NatCon Triumphs In Brussels

A Win For Free Speech In The Heart Of Managerial Totalitarian Darkness

ADF lawyer Jean-Paul Van Der Walle at NatCon with visiting Haircut-Needer

Last night, the legal team fighting for the National Conservatism conference in Brussels huddled upstairs at the conference venue, a modest dance hall in a scrubby part of the Belgian capital. NatCon was very fortunate to have on its side lawyers from the international division of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian legal organization that defends freedom of religion cases. ADF’s Paul Coleman, the British lawyer who directs ADF International, was there to speak, but Jean-Paul is Belgian, and lives and works in Brussels. When the municipal authorities came after NatCon, Jean-Paul took the case.

He told me this afternoon that things were utterly uncertain yesterday. Normally it takes days even for emergency petitions to the Belgian High Court to be approved. NatCon didn’t have days. If the petition had not been accepted, or if it failed, there would have been no Day Two of the two-day conference.

It was late in the evening, and nobody knew anything. Jean-Paul decided to pray. At 10:30 came a call summoning him to his country’s Supreme Court. He was going to argue NatCon’s case against a lawyer representing the mayor of Saint-Josse, the Brussels district that issued a ban order yesterday against the conference, which was being held inside its borders.

Jean-Paul told me he had no time to prepare, and no time to anticipate what the court’s questions would be. He showed up around midnight, and presented the case. Hours later, deep in the night, the court issued its verdict: the conference could go on. The doors of the Claridge venue opened at eight this morning, and today’s conference went off smoothly.

Jean-Paul told me that it was something close to a miracle that we prevailed — not so much because of the merits of the case (which were considerable), but because the court agreed to hear the case at such an hour, on such short notice. In conversation, the lawyer told me he thanks God for hearing his desperate prayer upstairs in the dance hall. He gives glory to God for the verdict.

So do I, but I also thank God for His presence in the work of this lawyer, Jean-Paul Van Der Welle. I say it every chance I get: ADF is absolutely indispensable. Because I follow religious liberty cases closer than most, I know how vital their work is. But it is very, very costly. Christians everywhere should donate generously to ADF (it’s tax-deductible); you never know when the liberty it saves will be your own. Though the NatCon case wasn’t a religious liberty issue, the fact that ADF lawyers were close to NatCon, and had a French-speaking lawyer licensed to practice in Belgium ready to roll, made all the difference.

So, it was a happy outcome for us all over here, though Jean-Paul emphasized that it easily could have gone the other way. Still, this is cause for celebration.

However, I can’t help but think of the many, many people and organizations that don’t have the immediate aid of a powerful ally like ADF when they are set upon by the woke. If you don’t think something like this could happen to you, your imagination is far too limited.

Here is a petty example, but not to me. A day or two ago I wrote about how Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which is the standard-bearer of the left-liberal UK establishment, reproduced selectively edited quotes from me, taken from an Antifa press release. As you will have seen in the previous Diary entry, I did not at all sympathize with the Christchurch killer, but rather unambiguously condemned him. Yet I said that the “chilling” fact of the matter is that the issues he said in his manifesto, including huge demographic shifts, are real and serious — and that we had better take them seriously. I compared him to Islamic terrorists, whose acts are always monstrous and worthy of contempt, but whose motivations we need to strive to understand, especially if they are based in grievances that have substance. Similarly, I explained how the Bolsheviks, as evil as they were, wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if they didn’t speak to (and exploit) the genuine fears that Russians of that time and place had.

That’s a legitimate observation, and I stand by it. But The Guardian, repeating Antifa’s smear, made it seem that I had sympathy with the Christchurch killer, who shot up a mosque in 2019. I wrote to the ombudsman (“readers’ editor”) to complain, and provided the full text of the 2019 blog essay from which Antifa and Guardian reporters quoted. This came in reply:

This must not have gone anywhere, because the Guardian repeated the smear in its second-day story about NatCon. And this smear has been repeated elsewhere in Britain. For example (click here to watch the clip):

Now, I doubt I have a libel case under UK law. I did say that the Christchurch shooter’s concerns were legitimate, but only in the same way that the Unabomber’s concerns about environmental destruction were legitimate. It in no way justifies the evil acts terrorists commit as a political statement to suggest that there MIGHT be a legitimate concern within their grievance. The NatCon organizers were persecuted wrongly by the mayor of a Brussels district, but that would not have given Yoram Hazony the right to firebomb city hall. And if he had, he would have been a monster for having done so … but the district mayor would still have been wrong for persecuting NatCon. You see?

Point is, again, I probably don’t have a libel case, but I still have to endure this smear being spread by left-wing British media. If I were rich, I would consult a British lawyer and go after The Guardian if I had even a shred of a case. But I’m not rich, so I just have to suck it up. This kind of thing happens every day. In some places, people lose their jobs for saying the wrong word, and creating an “unsafe” environment. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called this “everyday oppression” in an interview at the conference today. It’s a humiliating thing, and an infuriating thing. But it’s a fact of life.

‘National Conservatives Pounce!’

How the Washington Post led its story about the NatCon controversy:

The headline in The New York Times’s account of the event expresses the same sentiment:

These are classic examples of the “Republicans Pounce” (or “Conservatives Pounce”) phenomenon, defined on Wikipedia as downplaying controversies or stories that put the Left in a bad light by emphasizing the conservative response to the story, rather than the negative aspects themselves.

Uri Berliner, the veteran NPR editor who publicly criticized how public radio allows wokeness to drive its news coverage, resigned today. From a NYT report last week about the controversy inside NPR following his critical essay:

Wait … this is Uri Berliner’s fault?! These people — the Cavinses of the media — want so desperately to believe that they are fair. It is perfectly obvious to many of us that they aren’t, and don’t even try to be. If Republican congressmen, or any conservative, chooses not to talk to journalists because they do not trust those journalists to be fair, how can you blame them?

Today At NatCon Brussels

Viktor Orban sat onstage with Yoram Hazony for an interview. The Hungarian PM said that Hungary is an island of conservatism in an ocean of insanity. He says his country is a great place for conservatives to come and strategize on how to turn back the left-wing craziness. I can tell you from personal experience that he’s right.

A French journalist friend, listening to Orban, said that the thing that comes across about him when he speaks in English, in these interviews, is how he has a real sense of humor. That is definitely true. He should do more of these English-language interviews; he comes across as the soul of common sense. As someone who lives in Hungary, it is incredibly frustrating how the man is portrayed in the Western media as some sort of ogre, when in fact he comes off as a normal man who is abnormal in the sense that he wants to fight the craziness.

For example, Hazony asked him about the coming elections in the EU. He said:

“I’m a doer. I’m not a man to provide intellectual ideas. … If I approach the question of the elections from that point, the sense of this European election is to change the leadership.”

He said the EU leadership has failed, so it must be changed. Simple as that. Their Green transitions has failed. They promised better agriculture, but the farmers are suffering all over Europe. Migration crisis bigger than ever. They did not stop the Ukraine war. If they promised these things and didn’t deliver, they have to go away, simple as that.

Yeah, it really is as simple as that.

Hazony asked him about the way the terms “populism” and “nationalism” are demonized in the Western media. He said that in Western Europe, all the bad things in history are attributed to nationalism. But in Central Europe, nationalism — a sense of one’s own people as a nation that deserves rights and consideration — is thought of as a solution to the problems caused by internationalism. The media falsely portray nationalism as a handmaiden to fascism, but it’s a lie.

On populism, Orban said, “I’m an old man, and I remember the intellectual level of conversations thirty years ago.” You could actually talk about real things with Helmut Kohl, Tony Blair, and others. Today, though, “everything is about a fight over language. It doesn’t atter what the substance is.” He went on: If you say the wrong word, they bomb you.

Populism was a well known category saying there were candidates for leadership promising nice and good things, knowing in power that they can’t fulfill them.

It’s absurd to call me a populist, Orban said.

“I promise things, and I deliver them all,” he said. “That’s not populism, that’s politics.”

He said that the kind of oppression that NatCon experienced the day earlier reminded him of what it was like when they started Fidesz in the late Communist period. “We rented a place in Budapest, then several hours prior to the meeting, they said it was not available. … The same kind of pressure you experienced here was very common in the second part of the Eighties in Hungary.”

Orban said that Hungary doesn’t have a migration problem. The reason is very simple, he said. We say a border is a border. To cross the border illegally is an illegal action. … It’s not a human rights something, it’s a crime.”

He went on:

Migration is about civilization as well. We have a civilization based on Christian roots and traditions. Those who are coming are not. They are coming from Muslim civilization. That raises plenty of complicated questions.

Orban said he’s a grandfather, and thinks about the kind of country his grandkids will be living in in the year 2100. Will it be a Muslim civilization, a Christian civilization, or mixed? That’s what we have to think about with migration.

“To live in a Christian society, though it’s not as strong as it was, is an amazing thing,” he said. “It’s the best thing I can imagine for my kids and grandkids. Why should we give that up?”

He hastened to say that he has nothing against Muslims. He recently visited Morocco, and was impressed by what he saw. “It’s nice there, but don’t bring it into [Europe], to change [us] when most people don’t like it.”

Hazony mentioned that the Tunisian owner of the hall where NatCon met defended this meeting he hosted, even though he disagreed with some of what was said. Hazony quoted the man as saying that if we don’t tolerate one another, we are going to set the whole country on fire.

Orban responded: “Migration is about the right of a community to decide who they want to live with. That’s all. … Thank you to the Tunisian owner. I think it was a good decision to let you come to Belgium.”

(Here’s a clip from a GBNews interview that Nigel Farage did with the venue owner, Taïeb Ben Yaghlane, who really does have courage. Please watch it. The man just wants to be a normal person living in a free society. God bless him.)

Hazony then pointed out that some people in the West consider Hungary to be a model for a Christian society, but facts show that most Hungarians don’t go to church.

“We Hungarians are in trouble because the orientation of the people to the eternal questions of life is diminishing,” Orban said. “We are more more living on the everyday level, [ignoring the] possibilities and motivation to think in a more abstract way about our life.”

He said bluntly that the churches in Hungary are not strong, and that this threatens Hungary’s future.

“I understand that if the churches are not doing better, if the prophets are not coming, if the professors are not speaking on philosophical issues, if the people aren’t willing to open their hearts, then we will lose Christianity.”

That said, there is the matter of Christianity as a cultural heritage. The state can’t compel people to believe in Christ, but it can encourage the preservation of Christian heritage through policies.

Hazony asked him to react to the charge often bruited in the media that he is “Putin’s closest ally in Europe.”

Orban said that Hungary supports Ukraine’s argument that it is sovereign. There is no question but that Hungary opposes Russia’s invasion.

The problem is what to do about it. “Ukraine is not a sovereign state anymore,” he said. “Ukraine is just a protectorate of the West.”

Hungary may not like what Russia has done to Ukraine, but this is a “war of two Slavic countries,” and not Hungary’s business. The European Union wants to say that it’s their war too, “but not fully. We would not like to die. Please, Ukrainians die, but we would not like to.”

“I don’t criticize the Ukrainians,” he went on. “They defend their own nation. It’s their decision.”

“My job as an outsider is only to define and understand what is the reason of the war. The reason of the war is very simple: NATO membership.”

Orban said that as leader of a country that was occupied by the Russians for forty-five years, he can say confidently that the Russians will never allow NATO in Ukraine. Does Russia have the right to impose that on Ukraine? Probably not, said Orban. Yet we have to live in the real world.

“It is definitely true that they cannot win,” he said, of Ukraine. “It is not about my values, it is not about the heart, it is not about philosophical convictions. It’s about reality.”

The Europeans are following a bad policy, he said. They are encouraging Ukraine to fight a war that it can’t win. Said Orban: “It’s not about being Putin’s ally; it’s about truth, it’s about reality.”

Two of the best speeches I heard at the conference came from N.S. Lyons, the pseudonymous geopolitical and cultural analyst, and Pierre Valentin, the Wunderkind French cultural analyst.

N.S. Lyons

Lyons, whose Substack “The Upheaval” is must-reading, gave what I think was probably the best speech of the entire conference. He said that conservatism as we know it has not conserved anything. Conservatism has become mostly about whiners and grifters. “Just voting harder is not going to be enough,” he said.

So what is to be done? He said there’s a four-point resistance strategy. The resistance:

1. Needs to be antifragile. That is, difficult to suppress and cancel. Ideally it should gain strength from persecution rather than lose it.

2. Must be scalable. Meaning, flexible enough to deal with various things that happen.

3. Must be self-legitimizing. Rather than depending on outcome of election for its legitimacy, it should be seen as valid in its core beliefs.

4. Must be self-reinforcing. This means that its every exercise of power generates additional power, and builds on successes.

The only strategy that incorporates all four is “the strategy of deliberately constructing a parallel state from the ground up.”

In fact, he said, the Hungarian governing party Fidesz did this by starting the “civic circles movement” in the 1980s and 1990s. It turned away from “high politics” to build local networks, train grassroots activist in skills in civic strategies, and so forth.

Eventually Fidesz overcame the postcommunist blob through “pre-political community organizing.”

So has India’s ruling powerhouse BJP party, which grew out of RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization that “represents and entire economic and cultural society operating in parallel to the state.”

Lyons also cited the Czech anticommunist dissidents, and Vaclav Benda’s idea of the “parallel polis,” which I highlighted in both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies.

The dynamic is this: rather than capturing institution, these organizers build community at the grassroots level. Eventually this builds popular legitimacy. In time, people find themselves more likely to turn to this parallel polis than the state. And then things really change.

“It does not come from sad pleading of an election campaign,” Lyons said. Rather, it emerges from the ground up, in a process guided by an elite cadre.

If this sounds like old-school Communist organizing, well, yeah, it is. The Left understands this.

“Frankly,” Lyons said, “that is why the left is constantly winning, which is why the Left controls nearly everything, and you do not.”

The Right has talked about counterrevolution, but it has done nothing, he said. “The Right must adopt a counterrevolutionary strategy, before complacent conservatives deliver us up to destruction.”

Now is a great time for creative counterrevolutionary thinking, Lyons said. People are restless and dissatisfied. Somebody on either the Left or the Right is going to tap into this hunger for change — and will likely claim the right to rule.

He criticized people who dismiss the parallel polis at useless, defeatist retreat — the usual slander against the Benedict Option. He also criticized conservatives who say the only way we can hope to win is through capturing elite networks.

“Today in the West there is an abandoned crown lying in the mud waiting to be picked up,” Lyons said. “So I would say to the right pick it up before somebody else does.”

Then came Pierre Valentin, who is only twenty-six, but listening to him is kind of what it must have felt like to watch young REM play at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga., in the early 1980s. You get the sense you’re watching a star being born.

Pierre Valentin

Valentin, who authored the first French study of the woke phenomenon, described wokeness as “a spirit of sheer negation.” He insightfully observed that wokeness is an inversion of the traditional scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat mechanism sacrifices the exception, the outsider, for the sake of preserving the whole. But in the woke paradigm, you sacrifice the whole to coddle the exception.