The NYT’s Thomas Edsall writes a deeply reported weekly column about society and politics. Sometimes I disagree with him, even strongly, but it’s hard to find a better place to get the liberal view grounded in research. So it is with his column today, in which he writes:

America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump.

The peculiarly American characteristics of the Trump years have blinded us to the spread of this radical disorder worldwide — even as some prescient scholars and analysts have seen the connections all along and have been trying to make the public aware of them.

According to the Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky, there is a common thread to these seemingly disparate developments — what they call “the ubiquity of loss” — a condition the authors describe as a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline.”

We will come back to Edsall’s list of “structural problems” shortly. But first, more:

This trend toward autocracy, [political scientist Pieter] Vanhuysse continues, in evident

within the European Union, notably in Poland and, very much, Hungary. Both these countries have started to consciously devise demographic scare tactics (Muslims vs. “true” Polish and Hungarian Christians; true Hungarians vs. foreign cultures, anti-LGBT campaigns, anti-foreign NGOs) to serve incumbents’ power purposes.

The Global Trends report supports Vanhuysse’s point:

In some Western democracies, public distrust of the capabilities and policies of established parties and elites, as well as anxieties about economic dislocations, status reversals, and immigration, have fueled the rise of illiberal leaders who are undermining democratic norms and institutions and civil liberties. In newer democracies that transitioned from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s, a mix of factors has led to democratic stagnation or backsliding, including weak state capacity, tenuous rule of law, fragile traditions of tolerance for opposition, high inequality, corruption, and militaries with a strong role in politics.

There are explicitly anti-democratic forces working to encourage the developments Vanhuysse describes, according to the most recent Annual Threat Assessment.

Authoritarian and illiberal regimes around the world will increasingly exploit digital tools to surveil their citizens, control free expression, and censor and manipulate information to maintain control over their populations. Such regimes are increasingly conducting cyber intrusions that affect citizens beyond their borders — such as hacking journalists and religious minorities or attacking tools that allow free speech online — as part of their broader efforts to surveil and influence foreign populations.

And this:

Let’s let [George Mason University public policy professor Jack] Goldstone have the last word:

If Biden fails, God help us, we are headed back to the world of the 1930s, with steep political polarization, ethnic hatreds and cleansings, powerful anti-immigration sentiments and spreading fascism.

Read it all.

This is a good example of why I read The New York Times: to get a clear understanding of how liberals and progressives think.

But boy, is Edsall wrong. It’s not that he is necessarily wrong from an analytical point, if you start with certain priors (most especially, about what a good society is), but this analysis show why liberals like him and those he quotes fail to understand the complexity of the world. This column of his is a good illustration of what someone, can’t remember who, once said: liberalism is the only ideology that doesn’t think it’s an ideology.

Let’s start with his litany of horribles: “anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality.”

Anti-immigrant fervor is taken for granted as not only a bad thing, but something conjured up out of nothing by malicious political players. This allows liberals (both left-liberals and right-liberals), who generally believe that immigration is a good thing, to hold on to that view undisturbed. Well, France has a terrible, and perhaps irresolvable, problem with immigration. Some weeks back, a group of retired French generals publicly raised the prospect of civil war over the immigration problem. Specifically, they were talking about the nation-within-a-nation that has arisen in the largely ungovernable immigrant-heavy suburbs of major French cities. The fear among the French is that if the suburbs rise simultaneously, there are not enough police and soldiers to quickly restore order. This is not a right-wing fairy tale. It’s reality.

Similarly, in Italy, migrants pouring in from Africa are clogging cities, compelling Italian taxpayers to have to care for them, even though there are no jobs for these people to do. Spain has a parallel problem. When I was here in Spain two years ago, the Vox Party, a new political party that takes a hard line on immigration, had just overturned four decades of Socialist rule in Andalucia. In Sevilla, I heard about a Spanish coast guardsman who voted Vox because he could see with his own eyes, every day, how Spanish authorities were practicing catch-and-release with masses of illegal immigrants from Africa.

Viktor Orban is despised by elites in Western European capitals in part for his hardline anti-immigration stance, articulated and implemented forcefully during the 2015 crisis. Germany’s Angela Merkel opened the gates to one million migrants. Orban said none could come to Hungary. Hungary is a small country with a shrinking population. But they do not have a problem with violent Islamic radicalism, because they have no Islamic radicals. During the recent war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, disgusting anti-Semitic marches took place in capitals all over Europe, some of them featuring Muslim protesters calling for death to Jews. Not in Budapest. There, the native Jewish population went about its business without concern (I know this because I walk through the Jewish Quarter almost daily). There’s a reason, even if well-meaning liberals don’t want to see it.

The point is this: it is by no means obvious to everybody in a given country that immigration is a good thing. How many times to liberal elites have to learn this lesson? In Spain, from where I write today, the unemployment for adults aged 25 and under is, get this, 40 percent. Forty percent! For working-age adults older than that, it’s 14 percent — much better, but still, if we had that kind of unemployment rate in the US, we would be facing a serious political crisis, immediately. But opposition to immigration is an inexplicable urge that leads to “right-wing takeovers”?

Or let’s take two other Edsall bugbears, “political tribalism” and “racism”. Nobody can deny that political tribalism is tearing us apart, and that both sides play a role here. Edsall, like many unwitting liberals, seems to define “political tribalism” as “objecting to what liberals want.” Don’t share the liberal view on, for example, LGBT rights or “diversity, inclusion, and equity”? Well, then you are a political tribalist whose factional fanaticism prevents him from seeing sweet reason. And on race, I’m old enough to remember a time when the kind of racialist rhetoric that is totally mainstream on the Left right now would have been seen even by liberals as racist. But now white people who do not accept the progressive party line that there is something deeply wrong with them because of their race, and that justice requires them to accept policies that disparage and disadvantage them, solely on the basis of race — well, see, these are racists.

What would Edsall and his academic all-star team call non-white people who preferred policies that did not disadvantage people like themselves, and their children, on the basis of race? Not “racists,” I can tell you that. They would see them as ordinary political actors. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann has written about this kind of thing before, especially in his book Whiteshift. Many liberals have bought into the line that there is something uniquely terrible about white people that exempt them from the normal laws of politics and morality. Meanwhile, last night at dinner in Valencia, I discussed with a professor how the working class in a certain Spanish city went from voting for the Left to voting for the Right, in large part over immigration. From what the professor seemed to be saying, the Left’s core constituency in that city went from the working class to university employees and highly educated professionals — the kind of people who prefer the immigrants they do not know to the working classes in their own country. So it is with our liberals too, back in America.

The “ethnic tension” that Edsall decries is almost entirely being stoked by bad actors — activists, academics, media figures,  corporations, and others — on the Left! Who is it that is teaching us Americans to regard each other wholly on the basis of racial identity? In a time in which we desperately need to find some way to hold together across racial lines, it is the Left who is driving us apart, by intentional policy. And it is the Left at the same time who is blaming the Right for resenting them for this. It’s perverse. I’ve characterized this dynamic before like this:

Left: “Trans, trans, trans, trans, trans, trans, trans. Trans! Transtranstranstranstranstrans. TRAAAAAAAAAANS!”

Right: “Trans?”

Left: “BIGOT! You’ve got the blood of dead transpeople on your hands!”

On inequality, Edsall is right that this is a big problem. But you know what? The Left is now obsessed with “equity,” which is equality of outcome. Instead of attacking the deep and serious problem of structural economic inequality, the Left now focuses on diving what remains by using the power of the state and of institutions to distribute them according to a racial spoils system. And if people resent that — hey, what’s wrong with those bigots, holding on to their privilege?

Edsall characterizes this as “radical disorder,” but has no apparent awareness of the role liberal and progressive policies play in causing this disorder, and compelling voters to react against it. Instead, they implement cancel culture to prevent people from talking openly about these problems, many of which have been caused by leftist or neoliberal policies.

Edsall quotes the Danish political scientist Pieter Vanhuysse saying:

within the European Union, notably in Poland and, very much, Hungary. Both these countries have started to consciously devise demographic scare tactics (Muslims vs. “true” Polish and Hungarian Christians; true Hungarians vs. foreign cultures, anti-LGBT campaigns, anti-foreign NGOs) to serve incumbents’ power purposes.

Note the unstated premise: that any concern over immigration and demographics, religious difference, sexual morality, and the influence of foreign actors in domestic affairs, is nefarious. 

This is crazy. I mentioned above why there are very serious reasons for European nations to reject Islamic immigrants. You can say on balance that they are mistaken, but the idea that these concerns are ginned up by cynical politicians is idiocy. Western liberals accuse Hungary’s Orban of anti-Semitism because he heavily criticizes Hungarian-born Jewish globalist and activist George Soros for Soros’s activism in Hungary. This is a total smoke screen. Orban openly criticizes anti-Semitism, and he makes clear (most recently in his remarks to the media in London) that his opposition to Soros comes from resenting the oligarchical liberal’s attempts to use NGOs to overturn Hungarian policies and traditions. If George Soros was named Charles Koch, and was pouring a fortune into left-wing countries to disrupt the social order there in order to make them more right-wing libertarian, it would be much easier for the Left to understand Orban’s concern.

As I’ve written here recently, the Fidesz government in Hungary has just passed a law restricting the dissemination of pro-LGBT printed and broadcast materials to minors. Whenever you read anything in the Western media about Hungary or any European politics of the Right, take it with a large grain of salt. I am looking now for the wording of the new law, but until I find it, here’s what Orban himself said about it:

European bells are now being set aside because of new laws that are radically punishing pedophiles and radically protecting our children. In vain, the movement is eternal, it is no longer the “proletarians of the world unite,” but the “liberals of the world unite” is the new slogan. This, of course, reinforces the Central European belief that today the liberal is in fact the graduate communist. The current left-wing campaign against Hungary is further evidence that today the left is the enemy of freedom because they want political correctness as defined by them instead of freedom of speech and hegemony of opinion instead of pluralism of opinion.

Yet the new Hungarian law does not conflict with any lofty idea or European legislation. The new Hungarian law only clearly states that only the parent can decide on the sex education of children.

Schooling must not be contrary to the will of the parent, it must at most be complementary, its form and content must be precisely defined and it must be subject to the consent of the parents.

Parents also rightly expect that pornography, self-serving sexuality, homosexuality, and unalterable programs will not be available on surfaces that our children use without restriction. These limitations must also be determined with surgical precision. In Hungary, no one has a say in how adults live. In our view, the adult free man should not account for his life before some secular authority, but before the judgment seat of the Good God when the time comes.

Therefore, Hungarian law does not apply to the lives and sexual habits of adults over the age of 18, nor to their own adult publicity. Moreover, in the European context, Hungarian society is one of the European peoples most committed to individual freedom and tolerance. The reasons for this are they are rooted in our cultural traditions, in Christian freedom, in the struggles for national freedom, and in the deep contempt for communism and communist arbitrariness.

Hungarian freedom means not only political freedom, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, assembly and association, but also the right to protect our families and raise our children at our own discretion. Our law is a worthy continuation of the European tradition of freedom. The debate on the future of Europe, our children, has just begun. Here we are, we stand before the debates.

Liberals (including some right-liberals) see spreading LGBT messaging to children to be part of expanding freedom. Conservatives who side with Fidesz on this regard it as protecting children from cultural imperialism that violates the sanctity of the family. I get why liberals believe as they do; they don’t believe there’s anything wrong with LGBT messaging to children. But come on, people, don’t act puzzled when people who strongly disagree with you react according to what they believe is right. And when people in a particular country look at foreign NGOs and see them actively working to undermine that country’s laws and traditions, why on earth is it illegitimate for them to fight back?

I wish we had the political will in the United States to restrict LGBT messaging to children, and give parents more control over educating their families. If parents want to be liberal in what they tell their kids, fine, let them do it. But don’t force everybody to have to live by progressive doctrines.

Let me put it like this, with a story I’ve told here before. Back in 2003, I had just joined the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News. I sat in on a meeting with some diplomats from Mexico and trade officials from the US. They were there to ask us to support some new trade treaty. As I recall, the only real sticking point were small farmers along the US-Mexico border. The new treaty would have wiped them out. The people meeting with us were going on and on about how economically inefficient these farmers were, and how they were the only thing standing in the way of this wonderful new legislation. I was appalled by what I heard. No doubt these farmers were inefficient. But who said efficiency is the most important thing in life? These farm families had an entire way of life to protect, and these rich, powerful Americans and Mexicans were planning to roll right over them. The unthinking arrogance of these people pissed me off. All they could see was a bunch of economically problematic peasants.

Well, when I see Western liberals look down their noses at countries whose moral codes don’t align with What’s Happening Now, I think of those slick diplomats and trade officials who had nothing but contempt for those small farmers, because those farmers were Not Modern. People on the Left used to at least pretend to care about them.

Let’s close by recalling this quote from Edsall’s column:

If Biden fails, God help us, we are headed back to the world of the 1930s, with steep political polarization, ethnic hatreds and cleansings, powerful anti-immigration sentiments and spreading fascism.

Oh FFS, really? Joe Biden’s administration, and its fellow travelers in elite institutions, are stoking ethnic hatred with that many-headed hydra called Critical Race Theory. This administration is expanding gender ideology through executive action (e.g., the Justice Department preparing lawsuits against states who have the nerve to protect female athletes from unfair trans competitors). Joe Biden’s administration is presiding over a flood of immigrants rolling across the Rio Grande. Under this Commander in Chief, the US military has decided that Special Forces are too white, and are lessening standards to diversify them. And on and on.

But see, it’s Joe Biden who is defending the nation from FASCISM.

These people will never, ever understand what’s actually happening. On this trip to Spain, which ends for me tomorrow, I talked to a Spanish soldier who said that the morale among the troops with whom she serves is low. There used to be mostly unity there, but now they argue all the time over these issues that the Left has introduced into society, and is constantly pushing. But if you ask most liberals, they will tell you that all the problems in society are caused by troglodytes and fascists who refuse to roll over and give them whatever they want next.

The problem is that we live on the same planet, but different worlds. I was explaining to a group in Barcelona tonight about the arrogance of major American companies who are throwing their weight around to punish US states whose democratically elected lawmakers vote to enact social policies that the companies dislike. I cannot wait to vote for an American president, and American politicians, who will knock the dogcrap out of those oligarchs, and make them know their place. In a rightly ordered democracy, the Human Resources Department at Apple Computer would not get to run social policy in our states.

Anyway, the point is, when a columnist as intelligent as Tom Edsall can write a column like that, and it never once seems to occur to him that the tens of millions of people who disagree with liberal premises and goals are not necessarily haters and pre-fascists, it tells you a lot about how blind liberal elites are to the world into which they have been thrown.

UPDATE: A Catholic priest reader writes:

I used to say in the seminary that the liberals hate authority and so they can never admit they are exercising it. Instead, they are just being open, compassionate, and reasonable. So if you don’t go along, you’re not disagreeing or being disobedient–you’re being rigid.

The critical theorists are in a similar spot. They maintain there is no objective truth, but only competing narratives which are inherently about justifying  power. Then does it not follow that their own narrative, however much it professes liberation of the marginalized, is also a power grab? But, again, they can’t admit that to themselves so they use ad hominem attacks against those who raise the question or otherwise refuse to support their worldview.

You can’t be a fascist if you refuse to admit you exercise power except, maybe, if you use it to liberate fellow marginalized people who you claim are being oppressed by fascists. A neat and convenient self-justification.

The thing about the liberals in the seminary and these critical theorists is that if you don’t agree with them, obedience or conformity is never enough, they demand agreement.  They have to have agreement because adapting to them for any other reason exposes their exercise of power over you–and they couldn’t stand to see themselves as authoritarian. So their persecution of you is always your own darn bigoted fault.

The Hungarian Parliament has given a big fat finger to the cultural imperialists of the West:

Hungary’s parliament has passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s, as Viktor Orbán’s ruling party intensified its campaign against LGBT rights.

The national assembly passed the legislation by 157 votes to one, after MPs in the ruling Fidesz party ignored a last-minute plea by one of Europe’s leading human rights officials to abandon the plan as “an affront against the rights and identities of LGBTI persons”.

Despite a boycott of the vote by some opposition politicians, the outcome was never in doubt, as Fidesz has a healthy majority and the plans were supported by the far-right Jobbik party.

The measures have been likened by critics to Russia’s 2013 law against “gay propaganda” that independent monitors say has increased social hostility and fuelled vigilante attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the EU country’s eastern neighbour.

The Hungarian legislation outlaws sharing information with under-18s that the government considers to be promoting homosexuality or gender change.

“There are contents which children under a certain age can misunderstand and which may have a detrimental effect on their development at the given age, or which children simply cannot process, and which could therefore confuse their developing moral values or their image of themselves or the world,” said a Hungarian government spokesperson.

The law also means only individuals and organisations listed in an official register can carry out sex education classes in schools, a measure targeting “organisations with dubious professional background … often established for the representation of specific sexual orientations”, the government spokesperson said.

Companies and large organisations will also be banned from running adverts in solidarity with gay people, if they are deemed to target under-18s. In 2019, a Coca-Cola ad campaign featuring smiling gay couples and anti-discrimination slogans prompted some prominent Fidesz members to call for a boycott of the company’s products.

The law means that TV shows and films featuring gay characters, or even a rainbow flag, would be permitted only after the watershed, say campaigners who have studied the legislation.

So Viktor Orban has neutered Blue. You don’t see things like that often. Of course that article, from The Guardian, is filled with liberals characterizing this as the apocalypse. Note well, however, that most of the opposition MPs boycotted the vote. They’re positioning it as a protest against the outrageousness of the law, but the truth is, none of them wanted to be on record as voting against it. They know it would be used against them in next year’s campaign, and that it would be used against them effectively, because most Hungarians do not share liberal views on LGBT, not when it comes to children. To be fair to them, the ruling Fidesz Party tacked this legislation onto a bill penalizing pedophilia, putting opposition MPs who opposed the legislation in the position of having to vote against a larger bill strengthening laws against pedophilia.

You can criticize the law as bigoted, and Hungarian lawmakers who voted against it as bigoted, but this is really going to help Fidesz next year — for reasons that you will not likely hear about in Western news reporting.

I have written in this space for a couple of months how being in Hungary this season has taught me a lot about why the Hungarians believe the things they do. For example, none of us outside of Hungary (and adjacent countries) can possibly grasp how intensely Hungarians feel about the Treaty of Trianon. The 1919 treaty concluding World War I against the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire carved two-thirds of Hungarian territory away from the country, and distributed it to other peoples. Slovaks, Romanians, Croatians and others did well by Trianon, but it was a massive trauma to the Hungarians, and remains so to this day. It is impossible to overstate how strongly they feel about it — but spending a couple of months getting to know them, you really and truly get it.

And then they were occupied by an imperial power (the Soviets) for 40 years.

So, Hungarians feel very, very strongly about national sovereignty. They had a rotten 20th century, and resent like hell people from other countries exercising control over their fate. With that in mind, take a look at this e-mail I received last night from a reader:

I’m writing to you in connection with your recent article, in which you mentioned that you have no idea whether claims about Hungarian state corruption are true or false. Well, I just thought you might be interested to hear my two cents, as a young, conservative, somewhat disillusioned but still solid Orbán-voter.

I don’t want to bore, so just in a nutshell: in Hungary, the main opposing forces are not left and right, but globalist (the opposition) and localists (Fidesz). The globalists also significantly overlap with the post-communists. Post-communists, who have Western connections from their ruling days (when they built up these links through foreign-trade relations and so called “impex” companies), and who are now parroting every Western trend, from trans-acceptance to BLM, have managed to transfer their rule of most Hungarian institutions, from the arts to business (through “smart” privatization). When Orbán was defeated in 2002 (and this wasn’t today’s fire-and-brimstone Orbán, this was a moderate version), the media (partly Western-owned, partly under the rule of post-communists) played a large role in his defeat.

So when Orbán won in 2010, he decided to build up the localist side, whatever it takes. So yes, you might say that MediaWorks (the huge umbrella corporation of Orbán-friendly news outlets, from Magyar Nemzet to a large number of small local papers) is a corrupt empire propped up by state cash funnelled to it by crony deals. BUT the alternative is a media landscape where no conservative voice will ever find purchase, led by moral nihilists who would (and did) sell their country for baubles. Or you might find fault with the rise of Lőrinc Mészáros, now the richest man in Hungary, who is a childhood friend of Orbán. BUT the alternative is our country sold out to the highest bidder.

So, in my opinion “corruption” should be seen in this light. Of course, it is always disheartening to read about the latest purchase of Mr. Mészáros (currently he is building a 10 million USD mansion for his new, much younger wife), but we often say that if this is the price to pay to escape the madness engulfing the USA and much of the Western world now, so be it. We’ll pay that price.

So, to Western eyes, the Fidesz anti-LGBT legislation must look like nothing but cynical bigotry. But from the point of view of Hungarians who support it, it’s about the government refusing to allow Hungarian cultural beliefs to be steamrolled by Western elites, NGOs, and the media. You may think that this is a mistake by the Hungarians, but you should try to see it from their point of view, so at least you’ll understand why they think the way they do. As I’ve seen from my two months in this part of the world, the cultural imperialism coming from the West is really strong. In Poland, Romania, and Hungary, I’ve talked to a number of people who resent the hell out of being made to feel by Western Europeans that they are backwards because they are more socially conservative. When they have a government that pushes back to defend the nation’s values, they love it.

Meanwhile, in America, this new piece from Adweek:

Gosh, can’t imagine why the Hungarians wouldn’t want their children’s culture to enjoy these blessings of liberty…

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The inability of the left to meaningfully distinguish between the current LGBTQ activism and complete gay erasure is exceedingly telling as a feature of how lost in the sauce they are.

I’m in Madrid now on the Live Not By Lies (or, Vivir Sin Mentiras) book tour. It has been a very busy but encouraging day, talking to Spaniards about what’s going on in their country. I can’t get out of my head an intense conversation I had this morning with a woman from Venezuela, who escaped to Spain several years ago. She read the book, and felt compelled to tell me her story.

She said that my book meant a lot to her, because she feels the same sense of anger and foreboding about the coming of soft totalitarianism to Spain that I report hearing from American emigres from Communist Eastern Bloc countries. Those people told me that they struggle to deal with the fact that Americans don’t believe them when they warn that the things happening in the US now are reminiscent of the coming of Communism to their countries. This is exactly her experience in Spain as a refugee from socialist Venezuela, she said.

(She gave me permission to write about this, but I can’t use her name or identifying details, because her mother still lives in Caracas. I wish I had had the opportunity to write all this down immediately after our talk, but I had to go straight to an interview. What follows is the most I can remember at day’s end.)

“Ana,” as I will call her, told me that one thing that powerfully strikes her about wokeness is its inability to deal with realities that contradict the ideology. In Venezuela, when people were seen eating out of garbage bins, the ruling socialists’ answer was to remove the garbage bins. Rather than adjust their ideology to fit reality, they tried to adjust reality to fit the ideology. It’s quite insane, but she saw it happen again and again. The suffering of people doesn’t matter to the woke ideologues; for them, it’s more important to keep their ideological stance pure.

As we walked up a leafy Madrid street, I told her about the crazy Eric Deggans’ column (I wrote about it here) condemning Tom Hanks for not being “antiracist”. I explained how there was no way to satisfy Deggans’s demands — that no matter what Tom Hanks did, he would be guilty of something. Ana replied that that’s how these ideological extremists work. She quoted a philosopher — I can’t remember who, but she said she doesn’t think that he has been translated into English from Spanish — who said that modern ideology tends toward genocide. I can’t recall the argument, but she said the conclusion is that people need to be eliminated because they don’t fit the ideological ideal. (The argument itself is much more sophisticated as I recall, but like I said, I am trying to remember at the end of a long day.)

Said I, “If I’m understanding this correctly, it’s that Tom Hanks is problematic not because of his actions, but because he exists.”

Her: “Yes, and that means that the only sure way to deal with the contradiction is to eliminate Tom Hanks.”

We stopped for coffee and (for me) tortilla. As she talked about her life in Spain, she began to tremble slightly, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“I am exhausted from running,” she said. “I just want to get married, buy a house, have kids, have a normal life. But I can’t rest. Is it going to follow me here? Am I going to have to run again?”

She went on like this, stopping only to apologize for talking this way. The trauma of how her country was lost, and how she had to flee, is still very much with her. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” Ana said. “I could afford to fly away. So many others can’t.”

The Spaniards, she said, just can’t believe that something like that could happen to them. They believe that they are in the European Union, and the EU would never let Spain fall victim to a left-wing dictatorship. They don’t know how fragile democracy is, Ana said. They just don’t know. In her view, liberty is slipping away almost by the day here in this country ruled by a Socialist-Communist coalition(seriously, there are actual Communists in the Spanish government). And people seem so passive in the face of it, confident that It Can’t Happen Here.

Later in the day, I was sitting around a table having coffee with a large group, and mentioned Ana’s story.

“Oh wow,” said a young woman at the other end. “My husband works with two Venezuelans, and they say the same thing.”

I wonder if any of this has appeared in the Spanish media, or if they’ve been as utterly incurious as the US media have been about exiles from Communism saying similar things about the descent of American life into wokeness. Reader, if you know anybody who came to America from a Communist country, why don’t you ask them if what they’re seeing here these days reminds them of what they left behind?

UPDATE: I have taken down the link to the Yeonmi Park video about Columbia. On second thought, it sounds like one of those “too good to check” things. If anybody can find evidence that she’s for real, let me know, and I’ll restore it.

UPDATE.2: Reader Efrain Quilen:

My wife and I are Venezuelans living in Chile since 2007, and we have seen the slow involution of Chile from exemplary and stable democracy in South America, to being on the verge of woke neo-socialism.

Just for context, Venezuelans are the largest immigrant community in Chile, with close to 450.000 people in a country of 18 million. I’d say most of us are very vocal about what happened to our country, and have been sounding off the alarm for quite a few years now. In fact, “Chilezuela” as a concept is now widely used in local politics by the political establishment to describe the risk of going full socialist with disastrous consequences. Sadly, most people either ignore the warnings (“local politicians have been corrupt for too long so we need a change”), or just don’t believe it can happen here. It’s very frustrating.

So, we moved here 14 years ago running away from El Comandante’s socialist experiment, and now we may have to consider moving again if Jadue (the communist candidate, who is polling very well) wins in November. At least my wife has a spanish passport… and at least in Spain the Right seems to be putting up a good fight. We’ll see. We know the rise of this new religion is inevitable, and we’re willing to serve the Lord through it with our fellowship of brothers and sisters in Christ, wherever He takes us (or makes us stay)

In Romania, Live Not By Lies has become a hit. It also got a local journalist kicked off of Facebook. Catalin Sturza, who helped squire me around Bucharest on the book tour, writes on his FB page (he translated this for me):

Journalist Mihai Șomănescu just discovered that his Facebook account has been deleted. The last two posts were an interview with the American writer Rod Dreher and a text by the writer Traian Ungureanu (an ex MP of the European Parliament, n.n.), in memory of the journalist Alin Bogdan.

“The irony is that the last two public posts were Traian Ungureanu’s article about the late Alin Bogdan and the interview with Rod Dreher. Both spoke of the struggle against soft totalitarianism. What better way to prove that there is no totalitarianism than by banning discussion about it? That the interview with Dreher bothered Facebook badly is further proven by the fact that they also deleted two of the three pictures of Rod Dreher on the R3media Facebook page. It’s okay, I just put them back! ”

I hope this is a mistake that will be quickly fixed. Otherwise, such abuses would be beyond the limits of the absurd. As the red line of democracy and freedom of expression has already long been violated.

https://www.facebook.com/catalinsturzapersonalpage/posts/1171665746650551

And the news that I’m quoting, published on R3Media:

https://r3media.ro/dragi-prieteni-nu-am-plecat-am-fost-inchis/

Meanwhile, in Hungary, a conservative magazine that sometimes reprints my blog posts tell me they received a warning from Facebook that they should stop dealing with me because I’m dangerous. The journalist friend who passed this on to me is on vacation now, and I can’t reach him, so I won’t name it or give details. I can say that the three perfectly innocent things that FB cited as reason to take down a piece of mine included objecting to a half of a sentence claiming that Hungary and other Central European countries are treated unfairly in the Western media.

That is enough to trigger the Hungarian Facebook censor.

So a journalist in Romania gets kicked off of Facebook, on which he depends for his livelihood, for publishing an interview he conducted with me. A major political magazine in Hungary is threatened by Facebook because they publish material by me. Maybe now you understand better why there was almost no mainstream US media coverage of Live Not By Lies, even though it has sold over 120,000 copies in nine months. The book tells you what these tech tyrants and thought controllers are doing. They do not want you to know.

NPR, man. It used to be good, though liberal, until it was taken over by woke fanatics. Now NPR’s TV critic, Eric Deggans, is attacking Tom Hanks for not being woke enough. Deggans, who is black, praised Hanks for his recent op-ed about the Tulsa race massacre, and calling on Hollywood to tell more stories like it. But now Deggans wants Hanks to do penance for having made movies about white people. I kid you not. From Deggans’s essay:

[I]t’s wonderful that Hanks stepped forward to advocate for teaching about a race-based massacre – indirectly pushing back against all the hyperventilating about critical race theory that’s too often more about silencing such lessons on America’s darkest chapters.

But it is not enough.

After many years of speaking out about race and media in America, I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.

But in Hanks’ case, he is no average American. Or average Hollywood star, for that matter.

Over the years, he has starred in a lot of big movies about historical events, including Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Bridge of Spies and News of the World. He has served as a producer or executive producer on even more films and TV shows based on American history, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon. He was an executive producer of documentaries such as The Assassination of President Kennedy and The Sixties on CNN.

In other words, he is a baby boomer star who has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men “doing the right thing.” He even played a former Confederate soldier in one of his latest films, News of the World, standing up for a blond, white girl who had been kidnapped and raised by a Native American tribe.

He’s not alone. Superstar director Steven Spielberg has a similar pedigree (notwithstanding occasional projects such as The Color Purple and Amistad). And fellow director Ron Howard. These stories of white Americans smashing the Nazi war machine or riding rockets into space are important. But they often leave out how Black soldiers returned home from fighting in World War II to find they weren’t allowed to use the GI Bill to secure home loans in certain neighborhoods or were cheated out of claiming benefits at all.

They don’t describe how Black people were excluded from participating in space missions as astronauts early in America’s space program. As the book and film Hidden Figures notes, even brilliant Black and female mathematicians faced discrimination in the space program during the 1950s and 1960s. If given better opportunities, perhaps they could have helped us get to the moon sooner, by putting our best minds on the problem, regardless of race.

Deggans is angry because these artists didn’t make the films he thought they should have made. He goes one:

For those of us who speak often on these issues, one of the toughest things to do is to go to a white person who is trying hard to be an ally and tell them they need to do more. And I’m sure there are plenty of Hanks fans out there of every stripe who will say I am expecting too much, being ungrateful toward a big star who said more than he had to.

I don’t think that Deggans is being ungrateful. I think he’s being an ideologue and a bully. He wants Tom Hanks (and others) to engage in public struggle sessions that more or less disavow their work:

If he really wants to make a difference, Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change. They need to make specific commitments to changing the conversation in story subjects, casting and execution. That is the truly hard work of building change.

Read or listen to the whole thing. 

You will never, ever do enough for wokesters like Deggans. A critic who can look at a film like Saving Private Ryan and gripe about how it failed to have a black character, and how its star — a man whose work in that film did so much to create awareness of the greatness of the World War II soldiers for a new generation — owes an apology for it? Such a critic is a hack, and this is a garbage take.

Like I said, NPR used to be worth listening to, worth taking seriously. Now it only broadcasts to fellow left-wing fanatics who are obsessed with race, sexuality, gender, and identity politics. The “nation” in National Public Radio is not the country I live in, or want to live in.

UPDATE:Charlie Cooke’s take on the Deggans piece is very good. Excerpts:

You are guilty of nothing. Throw everything back in the face of these totalitarians!

One of the most instructive things about living in Budapest this season has taught me is what it’s like to be in a society where people have not lost their moral minds over gender ideology. That is, you can still show them things that are becoming completely normalized in our decadent country, and watch them recoil in horror. This is the correct instinct; maybe it will encourage them to protect themselves and their children from this poisonous ideology. As I wrote the other day, the ruling party in Hungary has proposed a law that would ban propagandizing children and minors for LGBT ideology. The usual suspects are screaming haaaaaaaaaaaaate!, but they had better hope that the Hungarian people don’t pay attention to the insanity that is being normalized in America.

This is a direct and sustained attack on the family, carried out by institutional elites. Here are two new examples. Keep in mind that part of the gaslighting strategy of the Left is to pretend that these things are outlier examples, that things really aren’t as bad as that. Last night I had dinner here in Madrid, where I’ve just arrived for a book tour, with some Christian friends. They told me that they withdrew their children from an excellent school a couple of years ago when the school took it upon itself to propagandize the kids with gender ideology, and explicit sexual instruction — all without telling the parents. When institutional elites downplay the radicalism of this stuff, don’t believe them.

A reader of this blog is a librarian who is deep in the closet in the workplace — as a conservative. He sends along this rave review from Library Journal, the most important trade magazine, of a new book called The Natural Mother Of The Child: A Memoir Of Nonbinary Parenthood, by Krys Malcolm Belc. Belc is a female who presents as male (“transmasculine”). Here’s the capsule review:

This memoir and call to action centers on what it means to be a parent, when being a parent conflicts with your identity and sense of self. When Belc, who is nonbinary and transmasculine, finds out that he’s pregnant, he struggles deeply with his body and the reality of creating life. Belc’s experiences illuminate how female-centric our understanding of pregnancy is, and how that gendered perspective shapes the medical systems and legal processes individuals must go through during pregnancy and parenthood. The U.S. medical and legal systems are not designed to meet the needs of nonbinary parenthood; through detailed legal records and reflections on his experiences working with the state, Belc demonstrates why the system must be reformed.

This memoir is driven by Belc’s distinctive voice and worldview; it’s reflexive and extremely blunt. At times, his stream-of-consciousness style can be disorienting—but then, discovering, navigating, rediscovering, and renegotiating yourself and your place in a world that wasn’t built for you is also disorienting.

VERDICT A wholly unique memoir that will speak to readers navigating nonbinary parenthood, as well as those who seek to understand the limitations of the U.S. legal system when it comes to nonbinary and trans parenthood.—Siobhan Egan, Barrington P.L., RI

Belc’s experiences illuminate how female-centric our understanding of pregnancy is… . Do you not recognize how batsh*t crazy that statement is? But this is how many of our elites think. Librarians who curate collections will mainstream this book — which, if you look at its Amazon page, has been widely and well reviewed. Here are just two of the many rave quotes:

Note well that on Amazon.com, you can buy this memoir in which a female who considers herself a man writes about having given birth to a child, and been oppressed by a system that described her as the “mother,” when in fact (according to her) she is the child’s father. But you cannot buy Ryan T. Anderson’s sober critique of gender ideology. And, as I keep pointing out, if Amazon will not sell books like Anderson’s as part of its corporate policy — which it says it will not — these books will not be published, as publishers can’t afford to issue books that Amazon won’t sell. We are seeing morally insane books like Belc’s be published, but books that dissent are going to be marginalized and phased out.

And the government had nothing to do with it. This is what I mean by soft totalitarianism.

Keep your eye on the institutional gatekeepers — media people, publishers, and so forth. People like librarian Siobhan Egan are eager to dismantle the family and the civilization that depends on it. They do this by mainstreaming morally insane concepts like “pregnancy should not be female-centric.” I get really, really tired of people — including conservatives — who act like this is no big deal, that it’s only something on the extreme that’s not going to trouble Good People Like Us, and that those who are raising the alarm are hotheaded culture warriors. Do you not understand that if the Equality Act passes, there will be no way to stop this? The House Democrats have already passed it, and President Biden has said he would sign it. The only thing keeping it from being the law of the land is the fact that the Democrats don’t have a filibuster-proof Senate majority. That’s how close we are.

We are well on our way to creating a society in which normal people are treated as freaks and outlaws. The world knows what it believes, and it is confidently trying to educate your children. How about you? Do you know what you believe? Are you defending your children?

Meanwhile, look at this fully heterosexual instance of initiating children into sexual display:

Live from NYC pic.twitter.com/qQHIDmKo0j

— Tales of NYC from Tik Tok (@newyorkisshitty) June 13, 2021

A reader sends in this blockbuster essay by chemist Anna Krylov, who warns that the same kind of ideological abuses Soviet society imposed on science are taking place now in America. Excerpts from her open letter:

Science was not spared from this strict ideological control. Western influences were considered to be dangerous. Textbooks and scientific papers tirelessly emphasized the priority and pre-eminence of Russian and Soviet science. Entire disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary, and hostile to the cause of working-class dominance and the World Revolution. Notable examples of “bourgeois pseudo-science” included genetics and cybernetics. Quantum mechanics and general relativity were also criticized for insufficient alignment with dialectic materialism.

Most relevant to chemistry was the antiresonance campaign (1949–1951). The theory of resonating structures, which brought Linus Pauling the Nobel prize in 1954, was deemed to be bourgeois pseudoscience. Scientists who attempted to defend the merits of the theory and its utility for understanding chemical structures were accused of “cosmopolitism” (Western sympathy) and servility to Western bourgeois science. Some lost jobs. Two high-profile supporters of resonance theory, Syrkin and Dyatkina, were eventually forced to confess their ideological sins and to publicly denounce resonance. Meanwhile, other members of the community took this political purge as an opportunity to advance at the expense of others. As noted by many scholars, including Pauling himself, the grassroots antiresonance campaign was driven by people who were “displeased with the alignment of forces in their science”. This is a recurring motif in all political campaigns within science in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and McCarthy’s America—those who are “on the right side” of the issue can jump a few rungs and take the place of those who were canceled. By the time I studied quantum chemistry at Moscow State University, resonance theory had been rehabilitated. Yet, the history of the campaign and the injustices it entailed were not discussed in the open—the Party did not welcome conversations about its past mistakes. I remember hearing parts of the story, narrated under someone’s breath at a party after copious amounts of alcohol had loosened a tongue.

Fast forward to 2021—another century. The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.

Just as during the time of the Great Terror, dangerous conspiracies and plots against the World Revolution were seen everywhere, from illustrations in children’s books to hairstyles and fashions; today we are told that racism, patriarchy, misogyny, and other reprehensible ideas are encoded in scientific terms, names of equations, and in plain English words. We are told that in order to build a better world and to address societal inequalities, we need to purge our literature of the names of people whose personal records are not up to the high standards of the self-anointed bearers of the new truth, the Elect. We are told that we need to rewrite our syllabi and change the way we teach and speak.

As an example of political censorship and cancel culture, consider a recent viewpoint discussing the centuries-old tradition of attaching names to scientific concepts and discoveries (Archimedes’ Principle, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Schrödinger equation, Curie Law, etc.). The authors call for vigilance in naming discoveries and assert that “basing the name with inclusive priorities may provide a path to a richer, deeper, and more robust understanding of the science and its advancement.” Really? On what empirical grounds is this based? History teaches us the opposite: the outcomes of the merit-based science of liberal, pluralistic societies are vastly superior to those of the ideologically controlled science of the USSR and other totalitarian regimes.

More:

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect. In some schools, physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. A comment in Nature calls for replacing the accepted technical term “quantum supremacy” by “quantum advantage”. The authors regard the English word “supremacy” as “violent” and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism. They also warn us about “damage” inflicted by using such terms as “conquest”. I assume “divide-and-conquer” will have to go too. Remarkably, this Soviet-style ghost-chasing gains traction. In partnership with their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion taskforce, the Information and Technology Services Department of the University of Michigan set out to purge the language within the university and without (by imposing restrictions on university vendors) from such hurtful and racist terms as “picnic”, “brown bag lunch”, “black-and-white thinking”, “master password”, “dummy variable”, “disabled system”, “grandfathered account”, “strawman argument”, and “long time no see”. “The list is not exhaustive and will continue to grow”, warns the memo. Indeed, new words are canceled every day—I just learned that the word “normal” will no longer be used on Dove soap packaging because “it makes most people feel excluded”.

One more:

[O]ur future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange of ideas—and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Read it all.

This scientist, Dr. Krylov, is the kind of person whose testimony inspired me to write Live Not By Lies. She lived through something that could have been the death of science. You would think her peers would listen to her. In fact, at least one is offended that a science publication would bring out such wrongthink:

I’m actually disappointed at @JPhysChem for allowing publication of a political, non peer-reviewed “viewpoint” that blames “extreme left ideology” and “cancel culture”… https://t.co/mxTLZafg1z

— FX Coudert (@fxcoudert) June 11, 2021

F.X. Coudert prefers to live by lies. Don’t be like young ideologue F.X. Coudert.

Be like Anna Krylov, a true scientist. It’s important.

This is what an actual pro-family, socially conservative government acts like:

Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which faces elections in early 2022 and promotes a strongly Christian-conservative agenda, has moved further against the LGBT+ community since last year. Poland’s ruling PiS party, Fidesz’s main European Union ally, has taken a similar stance for years.

The latest amendment, submitted to parliament on Thursday by Fidesz lawmakers to a bill that punishes paedophilia, says youngsters under 18 cannot be shown pornographic content, or any content that encourages gender change or homosexuality. This also applies to advertisements, the bill says. It also proposes setting up a list of organisations allowed to hold sex education sessions in schools.

“The new legislation proposed by Fidesz would seriously curb freedom of speech and children’s rights,” the Hatter rights group said in a statement, likening the bill to Russia’s gay propaganda law.

They always say that. What the proposed law would do would be to stop filth like the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade video from being broadcast to Hungarian children. If Hungarian voters saw the kind of thing that American children are propagandized by, they would be totally behind this bill:

Here’s a related video from Nickelodeon, the kids’ network, produced especially for Pride Month:

The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants to keep that garbage away from Hungarian children. Thank God for that. Hungary is not as far gone into decadence as we in America are. They still have a chance to hold this stuff at bay — but not if they elect the Left.

As I have written here, earlier this summer in Budapest, I spoke with an academic who opposes the Orban government. The main reason, as usual, is what he regards as its rampant corruption. He added that he supports gay marriage and gay adoption, but said he does not support transgenderism. Later, he agreed that is free to say whatever he wants in his classroom without fear of retaliation.

“Professor, the opinion you voiced earlier – that you support gay marriage, but not transgenderism – was the standard opinion among America liberals ten years ago,” I told him. “Today, if you stood in an American classroom and said it, you would probably be fired, and you would never be allowed to teach in academia again. This wouldn’t come from the state, but from the institutions themselves. So you tell me, who is more free?”

My point to the professor was that LGBT activists and progressive ideologues never stop with gay marriage. There is no point in which they can say, “This far, but no further.” The professor is right that there is no necessary connection between homosexuality, which depends on the gender binary, and transgenderism, which obliterates it. But that is not how LGBT activists have acted. They have insisted on the T, without apology or exception.

In America, I’d say, most people didn’t see this coming. When, in 2015, the US Supreme Court declared that gay marriage was a constitutional right, a majority of Americans agreed with them. People like me who warned that this was opening the door to far more radical changes than activists admitted were called alarmist. And now, only six years later, I am starting to no longer recognize my country.

Back then, if you had said that one day soon, American states would reserve the right to seize children and subject them to transgender medical treatments over the objection of parents, liberals would have accused you of alarmism. But that is now what is happening in some of America’s most progressive states. As journalist Abigail Shrier reports:

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

So, Americans have children’s media, children’s schools, and even children’s breakfast cereal, propagandizing their children to accept transgenderism from an early age, and then in some states, if a child as young as 13 decides that he is trans, the state can take the child away from parents and start the process of transition.

This is evil. And this is where the Left wants to take all of us. Don’t believe them when they say otherwise — whether they say it in English, Hungarian, or whatever. In America today, there is no meaningful resistance to this, and everyone is terrified of being taken out. If you resist, you get targeted by a multibillion dollar industrial complex that has the full support of the US Government,, high and low culture, the legal establishment, the courts, etc. This is the world I talk about in Live Not By Lies. It’s here. Few people are going to fight back in the US now, because doing so will cost a lot. Will conservatives take care of their own when they are cancelled? No, they won’t. The Republican Party seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were advocating about five years ago.

When I was interviewing the former anticommunist dissidents of Eastern Europe, they told me I shouldn’t imagine that there were many of them; most people, they said, just wanted to keep their heads down and go along to get along. Now I better understand why.

I am a strong believer in free speech principles behind the First Amendment (which they don’t have in Hungary, but never mind), but there have to be common sense limits when it comes to children. Several years back, the Orban government defunded and withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs at Hungarian universities. A decade ago, my view would have been that I don’t like gender studies, but the state should stay out of the way universities run themselves. Today, though, I fully support what the Orban government did. Gender studies (and Critical Race studies too) are malignant poisons that are destroying society. Liberalism of this sort is a suicide pact.

In conversations around Budapest, with both supporters and detractors of the Fidesz government, I hear a growing sense that a change is coming with the 2022 election. When I ask people who plan to vote for the opposition why they will do so, the answer is always the same: we are tired of corruption. I’ve talked to two different small business people lately, and they complain that the money the EU voted to help Hungarian small businesses survive the Covid crisis never made it to them. The belief is that it was pocketed by government cronies.

I am just a visitor in Hungary, so I have no idea to what extent the claims of corruption are true or false. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are largely true. How does that compare to the threat from progressives and gender ideology?

What was once on the fringes of progressive thought — I’m talking about gender ideology — is now thoroughly mainstream, and being institutionalized throughout the US government. Why? Because elites have already absorbed gender ideology, and American social norms are rapidly changing around it. There is still significant resistance to the Left on trans issues (see this recent Gallup poll), but  I don’t expect the resistance to last. How could it? The American people face relentless propaganda in schools, in workplaces, and in the media, both news and entertainment. You can escape this stuff by turning off your television – but how many Americans are going to do that? My wife and I raised our children without this kind of garbage, but it was difficult, and most of your children’s friends will have seen it, and had their minds formed by it. Besides, institutional elites are going to enforce this ideology. That’s a nice middle-class career you have there; sure would be a shame if something happened to it, bigot. 

Corruption can be fixed with determined executive and legislative action. It should be fixed, because it’s unjust, and because corruption undermines people’s confidence in the government. Whether true or false — again, I don’t read Hungarian, and haven’t been around here long enough to know how true it is — the Fidesz government at the very least has a big problem of perception, and needs to change course.

But corruption, as regrettable as it is, is within the bounds of the normal. Gender ideology, by contrast, is grotesquely abnormal, and will destroy families and society. These are different kinds of corruption. Nobody defends financial corruption as a moral good. To define something evil as a moral good is a far, far worse kind of corruption. Hungarians should know that once the virus takes root in their country, they won’t be able to get rid of it easily. They are fortunate to live within a constitutional framework that allows the state to protect their children like this, and to have a government that is willing to do so, even though it makes them hated by elites in more decadent countries. Hungarian voters can be certain that a government headed by the likely opposition candidate Gergely Karacsony, the leftist pro-LGBT mayor of Budapest, will open the doors to gender radicalism — doors that will be very, very difficult to close again.

Hungarians should learn from the bitter experience of social conservatives in the US. We are governed by what I call the Law of Merited Impossibility, which describes the sleight-of-hand leftists use to get us to put our guard down. Whenever we accuse them of doing something extreme that will lead to harmful consequences, they say that’s outrageous and alarmist, and that the bad thing will never happen. And then when it eventually happens, the Left says that it’s only right to fight “hatred.” So, the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

This is why you cannot trust the Left not to sexualize children for the sake of Progress. The Blue’s Clues Pride Parade for children is part of what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera calls the Grand March. He describes it like this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

The dictator of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftists is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

They are Leftists, and though they are also Hungarian, inevitably they will integrate the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade — by which I mean LGBT propaganda aimed at kids — into the Grand March. They’re already doing it with Black Lives Matter and Pride. Earlier this year in Budapest, a district mayor of Karacsany’s party engineered the temporary erection of a BLM/LGBT Pride statue, telling journalists that BLM’s goals are just as valid in Hungary as in America. 

See what I mean? The Left can and will integrate any other country’s problems into the kitsch called the Grand March. That’s what makes them Leftist. If they have to compel little children to confront transgenderism and homosexuality, well, that’s what Progress requires.

Here’s the bottom line: If you don’t like Viktor Orban, whatever his faults, then you had better be prepared for your kids to join the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade, and all the disorders that follow. Because it’s coming from the West, hard and fast.

UPDATE: A classic job from the media. Politico Europe reports on the legislation, allowing activists to characterize the new law as “hate-mongering” without challenge. Example:

András Kádár, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a Budapest-based rights watchdog, said “the provisions banning the ‘promotion or display of homosexuality’ fit into the trend of hate-mongering policies this governing majority has adopted over the past years against various social groups.”

“Provisions like these should not be adopted or implemented,” he added. “They are harmful, shameful and violate fundamental rights.”

Despite growing concerns about anti-LGBTQ laws and rhetoric, rights groups did celebrate a small win over the government in March, when the Hungarian Constitutional Court ruled that the law prohibiting individuals from changing their gender in legal documents cannot apply to ongoing proceedings.

The Hungarian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Orbán has previously described his country as “tolerant.”

“We can safely say that as regards homosexuality Hungary is a patient, tolerant country,” the prime minister said in an interview last October. “But there is a red line that must not be crossed, and this is how I would sum up my opinion: ‘Leave our children alone.’”

That’s quite sensible. Nobody is saying you can’t talk about LGBT issues. The ruling party proposes that you cannot do this in material aimed at children and minors. The Left, on the other hand, says that if you don’t want the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade airing on children’s TV, then you are a hater. This is all they have: spurious accusations of “hate” against anyone who disagrees with them.

The Left’s long march through the institutions continues through the US military. Here’s news from the front lines of the culture war, a war that the Pentagon’s leadership is apparently planning to win for the Left:

Its active wars ending, its ranks both smaller and more diverse and its talent needs shifting, the Pentagon is embracing ideas like inclusion and adopting many of the efforts long used in the private sector to recruit and retain women and people of color.

Yet while many inside and outside the military have embraced the effort as overdue, some Republican lawmakers and influential conservatives are mounting an inchoate but increasingly loud protest and promoting the idea that the armed forces are becoming the latest pawn in America’s culture wars.

They have taken aim at a variety of initiatives, including a possible Pentagon plan to increase monitoring of social media posts from service members and the addition of reading recommendations on “white supremacy and systemic racism” to military training guides.

In stoking opposition, those critics say the Pentagon’s policies amount to imposing a liberal, and in some cases unpatriotic, worldview on the armed forces.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the military budget Thursday morning, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, grilled Mr. Austin as to whether he believed that the military “is a fundamentally racist organization.”

He ticked off a long list of complaints he said his office had received from service members about mandatory training sessions on “police brutality, white privilege and systemic racism.”

Mr. Austin responded that he did not believe the military was racist but defended the department’s policies.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is important to this military now and it will be important in the future,” he said.

At times cutting off Mr. Austin when he tried to reply, Mr. Cotton warned, “We’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and sexes where none existed just six months ago, and unexpected retirements and separations, based on these trainings alone.”

How widely those views are actually held among service members in an increasingly politically diverse military is impossible to know. Military culture varies by service branches, rank and generations.

But the Pentagon’s leadership says its approach is necessary both to uphold the nation’s values and to assure that it can recruit people with the skills necessary for 21st-century warfare.

“The secretary has been very clear and fairly unapologetic about the fact that we want to get all the best talent that is available from the American people,” said John F. Kirby, a spokesman for Mr. Austin.

The Pentagon’s culture war has a new hero of battle: Lt. Col. Andrew “Dru” Rhodes, who describes himself as a “fervent anti-racist and anti-sexist.” He’s a white dude and a battalion commander. If this report is true, then he does not like white dudes. He reportedly told troops under his command that “white people are part of the problem.” As the reader who sent that to me said, “CRT [Critical Race Theory] will destroy our great military before China even gets the chance.”

Back to the NYT story that prompted this post, the informed source who passed it on said that the Pentagon is chasing a woke demographic that doesn’t exist:

A generation raised on Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project are not going to enlist, they are ambivalent at best about whether or not the US should be defended in the first place. So that leaves you with outliers that the current leadership regards as unacceptable and déclassé.

This is the same as so much of the woke Hollywood bombs, the marketing types are convinced that there is this massive demographic of woke types just waiting to consume. They believe this in large part bc of Twitter and the results are entirely predictable, just as they are likely to find here. Name one wokeist who is more likely to join an institution they see as racist, imperialist, and warmongering just bc its leadership mouths woke platitudes.

Heck, military service is considered déclassé for all but a small sliver of the middle class for cultural reasons, what do we expect to change?

If the US military earns for itself a reputation as hostile to white males and unwoke people, why should they put their lives on the line to defend a country that considers them to be “part of the problem”? What the Pentagon is doing here is really dangerous, and really foolish.

The military told Human Events, which broke the Dru Rhodes story, that it will investigate it. If it can be proven that Rhodes made those remarks, then he must be removed from command duty. If he isn’t cashiered, that will send a powerful signal to the troops — and to the country — about the kind of military we have, and are getting.