An op-ed contributor to the NYTimes, Emily Tamkin, writes about “How The American Right Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Russia.” She mentions me in her piece:

Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values. On Wednesday, conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants.”

Typical moronic analysis. “Beacons of whiteness” — good grief. Emily Tamkin has an expensive education, but she is an ignoramus. At least she linked to the long post where I made that intentionally hyperbolic comment. Here’s more context from that essay (emphasis in the original):

To repeat myself: I am opposed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I think Russia should leave Ukraine alone, but whatever happens, I am adamantly against following the US leadership into hawkish actions against the Russians. It’s not at all because I support Russia or in any way approve of what it’s doing. (I hope Russian families and Russian soldiers stop to think about what exorbitant cost is extracted from them so that Putin can restore Greater Russia.) It’s rather that I am sick to the point of puking of these people — the American elites — sh*tting all over so many of us, yet expecting us to send our sons (and daughters) to fight its damn wars. Especially when the goal is to extend American political and cultural hegemony over the world, to allow the Western-oriented elites in those countries to ruin the lives of the normal people in those places in the same way they have ruined ours.

Put another way, I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants. If that makes me a reactionary troll, fine, I’ll own that. I love my country and would put my life on the line to fight for her against foreign invaders. But we are not the good guys I used to think we were. We can’t even protect schoolgirls in Louisiana and Alabama from this toxic ideology that is destroying their moral sense, but they expect us to gear up in case we are called to fight for Ukraine?

And, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog these past few days, I repeatedly condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. What you don’t learn from Tamkin about what I wrote in that very post is that in it, I regret falling victim in 2002 to the right-wing warmongers who took us to the bad war in Iraq. Weirdly enough for someone Tamkin accuses of having a thing for whiteness, I mentioned favorably Muhammad Ali’s apocryphal quote that he was refusing to go fight in Vietnam because he did not want to fight foreigners on behalf of a racist regime at home. In fact, the thrust of the entire piece was about how American elites of both right and left expect everybody to jump all aboard their military crusades, despite the fact that that same ruling class despises many of them as deplorable.

None of this context appears in the Tamkin piece. In fact, she not only smears me as pro-Putin, even though my denunciation of Russia’s warmongering appeared in the very same column she quotes, but she also links conservative like Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, and me to stone-cold racists and neofascists like Richard Spencer (who has publicly denounced me in the past) and Matthew Heimbach.

This is why I hate The New York Times, which epitomizes the utter dishonesty of the Left. All Tamkin seems to care about regarding the war is that critics of knee-jerk US militarism like me aren’t onside regarding identity politics. The lives of our kids, I guess, are disposable to her in this potential war between the US and Russia. All she knows is that she hates Putin because he’s a right-winger, so everyone who is not willing to rush idiotically into World War III can only be a bigot — and we know what they deserve, right?

I was talking briefly this morning with an American conservative friend here about how the Left, and maybe even the mainstream Right, is dangerously out of touch with some grassroots conservative feeling about war and culture war. I told him that I heard from a conservative friend this weekend who told me about going to a class reunion, and meeting up with a bunch of his buddies who, like him, had either joined the military or gone into public service in some way immediately after 9/11 (they were in college then), because they wanted to serve their country. Today, not a single one of them would counsel their children to join the military. They no longer trust the US military leadership under this new regime of wokeness, and they think that the US Government, and elite society, hate them and their values.

My friend nodded his head, and agreed with me that wokeness is a national security issue. If we are in a new Cold War with Russia, the American people are going to need to find a way to unify, and be strong. Every single thing about wokeness — Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, all of it — is designed to exacerbate divisions along racial, sexual, and political lines, and demonize those who don’t agree. You may not like political, cultural, and religious conservatives, and you may think white people are what’s wrong with America — believe me, white people and others on the Right are well aware of how y’all think; you think we don’t read you and listen to you? — but there are a lot of us in this country, and you are going to have to depend on us if we get into war. I have no doubt that most Americans would fight like hell against those who would invade this country. But enlist to risk being sent abroad for some stupid nation-building mission, or to spread at gunpoint the American idea of “freedom and democracy” when the same ideology is destroying our country from within? Not no, but hell no.

I know — truly, I do — people who are grateful that they have guns, not because they think they’re going to have to use them one day to fight invading Russians, but because they fear they might have to use them one day to fight Emily Tamkin’s class. I used to think they were paranoid. After the Canadian truckers’ protest, I no longer do.

Let me put it to you liberal readers in a way you might be able to understand. A couple of years ago, when BLM was going strong after George Floyd’s murder, many black football players in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) marched for BLM. I wondered how these older white men who coach SEC teams were going to react. Alabama’s Nick Saban marched with his team; LSU’s Ed Orgeron did not. I have no idea what Saban really thinks of BLM, but he at least had the sense to know that when your team is predominantly black, you cannot take the strong feelings of your black players for granted. Whether or not their cause was righteous, if you want these young men to play for you, you don’t have much of a choice but to show them respect. After Orgeron was fired by LSU after two bad seasons, there was speculation that he lost the respect of black members of his team after equivocating on BLM.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Had I been an SEC coach, I would not have wanted to endorse the BLM organization with my presence at a march. But the purpose of my job is to win football games, and realistic self-interest meant that I would need to show the young men whose labor I depended on to succeed that I respected them (if not their cause). You don’t have to agree with them, but if you want them to help you accomplish your shared mission, you had better respect them.

Same thing here. If the ruling class in the US — not just the government, but business leaders, university leaders, media leaders, military leaders, and the rest — want to be able to count on American men and women to continue to volunteer to serve in the military, it had damn well better start treating all of us with respect. The old-fashioned liberal values that held this country together until the day before yesterday, when wokeness arrived, can do it again. America is not an ethnostate, and is not held together by a common religion. We need civic nationalism — and that civic nationalism has to make room for political, religious, and cultural disagreement within a broader unity.

When Biden took office, he signed a document moving LGBT advocacy to the forefront of US foreign policy goals. When I snarked about sending American troops to queer the Donbass, this is what I was referring to. The US elites have no idea at all how offensive and alienating this stuff is to many cultures around the world. It doesn’t care. It’s just going to roll right over those bigots.

Gay marriage rights is settled law in the US, and that’s something religious and social conservatives like me have to live with. But the war now for transgender rights, waged by the US Government, law, medicine, woke capitalism, the media, and everybody else, is taking the form of a direct assault on children and families. The Hungarian government passed a law last year protecting children here from being propagandized for this stuff, and reserving that right to families. If you want to teach your children about LGBT, nobody’s going to stop you. You just can’t use schools and media to usurp the rights of parents to do so. I wish we had the possibility to pass similar laws in the US. It might not be constitutionally possible, but American conservatives should admire without apology the Hungarian government for taking that step.

None of this makes sense to the Emily Tamkins of the world. Their moralistic narcissism is all-encompassing. She sees no meaningful difference between disgusting neo-Nazis like Spencer and Heimbach, and normal conservatives who have put in a good word for Putin in the past, or at least are not eager to rush into another damn war. I see that she is now writing about American politics and culture for the British magazine New Statesman. I hope the UK lefties who subscribe understand what kind of narrow view of this country they’ll be getting.

The war-and-culture-war problem is much broader and deeper than most of us know, I fear. This morning I had breakfast with a Hungarian friend, a young woman in her mid-twenties. Everybody here is worried about the Ukraine war spreading to Hungary. She told me that over the weekend, at family dinner, her younger brother, who is 21, said that if Hungary was attacked, he would leave the country. Everyone at the table was shocked by this. She told him that she, his sister, had already started looking into what kind of volunteer work she could do for the military in the event of war, and there he was, stating his plans to run away? She said her father came down hard on his son. Finally the young said okay, he would reconsider. But the fact that an able-bodied young Hungarian man, especially one raised in a conservative religious family, would feel that way about an attack on his homeland — that was very hard for them to take.

I told her that a conservative Hungarian friend of mine had told me last summer how shocked and appalled he was to hear his son of the same age say the same thing. How many more Hungarian men of that generation feel the same way? I asked.

My friend had been present a couple of weeks ago when a big group of us met with PM Viktor Orban. She reminded me that Orban said in that meeting that he believed Hungarian culture’s sense of manliness had declined. This from her brother, she said, was evidence that he’s right. Now, you can’t very well accuse wokeness of doing this to Hungarian men — Hungary is not (yet) a woke country — but something has happened here since the generation of 1956, which turned out in the streets to fight the Soviet invaders the same way the Ukrainians are fighting the Russian invaders today. If these two young Hungarian men we discussed at breakfast today aren’t one-offs, but indicative of a broader softening in the younger generation of Hungarian males, then Hungary has a huge culture problem. Their own culture will have become a national security threat. With Russian soldiers rampaging through next-door Ukraine, this is not an abstract issue.

I had to run out a few minutes ago to do an errand. While I was gone, I ran into a Hungarian friend, around age 30 I would say. I told her about the breakfast conversation, and asked her if she thinks this is a common problem. Yes, absolutely, she said, adding  that she observes the same attitude widely among Hungarians of her generation. “The boys are so soft,” she said. “I see it in my brothers. That whole generation, they all have their heads stuck in their smartphones. They don’t know what’s going on in the world, and don’t care. They have had life so easy.”

If I were the US Government, or at least a DC think tank, I would commission a reliable study on if and how wokeness is affecting social cohesion, with special reference to the willingness of young people to join the military. Given the brand new reality that Mr. Putin has frog-marched us all into, this is really important information to have. See, it’s not just alienated conservatives you have to worry about. Wokeness also tells people of color and other minorities that America is a shithole country whose history is nothing but racism, bigotry, and exploitation. Why, exactly, should young people who come to believe that narrative be willing to put their lives on the line to fight for America?

J.D. Vance brought a lot of opprobrium onto himself by saying in an interview a couple of weeks ago, before Russia attacked, that he didn’t care what happened to Ukraine, because he was more concerned with all the people back home in America dying from drug overdoses. It was an unattractive way of making a good point, which was this: that America is rotting from within, and nobody in power in our country, in the government or the private sector, seems to give a damn, especially if those suffering people can be dismissed as backwards bitter-clingers who have the wrong ethnicity, the wrong politics, the wrong religion, and the wrong views about gender fluidity. You can roll your eyes and dump on J.D. all you like, but the man is telling an inconvenient truth. Many people in North America saw how the media and other elites made all kinds of excuses for the BLM riots that burned down parts of cities, and for peaceful BLM protests that violated everything the government advised about Covid social distancing. But when mostly white (but not exclusively white — hello, Sikhs!) Canadian truckers staged their own protest, the state set on them and went after their bank accounts.

You don’t think people notice this stuff? You don’t think they will remember it? Maybe you don’t. But one day, you will.

One more thing: Emily Tamkin graduated from Columbia, and then earned a Master’s degree at Oxford. From what I can find online, she is a New Yorker by birth. There is nothing at all wrong with being a New Yorker with an Ivy League and Oxbridge education, but I would guess that she doesn’t know much at all about life in the rest of the country. Or care. That’s her business, but if you live in that kind of elite professional, cultural, and geographical bubble, you shouldn’t be surprised when the Americans you make a habit of sneering at and calling Nazis because they don’t share your parochial views and priorities don’t have any affection for you, or desire to take up arms to defend your contemptuous self.

I am seeing among many Americans, of both Left and Right, an alarming unwillingness to consider any nuance in this Russia-Ukraine situation, as if to attempt to see the world through the eyes of one’s enemies or opponents is immoral. I cannot say it often enough: this is exactly how I was in 2002, in the year the US prepared itself to go to war in Iraq. I did not want to hear the arguments of anyone who disagreed with my clear beliefs about the evil of Iraq, and the urgent need to launch a war in the Middle East to punish Islamic radicals of all sort. The fact that Saddam was an evil bastard, but the enemy of Islamists, did not matter to me. The claims that liberal democracy would not work in the Arab world, not because the Arabs were evil, but because they were not culturally prepared for liberal democracy, I dismissed as unimportant, and maybe even racist (“So you’re saying that Arab people are incapable of democracy, then?”). The only thing I thought was that Americans and Europeans who opposed the war were either fools or cowards. It felt so good to be so righteous — indeed, on the Right Side of History™.

We are setting ourselves up for the same mistakes, only this time, the stakes could mean World War III. Or, if by the grace of God we get out of this situation without a wider war, we will still face years, maybe decades, of an armed standoff with Russia, and perhaps Russia and China both. We cannot afford our self-satisfied incuriosity and bigotry about people not like ourselves. That’s true for all of us, conservatives and liberals alike. If you know anything about the period just before World War I started, European crowds all over the continent, and in the UK, were eager to rush off to fight, certain that war would be good for everybody, and would be over and done with quickly. The media were full of pro-war moralistic agitprop. It was all very jolly … until reality liquidated everyone’s delusions in the trenches.