes resistance to a certain idea of racial justice and gender ideology. Now, if the idea is that large segments of Evangelical Christianity gave itself over to crazy Trump worship, and compromised their religious principles, you get no argument from me. (You might remember what I wrote about the Jericho March in late 2020.) But what rubs me the wrong way about articles like Brooks’s is the way he construes Evangelical goodness and Evangelical badness according to a clean dichotomy. The “good” Evangelicals are the ones who hate Trump, embrace “racial justice” (as defined by the politics of 2020), and support a more progressive understanding of gender. LGBT doesn’t come up in the piece, but it’s definitely part of the mix. I know that Brooks is LGBT-affirming; some years back, he asked me to explain why I, as a Christian, hold to traditional beliefs on the matter. I did not convince him of the rightness of my position, but he sincerely wanted to know, and I respect and appreciate that). LGBT issues are one line that many Evangelicals, however progressive their positions are in other areas, won’t cross.

From the article:

Russell Moore resigned from his leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention last spring over the denomination’s resistance to addressing the racism and sexual abuse scandals in its ranks. He tells me that every day he has conversations with Christians who are losing their faith because of what they see in their churches. He made a haunting point last summer when I saw him speak in New York State at a conference at a Bruderhof community, which has roots in the Anabaptist tradition. “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches,” he said, “but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”

The proximate cause of all this disruption is Trump. But that is not the deepest cause. Trump is merely the embodiment of many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power.

More:

[I]t’s not just normal bickering. What Mindy Belz notices is that there is now a common desire to pummel, shame and ostracize other Christians over disagreements. That suggests to me something more fundamental is going on than a fight over just Donald Trump.

Yes, for sure. The gaping hole in the Brooks analysis is that what’s happening in Evangelicalism is just a mirror of what’s happening in the broader culture. Believe me, the Christian Left, in its various iterations, has no problem desiring, pummeling, shaming, and ostracizing Christians who don’t share its views. It’s the same thing on the political and cultural Left — and on the Right. Granted, Christians are supposed to be better than that, but the idea that Church people are going to be untouched by conflicts raging in the outside world is naive.

Leaving aside the frothy, combative folk of Evangelical Left and Evangelical Right, we have to acknowledge that there really are substantive moral and theological issues here. For example, Brooks holds up several black pastors and Evangelical figures as embodying the correct Christian position on race and race relations. I wonder what he would make of Voddie Baucham, the black Southern Baptist pastor whose bestselling book Fault Lines gives a deep and persuasive popular critique of social justice movements and the danger they pose to Christianity. Baucham is no defender of racism, but he does talk about how the current conceptual framework of social justice actually runs counter to what Christians profess to be true. I read the book and found it to be quite powerful, but maybe Baucham (and I) are wrong about this. But even if so, is Voddie Baucham really the kind of Evangelical from whom Evangelicalism needs to be saved by more liberal Evangelical pastors? Where does Voddie Baucham fit into David Brooks’s analysis? I hope Brooks will read Baucham’s book and write about it in a future column.

Similarly, for Kristin Kobes Du Mez, another of Brooks’s heroes in the piece, the Evangelical church is threatened by toxic masculinity. I would imagine that she has something of a point. But I also know that there are Evangelicals, like my friend Denny Burk, a professor at Southern Theological Seminary, who believe profoundly that women are forbidden by the Bible from holding pastoral positions in churches. Denny has been publicly critical of Donald Trump too. But is Denny the kind of Evangelical from whom Evangelicalism needs saving?

In my own circles of Christians of all different churches, I know a fair number of theologically conservative people who would identify as Trump supporters, but not one of them thinks Donald Trump is a good man. They voted for Trump because they are frightened by the Left. All, or almost all, of them work in professional circles dominated by liberals and progressives, and they see every day what liberals and progressives believe, including about people like them. You will never see any of these people publicly praising Trump, or going to a MAGA rally, much less speaking of Trump in the frankly embarrassing ways of some popular Evangelicals, who see him as the Great Savior of Christianity. Their view of Trump is entirely realistic, in the sense that they know who he is, and they know who his opponents are, and they are less afraid of him than of his opponents.

If Trump had never descended the golden escalator on that day in 2015, would all be well with American Evangelicalism? I doubt it. All the churches now are roiled to some degree or another by the challenges of our post-Christian society. Evangelicalism is dealing with the fallout from revelations of sexual and other corruption among its leadership. Catholicism in America had to deal with that starting in 2002, long before Trump reinvented himself as a politician. In my own church, Orthodoxy, there are some liberals who want to queer the Church, and there are some conservatives who want to believe that if we just keep our heads down, LGBT questions will pass us by. There is no way to hide from this stuff. It will find you. The question is, what will you do when it does?

Again, if you want to get rid of the rabble rousers on both sides of these controversies, you will still have questions that cannot be easily resolved, if they can be resolved at all. Is Critical Race Theory and its offshoots legitimately Christian? Is it something about which Christians can disagree in good faith? Or is it something that strikes at the heart of the Gospel? What does Scripture and Tradition say about homosexuality, and genderqueerness? How should we understand those phenomena, and respond to them? What about the role of women in the institutional church?

What sticks in my craw is the seemingly unexamined assumption that if you don’t land where educated middle class elites do on any or all of these questions, that you must in some sense be a threat to the integrity of the Church. Perhaps educated middle class elite opinion is the real threat, you know?

Brooks’s column pairs well with Basham’s piece because they both seem to identify an Evangelicalism that valorizes being a certain kind of person, with a certain cast of mind, as giving one moral credibility. As a Catholic years ago, I saw this kind of thing all the time.

Case in point: Catholics like me were easily persuaded to accept the arguments of certain Catholic figures (clerical and lay) because they were on Our Side, and to dismiss the claims of others, because they were the Other. Case in point: the liberal Catholic journalist Jason Berry did fantastic work exposing the evil of Marcial Maciel, the deeply corrupt founder of the Legion of Christ religious order. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus fell victim to the blandishments of the Legion, because the Legion, being militantly conservative, were his kind of Catholics. Neuhaus denounced Berry and his colleague Jerry Renner for slandering good and holy Father Maciel and his movement. I remember wincing at that when I read it, because I know Berry somewhat, and though I didn’t agree with him theologically, I knew him to be a serious and honorable journalist. Yet I saw a lot of my Catholic friends took Neuhaus’s line, because they gave Neuhaus authority, and because they too believed that the Legion must surely be under assault by the wicked libs.

Of course we all found out after John Paul II passed that Berry was right, and Neuhaus was catastrophically wrong. I’m not getting on my high horse here: if it hadn’t been for my friendship with Jason Berry, and the cracks that my own reporting (not on the Legion) had put in my confidence in conservative Catholic leaders, I would have been right there with Neuhaus.

Basham’s piece challenges the idolization of Francis Collins by Evangelical elites, who in her view allowed the government to exploit that trust to use them. Brooks’s piece praises Evangelicals who challenge those Evangelicals who idolize Trump and MAGA-ness, but doesn’t dig into the core theological issues that exist whether or not one is an ideological brawler. In other words, these figures agree with David Brooks’s view of the world, so he trusts them, even thought it is possible that they are right about Trump, but wrong about other things.

I am thinking now of a man I came to know a bit a couple of decades ago, when I was writing about the Catholic abuse scandal. Steve Brady was a small-town Illinois Catholic who ran an outfit called Roman Catholic Faithful. Steve was a conservative, but he was not cosmopolitan, and not polished. What was he? Brave, and principled. He called out corrupt bishops — even those who had sympathies of conservatives — before it was cool to do so. I met him in person at the 2002 Dallas bishops’ conference meeting — the first one since the scandal broke nationwide. He was modest and unassuming. At that same meeting, I was asked by the freelance correspondent Fox News had hired to cover the event to give her a briefing. She was not a Catholic, and didn’t know who the players were, or what the issues were. When I got to the part about the role homosexuality played in the scandal, she shut me up and said that “we can’t go there.” She explained that there were orders from the top of the network to avoid talking about that. When I suggested that she should talk to people like Steve Brady and Michael S. Rose, she said sorry, she was told to stay away from people like that. This was Fox News, but it was manipulating the narrative as much as any liberal news network.

But Fox is respectable. Steve Brady? Just a small-town Catholic hothead, according to Team Roger Ailes. A nobody, best ignored.

What’s so hard about all this is that it is hard to separate the personal faults of individuals from the beliefs they hold. I genuinely hate the way so many people on my side demonize David French, a friend who is a decent man. Yet I also believe, just as genuinely, that French is wrong about some significant things. It ought to be possible for us to dispute these ideas without falling into personal invective, but very few people on either side these days seem to be capable of doing that. Me, I would like to see Evangelicalism shake free of the MAGA grifters, and those who believe somehow that the Republican Party is the vehicle of our temporal salvation. But I don’t see how things will be better off by trading one set of ideologues for another, even if I would rather have dinner with the right-liberals than with Jericho Marchers.

Francis Collins is an infinitely more respectable Christian public figure than any number of MAGA World luminaries, but it’s debatable as to who has done more damage to Christianity. I would say that if Evangelicalism needs to be “saved,” it’s might be as much from the Collinses, who lend respectability and authority to some repulsive ideas, as from the MAGAheads. What’s not debatable at all to my mind is that Viktor Orban, the Calvinist politician who leads Hungary, is a far better friend to Christianity than figures like Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg, the leading European Catholic bishop — and I know plenty of Catholics who would say the same thing. But none of them would be allowed to write that in The New York Times. The slick progressives holding power at senior levels within the Catholic institution are a far greater threat to its integrity than just about anybody else on the scene.

What this is all about, in the end, is the widespread collapse of authority within our culture — within the culture of the Church, and within culture, period. Nobody knows who to trust, or why. Hannah Arendt warned that the collapse of hierarchies, and the willingness of people to believe that “truth” was whatever those they already agreed with said it was, was a precursor to the coming of totalitarianism.

UPDATE: A reader suggested taking a look at the conservative commentator Erick Erickson’s take on this controversy. It’s worth reading. 

Basically, Erickson thinks Basham’s piece was powerful, but after making some phone calls to people he knows at NIH, he comes away more sympathetic (but not entirely sympathetic) to Collins than he was after reading Basham’s piece.

The post Evangelicals: Who Are The Good & The Bad? appeared first on The American Conservative.

News from the collapse of Christianity in the West:

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the EU, said the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old teaching on homosexual relationships was wrong and needed to be changed.

In an interview with the German Catholic News Agency KNA, the cardinal was asked, “How do you get around the Church’s teaching that homosexuality [behavior] is sin?”

The Cardinal replied, “I believe that this is false. But I also believe that here we are thinking further about the teaching. So, as the Pope has said in the past, this can lead to a change in teaching.”

“So I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct,” said Cardinal Hollerich.  “What one formerly condemned was sodomy. One thought at that time that in the sperm of the man, the whole child was kept. And one has simply transferred this to homosexual men.”

“But there is no homosexuality at all in the New Testament,” he said. “There is only discussion of homosexual acts, which were to some extent pagan cultic acts. That was naturally forbidden. I believe it is time for us to make a revision in the foundation of the teaching.”

The Catholic Church does not teach that being homosexual or having homosexual tendencies is sinful. However, it says that to engage in homosexual practices is sinful.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (2357)

More:

In the KNA interview, Cardinal Hollerich was asked about changes in the church and he replied, “we cannot give the answers of the past to the questions of tomorrow.”

“The change in civilization we are witnessing today is the greatest change since the invention of the wheel,” said the cardinal. “The Church has always moved with the times and has always adapted. But one always had much more time to do that. Today we must be faster. Otherwise, we lose contact and can no more be understood.”

The top Catholic cardinal in Europe openly denies magisterial Catholic teaching, based in clear Scripture. That report, from Catholic News Service, cites this 1986 letter to the world’s Catholic bishops from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, who was at the time head of the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office. It says, in part:

4. An essential dimension of authentic pastoral care is the identification of causes of confusion regarding the Church’s teaching. One is a new exegesis of Sacred Scripture which claims variously that Scripture has nothing to say on the subject of homosexuality, or that it somehow tacitly approves of it, or that all of its moral injunctions are so culture-bound that they are no longer applicable to contemporary life. These views are gravely erroneous and call for particular attention here.

5. It is quite true that the Biblical literature owes to the different epochs in which it was written a good deal of its varied patterns of thought and expression (Dei Verbum 12). The Church today addresses the Gospel to a world which differs in many ways from ancient days. But the world in which the New Testament was written was already quite diverse from the situation in which the Sacred Scriptures of the Hebrew People had been written or compiled, for example.

What should be noticed is that, in the presence of such remarkable diversity, there is nevertheless a clear consistency within the Scriptures themselves on the moral issue of homosexual behaviour. The Church’s doctrine regarding this issue is thus based, not on isolated phrases for facile theological argument, but on the solid foundation of a constant Biblical testimony. The community of faith today, in unbroken continuity with the Jewish and Christian communities within which the ancient Scriptures were written, continues to be nourished by those same Scriptures and by the Spirit of Truth whose Word they are. It is likewise essential to recognize that the Scriptures are not properly understood when they are interpreted in a way which contradicts the Church’s living Tradition. To be correct, the interpretation of Scripture must be in substantial accord with that Tradition.

More from Ratzinger:

In Genesis 3, we find that this truth about persons being an image of God has been obscured by original sin. There inevitably follows a loss of awareness of the covenantal character of the union these persons had with God and with each other. The human body retains its “spousal significance” but this is now clouded by sin. Thus, in Genesis 19:1-11, the deterioration due to sin continues in the story of the men of Sodom. There can be no doubt of the moral judgement made there against homosexual relations. In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, in the course of describing the conditions necessary for belonging to the Chosen People, the author excludes from the People of God those who behave in a homosexual fashion.

Against the background of this exposition of theocratic law, an eschatological perspective is developed by St. Paul when, in I Cor 6:9, he proposes the same doctrine and lists those who behave in a homosexual fashion among those who shall not enter the Kingdom of God.

In Romans 1:18-32, still building on the moral traditions of his forebears, but in the new context of the confrontation between Christianity and the pagan society of his day, Paul uses homosexual behaviour as an example of the blindness which has overcome humankind. Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations. Finally, 1 Tim. 1, in full continuity with the Biblical position, singles out those who spread wrong doctrine and in v. 10 explicitly names as sinners those who engage in homosexual acts.

And:

But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve.

An authentic pastoral programme will assist homosexual persons at all levels of the spiritual life: through the sacraments, and in particular through the frequent and sincere use of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through prayer, witness, counsel and individual care. In such a way, the entire Christian community can come to recognize its own call to assist its brothers and sisters, without deluding them or isolating them.

Read the entire letter, which was approved for publication by Pope John Paul II. It is deeply wise and authentically compassionate. And now that poor old man, holy Joseph Ratzinger, has to live to see so much of his work dismantled by the current pope and faithless cardinals, bishops, and priests — including this Jesuit Hollerich, raised to the cardinalate by Francis, but first appointed to the episcopacy by, well, Benedict XVI. What an agonizing irony.

Now, take a look at that 1986 letter by Cardinal Ratzinger, which is unambiguous about Scriptural teaching, and is in harmony with the ancient Church’s witness on the subject, and compare it to what Cardinal Hollerich, the Relator General of the October Synod, says. It’s a different religion. Cardinal Hollerich knows that you can’t really finesse the matter, so he says flat out that the Church has been wrong. He says in effect that he knows better than St. Paul. How can a church that flip-flops so spectacularly on a key issue like this be taken seriously as authoritative? It can’t. We are witnessing the destruction of the Catholic Church by its senior leadership.

You hear the latest from Pope Francis? Watch and listen:

Pope Francis: “let’s think about those who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism: Are these also at home?” Yes, these too. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the Communion of Saints.” pic.twitter.com/c8oxDIbrAO

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) February 2, 2022

Nobody goes to Hell. Sorry, St. Paul. Sorry, Jesus. You were wrong. Pope Francis knows better.

If he was saying that those who have denied the faith, apostates, and even persecutors are human beings despite that, then of course he is right. If he is saying that they can be forgiven if they repent, and be restored to communion with the Church, then yes, that is absolutely true. But that is not what he said. He said that people who curse God, who deny the faith, who beat, torture, and even murder Christians, are at home in the Church.

This is moral insanity. Adolf Hitler was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic. According to the teaching of the Jesuit pope, he is part of the Communion of Saints. Francis said in this discourse (see the screenshot above) that the communion of saints includes all the sinners on earth. This is not true. Look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the Communion of Saints. Besides, if there is no meaningful difference between sinners and saints, what is the purpose of the Church at all?

How is this not diabolical confusion?

I hope I’m wrong, but I believe that I will live to see a schism in the Catholic Church. You might say, “What do you care? You aren’t Catholic.” Leaving aside the many Catholic friends I have, whom I do not want to see grieved by this, I have for many years been clear that the future of Christianity in the West stands or falls with the Catholic Church. We Orthodox are far too small to make a difference. Protestantism is stronger in some precincts, but in my judgment it lacks the fundamentals necessary to withstand the acid bath of modernity. A conservative Evangelical friend confided to me the other day that his denomination is dead, but doesn’t know it yet. We non-Catholics living in the post-Christian West may not be subject to the pontiff’s authority, but I am confident that our own well being depends on Rome’s health. And right now, it looks like Rome is falling apart theologically under its current leadership.

Catholic readers, a serious question: if the Synod and the Pope change Catholic teaching on homosexuality, what are you going to do? Would you go into schism? If you remained in Communion with the Roman see, how would you manage that?

Orthodox Christian readers, this is exactly the kind of thing converts like me are trying to protect our Church from by sounding the alarm about liberal renovationists of our time and place.

Look, there are no ecclesial safe places from this stuff. Some places are safer than others, but if you can go from the Vatican’s doctrinal office writing that binding letter in 1986 to the kind of radical revisionism on homosexuality that we hear today from top cardinals, and that the Pope permits and encourages (e.g., his recently publicized letter praising the radical nun for her pro-LGBT work) in a single generation, then all that is solid melts into air. Who authored that phrase? Marx and Engels — you know, the two bearded Germans who, I have on top authority, are in the Communion of Saints.

This is madness. If you can’t read the signs of the times and prepare yourself, your family, and your parish to endure what is fast coming at all Christians, you are foolish, and will live to regret it.

The post Francis’s Church: Where All The Sinners Are Saints appeared first on The American Conservative.

Good morning from Budapest. I flew over yesterday, but I don’t think I’ve ever made a journey that was so exhausting. There was nothing unusual about it — except that I’m still getting over Covid. When I arrived at my rented flat here, I crashed hard, and slept for 14 hours, with the exception of waking up for an hour and eating crackers and potato chips in the pantry before going back to sleep. Whee! But I’m glad to be here. I will be giving some lectures at Matthias Corvinus Collegium this spring, and doing some work for the Danube Institute, as well as working on my next book. If you’re coming over for CPAC Budapest next month, come say hi, and ask me where to go for your beer (ruin bars in the Seventh District) and coffee (Vinikli, which also serves great Hungarian wine by the glass, and, of course, Scruton).

Wait, I’ve already told you. Oh well, come say hi anyway.

Now, to business. Ross Douthat has a typically incisive analysis on our two political parties and their relationship to democracy. Here’s how it starts:

“There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”

The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.

So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.

Douthat explores how neither party can claim to be fully “on the side of democracy” as Ben Rhodes means here. This is a classic Douthat analysis column, and he criticizes Republicans too. But I want to focus on this part of his take, because it explains something important about why Hungary matters, or should matter, to American conservatives:

But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.

This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.

This, he explains, is why Donald Trump’s “stolen election” claims find purchase with right-wing voters. They are prepared to believe it, based on the framework through which they regard American politics. But — and this is a big but — the Democrats are blinded by their own biased framework. Here’s Douthat:

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.

Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.

Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.

Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is a democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.

Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values.

Read it all. 

What does this have to do with Hungary? As you might have heard (see above), CPAC is coming to Budapest in March, one month before the national election which could turf out Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been in power since 2010. Orban completely mystifies Western liberal observers, particularly in the media. If you’ve been a follower of mine over the past year, you’ll know that I came to Budapest on a fellowship a year ago, and was startled to discover after being here for only a short time how far from the truth the standard Western narrative of this country and its (democratically elected!) leader is. Mind you, I’m not saying that the Orban government is completely unproblematic, but I am saying that it is far, far better than the way it is routinely portrayed in US and western European media. And not only that: the Fidesz government here is in many ways an example of successful national conservatism/populism.

Because of CPAC’s plans, American journalists are suddenly really interested in the growing relationship between Hungary and the American Right. I’ve given a couple of interviews in the past two weeks about them. Yesterday, in a series of email exchanges with one reporter, I shared with him why Hungary should matter to American conservatives. I’m not going to quote myself directly, because I don’t want to jump the gun on his story, and I don’t know which of my quotes he’s going to use, but I will explain it in paraphrase.

Re-read that last Douthat passage, and you’ll understand Hungary. At the moment, Hungary is facing persecution by the European Union because of a law it passed last summer that restricts media information about LGBT aimed at minors. It is perfectly normal for any country to restrict what information is available to children. Did you know that Sweden bans advertising that targets children? I fully support this, and wish we had a similar ban in the US. Not all European countries do this, but if any country wanted to, what business is it of other countries to tell them how they should regulate media aimed at young minds? If Hungary had banned ads that tried to convince children to buy products, nobody in the EU would have cared; some might have even praised the Hungarians for defending childhood.

What the Hungarians banned, or at least restricted, was advertising and other forms of information aimed at propagandizing children and minors for a permissive, left-wing take on LGBT. See here for more details. It also says that only approved organizations can offer sex education in schools. Given what US parents are learning about how teachers and school officials systematically deceive them on how they propagandize children to accept genderfluid identities, a lot of us would love it if our local representatives passed a similar law. The problem for the EU, of course, is that the Hungarians hold traditional views about sexuality and gender. If Budapest wanted to restrict ads selling candy and soft drinks to minors, nobody in Europe would mind, but when Budapest wants to restrict selling gender ideology to children, then it’s the most wicked thing in the world. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, wants to kick Hungary out of the EU over it, and France’s Emmanuel Macron last year characterized Hungary’s law as a violation of hundreds of years of European tradition.

Did you know that incest between consenting adults has been legal in France since 1791, and the French are only just now attempting to ban it?I don’t recall that the Hungarian government or any other European government raised hell about France’s disgusting pro-incest legal regime. What happens in France regarding governing the sexual license of its people is the business of the French. But for Hungary, the EU elites have different standards. The will of the Hungarian people as expressed through their elected representatives, which in this case is generally in line with how most Europeans regarded homosexuality and transgenderism, particularly among children, until seemingly the day before yesterday, counts for nothing.

As I see it, the Hungarians might be wrong about this (I don’t think they are, but maybe I’m wrong too), but they have a sovereign right to be wrong. Yesterday I wrote in this space about a conservative Tennessee school board that removed Maus from the eighth grade curriculum on grounds that cuss words appear in the graphic novel about the Holocaust, and also rodent nudity (presumably of naked Jews, depicted as mice in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, going to the showers at Auschwitz). A progressive school board in the Seattle area removed To Kill A Mockingbird from a required reading list because the Civil Rights-era novel about justice in the Jim Crow South uses the n-word. I think in both instances, the two school boards did something idiotic — but I strongly defend their right to make those decisions. If local people don’t like it, they can vote those school officials out. This is how it is supposed to work in a democracy. It was established long ago that European Union elites are all for democracy, until the demos decides something that goes against what those elites prefer. Then it’s the demos that is undemocratic.

See how this works? Similarly with George Soros. The Fidesz government has long made him a symbol of all that they hate. Our media love to say this is an example of anti-Semitism, because Soros is of Jewish heritage (he does not practice Judaism, and is in fact an atheist). American and Western European liberals accept this as an obvious fact — that the anti-Soros attacks are anti-Semitic — even though on evidence, the anti-Soros attacks are not about his ethnicity, but about the fact that he is an extremely rich foreigner who dedicates much of his fortune to trying to change Hungary to fit his globalist principles. It was Soros, recall, back in 2015 who pushed European countries to be far more accepting of Third World migrants. 

The Hungarians refused to settle these refugees, in part on grounds that they are defending Europe from an invasion of people from other civilizations, who will permanently alter the European character of the countries in which they settle. It’s undeniably true. One could still make the case that the moral imperative of accepting these immigrants outweighs the cost of these permanent changes, but that’s not how the globalist, Soros left behaves. It simply screams racism! and tries to demonize politicians like Orban and his ideological allies in other European countries — and the media go along with it.

Conservative Americans have awakened to the malign influence of the globalist billionaire on our own politics, regarding the progressive district attorneys in US cities elected in part with Soros financial support. Their soft on crime policies are turning parts of those cities into hellholes. It is not anti-Semitic to point to this fantastically rich progressive and the role he plays in using his fortune to change America into his image. Our media have gone after the Koch brothers for the same thing for years. But Soros deserves a pass on this scrutiny because he is ethnically Jewish? Give me a break.

In 2018, the Soros-backed Central European University partially moved out of Budapest in the face of hostility from the Orban government. At the time, I did not take a stand on whether this was a good or a bad thing, saying simply that as a general principle, I am against universities feeling compelled to abandon a country. But I did want to give more context to the story than we were getting in the US media. Back then I wrote:

From Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe:

In October 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, criticised Soros publicly as one of a circle of activists who “support anything that weakens nation states.” Soros responded publicly to confirm that the numerous groups he was funding were indeed working for the ends described by Orban. In an email to Bloomberg, Soros said that it was his foundation which was seeking to “uphold European values,” while he accused Orban of trying to “undermine those values.” Soros went on to say of Orban: “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The dialogues ceased before anyone could ask Soros how long those European values might last once Europe could be walked into by people from all over the world.

In his email to Bloomberg Business, Soros referred to this plan, which you can read in full on the Soros website (GeorgeSoros.com). Excerpt:

First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly – a principle that a qualified majority finally established at last Wednesday’s summit.

Soros continues:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has now also produced a six-point plan to address the crisis. But his plan, which subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders, threatens to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built and violating the laws that are supposed to govern it.

Orban was exactly right! Soros believes that borders are less important than moving a million “refugees” into Europe each year, indefinitely. This is not a secret. The globalist billionaire Soros is — was — funding a university in Budapest whose purpose is to radically undermine the political and cultural order of Hungary.

Having seen since then how ideologically captured universities in the US work, in conjunction with government and corporate elites, to radically undermine the political and cultural order that people like me support, I am today far more sympathetic to what Orban did. More from that 2018 post:

Orban leads a tiny and relatively poor Central European country of fewer than 10 million people, is desperately attempting to prevent that country from committing cultural suicide like the rest of Europe. It is hard for Americans to understand what the world looks like from the perspective of a country like that. When I was in Budapest earlier this year, I spoke to an Orban supporter who agreed that he was flawed. In particular, the supporter said that Orban is more susceptible to crony capitalism than he ought to be.

But, said the Orban backer, you have to understand that Hungarians are profoundly wounded by their country’s subjection to the Soviets for much of the 20th century. They feel acutely the pain of losing national self-determination. After communism’s fall there, my interlocutor explained, wealthy Western capitalists swooped in and bought decrepit state industries at fire sale prices. Hungarians were thrilled to be free of the Soviet yoke, but they were not happy to have their economic future in the hands of rich Westerners. Part of Orban’s popularity has to do with his willingness to say that Hungarians ought to be deciding the future of Hungary, and not only to say it, but to back it up with policies.

This is why the Hungarian people supported him in his refusal to yield to Brussels’s demand that Hungary accept large numbers of “refugees.” And this is why they generally support his nationalism.

Orban considers Soros’s university to be an agent of real corruption in the heart of his embattled nation. Consider something as petty as the gender studies program at the university. That’s a garbage discipline that promotes an ideology that destroys marriage and family. When I was in Hungary earlier this year, I spoke to people there who could not grasp the West’s acceptance and promotion of transgenderism, and gender ideology more broadly. I’m serious: it made no sense to them at all. I warned them that not long ago, it wouldn’t have made sense to Americans either, but cultural elites have stopped at nothing to mainstream it, and even to turn it into law. The same will happen to them if they aren’t careful.

And:

George Soros has never hidden his desire to spread secular liberal values to the former Soviet bloc countries. A few years back, the Obama-era USAID paired with Soros to translate and publish Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the Macedonian language, and distribute it there, to undermine the conservative government. In 2016, USAID announced a plan to spend $300,000 promoting “LGBTI inclusion” in Macedonia.

It seems to me that the Orban government correctly understands that the culture war is a war of imperialism and subversion fought by other means by nations and private actors (Soros) who wish to defeat traditionalists. Whether or not that justifies kicking Soros U. out of the country is a separate question. But American readers should understand that coverage of this event in Western media is not telling the whole story, and gives no context for understanding why the Hungarians would see Soros U. as a threat to their sovereignty — and indeed, why they would see decadent Western liberalism as a threat to their existence as a people.

Read that whole 2018 post. 

Now, again, re-read these Douthat lines:

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.

Do you see why Hungary is important to American conservatives now? Or should be? It is led by a man and a party unbowed by attacks from globalist liberal elites like George Soros, Mark Rutte, and Emmanuel Macron. Orban’s fight is our fight too. For that matter, the fight waged by national conservative politicians like Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox party, Eric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the Law & Justice party in Poland, and others — we may disagree with them on some things, but broadly, their fight is our fight too.

You are not going to hear about this from the establishment media or from establishment Republicans. The anti-democratic authoritarianism, even the soft totalitarianism, of the progressive Left is invisible to the media, and establishment Republicans are way behind the story. This is why I was so pleased to have played a small role in helping smooth the way for Tucker Carlson to come to Budapest last summer and give another side to the story of this country than what Americans normally get. The Tucker Effect has been great; I doubt CPAC would have planned its event here if not for Tucker putting Hungary and Viktor Orban on the radar of US movement conservatism.

To be clear, there are meaningful differences between American populism and the various European populists. For example, the Orban government has been far more aggressive on Covid restrictions than most American conservatives would like. But so what? It’s important to be aware of these differences, and also to do one’s homework and avoid allying with truly anti-Semitic or neofascist political factions (along these lines, it’s interesting how there hasn’t been any reporting that I’ve seen about how the anti-Orban Hungarian left partnered with the genuinely far-right Jobbik party in an effort to unify the anti-Orban opposition in this year’s election; this alliance of convenience with a party that has an openly anti-Semitic recent past has been undiscussed in the Western media). It is important to know, though, that the mainstream US and UK media are not reliable guides to covering right-of-center politics in Europe.

Here is a link to a superb and nuanced 2018 piece in the New York Review of Books by the Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, who is a man of the center left, writing about new paths on the French Right. I was thrilled to read the piece, not only because I’m interested in the French Right, but because some of my Catholic friends and their institutions figure into the piece. Lilla writes about how the French media completely missed the huge popular support for the Manif pour Tous movement opposing same-sex marriage. The movement failed, but it turned out a million Frenchmen on the streets of Paris to demonstrate in favor of the idea that children deserve a mother and a father. Lilla wrote back then:

The first reason is that it revealed an unoccupied ideological space between the mainstream Republicans and the National Front. Journalists tend to present an overly simple picture of populism in contemporary European politics. They imagine there is a clear line separating legacy conservative parties like the Republicans, which have made their peace with the neoliberal European order, from xenophobic populist ones like the National Front, which would bring down the EU, destroy liberal institutions, and drive out as many immigrants and especially Muslims as possible.

These journalists have had trouble imagining that there might be a third force on the right that is not represented by either the establishment parties or the xenophobic populists. This narrowness of vision has made it difficult for even seasoned observers to understand the supporters of La Manif, who mobilized around what Americans call social issues and feel they have no real political home today.

The Republicans have no governing ideology apart from globalist economics and worship of the state, and in keeping with their Gaullist secular heritage have traditionally treated moral and religious issues as strictly personal, at least until Fillon’s anomalous candidacy. The National Front is nearly as secular and even less ideologically coherent, having served more as a refuge for history’s detritus—Vichy collaborators, resentful pieds noirs driven out of Algeria, Joan of Arc romantics, Jew- and Muslim haters, skinheads—than as a party with a positive program for France’s future. A mayor once close to it now aptly calls it the “Dien Bien Phu right.”

Lilla went on:

This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (AppleGoogle-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).

More:

Whatever one thinks of these conservative ideas about society and the economy, they form a coherent worldview. The same cannot really be said about the establishment left and right in Europe today. The left opposes the uncontrolled fluidity of the global economy and wants to rein it in on behalf of workers, while it celebrates immigration, multiculturalism, and fluid gender roles that large numbers of workers reject. The establishment right reverses those positions, denouncing the free circulation of people for destabilizing society, while promoting the free circulation of capital, which does exactly that. These French conservatives criticize uncontrolled fluidity  in both its neoliberal and cosmopolitan forms.

These are my people! Many of them are committed Catholics who reject the racist far right, but who also are sick and tired of the French conservative establishment. Lilla did a real service in exploring their ideas, and distinguishing them from the outdated and inaccurate stereotypes of the French Right reflected in media coverage. What do you know, James McAuley, the Washington Post‘s Paris correspondent wrote to NYRB to accuse Lilla of trying to whitewash the racism of these French conservatives. I wrote about that here, including Lilla’s response to the accusation. Lilla wrote:

But a reader of McAuley’s letter who had not seen the piece might come to a different conclusion: that it was intended to whitewash Marion (or her grandfather, or right-wing forces everywhere; it’s unclear which) and ignore the real animating forces on the right, which are “white supremacy,” “hatred of the other,” “bigotry,” and “an ideology of exclusion,” all whipped up by the phantom of immigration. In other words, never mind all the things that seem new, forget the writings about family and sexuality, forget all the talk about organic community, forget the lashing out against neoliberalism and tech giants, forget Pope Francis (an inspiration for some). It all comes down to hatred: “Any responsible discussion of the movement’s new developments must begin and end there.”

That sentiment is so common on the left, and not only in France, and so fruitless for confronting the contemporary right, in all its manifestations, that I’m moved to respond, though this was not my original subject. The forces McAuley lists are real enough in our societies. But it is foolish to deny or minimize social realities that xenophobes exaggerate and exploit, in the vain hope of cutting off their oxygen. Equally foolish is an unwillingness to take up fundamental political questions that the xenophobes give bad answers to, and to try giving better ones—questions like Ernst Renan’s “What is a nation?” These avoidance instincts must be resisted. If there is anything we’ve learned in recent decades, it is that closing our eyes or establishing taboos on what can and can’t be discussed, or how, always backfire. The left needs to present people with a fuller reality than the right presents, not an equally restricted one.

He’s right. Mark Lilla is an old-fashioned liberal who believes that defending liberalism requires understanding its opponents and challengers, not living in a phony dream world. I am quite sure that Mark Lilla vehemently opposes Viktor Orban and most of the European populist right. But to his great credit, he is trying to understand them. Meanwhile, within his own university, Lilla has been denounced as one engaged in “making white supremacy acceptable” because of his criticism of the fanatically illiberal left in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory.

Anyway, I’ve rambled too long. The reporter I emailed with yesterday asked me how I square my own conservative commitments with my support for Orban, given that Orban’s policies don’t always line up with mine (the example he brought up was how fighting abortion has not been a priority for Fidesz). My response was that Hungarians are not the same as Americans; we have different traditions, and different concerns. Plus, after forty years of Communism, Hungarians are less religious overall than Americans are. Still, I was not aware in my answer that Hungary’s abortion laws are significantly more restrictive than American ones. I wish we were as restrictive of abortion as Hungary is!

Anyway, on the general point about why we American conservatives should make alliances with Hungarian conservatives, even if we don’t share 100 percent the same views, I told the reporter that I learned an important lesson interviewing anti-communist dissidents in the former Warsaw Pact countries. In particular, when I asked Kamila Bendova how she and her late husband, Vaclav Benda, justified their close alliance with Vaclav Havel and the other leaders of the dissident movement, given their own strict Catholicism (the rest of the dissidents were irreligious and sexually adventurous), she told me that under conditions of totalitarianism, the rarest quality to find in individuals was courage. She said the overwhelming majority of Czech Christians kept their heads down and wanted to avoid trouble. The Bendas weren’t that way. There were so few brave anti-communist dissidents that when you found one, you needed to figure out how to stand with that person, no matter how much you differed on religion, morality, and politics. That lesson really stayed with me, and it’s why I have no trouble at all standing with anti-woke liberals like Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, Peter Boghossian, and others. We disagree on many things, but we all share the conviction that the wokeness that has captured the American establishment and its institutions is the greatest threat facing us all now. Similarly, I don’t like some things about the Orban government’s policies (e.g, its tolerance for corruption, its openness to establishing a Chinese university here, its use of Pegasus spyware against journalists), but on the big and important things, Orban and Fidesz are on the right side, and they deserve our allyship.

For example, did you know that Hungary, alone among the nations of Europe (to my knowledge), has a state ministry dedicated to advocating for and helping persecuted Christians? I wrote about it last year when I visited its director, Tristan Azbej. Excerpt:

More than a third of a billion people around the world — Christians — are persecuted, Azbej said, but their plight is barely mentioned in United Nations, European Union, and human rights NGO circles.

“The reason for that is mostly political. First of all, the Muslim majority countries, they don’t necessarily persecute Christians, but they are interested in hiding the fact that Christians are persecuted,” Azbej said. “Second, the Western liberal governments and politicians want to conceal this fact, simply because it doesn’t fit their narrative. In their narrative, Christianity is the oppressor, is the persecuting ideology that they say— falsely, I think — is persecuting sexual minorities. They are only interested in that.”

Azbej said he and his staff have to deal with this denial every day in the diplomatic world. This is why his Hungary Helps program not only has to deliver aid to persecuted Christians, but has to advocate for them too.

“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “Nigeria currently is where the most severe Christian persecution takes place. Last year there were close to 3,000 reported cases of jihadists murdering Christians for their beliefs. Whenever I talk with Western diplomats and politicians about this, they try to convince me that it has nothing to do with persecution.”

Azbej recalled a conversation with a high-ranking Western diplomat.

“When I explained about the genocide committed by Boko Haram against Nigerian Christians, he told me it wasn’t religious persecution. This was near the beginning of my appointment, so I was really shocked. Do you know what he told me the cause was? Climate change. He said it was farmer-herder conflict caused by climate change.

“I explained the reports and the testimonies we received on the ground,” Azbej continued. “It is true that herders are attacking farmers, but the herders are all jihadists who get weapons and funding from al Qaeda. We had numerous testimonies of them overrunning villages and burning Christians inside their churches. We had a report where they burned alive 150 Christian martyrs inside their church, then they razed the church to the ground and built a mosque instead. But the Western diplomat kept insisting it was climate change.”

Azbej said his secretariat logically belongs in the foreign ministry, but instead he reports personally to PM Orban, because the issue of persecuted Christians is a priority for him. Whenever the secretariat receives representatives from persecuted Christian churches, Azbej takes them over to meet Orban. (A couple of years ago I was present in a meeting with Orban at the Buda Castle in which a bishop from a Middle Eastern church thanked Orban with great emotion for all that Hungary had done for his people).

So, liberals, tell me again why American conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, are supposed to hate Viktor Orban’s government? Is it because they aren’t ashamed of their country’s Christian heritage, and unlike the US government, sees a particular responsibility to aid and defend persecuted Christians in other countries? The US State Department, at least since the second Obama administration, has made it open policy to defend persecuted LGBTs abroad. Christians? Forget about it. In the mind of liberals and progressives, we Christians are always the bad guys. Hungary doesn’t see it that way. Imagine that. Thanks to the opening Tucker Carlson provided over the heads of the US media and gatekeeper Republican institutions, ordinary American conservatives can start to understand what a friend we have in Hungary — and how we ought to be standing with them, and up for them.

The winter sun is up over Budapest now. I’m going to go out and say hello to the city.

The post Hungary & American Conservatives appeared first on The American Conservative.