The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Rule 5 Sunday: Fast Cars & Fast Women

Posted on | July 16, 2017 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

So here I was, sitting in the apartment on a Sunday afternoon, wondering what I was going to use as a topic this week, and I open the blog – and Smitty comes to my rescue! Chicks with turbos! I don’t know who this model is with the Ford GT40, but she definitely looks high speed and low drag.
Insert the standard disclaimer here – don’t click when you shouldn’t.

Ready to go

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns, followed by Goodstuff and the very flexible Russian First Lady, Alina Kabayeva. Animal Magnetism checks in with Rule Five Message Discipline Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while Pushing Rubber Downhill debuts with More Links, More Vids, And More Hawt Chicks.

EBL checks in with It’s A Good Day To Eat Ice Cream, Lady Godiva, Heidi McKinney, Cow Appreciation Day, Separated At Birth, National Macaroni & Cheese Day, This Is CNN: The Easily Confused Poppy Harlow, Where In The World Is Heidy Pandora?, Game Of Thrones Season Seven Cocktails, and Riot On Sunset Strip vs. Europe 2017.

A View From The Beach presents No More Ms. Nice Girl Says Sophie Turner, Reason #5606 That Trump Was Elected, Fish Pic Friday – Sheepshead, More Evidence of Russian Collusion, Tanlines Thursday, Way Back Wednesday, Pennsylvania to Ease Smallmouth Rules?, To Pose in Zanzibar and Why Would Anyone Ever Think This Was a Good Idea?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Pauley Perrette, his Vintage Babe is Amanda Blake, and Sex In Advertising is covered by Flirt Vodka. At Dustbury, it’s a pair of hot chanteuses: Reba McEntire and Linda Ronstadt.

Thanks to everyone for the lovely linkagery!

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Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women
Amazon Personal Bra Boutique

Category: Rule 5

Those ‘Turbo’ Thingies

Posted on | July 16, 2017 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Category: humor

FMJRA 2.0: Modern Love

Posted on | July 15, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: (Snap-On) Tool Time
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Mental Door
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.10.17
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 07.11.17
Proof Positive
EBL

The Third Law of SJW: VidCon 2017 and Anita Sarkeesian’s Paranoid Projection
Adam Piggott
EBL

Feminist Denounces Ivanka Trump as a Symbol of ‘Patriarchal’ Authority
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 07.12.17
Proof Positive
EBL

It All Comes Back to Hungary: Soros, Cultural Marxism, Lukacs and Bela Kun
Adam Piggott
EBL

Columbia University Settles Lawsuit in Infamous ‘Mattress Girl’ Case
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.13.17
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach

Feminist Motherhood Advice (and Other Reasons to Avoid Jody Allard)
Welcome To My Playpen
EBL
Adam Piggott

In The Mailbox: 07.14.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (10)
  2. Proof Positive (6)

We also had a couple of near misses. Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!

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Amazing Deals On Pre-Owned Video Games

Category: FMJRA Award

In The Mailbox: 07.14.17

Posted on | July 14, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.14.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Jody Allard – Accused Of Abandoning Animals, Psychologically Abusing Her Own Sons
Twitchy: Dems’ “End of Dress Code” Celebration Accidentally Tramples Nancy Pelosi
Louder With Crowder: Louder With Crowder #196 – Net Neutrality Sucks! – With Ben Shapiro & Cassie Jaye
According To Hoyt: (Jeb Kinnison) On Net Neutrality
Monster Hunter Nation: Update Post – Grunge With The Wrong Spine, Etc.
Vox Popoli: Expel Your SJWs


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: More Links, More Vids, And More Hawt Chicks
American Power: Eric Raymond On Gramscian Damage, also, Gordon Craig, Germany: 1866-1945
American Thinker: Media, Dems Ignore Hillary/Ukraine Collusion
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Message Discipline Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For July 14
Da Tech Guy: (Fausta) The Western Canon As Guerrilla Reading
Don Surber: Snopes Sticks Up for President Trump
Dustbury: Tidy Profit Turned
Fred On Everything:
The Geller Report: Over 150 Christian Churches Plundered, Destroyed By Muslims In Kosovo
Hogewash: LOLSuit VIII News, also, A Non-Hearing
Joe For America: Fed Up Cop Tells Anti-Cop, Celebrity Crowd Off, Goes Viral For All The Right Reasons
JustOneMinute: Coming To Terminate You, also, Sarah Palin Can Sue The Times For This Too
Power Line: Democrats Vs. Trump: The New Meaning Of Treason
Shark Tank: Democratic Hypocrisy On Display In Election Collusion Scandal
Shot In The Dark: I’m Done Pretending To Call This Sort Of Feminism Anything Other Than Child Abuse
STUMP: Illinois Quick Take – Gas Taxes
The Jawa Report: Libya Update – Still FUBAR, also, Meanwhile At Zion
The Political Hat: ACLU Versus Hyperintelligent Bees
This Ain’t Hell: Friday Morning Feel Good Stories, also, 75-Foot Pistol Shot
Weasel Zippers: Pelosi Claims Military-Paid Transgender Surgery Necessary For National Security, also, Two Teenagers Arrested In London Acid Attacks
Megan McArdle: Summer Treats That Blend Sour And Sweet
Mark Steyn: Chancers And Honeytraps, also, When The Insurance Is The Catastrophe


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Category: Linkagery

Feminist Motherhood Advice (and Other Reasons to Avoid Jody Allard)

Posted on | July 14, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

Jody Allard is a feminist and a bad person, but I repeat myself. Last fall, Ms. Allard gained notoriety when she published a Washington Post column about “rape culture” that targeted her own teenage sons:

They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now and they roll their eyes and argue when I talk to them about sexism and misogyny.
“There’s no such thing as rape culture,” my other son said. “You say everything is about rape culture or sexism.”
I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism.

This provoked a memorable headline at Ace of Spades HQ:

Amazing: Angry, Bent Feminist Shames Her Own Sons
as Being Insufficiently “Anti-Rape” Despite
One of Her Sons Being at Risk For Suicide

Instapundit called Ms. Allard’s column “media-based child abuse,” and you might suppose that a sense of human decency would have caused her to avoid causing further embarrassment for her sons, but if she had any sense of human decency, she wouldn’t be a feminist, would she?

 

Last week, Jody Allard continued her anti-male jihad, this time in the form of recounting the reaction to her column last September:

I didn’t think it would be controversial when I wrote it; I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture. The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong. My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time my sons encountered my words about them on their friends’ phones, their teachers’ computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus. . . .
One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he’s never told me so. He doesn’t understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay. He sees himself as the “good” one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful, and who listens instead of reacts. He doesn’t understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny, and that not all sexists sound like Twitter trolls. He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem. . . .

In other words, her son has taken the Red Pill, and it was the experience of being publicly humiliated by his own mother that led him to it.

Way to go, feminist mom!

Not content with this predictable failure (and let’s not forget her lack of basic human decency), Ms. Allard extends her indictment to all men:

As a single mother, I sometimes wonder whether the real problem is that my sons have no role models for the type of men I hope they become. But when I look around at the men I know, I’m not sure a male partner would fill that hole. Where are these men who are enlightened but not arrogant? Who are feminists without self-congratulation? . . .
If the feminist men — the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for equality — aren’t safe, then what man is? No man, I fear.

We may notice, en passant, that Ms. Allard uses the adjective “feminist” as though it were a synonym for good. That is to say, in her mind, words like “feminist,” “progressive” and “equality” express the summum bonum, the highest moral ideal, the essence of all virtue. Most parents might hope their sons would grow up to be hard-working, honest, courteous and so forth, but such ordinary common-sense virtues are worthless in the eyes of a fanatic like Jody Allard. The only measure of virtue she recognizes is feminism, so unless her sons are whatever she conceives a “feminist man” should be — “enlightened but not arrogant” — she regards her teenage boys as the enemy, an existential menace.

As interesting as that is, however, more important is Ms. Allard’s description of herself as “a single mother.” Elsewhere, she explains that she has seven children and has been divorced three times:

My first husband and I got married pretty much entirely because we were both Catholic, and I got pregnant. Oops. I was madly in love with my second husband, but that ended. For my third try at marriage, I married a much older man whom I met at work and trusted would take care of me and my kids, but that didn’t work either. Yikes.
Needless to say, after three excruciating forays into marriage, I have no desire to get married again. In fact, when I left my last husband, I decided to stay single until I got my life together. I’m not sure how long I expected that to take, but I definitely didn’t anticipate still being totally and completely single five years later.

There are clues here, my friends. Husband No. 2 was her favorite, “but that ended,” she says without explanation, leaving us to wonder why, whereas she has written extensively of Husband No. 3, whom she labels an emotionally abusive narcissist. Also, apparently Husband No. 3 cheated on her with a woman “frizzy hair and skin covered in acne.”

Jody Allard is now 38 years old and, to judge from her own writing, her entire adult life has been an unbroken series of bad decisions. Anyone may peruse the archives of her writing at contently.com and evaluate her fitness to provide others with advice on parenting (or anything else).

Ms. Allard’s writing represents an expression of the feminist slogan, “The personal is political.” She recounts her failed marriages as a way of establishing her status as a victim of male oppression. If such personal revelations also support the conclusion that Ms. Allard is emotionally disturbed and/or lacking sound judgment, this self-inflicted damage to her reputation is acceptable as necessary to advancing the feminist cause. As I have observed about young feminists on Tumblr, “Like Catholicism, feminism turns confession into a sacred ritual, so that the feminist obtains a kind of holiness by telling her inmost secrets and desires.”

Beyond the blessings of confessional holiness, Ms. Allard says she has spent five years in therapy “recovering from complex trauma”:

I suffer from PTSD-like symptoms as a result of both individual isolated childhood traumas and the relentless experience of growing up in an abusive home. It has only been in the last few months that I have begun to recognize that I simply do not know how to nurture anyone, much less myself. I ache and yearn deep inside for the experience of being nurtured, and I’ve spent my adulthood looking for a mother. And as much as that has hurt me, I fear that it has hurt my children, too.
I began my personal journey in therapy almost five years ago. In the beginning, I thought that I needed help communicating with my then-husband. I thought that I could fix what was wrong with me and proceed through my life without so much as a single scar. I thought that I could do anything and be anything, and that my past didn’t define me. My life was my own, and I was determined to conquer it.
Therapy led me somewhere entirely different. In therapy, I finally recognized the failures of my relationships that had nothing to do with me. I learned to stop taking on the pain of others and to establish healthy boundaries.

Let us briefly note three points:

  1. Feminists and the psychotherapy establishment have, in recent decades, reached a consensus that millions of women suffer from the effects of emotional “trauma” akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Of course, PTSD originated as a diagnosis of the psychiatric problems of U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, so that feminism now teaches women that their misfortunes are as “traumatic” as the experience of Marines who survived the siege of Khe Sanh or POWs tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.
  2. We need not doubt Ms. Allard’s description of her childhood as “abusive” in order to be skeptical of her claim that this experience has been the source of all her problems in life as an adult. She has written about her biological father, who allegedly abused her, although she has no memory of him, and hasn’t seen him since she was 5. Ms. Allard is also estranged from her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken since 2012.
  3. The effect of her therapy, Ms. Allard says, has been her discovery that she is not responsible for the failures of her relationships. Evidently, everybody she has ever known is toxic and dysfunctional, and she alone is without fault, a martyred saint suffering for the sins of others.

Therapy is to the 21st-century woman what church was to her grandmother. Psychology offers a sort of secular salvation, whereby patients are absolved of responsibility for their faults and failures.

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Lasch’s analysis of the effect of “therapeutic morality” was published the same year that Jody Allard was born. The Culture of Narcissism was a national bestseller, and Lasch was credited for his prophetic insight as the 1980s became known as “The Me Decade.” Yet it is apparent that Ms. Allard has never bothered to read Lasch, or else she might be cognizant of Lasch’s critique of feminism, in a chapter titled “The Flight From Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War.” Feminism is part of the larger cultural problem, and not a solution. While I will not bother the reader with a psychology lecture, the key point is that pathological narcissism is not mere arrogance or ordinary selfishness. Rather, narcissism involves a process of rationalization — excuse-making — in an attempt to protect the damaged ego from a sense of shame. One of the ways this is done is by blame-shifting and scapegoating, so that the narcissist never has to admit fault or accept responsibility for his own failures and shortcomings. The narcissist may become a cunning sociopath, but this scapegoating tendency may also result in paranoia, as I explained in a 2010 column, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?”

Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — ‘It’s not your fault’ — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.”

In order to become responsible adults, we must learn to accept blame for our own failures and must resist the temptation to self-pity and scapegoating. The intelligent reader can see how feminism, which tells women that patriarchy is to blame for all their problems, thereby offers them a permanent exemption from personal responsibility.

Here, then, we find Jody Allard proclaiming that all males (including her own teenage sons) are complicit in “rape culture,” a paranoid conspiracy theory that views every manifestation of male heterosexuality as a potential threat of violence from which no woman is safe. When her sons (quite naturally) protest against this insulting anti-male rhetoric, Ms. Allard responds by turning their claims of innocence into proof of guilt: To deny blame for “rape culture” is . . . rape culture.

Good luck trying to use facts and logic with Jody Allard. She is engaged in a tactic known as “kafkatrapping,” where the accuser claims to know that the accused is guilty of ThoughtCrime — racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. — and denial of guilt is treated as evidence of guilt.

Speaking of which, is Ms. Allard still abusing helpless animals? According to a 2013 report, she was accused of adopting and then “dumping” pets:

Allard often attains animals on Craiglist and other online groups, gets bored within a couple of months, and dumps them a couple of months later.  Victims have included dogs, cats, chickens and at least one rabbit.

Allegedly, I hasten to add, because I cannot verify such an accusation, and don’t know if Ms. Allard has denied these animal-abuse charges. But considering how she treats her own sons . . .

Professor Glenn Reynolds comments on Jody Allard:

You think men are bad because you make bad decisions. You let yourself off the hook for those because “empowerment,” but you judge your sons with microscopic harshness. You lead a life that ensures your sons will have no close positive role models. Angry feminist single moms, I suspect, are disproportionately the mothers of the alt-right.

Did you know Washington State has a toll-free 24/7 child abuse hotline?



 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 07.13.17

Posted on | July 13, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.13.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Did Obama Set Up Trump To Justify FISA Warrant?
Twitchy: Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Smug Constitution-splaining Blows Up In His Face
Louder With Crowder: Rocker Launches Kid Rock For Senate…Wait, Seriously?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: All The Indicators Are Pointing Toward Women Being An Unmitigated Disaster In The Workplace
American Power: Rise Of The Dirtbag Left, also, Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies
American Thinker: The Left Media’s Extraordinarily Popular Delusions
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Hostile Media News
BattleSwarm: The State of The War Against Daesh
BLACKFIVE: Kathy Reichs, Two Nights
Bring The HEAT: D’OH!
Da Tech Guy: Thank You, Brad Sherman! The Impeachment Trap Is Sprung On Democrats
Don Surber: Study Shows CNN Is 93% BS, also, Dankheart (Really Stupid – Really Funny)
Dustbury: Our Chief Weapon Is Annoyance
Fred On Everything: Fun With Slavery – Dark Spots In A Shining Sea Of Twaddle
The Geller Report: French Prez Macron Admits “Islamic terrorism” Is “Hobbling Africa”
Hogewash: I’m Not Making This Up, You Know, also, A Monkey Walks Into The 9th Circuit With A Copyright Complaint
Joe For America: Clint Eastwood Casts Real Heroes Of Paris Train Attack In Film
JustOneMinute: What About That Russian Lawyer?
Power Line: Left-Wing Indoctrination In The Schools – It’s Worse Than You Think, also, Electric Car Talk
Shark Tank: Nelson Keeps Raising Millions, But Will It Be Enough To Beat Scott?
Shot In The Dark: It Never Existed, Lindstrom
STUMP: A Real Russian Scandal – Yuri Dmitriev And Stalin’s Great Purge
The Jawa Report: A Yazidi Primer, also, Islamic State Of Roadkill
The Political Hat: Quick Takes
This Ain’t Hell: No, Ice-T Was Not A Ranger, also, CBS’ SEAL Team
Weasel Zippers: Check Out All The Democrats Connected To “Russian Lawyer” Trump Jr. Met With, also, CNN Anchor Mistakes “Star Spangled Banner” For French National Anthem
Megan McArdle: How Would A Bipartisan Healthcare Bill Even Be Possible?
Mark Steyn: Azerbaijani Sunshine On CNN’s Shoulder


Summer Digital Deals
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Category: Linkagery

Columbia University Settles Lawsuit in Infamous ‘Mattress Girl’ Case

Posted on | July 13, 2017 | Comments Off on Columbia University Settles Lawsuit in Infamous ‘Mattress Girl’ Case

The Columbia Spectator reports:

Columbia and Paul Nungesser, CC ’15, have agreed to settle a lawsuit that he filed against the University in 2015.
Nungesser was at the center of a gender-based misconduct investigation after Emma Sulkowicz, CC ’15, accused him of assault in 2012. He was later found not guilty by a University investigation.
Sulkowicz protested that finding in her senior art thesis, “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” in which she carried a mattress with her at all times in a critique of the University’s decision not to discipline Nungesser. . . .
Nungesser’s suit charged that the University failed to protect him from—and even encouraged—sustained protest by Sulkowicz, which Nungesser initially argued was a violation of Title IX.
The University announced that it had settled the suit—for which Nungesser submitted a new complaint after his initial one was dismissed last year—in a conciliatory statement released Thursday.
The statement reaffirmed that Columbia’s investigation had found Nungesser not responsible and expressed regret that his time after the investigation was “very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.”
The statement also said the University will reform its gender based misconduct policies to make sure all students, “accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible,” are treated with “respect.”
The University did not disclose the terms of the settlement.

The “prestige” of elite universities is mainly a matter of money. The annual cost of attending Columbia University is $68,300 including tuition, fees, room and board. What does this money buy? A radical left-wing indoctrination that renders young people permanently incapable of living in civil society. Your child would be better off never going to college at all than to attend an Ivy League lunatic asylum like Columbia.

 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

It All Comes Back to Hungary: Soros, Cultural Marxism, Lukacs and Bela Kun

Posted on | July 13, 2017 | Comments Off on It All Comes Back to Hungary: Soros, Cultural Marxism, Lukacs and Bela Kun

 

Vox Day calls attention to interesting news from Hungary:

The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment.
The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.
George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front for the criminal people smugglers bringing third world migrants to Europe.
What is lesser known however, is the extent to which Soros is using his ‘soft power’ to influence civil society.
The Central European University in Budapest was founded and bankrolled by the Jewish billionaire, and has attempted to exert its influence against Viktor Orbán’s popular government in loosely veiled retaliation for recent legal measures against the university.
In recent months Hungary has seen protests by students carrying the Soros message against the potential closure of the university, with some fearing that this could be the beginning of another ‘colour revolution’.
Soros’ Open Society organisation has also worked tirelessly behind the scenes against the Hungarian government’s opposition to illegal immigration, despite the fact that 98.5% of Hungarians rejected illegal migrant quotas in a referendum just last year.

The spurious claim that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Soros, or that Hungarian officials are wrongly scapegoating Soros, is reminiscent of how Communists (and their liberal stooges) in the 1950s claimed that so-called “McCarthyism” was inspired by anti-Semitism simply because certain high-profile cases (e.g., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) involved Communist Jews. Many of the leading anti-Communists of the Cold War were also Jewish and, in point of fact, the federal judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to the electric chair was himself Jewish.

In conflating opposition to Soros’ subversive agenda with anti-Semitism, the Left is mirroring neo-Nazi rhetoric, which is . . . not helpful.

What intrigued me about this story was that opposition to Soros has become a nationwide issue in Hungary, which can rightly be called the birthplace of Cultural Marxism, as Linda Kimball has explained:

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow, Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters. . . .
In 1923, the Frankfurt School-a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revolution based on culture . . .
The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.

Totalitarians cannot tolerate rival sources of authority, which is why all totalitarian regimes seek to destroy religion and the family as independent institutions. Loyalty to traditions inherited from our ancestors, a sense of duty to our own flesh and blood, and faith in an eternal God as the source of eternal law, are a stubborn obstacle to the revolutionary agendas of totalitarian fanatics.

Hungarian dictator Bela Kun (left) and deputy commissar Georg Lukacs (right).

Very few young people today know anything about the history of Communism, and not one in a thousand American college students would be able to correctly identify Bela Kun, but the nightmare of the Red Terror in Hungary which began after Kun’s Bolsheviks seized power in 1919 has surely not been forgotten by the Hungarian people. One of the Bolshevik commissars, Tibor Szamuely, declared in a speech: “We will exterminate the entire bourgeoisie if we have to!”

Now, nearly a century later, Hungarians find themselves threatened by a flood of Muslim “refugees,” and the subversive Soros is trying to foment a new revolution to impose his agenda on Hungary:

On billboards across Budapest Soros stands accused of being a political puppet master. [In June], in a move seen as directly targeting Soros, Hungary’s parliament passed legislation requiring NGOs to declare themselves as “foreign agents” on their websites and documentation if they receive funding from political sources abroad. . . .
Soros’s reputation in Hungary took a particular hit during the 2015 migrant crisis, when his advocacy for the humane treatment for refugees ran up against Hungary’s ultra-conservative government, led by [Viktor] Orbán, a rightwing nationalist.
In recent months, the dispute has intensified. The prime minister has described the billionaire as someone who had “ruined the lives of tens of millions of people” with currency speculation.
Soros hit back with a speech in Brussels [in June] in which he referred to the Hungarian government as a “mafia state” and said: “He [Orbán] sought to frame his policies as a personal conflict between the two of us and has made me the target of his unrelenting propaganda campaign.”
Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, told the Guardian that the Brussels speech was a “declaration of political war on Hungary”. Soros-funded organisations, Kovács said, were engaged in “political activism camouflaged as NGO work”.

The description of Orban as a “rightwing nationalist” leading an “ultra-conservative government” raises definitional issues. How does one distinguish an “ultra-conservative” from a mere conservative, for example? And what is it about Orban’s nationalism — other than his opposition to unlimited immigration — that makes him so “rightwing”?

Left-wing journalists apply these scary labels haphazardly in an attempt to conjure up images of goose-stepping brownshirts, to imply that Orban is a latter-day Hitler. Of course, I know practically nothing about Viktor Orban, and maybe he isn’t a very nice guy, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a murderous megalomaniac with ambitions of global domination. So unless Orban starts putting his enemies in concentration camps, or sending armored division to invade neighboring countries, I’m going to guess that the Hitler comparison implied by the phrase “rightwing nationalist” is as wrong as the Trump-is-Hitler rhetoric of the Left.

What we are actually witnessing — in Hungary, in the United States and in many other countries in recent years — is a populist reaction against the elite “progressive” consensus of which Soros is a prominent symbol. There is an international clique of influential people and organizations who share certain ideas about the future direction of political, social and economic policies, and who don’t want to be bothered with debating the merits of these policies. The ordinary people whose lives would be affected by the agenda of the elite aren’t being asked for their approval, and popular opposition to the elite agenda (e.g., the Brexit vote, Trump’s election, Hungary’s anti-“refugee” referendum) is treated by the elite media as evidence of incipient fascism. Never does it seem to have occurred to George Soros, or to anyone else in the international elite, that perhaps their policy ideas are wrong, that they have gone too far in their utopian “social justice” schemes. Unable to admit error, the progressive elite therefore resort to cheap insults and sloppy accusations of “fascism” to stigmatize opposition to the Left’s agenda. Why is Viktor Orban under attack by Soros-funded organizations? Why is the Left trying to depict Hungary as a fascist state? The real answer is not hard to find:

Hungarian President Viktor Orbán has sparked controversy after hosting a notorious anti-LGBT organisation in Budapest.
The US-based International Organisation of the Family (IOF) has consistently campaigned against gay marriage, and reportedly colluded with Vladimir Putin on anti-LGBT legislation in Russia.
[In May], Mr Orbán spoke at the group’s annual conference, entitled “Building Family-Friendly Nations: Making Families Great Again”.
The Human Rights Campaign describes the group “as a dangerous group of activists spreading anti-LGBT rhetoric and promoting laws and policies that criminalise LGBT people”, and the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has designated the organisation a “hate group”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at a May pro-family event in Budapest.

You can learn more about the International Organization for the Family (IOF) from its president, Brian Brown, who asks that Christians keep the IOF “in your thoughts and prayers.” You see how the Left now seeks to destroy Christianity by labeling Bible-based beliefs as “hate,” a typical tactic of cultural Marxism and a reminder of the Red Terror in Hungary.

Opponents of radicalism who study history know that the Left is often more dangerous to its friends than to its enemies, as illustrated by the fate of Bela Kun. After his Bolshevik regime in Hungary was overthrown, Kun fled to Austria, but in 1920 was arrested and eventually deported to the Soviet Union. There, he was assigned by Lenin to assist the Red Army in Crimea, where Kun was responsible for the arrest and summary execution of more than 60,000 civilians. Kun then became an operative of the Comintern until, during Stalin’s purges, he was arrested in 1937, accused of Trotskyism, and executed in August 1938.

As a great man once said, “It is history that teaches us to hope.”



 

 

Category: Hungary
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