Criminalizing Dissent Is Coming

Politico Piece About Trump & Orban Laying Groundwork For Free Speech Clampdown

Ah, I arrived at the gate for my Berlin flight, and found that it’s delayed for 90 minutes. So I have time to dash off something. I think this is important, actually.

Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister. Excerpt:

The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nerve center for incubating policies for a second Trump administration, co-sponsored a discussion in October 2022 about how to bring “peace in Ukraine” featuring Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto.

Audience members included conservative policy and national security officials and GOP strategists, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Once seated, they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points.

“Russia has the will, strength, and patience to continue war,” warned the document, which was given to POLITICO by a participant. “U.S aid to Ukraine must be severely constricted and Ukrainian President Zelensky should be encouraged by U.S. leadership to seek armistice and concede Ukraine as a neutral country.”

“If the U.S. continues to enable war, it will result in the destruction of Ukraine and provoke further Russian aggression toward the West, with the potential for nuclear conflict,” it said.

You see what Politico is doing here? We are not supposed to evaluate these claims; we are supposed to reject them out of hand as “pro-Russian talking points.”

This is the same kind of manipulation the Blob used to manufacture consent of the American people to support the Iraq War. What, you think Arabs don’t deserve democracy? You want Iraq to create a mushroom cloud over an American city? You want the terrorists to win?!

The Orban government might be wrong in its analysis of the Ukraine war, but characterizing it as nothing more than “pro-Russian talking points” does a profound disservice to democratic publics in the US and Europe, who are financing NATO’s participation in this war. If Orban’s government is wrong, then explain how they’re wrong. Don’t talk to people like we’re morons.

More:

Hungary’s attempts to influence the policy debate in Washington are echoing right now in Brussels, where Orbán’s followers have seeded several anti-European Union, right-leaning media outlets and think tanks, the best known of which is MCC Brussels. Launched in 2022, the think tank is funded by Orbán’s government, and the prime minister’s political director, Balazs Orban, who is not related, chairs its board of trustees. MCC has led campaigns seeking to undermine EU action on climate change and backing farmer protests which rocked the EU capital last year.

You see what they’re implying, don’t you? That failing to agree with what the EU wants to do is somehow disreputable and even pro-Russian. European voters have no right to listen to a dissenting opinion. They should be quiet and do as their elites tell them to do. What, do they want the Russians to win?!

More:

The pamphlet distributed at the “peace in Ukraine” conference illustrates how “corrupt authoritarians are accessing and abusing our system to undermine U.S. national security,” said Kristofer Harrison, who was a Defense and State Department adviser during the George W. Bush administration.

There are Americans like Prof. John Mearsheimer, who has nothing to do with the Orban government, who argues that NATO involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war undermines US national security. Is he a traitor too? Is anyone who dissents from the forever-war policy of the Blob a potential traitor under the control of corrupt foreign authoritarians?

From a New Yorker interview with Mearsheimer:

Looking at the situation now with Russia and Ukraine, how do you think the world got here?

I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.

You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?

If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.

The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.

Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.

Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business.

We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.

Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is behaving that way?

That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well.

Stop, people! Don’t remember the Iraq War! You shouldn’t be thinking about those things, lest you question what the authorities tell you to think and to do with regard to war.

From my book Live Not By Lies:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

Back to Politico. I come up late in the story:

American writers close to Danube include Rod Dreher, who’s been paid by Danube to publish articles in U.S. media and has promoted “American Orbanism.”

They make it sound like I’m a paid propagandist. Here is what my contract at Danube requires of me with regard to the US media. This is the only thing. I’ve cut and pasted this from my monthly evaluation form, in which I have to demonstrate that I am fulfilling the terms of my contract:

That’s it. Nobody at the Danube Institute has ever told me what to write, or what not to write. I wouldn’t have come to Hungary if that were a condition of my being at Danube. John O’Sullivan, the president of the Institute, runs a clean shop. It is all but impossible to get anything into the US media favorable about the Orban government (I’ve tried), so my writing “articles about [my] experiences in Hungary in the American media” have been confined to blog postings at The American Conservative when I was on staff there, and, since I left over a year ago, to my subscription-only Substack newsletter. If the Hungarians are in the market for a paid propagandist, they’ve chosen badly.

Everything I’ve ever written, and ever write, about my views on Hungary, the Orban government, and the lot, are my opinions alone. I might be wrong about any or all of it, but the opinions are mine, not dictated to me by anybody else. The day an order comes down from the Orban government telling me to write about this thing, or not to write about that thing, is the day I turn in my resignation. And for the record, despite these disgusting McCarthyite smears, if the United States should ever declare war on Hungary, I will return to America, as I am a loyal American.

The unstated premise of this criticism is that any American who finds anything good to say about Hungary and the Orban government is surely guilty of some form of corruption, maybe even treason. I have made it very clear in my writing since I got to know Hungary that I believe there are important lessons that US conservatives can learn from the Orban government. Do I approve of everything the Orban government does? No, of course not. But I like its approach to migration, its approach to family policy, and its recognition in policy that Christianity is important to Hungary’s identity. I like how the Hungarian government recognizes that the Left has made culture a political battleground, and is willing to take the fight to them. I like how the Hungarians question whether or not global capitalism is always and everywhere good for Hungary — and when they judge that it is not, they legislate to protect Hungarian national interests.

And I very much like how Hungary has from the beginning questioned NATO strategy in Ukraine. Even if I didn’t agree with Orban’s general analysis of the war, I would be grateful that at least somebody within the EU is asking whether or not this war is good for Europe. RFK Jr. put out a short video making a case that NATO’s involvement in Ukraine benefits US defense contractors. Is he wrong? Maybe. But ask yourself: how often do you see in the US, UK, or western media serious questioning of why we are fighting this war with our Ukrainian proxies? Why is asking in a serious and sustained way if this war is in America’s (or Europe’s) national interest something that is very hard to come by in the public square? I’ve noticed on my trips back to the US from Hungary, that when I engage in discussion about the war, almost nobody has any understanding about its complexities; they just repeat talking points they’ve heard in the media, and accuse me of Russian sympathies (Untrue: I’ve said from the beginning that Russia should not have invaded — but I’ve also said that Prof. Mearsheimer is right: the US and NATO provoked them).

The point is that coming back home from abroad, I can see and hear the effect of there being little dissent from the war policy appearing in our media. Though I don’t read Hungarian, living where I do, I am exposed to all manner of arguments, for and against NATO’s policies. People actually argue about this stuff, as we are supposed to do in a democracy. The Blob and its media allies constantly accuse Orban of being in the tank for Moscow, but Orban makes a reasonable point: are European governments not in the tank for Washington? How has fighting the Ukraine war affected Germany, for example? It has made Germany poorer and more unstable.

To be sure, most Europeans still favor supporting Ukraine. That is their right. My point is that it ought to at least be a matter for open discussion and debate, absent the sort of McCarthyite smears that are so common in our media. Again, the Politico article seems premised on the idea that to dissent from US Government foreign policy is to be traitorous in some sense. If Donald Trump is against continuing NATO’s war policy in Ukraine, well it can only be because he has been hoodwinked by a Magyar autocrat. Right?

Do you see what they’re doing? They’re laying the groundwork to criminalize dissent. I expect that if Kamala Harris comes to power, Washington will go after me and anybody else who has expressed sympathy or agreement with Hungarian government policies. This Politico story was a clear signal. Democratic operative James Carville has been in the media lately wildly exaggerating the influence I supposedly have on J.D. Vance. At first I was flattered by this, but now I’m starting to realize what’s probably going on: they’re all creating a case for me, as some kind of paid agent of Budapest, whispering Wormtonguishly in the ear of a man who might become the next US vice president. It’s all bullsh*t, but then, they know it.

Walter Kirn is right:

Ultimately they’re going to go after Elon Musk. You must know that. In her Davos speech this past January, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said:

For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarization within our societies. These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing.

Not mass migration, which is overwhelming European society. Not economic stagnation. Not the collapsing fertility rate. No, the top concern is disinformation. And why? Because it gets in the way of Brussels and other European elites doing what they want to do, whether or not the people want it.

Do you see what’s happening in Britain today? People are going to prison for saying and writing things the government hates — specifically, objecting to the colonization of their own bloody country by migrants aided and abetted by the government, the media, and UK institutions. This is not a conspiracy theory — it’s really happening.

You’d better believe that other governments, including the US government, are watching and taking notes. You may not like this or that policy of the Orban government, but Hungary is still a place where you can say whatever the hell you like about the government and its policies, and nobody will threaten you with prison. And yet the British and US media have the gall to call Hungary authoritarian!

Think about it: the people in the Washington establishment who are creating and propagating this narrative are the same ones who brought us the Russiagate hoax to try to derail the Trump presidency. They are the same lot who insisted that the Hunter Biden laptop was probably Russian disinformation; remember how 51 former US intelligence officials publicly attested to their belief in this lie?These are the same institutionalists who created false Covid narratives to manipulate the public into doing what they wanted. Over and over.

I’m getting on a plane in a few minutes for Berlin, where the great and the good are freaking out now over the fact that roughly one out of three eastern German voters chose the AfD in the weekend’s election. The AfD is routinely called “extremist” and “far right”; the German government calls the party, which is one of the two most popular parties in the eastern half of the country, as “suspected extremists.”

Well. Konstantin Kisin’s remarks from this past June are even more valid now. Excerpt:

In continental Europe, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim parties are progressing  at a rapid rate. At the time of writing, Nigel Farage has re-emerged to lead the Reform Party on a platform of reducing net immigration to zero and was immediately physically attacked. Why is this happening? 

Throughout the last decade, the legacy media answer has been the same: we don’t know and we don’t care. The rise in anti-immigration sentiment and growing concerns about the Islamification of Europe are seen not as a predictable reaction to unprecedented immigration levels, but as some sort of inexplicable evil emerging, once again, from the racist underbelly of a deeply suspect body politic. Despite being obviously true and confirmed by both ancient and recent history, the idea that right-wing extremism (the forces of order) is rising as a response to left-wing extremism (the forces of chaos) is outside the bounds of acceptability among the chattering classes.

This is largely a product of the fact that left-wing extremism is never actually described as extremism: 

It is not considered extreme to throw open the borders resulting in more people coming to Britain in 11 years of the Blair Government than came into Britain between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and 1950. 

It is not considered extreme to double Sweden’s foreign born population since the turn of the century. It is not considered extreme that this has resulted in Sweden having the highest rate of gang killings in Europe. It is not considered extreme that the governor of the Bank of Sweden was forced to acknowledge in an interview with the Financial Times that the growing crime problem is so serious, it risks damaging the country’s long-term economic growth. 

It is not considered extreme that the United States has had over 8 million illegal immigrant “encounters” under the Biden Administration, with over 1.7 million known gotaways (illegal immigrants who evaded border patrols) currently residing in the United States without proper documentation or being vetted by immigration. 

It is not considered extreme to introduce overtly sexual content into schools up and down the United States.

It is not considered extreme to promote the idea that children are capable of consenting to life-changing surgeries and hormonal interference in their bodies to treat mental disorders. 

It is not considered extreme to replace pedestrian crossing lights in central London with LGBTQ+ signals. 

It is not considered extreme to teach several generations of children to hate their country. 

It is not considered extreme to prosecute and imprison people for making offensive jokes in private WhatsApp messages.

It is not considered extreme to put male rapists in female prisons.

It is not considered extreme to pass speech-restrictive legislation that could result in the police arresting comedians for jokes.

What is considered extreme is pointing out that there is a problem with any of this. As my readers know, objecting publicly to any of this will immediately earn you the dismissive label of “culture warrior”. Because destroying your country’s history and culture is not considered extreme, but defending it is.

This is precisely the correct way to understand the Blob’s attack on Viktor Orban and those who like his political principles. Hear me clearly: I do not say that Orban’s government should be free of criticism. I’ve said myself that I have serious concerns about its opening to China, for example — while at the same time recognizing that the constant pressure from Brussels and Washington to capitulate to their policy demands foolishly serves to push Budapest towards Beijing.

The point is this: if people in the US, UK, and western Europe stop thinking of Viktor Orban as a Russophile devil, and start paying attention to what he says, and how he governs the country — a country that has none of the problems that mass migration has brought to western Europe, for example — then they might actually start wondering what the establishment’s policies have done for them.

I’ll leave you with this: the signs are appearing with more frequency now that the transatlantic ruling classes and their institutions are moving towards criminalizing dissent. I published Live Not By Lies in 2020, anticipating all this. Now it’s really getting going. Keep your eyes open. And look, my regular readers know that Donald Trump is not my favorite politician, but I am going to vote for Trump with enthusiasm, if only to protect our right to free speech, and our ability to dissent without persecution.

If we lose that as Americans, what do we have? Do we want to end up prostrate like the British people, humiliated by a ruling class that hates them?