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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 7, 2022

Here is what she said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is from Nov 2019.

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

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) April 6, 2022

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

Now, it’s People magazine saying it.

It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying it.

It’s the ACLU saying it.

This is what is conventional liberal wisdom today:

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

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

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

Gender Spectrum on how to deceive parents.“Change attendance sheets to reflect student’s chosen name, but not alter the entry in the district’s student information system so any written communication w/ the parents uses the student’s name as reflected on the birth certificate.” https://t.co/wt4YMjXcN1pic.twitter.com/ERCFJeeoBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Adam read (@Adamrea23499297) April 4, 2022

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

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

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

(Please somebody have a Bigfoot story!)

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

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

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

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

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

This informal network includes some prominent religious leaders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And look at these top US government bureaucrats:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Carl:

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

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

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

Carl goes on:

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

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

More:

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:That didn’t take long:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Titus:

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

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

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

Read it all. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Peril Of Conservative Culture-War Complacency

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

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

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 3, 2022

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

UPDATE: I had lunch with my friend Gyula Pal, a philosopher and former student of Roger Scruton’s. Before we met, he sent me this analysis he wrote for his Facebook followers:

“Where did the new two thirds [Fidesz] majority come from and why is it good?

There are two things on which everyone in our divided political community can probably agree: never before have the stakes of a referendum and a general election been as high as they were this Sunday, and never before has a governing power been under such attack (from the right and the left, from within and without, etc.) as they were now. What could be the reason for the attacks? Why, in spite of the attacks, did the FIDESZ-KDNP win another large majority? What should be done after the elections?

My answers are very brief:

1. on the issue of child protection, the government is attacked from the left because it goes against the western left-liberal-progressive political consensus that children’s rights cannot be linked to parents’ rights, while from the right-liberal side this problem is simply not visible and appears to be shadow fighting. However, the FIDESZ-KDNP has recognised that the future will be decided in the cultural sphere, and within this sphere, most of all in the area of value transmission and education and the majority of Hungarian society has also come to this realisation. However, political and legal measures – including the referendum – are only necessary but not sufficient conditions for a civilisational reform capable of reversing the decline in social relations, social institutions and communities that has been observed in modern societies for decades (or even centuries).

2. The policies of the national-conservative FIDESZ-KDNP coalition and its position on geopolitical issues are attacked from the left for refusing to dissolve national self-determination in the EU bureaucratic machine (see also child protection issues) and from the right (see Polish conservatives) for being even more ‘spun on our own axis’ than  ‘Atlanticism’ can bear. But on this issue, and there is a national majority behind the FIDESZ-KDNP, the world that is changing from unipolar to multipolar could easily become so chaotic that someone further away from the North Atlantic centre of power (where Hungary is also located) could easily become a “collateral victim”, especially in economic terms, from which Article 5 of the NATO Treaty does not protect anyone. And in the new world order, new opportunities will find only those actors with room for manoeuvre between the poles, while the others are more exposed to the changing balance of power. The task of the new FIDESZ-KDNP government, therefore, is to rebuild Hungarian national sovereignty in the emerging multi-polar post-liberal world order, where the West is only one of the centres of power, but in such a way that it includes everything that was valuable in our culture (and in European culture) before, during and after Christianity.