In the recent past I have written about “The Real Reason the Right Continues to Lose Every Ideological Battle” in connection to its fundamental blindness that the Liberalism it supports is the source of the “woke” madness around us, i.e. putting the individual as a little god-like figure on a pedestal is not going to create a strong group-value focused culture. That piece was oriented towards the English-speaking Right, but the International Right who has no particular addiction to Individualism still fails to intellectually triumph over the “value system” of the rainbow color haired freak show that is pushing their global ideological agenda. This International Right would include Viktor Orban’s Illiberalism that wants to add a counterbalancing element of “us” into the “me”-focused Western-Democratic system and Vladimir Putin’s highly-undefined call to “Russian Conservatism” for his country and Conservatism of various forms for the natural diversity of the upcoming Multipolar World.

On a personal level it is these sorts of new ideological movements and answers to the doomed-scenario of Liberalism that are what give me the strength to get out of bed in the morning. An alternative to the Cultural Masochism and Hedonism of the West exists and there are nations on Earth, in fact some could say the majority, that want to embrace an existence rooted in their traditions and culture rejecting the homogenized and atomized meaningless future of a completely Postmodern Globalized World.

There really are truly brilliant ideas coming from the Eurasian landmass east of where the Berlin Wall once stood, and yet they remain fully in the realm of the academic and abstract, as food for thought and speeches at the Kremlin. For someone who lives within Russia it is amazing what level of support Conservatism and Traditionalism have and yet how little has been implemented systematically or even defined. The slogan “Traditional Values” is a massive hit across the territory of the former USSR. It is two words that have great power and an inherent attractiveness to the people in these parts. It is a powerful short message that rivals “Diversity” or “Human Rights” in its potential implications, which themselves behave like self-justifying arguments. This is a truly massive ideological development within Russia that should be affecting public policy, raising levels of passion within the nation and making big changes and yet Russia systemically remains Liberal and the upcoming generation of Russians are going to be just as broken and raised by TikTok as their Western counterparts. This is so frustrating, so obvious and yet why this is happening, for years I had not the ability to put into words.

But then by random chance I heard a story from over two thousand years ago that explains everything. This tale from Ancient Greece lays out exactly why the Russians and Hungarians are paralyzed in the face of such seemingly weak intellectual competition from the “wokeness” brigades. At the moment I finished listening to this story, I knew that this is why we are losing. This scenario of confusion from countless centuries past is exactly the reason why Russian Conservatism and Traditional Values and Hungarian Illiberalism never leave the realm of fancy public speeches. The star of the show is Socrates and you can listen to it in vastly greater detail here.

The locals in Ancient Greece wanted their young men to grow up courageous for they thought that this quality is the most important for having a great society made up of great men. They approached Socrates, the smartest gent around, for ideas on how to make their boys into courageous men.

Socrates explained to them that they would need to find an expert in courage, because how can you instill something in youths if you do not have expert knowledge in it? So the question became who are the most courageous men in society?

They decided unanimously that it would be best to consult two generals who had real combat experience. These men fought for their lives many times and came out the winners so surely they should know everything about courage. Who is more courageous than a highly successful battle-hardened warrior?

The generals were quite sure that they knew exactly what courage was and that “armored fighting” as they called it (i.e. training for real war, not sports like boxing) was the best way to make wimpy boys into tough men. The generals were absolutely sure of this.

However, prodding questions from Socrates showed them that they really didn’t have any definition of what courage was. Would going into an easy battle with little risk be courageous? Would the opposite, going into certain death be courage or madness? Doesn’t it take courage to stand up for what is right at great risk even in a social context? Is the battlefield really the only place for courage? Since childbearing has significant risks, does that make all mothers courageous?

Long story short, at the end of it all, no one was able to define what courage is in a consistent way and yet everyone remained absolutely sure that courage was in fact a very good and absolutely necessary thing, and that the generals possessed it.

They were stuck with the paradox of being absolutely sure that something was right and critical for future generations, but at the same time being completely unable to define it or understand it, thus making any attempts to instill this value on society essentially shots in the dark with no systemic methodology to guarantee results.

The story ends with all parties shrugging their shoulders and going home, nothing changed.

 Now if we change the word “courage” to “Traditional Values” then we get a perfect carbon copy of what’s happening across the Multipolar World – everyone is sure that Traditional Values are righteous and necessary, yet they remain ultimately undefined, meaning they are impossible to implement into law (perhaps excluding the Islamic Republic of Iran), instill in the youth of tomorrow or at the very least propagate through the media. If you cannot even define and put structure to your value system how the hell are you going to base your society on it? This is the maddening factor that burns anyone of intellectual acumen in Russia. The overwhelming majority is in favor of this brilliant slogan “Traditional Values” and yet what this means is completely undefined. You cannot triumph on the battlefield of ideas when you are not sure of what you are talking about. Any Conservative would say that “feelings” are a weak argument, but that is really the only thing standing behind Traditional Values, a gut feeling that this is right, much in the same way the generals had a hunch that armored fighting is the best way to bring out courage in teenagers.

Although this story about Socrates is very telling, the ancient Greeks had some advantages that allowed them some slack in how they raised their youth. The Athenians probably did not have to deal with big money NGOs, Hollywood, and every form of media pushing an “anti-courage” agenda. A shrug-your-shoulders, hope-the-kids-turn-out-alright, way of thinking is not what is needed, especially for Russia, Hungary or elsewhere in a partially Globalized World. Ideology in a sense is a bit of a zero-sum game. All of us have to have some sort of ideological structure in our minds, and if no one can promote an idea besides wokeness then guess who’s going to win? The time has come to define what Traditional Values are, and what Illiberalism would look like. This is the time to build the apologetics to justify these “feels” based Right Wing dream projects.
So if we are to suppose that Traditional Values are the way to go then what does that mean?

Even something as basic as marriage needs to be analyzed, broken down and structured into a coherent logic for 21st century Traditionalism. We argue that marriage is between one man and one woman because it was “tradition”, but it was also tradition to only be allowed to get married when the man had the infrastructure to provide for the wife. So no house = no marriage? Do brides need their fathers to sign off on them getting wed, that’s how it used to be? It was also tradition to harsh punishments on acts of adultery (if it went public), do we need to bring this back? Public shaming kept children from being born out of wedlock, does this mean we should have a 21st century shame-based punishment system? In the past if a man died often his family would look after the widow, so does that mean that we have to create a system of allocating widows by some sort of lineage to be taken care of in old age? In the olden days men had the responsibility for and authority over their wife and children, how exactly is that going to work in our times after generations of Liberalism, or is this part of tradition to leave on the cutting room floor? Just the single question of what marriage would look like in a 21st century Traditionalist society has gone completely undiscussed and is absolutely massive in scale, thus it has no argumentation or apologetics for the promotion of this way of looking at marriage, thus it isn’t going to happen, while in the West marriage to babies, dogs and ghosts will probably become a reality.

To put it bluntly, if we are going to do this whole Multipolar World filled with a renaissance of various Traditional Values thing, then we are going to need to actually do it and in a systematic way. Somehow a concept as goofy and inherently flawed as “intersectionality” got from the academic/think tank realm, to the activism sphere, then to the media and has now become a dominant ideological pillar of the Western World being spread globally by big corporations and Hollywood incidental PR. If our Traditional Values are actually worth saving then they must be able to do the same. If certain key players in Hungary and Russia really want to save their societies it is going to take funding think tanks, big media projects, and a lot of PR in the entertainment sphere. This is no longer an option but a necessity, you simply cannot expect to win with ideas that you yourselves to not fully understand nor challenge.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

The Western hemisphere is suffering from a dearth of political talent at a time when a wave of Cultural Marxist ideology is being forced on the people, already suffering under the physical and mental strain of a pandemic and its draconian response.

This month, New Zealand’s Green Party, which shares power with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s ruling Labour Party, removed a portrait of Winston Churchill, the famed British statesman, from a public area in the Parliament House. It seems that the left-leaning lawmakers could not handle the daily reminder as to what a devoted leader of the people truly looks like. Thus they proceeded to do what the left does best, which is to play the deranged game of cancel culture with their own history.

The left-wing beef with the ‘British Bulldog’ is that he promoted imperialistic views, as well as hostility towards socialism, so apparently we’re supposed to forget that the British statesman helped to save the world from the scourge of Nazi Germany during World War II. Thus, without any democratic debate on the matter, Churchill’s visage was swiftly moved to a less conspicuous place lest anymore leftist sensitivities come under assault. In Churchill’s place the Greens said they will display “new art by a tangata whenua artist.”

What the asinine stunt by the New Zealand Leftists effectively demonstrates is the pathetic depths to which statesmanship has fallen. After all, are we not in the midst of a pandemic? With the fate of humanity on the line, how is it conceivable that the idea of removing the portrait of a dead white man – and not necessarily the most infamous in the rogue’s gallery – entered anybody’s head? What better way for these politicians to deflect attention away from their own questionable leadership skills than by dragging up the deficiencies of past statesmen?

As to be expected, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern passed on a very good opportunity to take the steam out of the woke movement’s global inquisition as she expressed ambivalence over Churchill’s removal.

“I personally do not care where portraits hang in Parliament – I care about what we do in this place,” she told reporters. “We’ve got a responsibility to look after New Zealanders in a massive crisis we’re facing.”

“Frankly, who hangs on the wall at the time we do it – I don’t care.”

The Green Party’s hatred of Sir Winston Churchill is born out of a hatred of the western values and freedoms that he fought for: Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Association.

Looking fwd to welcoming Sir Winston Churchill to Nationals offices. https://t.co/CaAAw6vc7T

— Simeon Brown (@SimeonBrownMP) August 10, 2021

How is it possible that Ardern “doesn’t care” about paying a very humble homage to a talented statesman who helped forge cooperation between New Zealand and Great Britain during World War II in their mutual effort to defeat Hitler? Churchill, in the face of a real existential crisis, demonstrated political acuity and aptitude and not a moment too late. Ardern, facing her own crisis that goes by the name of Covid, unfortunately cannot say the same.

Although her island nation of some 5 million inhabitants has recorded just 26 Covid-related deaths since the beginning of the pandemic and under 3,000 confirmed infections, Ardern just announced that New Zealand will keep its borders closed to international travellers (with exceptions made for Google founder, Larry Page, of course) until the end of the year.

In February, after three new local COVID-19 cases were reported in Auckland, Ardern  ordered everyone to stay home except for essential shopping and essential work. In March, the entire country went into full lockdown for an entire month.  The message is clear: New Zealanders, much like other places where the simple pleasures in life – shopping, traveling, eating at a restaurant – are becoming severely hindred with the introduction of vaccine passports, will be forced to forever coordinate their life plans with that of a viral outbreak.

Is that the sort of action a leader cut from the same cloth as Winston Churchill would have advised under similar circumstances? It’s very difficult to imagine. Regrettably, the truly great Western leaders of the type that once dominated the world stage are gone, and it seems that that is no accident. As the trajectory of international politics moves from the national to the global, the very worst type of politician – weak, craven and more subservient to global institutions, like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and their warped ideologies – have been thrust into the spotlight.

These new and very underachieving ‘woke’ leaders, typified by the likes of US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are very poor substitutes for the leaders of yesterday who possessed the conviction, spirit and courage necessary for the success of Western democracy.

Although they had their flaws, is it very difficult to imagine, for example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and ex-French President Jacques Chirac – two fiercely independent European leaders who, together with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, expressed their opposition to the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 – opening up Europe’s borders to accommodate millions of illegal aliens. Yet that is exactly what Macron, the former Rothschild investment banker, and Merkel have succeeded in doing to Europe, where in the year 2015 alone over 1 million illegal migrants entered various European states for a taxpayer-subsidized lifestyle. That inexplicable decision has an American version now furiously underway on the US-Mexico border – during the peak of a pandemic, no less – thanks to the destructive policies put in place by the Biden administration.

At the same time, Brussels has committed itself to promoting the transgender ideology that first took root in the United States before spreading around the Western hemisphere. In fact, Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand has the dubious distinction of being home to the world’s first transgender Olympian. In the Tokyo Summer Games, Laurel Hubbard competed for New Zealand in the weightlifting event.

Now, the Eastern European nation of Hungary, which has just passed child protection laws similar to that of Russia’s that forbid sexual propaganda in kindergartens, schools, on television and in advertisements, faces severe sanctions from Brussels for daring to do the right thing. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who singlehandedly halted the flow of illegal migration into the continent with the construction of a border fence along the Serbian border, said he would let the Hungarian people decide on the issue in a referendum.

Hungarians will be asked whether they support the teaching of sexual themes in schools without parental consent, and whether they believe gender reassignment procedures, complete with puberty blockers, hormone drugs and radical surgeries, should be promoted among children.

Now that the global mainstream media largely supports open borders, transgender ideology, and every other leftist narrative (which, by the way, makes the question of premeditated collusion a viable one), the importance of strong and courageous leaders to stand up to the madness is of the utmost importance. Yet for every Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, who seem to rule with the best interest of their people and nation at heart, there are one hundred venal and spineless leaders who would sell their country and people down the river for a song.

The reason for the removal of Winston Churchill’s portrait from the New Zealand Parliament had nothing to do with the shortcomings of the British statesman, and everything to do with the glaring deficiencies of today’s lackluster liberal leaders who could not bear to be reminded of their mediocrity every time they passed the picture of the great man in the hall.

The Visegrad nations in the center of Europe are challenging the orthodoxy of the EU elite and throughout history direct challenges to enforced dogmas spark a lot of chaos, change, and empower others to stand against the status quo.

Right before the Protestant Revolution in Europe many significant players doubted the necessity of Rome and had some qualms about certain dogma, but they dared not speak heresy, at least not publicly. When Martin Luther nailed his list of complaints to that church door it instantly shifted the Overton Window just enough to make yesterday’s unspeakable blasphemy, become a possible option with many lethal consequences. Luther’s heresy (or bravery depending on your religious views) opened the door for others to follow and led to the downfall of the Catholic Church in many nations, ending Western European Christian unity. It looks like history is yet again repeating itself as certain leaders are spreading a new heresy, openly and loudly against the sacred dogma of 21st century Europe.

We have all heard about the famous Russian law that bans “homosexual propoganda”. This has been blasted by the mainstream media but it is very much an external problem from their standpoint. In the minds of today’s spineless and genderless European hipster serfdom Russia is a distant backwards realm locked eternally in the Dark Ages. The Western subconscious mind is held together by the glue of belief in its own inherent superiority. This makes the Russians eternally bad, but that bad is an “out-group” sort of bad.

Image: Viktor Orban has chosen the path of most resistance in Europe or even perhaps career martyrdom.

But now in the heartland of the EU itself, the Hungarians, under the full weight of Brussel’s bureaucratic yoke and decades of Hollywood influence, have passed a similar set of laws to those in Russia about banning LGBT propaganda. This is happening at home and in the heart of Europe by members of the in-group. At the very least the Hungarians under Orban are now spreading a heresy against the core values of the EU.

Since the end of WWII Conservatives have utterly failed on all fronts to counter the changes to society that have happened. There has really only been a Liberal Agenda at high speed vs. a slower incremental Liberal Agenda that is slowed down by the human road bumps that are the modern Right. Rather than simply resisting the “inevitable” rise of gay marriage and adoption, Hungary is actually for the first time actively pushing in the opposite direction which could be that Martin Luther or Rosa Parks moment. The Silent Majority clearly sees that it is wrong to destroy the idea of gender and the family for the sake of the feelings of a tiny percent of the population and cradle-to-the-grave propaganda has failed to change this in the former Warsaw Pact nations. The absolute majority of humanity does not want to go to the back of the bus anymore for the ability of drag queens to dance upon the centuries of culture and struggle that got humanity to where it is today.

Czech President Milos Zeman has come out vocally and openly to support the legislation made by his neighbors. While joyously smiling, he told CNN that if he were younger he would “get trains and busses full of heterosexuals to come to Prague in order to show how absurd it (LGBT) is”. That is a very blasphemous thing for an EU leader to say. Zeman, who has already been deemed a Russian agent by the Mainstream Media, perhaps simply feels he has nothing to lose as he nears the end of his life. It is easy to be bold at the end of the road.

Of course the reaction from mainstream dogmatic EU officials has been shock and horror with calls coming to excommunicate Hungary. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared that because of this move by Orban, Hungary “has no place” in the European Union. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was a bit softer, saying “This Hungarian bill is a shame”. The EU bureaucracy has also called this law and similar Polish maneuvers to be “grotesque”.

Image: The Visegrad Group has a much more “European” vision for the EU.

The Hungarians passing some bill to ever so partially block LGBT, with the Poles trying shenanigans of their own with praise from an elderly Czech president may not sound that important, especially to those living in countries that have a more normal view on gender roles. However, we cannot ignore that for the Western elites LGBT is a core inarguable dogma. This is something that the EU takes dead serious and is a core element of their agenda.

Every corporation, every embassy, every school and every advertisement over the last 10 years has become increasingly rainbow ridden. The LGBT movement is vastly louder in its promotion from the West than Capitalism or Democracy ever were during the Cold War. Gay parade promotion has become a symbols of Westernness and Globalism and are a real foreign policy objective for the USA/EU. The push is on and has been on for quite some time. As we have seen standing up against this movement in the west is essentially career suicide at the least. This article does not use the terms “heresy” and “blasphemy” to be cute, this is really the dynamic at play – a zealous and extreme hatred of the family and traditional gender roles that has zero tolerance of any thoughts or actions to the contrary.

The Visegrad nations in the center of Europe are challenging the orthodoxy of the EU elite and throughout history direct challenges to enforced dogmas spark a lot of chaos, change, and empower others to stand against the status quo.

The strategic consequences of the Visegrad nations’ moves against Euro Dogma.

• The EU could simply wait this out. Hungary is the most uppity nation but they have no border with the Russians, meaning they simply cannot leave the union. They would be surrounded and starved out like a poorly defended Medieval castle. Generation upon generation of people are becoming more liberal and perhaps in another two generations Hungary will “grow up” to be as submissive and self-loathing as Germany.
• There are no legal methods to expel Hungary from the EU. But there were not any in the Soviet Union either and look what happened there. Perhaps if you calmly remove the first domino the others will not fall. See Brexit, as a good example of controlled demolition. Even the most delusional human suits in Brussels have to see that everything to the east is full of barbarians and is Polish migrant labour really worth some future risks of a mass exodus? Perhaps it would be best for stability to just go back to exploiting Africa for cheap labour and cut the Slavs loose.
• Poland (and to an extent the rest of the Visegrad Group) is traditionally terrified of Russia, thus given the choice of being cut loose from the EU or going “gay”, there is a strong chance that Warsaw would side with even the most Satanic and self-destructive EU model rather than bow to Moscow. Ironically the threat of being expelled could actually make these nations far more compliant.
• As individual nations the Visegrad Group are nothing, as a block they are something, and their Traditionalist efforts need to be coordinated in order to be effective. The EU must keep them as divided as possible.
• Any person who is not 100% for LGBT is the enemy in the West. The Mainstream Media will try to turn Orban and other Visegrad leaders into mini-Putins in Europe’s backyard that must be stopped because of freedom. The demonization for them is only just beginning.
• Russia will somehow be blamed for this. Russia should plead guilty regardless of the truth of the accusation because it gives even more credibility to them as the “last true Christian nation”.
• If the Visegrad Group were to become more or semi-independent then the Ukraine would be divided with the Russians within a few days’ time. All parties would agree that they want certain parts of that region to come back home. A Kiev trapped between “Visegradia” and Russia would be doomed to partitioning.
• The weaker the West is, the better Russians can sleep in peace. Russia needs to expand its ideological influence deeper and deeper into the Visegrad nations on all fronts. The EU must find a new way to repackage their Liberal Agenda because out East, they are not buying it.
• A system of apologetics/argumentation for traditional families in the XXI century will become more finalized soon and will be the greatest weapon for everyone on the “wrong” side of the Berlin Wall.

At the end of last month, the EU collapsed into emotional melt-down. It occurred when Charles Michel, Council President, decided to move up a summit debate on LGBTQI and EU values — in a reaction to a letter of concern drafted by 17 Council members. Dutch PM, Rutte, used the moment ‘to go nuclear’ (as he had earlier promised), saying in advance of the summit that: “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue.” And, at the summit itself, Rutte threatened that Hungary “must repeal” its (allegedly) “anti-gay law”, and respect fundamental human rights, “which are not negotiable — or they must leave [the Union]”.

Rutte acknowledged that “I can’t push them out”. He argued however, that Orbán’s (alleged) ‘anti-gay’ law “seriously contradicts the values that Europe stands for”, and insisted that they were not up for debate. Should the EU not act now, it would stop being a union of values and would become a mere trade bloc, Rutte insisted. The debate then descended into the highly personal and emotional:

“We have known each other for eight years, but this touches me,” Xavier Bettel told Orbán inside the summit room. Luxembourg’s prime minister is married to a man, and was a co-initiator of the 17-state protest letter. “I did not become gay. I am. It is not a choice … My mother hates me for it. This [the draft Hungarian law] is very bad. This is stigmatizing”, he said, according to officials. “I respect you, but this is a red line. It is about basic rights, the right to be different”.

Well, there it is: the culture war, and its accompaniment – the war on ‘Populism’ flows, in full spate, as the floodgates open. As in America, it will have profound consequences, and give rise to sharp internal tensions.

The start to this ‘war’ reaches back to the 1990s, when Hungary and Poland “led eastern Europe in economic shock therapy, pushing market reforms beyond what their western advisers demanded. But in cultural terms, the Polish and Hungarian Right chose a more conservative course”. In particular, rather than open his nation’s border to offset population decline, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, looked to the nuclear family as the key route to spur national growth. Since 2010, which marked the start of Orbán’s role as prime minister, the number of marriages among Hungarians has increased by 89.5%; and the fertility rate is rising.

Both these states nonetheless, continue to see themselves as deeply European, even as they have steered further away from the EU valorisation of cosmopolitanism as its primordial cultural end, to be brought about through open borders, and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples.

Orbán is far from alone in his traditionalist stand. In Rome, as one example, the Vatican has taken the unusual step of making a diplomatic démarche to the Italian government concerning a draft bill. The law, known as the Zan bill (after gay activist lawmaker Alessandro Zan), was approved last year by Italy’s lower house and has since been fiercely debated in the Senate. The bill would explicitly categorize violence against LGBTQI people as a hate crime, making it akin to a racial or an antisemitic attack, whilst prescribing harsh penalties for any infringement. The leader of the League (Party), Salvini, said it would punish those “who think a mom is a mom; and a dad is a dad”. Many ordinary Italians would agree.

Even liberal-élite parents though, are anxious – witness the Vatican démarche – as they see their imagined, liberal Community of Meritocracy metamorphose into some kind of a super-woke ‘Moralocracy’. And it might only be a matter of time until academic testing is abolished in the name of combatting racism. “So how the heck are you supposed to get your kid into Oxford, if she’s white? And paying a woke surgeon (or maybe insurance will cover?) to cut her breasts off when she turns sixteen – is the new ‘cool’”. Abigail Shrier writes about this in her new book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. It is driving many parents close to breakdown.

And, as in America, parents don’t care for their children being taught Critical Race Theory, either. The latter stems from a school of thought amongst post-Russian Revolution Marxist intellectuals who were disturbed by the fact that communist revolution didn’t sweep Europe, just as Marx had predicted. This revisionist ‘Race Theory’ updated ‘Marx’ to being a struggle between ‘who has power in society, and who doesn’t’, instead of a class struggle.

Both Marxist variants however, rely on the disruptive dualism of the oppressor versus the oppressed, that is intended to set layers of society into conflict one with another. And this is what it is doing: With a younger generation severed and at odds with their parents, whom they are being taught to see as congenital racists.

Well, last week the EU declared war on such parental anxieties. It hung its hat on the ‘Race Theory’ and LGBTQI peg.

1. J. Hopkins, whom Matt Taibbi once described as a post-Soviet version of a самиздат writer (i.e. one who is so insightful that, sooner or later, both the writer and his readers are bound to be led to prison! – intended by Taibbi as a high compliment, incidentally), has sought to convey what it is that is ‘going on’ here.

Yves Smith, writing from the esteemed economic blog Naked Capitalism, expands on Hopkins’ prophecy. She writes:

As I begin explaining the work of Hopkins to my (remaining) well-educated liberal friends and neighbours [in NY], it startles me again, and again, that they are serenely oblivious to what to me is so balefully obvious: the rise of censorship in the USA — censorship by liberals! …“Look”, [Hopkins wrote in 2017, the first year of Trump’s Presidency] “I know what you’re probably thinking. But it isn’t that liberals don’t actually care about fundamental liberal values, such as freedom of the press and speech – and all that. It’s just that they desperately need the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate next year, so they can get on with impeaching Trump …“The point of all this propaganda [especially concerning Russian hacking] is to delegitimize Donald Trump,” “and to prophylactically reassert the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, ‘reality,’ and ‘truth.’

In practice, the ‘Russia stole the election for Trump narrative’ was a stone cast at two different ‘birds’: One was Trump; but the other was aimed in the direction of Putin. Why? Well, in oligarchic capitalism, the latter’s huge wealth is both the anvil and hammer, on which western narratives of political ‘reality’ are forged. They ‘beat out’ each successive ‘reality’. Not so in Russia and China. The power of political leaders there trumps the oligarchic machinations (they go to goal). It was not always so. Cosmopolitan oligarchs came within a hair’s breadth of literally stealing Russia under Yeltsin; but then Putin entered the frame – to spoil it all. The oligarchs are still extremely cross.

Hopkins’s main theme however, is the War on Populism (the topic which so absorbed the Euro-élites at their Council summit). He asks: So how, and why, has unchecked global capitalism resulted in this War on Populism? “The problem is [he responds] … well, the problem … is people”.

Hopkins writes, in The Last Days of the Trumpian Reich: “Not rich and powerful people like themselves [are the problem], or the people they need to continue working, consuming, and servicing the interest on their loans, but … you know, all those other people. Uneducated, un-woke, working-class people. Gun-toting, fanatically religious people. Racist, conspiracy-theorizing people. Deplorable people. Populist people”.

“People they don’t need anymore. These people have been a problem recently. Not only are they a drag on the system, they have been actively interfering with it, voting for Brexit, electing Donald Trump, refusing to abandon their traditional values and outmoded ideas (e.g. national sovereignty, freedom of speech, and mammalian biology) and to get on board with global capitalist ideology – and have been otherwise a real pain in the ass.”

Yves Smith again:

“The [above] paragraph both illuminates, and is illuminated by, the work of Thomas Frank, who has so brilliantly shown — above all in his masterpiece, Listen: Liberal — just how, since the election of our first Neoliberal president in 1992 (which was, significantly, the year after the collapse of the USSR), the Democrats reinvented themselves as the party of the Liberal, Creative, Professional Managerial Class: The party of the credentialed meritocracy, the party, above all, of the winners. So, yes, as a matter of course, the Democrats have been taught to be openly hostile to working-class “deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton officially named them, to see them as “being a real pain in the ass,” as Hopkins writes.

“And the deplorables really are a drag on the global capitalist system. (Most of them want free health care, for Pete’s sake!) A lot of them voted for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and, far, far worse, even more of them voted for the “white-supremacist white-nationalist fascist dictator Nazi-Hitler” (as Glenn Greenwald said!), i.e. Trump. They really are – bottom line here – losers with a big ‘L’.

“The liberals, the bien pensants (as Thomas Frank has called them) — the ‘winners’, that is — who read The New York Times and The Washington Post and listen to NPR and watch MSNBC and CNN, who went to good colleges and got all kinds of professional credentials, are certainly well-informed enough to know that the future is all about global capitalism. And they know that, if they play by the rules, global capitalism has a place for them. Furthermore, they know (or could easily figure it out), that global capitalism does not have a place for life’s losers. But that’s just tough shit, isn’t it?”

So when the Re-set – the ‘New Normal’ – was unveiled at Davos, millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially – happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is – they were “far-right extremist” conspiracy theories, “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever – despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

How then would Davos propose to slide humanity into this ‘new normal’? Well, perchance Davos man wants to go in the opposite direction to epistemological purity? That is, it seeks to generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly. This could become the mental ‘blank page’ on which the deliberately fluid realities of cosmopolitanist gender, and self-defining identities, might be written.

The oligarchic Elect now seek to ‘unvalue’ all remaining national values, untether national cohesion – for its logical objective is not to author a new ideology (it doesn’t need that). But, rather, to impose a single global, mercantilist order through first, the monetisation of every possible ‘thing’, and then its ‘capitalisation’ into fresh financial ‘assets’.

Of course, even the Re-set needs its ‘narrative’. But the point here on narrative – any Establishment narrative (one example from the BBC’s “Reality Check” section) – is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’, that contradicts their narrative.

The credentialled ‘managerial classes’ (such as run Brussels), know that their success is in large part made possible by their enthusiasm for official narratives. And their collective hope is that correct ‘narrative’ provides them with an enduring safe space. On one side of the Maginot Line then, is ‘normal’ society, gainful employment, and with career advancement and all the other considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Beyond the Maginot Line is poverty, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other forms of suffering and discrimination.

“Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in countless ways, each of us are asked, and have to answer this question. Conform, and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.”

So what will global oligarchy’s ‘Conquest of Absolutely Everything’ look like? A world of atomized consumers, stripped of their rights and of any allegiances to family, or clan, or nation, or religion, or even to meaningful cultural appreciation.

Nevertheless, a globalist world, for the few who aspire to grow immensely wealthy in it, is still understood to be a veritable cornucopia of uncountable material satisfactions. A magic carpet they would be loath to abandon. Yet, anxieties are rising, even amongst the billionaires. The world is tacking in new uncertain directions. To throw in one’s lot now with the ‘masters of the universe’ may ultimately prove to have been but a fleeting chimaera.

For ‘the many’, on the other hand, the tech and robotic Re-set, proclaimed by the Davos crowd, will be a place of glorified slavery, lived in deserts of social isolation. To the extent that some amongst ‘the many’ have seen what a tech Re-set has in store for them, they don’t like it. It smacks of totalitarianism, of tech-feudalism – and they have started to oppose it. They are then … ‘populists’. Which is to say, they become a huge problem for their masters. No wonder, the EU Council summit was so heated and distraught.

Rather than opening his nation’s border to offset population decline, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, looked to the nuclear family as a way to spur national growth, an investment that is now reaping handsome rewards. So why is the leader of the national conservative Fidesz party still chastised by his European peers?

What sort of madness is it that induces so many EU leaders to place their respective nations on the path to eventual ruin? Case in point: the opening of the European landmass to massive migration, which continues to invade the shores of European continent.

If pure insanity were not the primary motivating factor behind modern politics that it is today, it would seem strange that Brussels decided to address the migration crisis not by strengthening EU borders – a time-proven security measure employed by nation states throughout history – but rather by lowering the moat and inviting the strangers into the EU hothouse.

Those migrants, Westerners have been told ad nauseam, do not represent a threat to the peace and security of the nation state. Rather, they are essential to help offset flagging birthrates and diminishing labor reserves on the continent. In other words, governments simply had no other choice but to open their doors to the hoard. Just ask the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, who funded the migrant incursion to the tune of $500 million dollars.

“Governments must play the leading role in addressing this crisis by creating and sustaining adequate physical and social infrastructure for migrants and refugees,” Soros wrote in a 2016 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps if Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán had been a billionaire financier and not merely the democratically elected leader of an Eastern European country, his own personal plan, which called for the construction of a security fence to block the mass migration, might have gained some traction and spared the EU from being inundated with migrants they simply cannot accommodate. Indeed, as the major Western European capitals wallow in rising crime and homelessness, Hungary is showing the rewards that come from taking the path less traveled.

Consider marriages, which are critical for fighting demographic decline, not to mention the dubious argument that migrants are necessary for shoring up population numbers. Since 2010, which marked the start of Orbán’s role as prime minister, the number of marriages among Hungarians has increased by 89.5%, while the number of divorces is down 57%, according to data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. That is a marked contrast with the former period of leftist rule in Hungary (2002-2010), when the number of marriages had decreased by 23%.

Moreover, 90% of married couples say they want to start a family; 43% would like to have at least two children, and 18% three or more. It seems they may enjoy success on that account as the fertility rate has increased from 1.25 in 2010 to 1.55 in 2020, the highest reported percentage since 1996; already the number of births has increased by 2.1%, while abortions have dropped by nearly 50 percent.

Meanwhile, employment among Hungary’s female workers has gone from 54.6% in 2010 to 67% in 2020, while the overall unemployment rate is just 4.2%, the sixth lowest figure in the EU.

This positive news is no accident. In addition to providing incentives for young Hungarians to enter into wedlock (the government provides stae-backed home and car loans for first-time buyers, as well as a vast network of nurseries that allow parents to focus on their careers, among many other perks), the government of Viktor Orbán has taken steps to protect underage children in Hungary from overt sexual messaging, notably from the LGBTQ community.

This month, Hungary’s parliament outlawed the dissemination of information to impressionable minors that actively promotes homosexuality or gender change. Imagine! A school environment that focused attention on academic excellence as opposed to the sexual identity of the prepubescent students? Nevertheless, the news was greeted by European lawmakers with the same predictable hysteria that welcomed the construction of Hungary’s barrier fence on its southern border.

In a European Council meeting this month, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Hungary’s premier to either “respect LGBT rights or leave the European Union,” while French President Emmanuel Macron remarked that the “fight against homophobic laws is to defend individual freedoms and human dignity.”

It is both sad and tragic that EU leaders fail to understand that parents have a right to know that their children are receiving a public education without lectures being held on alternative sexual lifestyles, which many believe is a discussion best held between parents and their children, if at all. At the same time, should it really be a priority among EU leaders to celebrate alternative lifestyles among schoolchildren at a time when the continent is suffering on the demographic front? There is a severe contradiction inherent in that argument that few wish to confront. In any case, human rights are human rights regardless of the sexual orientation of the individual. The law is specifically designed to protect everyone equally.

More to the point, however, is that Viktor Orbán continues to show Brussels and the major Western capitals that there are better ways of managing the EU than simply taking the “one suit fits all” approach (which is what helped fuel Brexit, by the way). While Western Europe may have “lost its religion” and conservative beliefs long ago, it should keep in mind that countries like Hungary and Poland have not. Eastern European nations, with histories far different from their Western counterparts, still largely observe Christian teachings and conservative lifestyles that Brussels wishes to ignore.

Moreover, judging by the positive data emerging from Hungary with regards to its demographic and economic situation (which did not require a massive influx of migrants to become stabilized), it would appear that Viktor Orbán has many valuable lessons to teach the bureaucrats back in Brussels. Yet admitting as much would require Western European leaders to drop their empty virtue-signaling play acting and actually defend the vital interests of the people. There are powerful forces at play behind the scenes, however, many of them non-government organizations with vast influence, that will never permit such a volte-face.

Sadly, the days of dynamic political leadership on the European continent are over as weak and venal leaders continue to destroy the fragile bonds that hold the EU together, while ostracizing smart and courageous leaders like Viktor Orbán who actually accomplish commendable things. The tiger that could have saved the EU from itself has been caged and, to use the parlance of these troubled times, cancelled, and now only timid mice are calling the shots. The European Union needn’t end on such a lamentable note, but it’s very hard to see any other alternative.

How fanatical are European elites about LGBT? Look:

Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, said Hungary either “must leave” the EU or repeal the law, which bans TV shows and other content seen as championing LGBT lifestyles for the under-18s.

However, some eastern European governments refused to join 17 of the bloc’s 27 countries in a rare joint statement condemning a fellow member state.

The Hungarian government hit back against what it called the EU’s “shameful” interference in its domestic affairs.

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, said the law was about “defending the rights of the kids and the parents” and claimed to be a fighter for gay rights when Hungary was under communist rule.

“Homosexuality was punished, and I fought for their freedom and their rights,” he said as he arrived at the summit. “So I am defending the rights of the homosexual guys. But this law is not about that.”

More:

While the EU has no power to force a country to leave, this could be achieved “step by step”, Mr Rutte told reporters in Brussels. “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue,” he said.

“They must realise that they are either part of the European Union and this community of values, which means that in Hungary… no one can be discriminated against and [everyone] can feel free on grounds of sexuality, skin colour, gender whatever.”

Read it all. 

I wonder if Europe’s Muslims support the Hungarian law. If they do, is there no place for them in the European Union? Someone should ask the Dutch prime minister.

This is really extraordinary. A country that has been part of Europe for a thousand years is now regarded by other European leaders as unfit for their company because it bans a kind of sexualized material aimed at children — a ban that probably would have been supported by majorities in every European country forty or fifty years ago.

The rainbow flag has taken on special significance in our regime. It is the flag of our globalist elites, symbolizing “diversity and inclusion,” principles that they regard as the source of their right to rule.

“Regime” is a technical term in political philosophy. It refers to the source of political authority. A regime defines essential matters about which “we all agree.” This agreement establishes the boundaries of legitimate political contestation, and it treats as traitors, rebels, and revolutionaries those who overstep and transgress.

America’s regime has long been that of a constitutional republic. We litigate, organize, and in some cases protest. Politicians exploit procedures to angle for advantage. Elections are contested. And all of this is supposed to operate under the limits imposed by our rule of law. But our regime is always more than constitutional provisions. It also concerns what counts as a legitimate opinion in public life, and what is beyond the pale. In this domain we have undergone regime change.

Yes, even the pro-life Catholic conservative Democratic governor of Louisiana takes a knee before the rainbow flag. He vetoed a bill that would have protected female athletes from trans competitors.

The regime change is even more pronounced in Europe. More:

So it’s not surprising that our elites have embraced the rainbow flag. It flutters over our universities and is featured in the windows of global corporations. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street—drivers of globalization and the breaking of boundaries—wave the pride flag.

The rainbow flag represents the regime that our globalized elites intend to sustain. As a regime, it treats dissent as illegitimate. Those who object to the rainbow flag and what it represents are not fellow citizens concerned that society cannot function without clear social markers of the differences between men and women. They are “haters” and “bigots.”

… America spawned the open-society consensus, which over time evolved into the open-border, open-trade, diversity and inclusion regime now pressed upon us as so self-evident and non-controversial that it is obligatory. Our country invented the rainbow flag and our embassies export it to the entire world. But populism bids fair to strengthen rather than weaken. It challenges the hegemony of our globalized elites and the regime they insist must determine public life. I predict that the time is coming, perhaps soon, when our elites will suppress the American flag and wave all the more insistently the rainbow substitute.

Read it all. 

The rainbow flag is the “Workers Of The World, Unite” sign from the Havel’s Greengrocer Myth. Viktor Orban is Havel’s greengrocer. American conservatives, pay attention!

This letter came today from a Hungarian reader:

I see you’ve written about our soccer woes, but I’m not sure the events surrounding the Germany-Hungary match reached you. It’s not just the whole “lighting up the stadium in rainbow colours” row. The German authorities behaved really shamefully:

1, They didn’t let Hungarian consuls accompany the supporters to help mediate with local authorities

2, Several groups of supporters were detained for hours, and only let go after the Hungarian government intervened (the Germans later explained that they received information about “problematic” groups infiltrating the Hungarians)

3, I read on fora that even “regular guys”, so not the organized, black-clad supporter groups but normal, balding, 40-ish dads with kids were pushed to the wall and searched, multiple times

4, A pitch invader with a rainbow flag ran into the field during the Hungarian national anthem

5, Around the 80 minute mark, military police officers lined up in front of the Hungarian supporters, who weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. in a few minutes, the Germans equalized…

This is truly outrageous. I don’t care about the rainbow lights, the rainbow flags, the Germans are entitled to their own opinion in these matters. I do think it’s misguided, as Orbán wasn’t even there, so who were they protesting? Whatever, let Germany virtue-signal themselves to death for all I care. But treating innocent supporters like this is insane.

And then came Mark Rutte, who said publicly that we “must kneel” in the matter of the recent laws regarding homosexuality. These guys are not even trying to mask their efforts to dominate us into submission.

But if they think that this will defeat Orbán, they are very much mistaken. On the contrary. Many Hungarians are on the fence about the government, but when they hear such words, they will surely turn out and vote for Orbán. Hungarians prefer someone who stands to someone who kneels.

So does this American.

UPDATE: The European Parliament has approved the Matic Report, which defines abortion as a human right, and essential to democracy. It has thereby defined all faithful Catholics and pro-lifers of any confession as a threat to democracy and human rights. More:

Speaking in the debate, Matić said: “Tomorrow is a great day for Europe and the entire progressive world. Tomorrow we decide on positioning Europe as a community that chooses to live in the 21st or the 17th century. Don’t let history remember us as the latter ones.”

Read the signs of the times.

theamericanconservative.com

Every time – and we’ve just had an illustration – someone in Kiev makes trouble for Russia, the Internet is full of people crying on Putin to just go in and knock them over. A sub-variant of this is that Moscow should have invaded after the Maidan coup, arrested all the nazis and put Yanukovych back to serve out the rest of his term under the now-forgotten agreement hammered out by the EU.

But there’s actually a good reason why Moscow, in Ukraine or earlier in Georgia, did not invade and knock Zelensky or Saakashvili over and why it doesn’t forcefully deal with other irritations. And that reason is a very simple one: it’s not that it couldn’t have done it – there was nothing between Russian power and Tbilisi in 2008 or between it and Kiev in 2021 – but, simply, experience. Both Moscow’s experience and its observation of others’ experiences.

We will start with others’ experience. The Royal Navy began to switch to oil fuel just before the First World War and that made assured oil sources vitally important to it and, by extension, to Britain and other naval powers. Iran (Persia) was a major source and Britain made a rather one-sided agreement after the war giving a British company excessive rights to oil sources in Iran. Iran was heavily influenced by Britain from that point on, to the growing resentment of the Iranians who saw themselves getting little out of the arrangement. In 1951 Mohammed Mosaddegh became Prime Minister and nationalised the oil company. A pause should be made here – later experience has shown that such nationalisations are very far from catastrophic: the oil has to be sold to somebody, the price isn’t set by the selling country and, in the end, it’s actually a business matter that can be settled by business methods. The Suez Canal functions and so does the Panama Canal despite local control; state-owned companies sell their oil and life goes on. But such was not considered acceptable – fear of communism or the Soviet Union gaining control or just amour-propre – and, in the end, it was decided to solve the problem by getting rid of him. Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup organised by London and Washington but mostly carried out by the CIA. And so the problem was solved. Officially denied by London and Washington for years, the CIA’s involvement was confirmed in 2000 and more documents were released in 2017. But the Iranians always knew who did it and the coup greatly contributed to their dislike of the USA and was a strong motivation in the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Today Iran is perceived in Washington as a “daily threat” and its extensive armoury of missiles “a significant threat“. Several decades of neocon/PNAC/exceptionalist harebrained machinations against the “Iranian threat” has made it more powerful, more influential and more determined than before. It is now a very significant obstacle to American ambitions to control the MENA. So, in retrospect, the overthrow of Mosaddegh was not so successful after all and sixty years later the problem is very far from “solved”. Doing business with Mosaddegh, in the long run, would have been the better response and Iran might even be well-disposed towards the USA and its allies or at least indifferent today. Knocking Mosaddegh over worked at first, but the effect didn’t last.

This was then-new CIA’s first known venture into “knocking him over” although Washington was well-practised in the custom – perhaps the first was the coup that overthrew Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii in 1893 – but there were to be many more. Diem in Vietnam; but that didn’t work either and the Vietnam War just got worse until the USA retired in defeat. For years Washington has proceeded under the delusion that it’s just one person that stands in its way and with him removed the road will be smooth. It never is, but Washington never stops trying. Washington has overthrown many governments in Latin America without, it appears, bringing stability or friendship any more genuine than the passing dependency of the current beneficiary. Even Newsweek ran a piece concluding: “As it stands, however, the only evidence we have of anyone interfering with any election or government implicates the U.S. — not Russia. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.” Seventy-two attempts during the Cold War calculated the Washington Post. Knocking him over is very much the American style of diplomacy.

The resentment of the outsider’s interference never goes away. And, as the case of the Shah illustrates, any excesses the puppet commits are attributed to the puppet-master. Americans are very offended with the “Great Satan” chants and flag-burnings but – typically – they cannot understand the why of it: Iranians blame Washington for everything bad between the overthrow of Mosaddegh and the departure of the Shah and continual hostility thereafter. And, from the arming of Saddam Hussein, the naval battle and the civilian plane in 1988 to the killing of Solomeini last year, they can enumerate examples. Far better from Washington’s perspective if Mosaddegh had been left in power.

Another disastrous CIA enterprise was the subversion of Soviet-supported governments in Afghanistan especially the post-Soviet one of Najibullah. In doing so, Washington built up the very elements that would, after an involvement that more than doubled the Soviet stay, send it and its allies home in defeat. There is no doubt that Washington would be happier with a Najibullah in Kabul than with what will be there in a year.

Speaking of Afghanistan, we now turn to Moscow’s direct experience of failure. In 1978 the local communist party pulled off a coup in Kabul no doubt with some involvement from Moscow. But the Afghan communist party was deeply split and the government was too hasty in communisation; dissatisfaction grew and the communist government trembled. This could not be tolerated under the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine and Moscow decided to end the problem by knocking him over; it invaded, the present leader was killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal from the rival faction. Karmal eased off on the communisation but it was too late; the revolt expanded, the Soviets got bogged down and finally left the, in Gorbachev’s words, “bleeding sore” in 1989.

In Hungary in 1956, Imre Nagy, a long-time communist, spoke in favour of a “new course” reform after Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s “cult of personality”. This led to revolution and a Soviet invasion which deposed Nagy and later tried and executed him. A similar attempt in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček of “Socialism with a human face” in 1968 was similarly crushed by an invasion and deposition of Dubček. He at least was spared to live to see the end of the Soviet Union.

So Moscow can remember three cases in which, under previous management, it just “knocked the guy over”: Nagy, Dubček and Hafizullah Amin. In no case was there any profit except in the short run. Hungary and Czechoslovakia dropped the Warsaw Pact, the USSR and communism as soon as they possibly could and the resentment carried them into NATO. The Afghanistan War limped on until Moscow admitted defeat and handed it, as you might say, off to Washington so it could be defeated there in its turn. (Speaking of cunning schemes that have disastrous results for the schemer, the case can be made that it all began with Brzezinski.)

Had Washington and London left Mosaddegh alone they would both be happier today and, in all likelihood the price of oil would be the same and the supply just as assured. Admittedly it’s hindsight but hindsight is supposed to produce foresight. Washington’s endless interventions in Latin America have brought only short-term benefits and have left a legacy of hatred that will, one day, boil up. Washington would have been wiser to have left Afghanistan as it was just as Moscow would have been. Overthrowing Nagy and Dubček brought short-term gain and laid the ground for longer term problems – especially as Prague has become a Tabaqui thinking itself safe between Shere Khan’s paws.

In short, the lesson of history is that, in almost every case, “knocking him over” gives a geopolitical quick sugar hit that will be paid for later. Moscow knows this because it is smart enough to learn from its own and Washington’s failures. I can never stress too often that Moscow was once an exceptionalist power: for seven decades it was the capital of the leading and guiding light of history as the “world’s first socialist state”, the standard-bearer for the “bright future of mankind”, producer of a new type of human being and that exceptionalism brought it neither friends nor prosperity. Putin himself called it “a road to a blind alley“. But Washington is still in its exceptionalist phase and thinks that doing the same thing again this time will succeed.

And sometimes there isn’t even the quick sugar hit: for each in Afghanistan the hangover began within a few weeks. If Moscow had driven into Tbilisi and sent Saakashvili running – Shere Khan would not have come to Tabaqui’s defence then or in Ukraine – Moscow would then have to do something to create a Georgia more to its liking. Conceivably Russian intervention could have kept Yanukovych surviving under the EU-brokered agreement but it is highly probable that the next election would have brought the Maidan people to power and the situation would be much as it is today as far as Moscow is concerned. As for a swift drive on Kiev last month, there is no doubt Moscow had the military might to do it, but then what? As Bismarck observed, one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

And Moscow has enough experience in the USSR days of trying to sit on bayonets and can watch Washington’s failures.

In short, Moscow knows what Washington has not yet learnt: it’s not just one guy, it’s a whole country and sugar hits don’t last.

As many of you know, David Brooks and I are friends. I can tell you that it’s hard to find a more generous and decent man anywhere. That’s really true, and that, besides my innate loyalty to friends, is why I ball up my internal fist whenever I hear people criticize him harshly. And it’s why I’m not going to publish any comments on this blog that criticize him personally (as distinct from criticizing his ideas). But I also recognize that David is dispositionally and convictionally more liberal than I am, and far more optimist about the way of the world. This is a preface to say that his column today is halfway about me and people like me.

Here’s why it’s “halfway” about me.

As you know, I was never a Trumper, but also not a Never Trumper — and Brooks’s column today illustrates why. I did not and utterly do not share the sense among the Never Trumpers (Republican or Democrat) that the system is basically okay, and the country is basically okay. Neither did I share the view that Donald Trump was any kind of solution.

(That said, read the whole Kerwick column; the quote Brooks uses is much less offensive in context. Berwick is not talking about going on the offense. He’s talking about being defensive against rioters and Antifa. He’s saying if you want to protect yourself, your property, and your neighborhood from these bullies, you have to be prepared to be violent in response to violence. I actually agree with that. Some Christians are pacifists; most are not. I am not. If Berwick had not written the odious paragraph Brooks cited, I would have agreed with his column.)

Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side. This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of macho display.

I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

OK, let’s get to work.

That said, the column is the kind of thing you’d have expected to see in a liberal St. Petersburg newspaper in 1915. I don’t say that to be insulting. I say it descriptively. It is the opinion of an intelligent, cultivated liberal observer who cannot see how bad things have become. The fact that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and other institutions.

It is true that conservatives are badly led, and that those who think things will be okay if we just cling tighter to Trump are only making things worse, if only because they have chosen a false solution. But I genuinely don’t understand how any non-progressive person can think things are basically fine. Let me put a fine point on it: I don’t understand how any non-progressive person can be anything just short of apocalyptic, given the state of things.

Let me explain.

We are living in a country whose elites are teaching us to see each other primarily on the basis of race, and to hate each other for it. Look at what political scientist Zach Goldberg has found:

1/n No, the NYT (and likely other outlets) didn’t always do this (i.e., ‘[Name of person], who is white…’) to the same extent that they have over the past decade or so. pic.twitter.com/wHB0hXs3r4

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) April 22, 2021

The elite leadership class is jamming this neoracist ideology down everybody’s throat at every turn. Now even the US military does it too. Here, from today’s news, is just one of the impacts on ordinary people:

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

“[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.”

His post included a chart with what appeared to be set math courses for 2022-2030.

VDOE spokesperson Charles Pyle indicated to Fox News that the courses would allow for at least some variation depending on students’ skill level. “Differentiated instruction means providing instruction that is catered to the learning needs of each child (appropriate levels of challenge and academic rigor),” Pyle said.

On VDOE’s website, the state features an infographic that indicates VMPI would require “concepts” courses for each grade level. It states various goals like “[i]mprove equity in mathematics learning opportunities,” “[e]mpower students to be active participants in a quantitative world,” and “[i]dentify K-12 mathematics pathways that support future success.”

Because most black students, for whatever reasons, are disproportionately underachieving in math, the state, in its bountiful compassion, is going to level everybody else down. You know what’s going to happen, then, right? The rich will be able to afford to take their kids out of public schools and put them into schools where they won’t be held back to the standards of the weakest students. The middle class and the poor are out of luck.

How is this justice? This kind of thing is advancing everywhere in this new America.

Now we learn that the Biden administration is planning to go big on pushing Critical Race Theory on all public schools in America. 

This neoracist ideology, which has become the dominant ideology among American elites and their institutions, is going to destroy the country. I honestly do not understand why writers like my friend David Brooks are not alarmed by this. I’m not kidding: Critical Race Theory is going to destroy America as we know it, as this Christopher Rufo explainer makes clear.

Bari Weiss, this blog, and others have been reporting on the very important fight going on in elite NYC public schools over the effects of critical race theory on the curricula there. Its important because whatever happens with the elites — the future power-holders in this country — is important. If you wanted to know what was going to be common on campuses nationwise in 2021, you would have done well to look at the Ivies a decade earlier. Allow me to quote from Live Not By Lies:

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

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.

Like the early Bolsheviks, they are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.

Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.

This is happening to us right now! And these radicals, in power in institutions and corporate suites, are advancing their illiberal revolution, within the formally liberal rules of our society. Amazon is deciding not to publish certain kinds of books — which is its right, but which is also illiberal. Publishers are withdrawing books based on certain unproven accusations against writers. Here in Budapest, I was discussing yesterday with some Hungarians the complaints from Hungarian liberals that the Orban government and its supporters monopolize the media and suppress dissenting views. While I have only been here a few days, and don’t yet know how much of that is true, I can say for sure that our own leading media, while not under any kind of government pressure, nevertheless absolutely and without apology marginalize views they dislike. Remember, the process that resulted ultimately in Bari Weiss resigning from the Times began when the paper refused to publish an op-ed from a US Senator whose view — that the National Guard should be called in to stop rioting — was shared by over half the American public. [UPDATE: A reader points out correctly that I got that wrong — that they published the op-ed, but it caused intense blowback in the newsroom, and ultimately the firing of James Bennet. — RD] If you are waiting to see op-eds  seriously opposing BLM, or transgender ideology, or anything else beloved of our ruling class, in our top newspapers, or if you are hoping for fair coverage of these issues from our major media, you are on serious drugs.

I hear all the time from college students telling me about how afraid they are to say what’s on their mind in their classes, for fear of being failed by their professors, or attacked by a mob of students. This has been going on for years; I have the receipts in my email in-box. Do you ever read about this in our mainstream media? Rarely, if ever. They only see what they want to see. This is all happening in an America that is formally liberal and democratic, but there’s nothing liberal and democratic about any of it.

This week we saw a white police officer shoot to death a black teenage girl who was in the process of trying to stab another black female. He saved the life of a black woman — and for that, he was denounced by the usual suspects as a racist killer, and one of the richest and most powerful athletes in the country, LeBron James, tweeted out the cop’s face and a threat. Why anybody would want to be a police officer in a country like ours is becoming, I have no idea. In the name of this utopian ideology, we are destroying our schools, and we are destroying the ability of the police to maintain law and order. Hannah Arendt, whom I quote in LNBL, said something similar happened in pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

And now we get to gender ideology. I won’t recap here the many cases to which I’ve drawn attention of American children being catechized in these malicious lies in schools. Yesterday I met a young Hungarian scholar, and talked to him briefly about the “Uncle Jay Should Move To Budapest” post, and how gender ideologues in schools are teaching American and Canadian kids to reject what their parents say, and to regard their parents as backward fools. His eyes widened, and he said, “I did my PhD thesis on how the first thing totalitarian regimes do to start gaining control is to insert themselves into the family, and began to separate children psychologically from parents.”

And now we learn that the US Postal Service has been monitoring social media posts of ordinary Americans, looking to root out “extremists.” Where are the Republicans on this? Too busy fighting opponents of the Iran deal to scrutinize a purge of domestic political opponents of the Left? Did you see that a Norfolk, Va., police officer was fired for the perfectly legal act of donating $25 to the defense fund of Kyle Rittenhouse? Madness.

Did you know that in one of Philadelphia’s poorest and worst schools, they’re teaching children to celebrate “black communism”? I kid you not. And now, as the invaluable Christopher Rufo has documented using whistleblower leaks, Philadelphia public schools are using George Floyd to further radicalize children:

The day after the Chauvin verdict, Philadelphia Public Schools teaches kindergarteners that “George Floyd was killed by a police officer” and that America is built on a “pyramid of hate” culminating in “genocide.”

The lesson plan, produced by Philadelphia’s Office of School Climate and Culture, instructs kindergarten through second grade teachers to encourage students to discuss “what happened to George Floyd and the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The teachers are told to share a “social story” presenting the case in racial terms: “George Floyd was killed by a police officer”; “Mr. Floyd was African American, the officer was white.” The lesson teaches that for years, “some police officers have hurt African Americans.”

Finally, the teachers are asked to discuss the “Pyramid of Hate” with the children as young as four years old, teaching that “our society” is built on “biased attitudes,” “systemic discrimination,” and “bias-motivated violence,” which can lead to “genocide.”

From the documents, this “Pyramid of Hate” designed by the ADL:

Read the fine print. We go from a “lack of self-reflection or awareness of privilege” to “cultural appropriation,” and ultimately to genocide. The clear implication is that if you don’t stamp out things at the base, you will eventually have genocide.

This is stone-cold ideological indoctrination designed to smear anybody who objects to left-wing radicalism as a potential génocidaire. This week, in the establishment publication Foreign Policy, an essay appeared calling for truth commissions and reparations in the wake of the George Floyd verdict.

I could go on.

It’s happening. It’s happening right now in America, and it’s accelerating. Contra David Brooks, though there are indeed some dark American hearts, the greater darkness is not in the hearts of Americans, but in the hearts of these proto-totalitarian elites who are transforming the country. When Brooks faults alarmists like me for failing to recognize that the way to achieve change is through the “conversation and compromise of politics” I feel that I’m being gaslit. Yes, I would very much like to discuss conversation and compromise — but this is not on offer from the illiberal left, and its establishment enablers. I don’t understand why Brooks and those like him can’t grasp how the things happening in the country look to so many of us. Talk to the left-liberals Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying about “conversation and compromise of politics.” It scarcely exists. We are being demonized and driven out of our jobs and livelihoods, having our children propagandized by ideologues trying to separate them from their families and even their understanding of themselves as male or female, and being told that we are guilty of racist bigotry simply for believing in rewards for achievement — things that were common in America until the day before yesterday.

The reason I wrote Live Not By Lies is because people who grew up under communist totalitarianism could see all this coming, and have been trying to warn their fellow Americans. The book has become by far my biggest seller, despite the fact that, by contrast to The Benedict Option (also a big seller), it has received almost no mainstream media attention. I’m sure that there was no conspiracy to suppress attention to the book. It’s just that the idea that the United States is moving towards “soft totalitarianism” strikes people in the ruling class as crazy — this, despite the many examples I give in the book, and every week in this blog space. They cannot comprehend what’s actually happening in this country. Once again, I turn to Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (also quoted in Live Not By Lies):

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

This is how I read columns like David Brooks’s: as rationalizations to explain away the intrinsically incredible, but actually existing, state of affairs. Brooks duns the radical pessimism of the Right, but he doesn’t actually engage with why so many of us are radically pessimistic, and whether or not we have a right to be, considering the things we believe.

Again, part of my own despair is that at this point on the Right, we have the ever-useless Republican Party, and impotent and often crackpot rage of the fire-in-the-belly Trumpers, who give their minds over to dipshit conspiracies like QAnon, while their enemies, having marched through the institutions, are now marching outward, conquering everything. One problem is that good people like David Brooks want to defend liberal democracy, but liberal democracy is ceasing to exist, because even the liberals are now illiberal. The time to have defended liberal democracy is when the mobs were coming for professors like Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale. We are supposed to believe now, though, that what is now mainstream on the left — e.g., Biden’s coming push for mainstreaming Critical Race Theory in US public schools — is in any way classically liberal or democratic?

And when people get sick and tired of two standards of justice for people of different races, and get fed up with their children being told that the should hate themselves for being white, and that maybe, despite having man-parts, they might actually be female, and people start fighting back substantively — with public protests and legislation, not tweets and lib-owning commentaries — these same defenders of liberal democracy are going to wonder how on earth we got here.

In conversation with a politically aware Hungarian yesterday, I explained to him why I thought the totalitarianism coming into being in the US now is “soft” — because it presents itself in therapeutic terms, and because it is being carried out under cover of “liberal democracy.” He looked at me, cocked his brow, and said, “But you know, it won’t stay soft for long.”

No, it won’t. What I suspect will happen is that many of us on the Right will get sick and tired of being pushed like this, and some will react in destructive ways (e.g., January 6). This will give the state, and its allies in corporations, the justification they want to crack down hard.

That’s why we who are its targets had better refuse false hope, and prepare to hold out for the long run, while we still can. I hope that we can figure out some ways to put a stop to this, but at this point, in the first half of 2021, I seen nothing and no one on the horizon. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for a savior figure. One of the most important lessons the Right should have learned from the Trump administration is that performative anti-wokeness is useless.  You have to know how to use power to get things done.

Ultimately, though, our core problem is spiritual — and that’s not something that can be solved through politics. But that’s something for another post. Let me restate a Brooks passage:

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.” Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

For me, my personal challenge, as a man of the Right and as a Christian, is how to live through this:

It’s a big beautiful world, mostly full of good people, but our lives are threatened by a loss of God, and of a deep sense of the Good, and by technocratic, progressive ideologues who call Evil good, and who are forcing on us a world in which identifying the good and living faithfully to it is becoming more difficult. How can we resist this without surrendering to an Evil that promises falsely to help us?

I’ll leave you with a poem I read today, after looking up the name of the man whose image leads this page. It’s a statue in Budapest. Miklos Radnoti was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. He was a Jew who converted to Catholicism, but who died in the Holocaust. His poetry was optimistic and full of life, until in the late 1930s, the shadow of totalitarianism over Europe changed him.

This is one of his final poems before his murder. What is so touching about it, at least to me, is how he draws attention to the details of the lives of those he loves and knows, and contrasts that with the abstraction they all become to the bomber pilot flying overhead. Radnoti was writing as a captive held by fascists in a war, but I would say that the ideological abstractions that led to the war are the same abstractions that are allowing the progressive ideologues to make culture war on a diverse country and a diverse people whom they don’t know, but certainly despise:

UPDATE:  A reader writes: