Päivi & The Advance Of European Dictatorship

And: Gender Ideology & Weimar; Trump & Economic Discontent; Tennessee Demons

Päivi Räsänen, Lutheran, confessor, hero of the faith

This morning at breakfast I ran into my friend Päivi Räsänen, the Lutheran member of parliament from Finland who stands convicted by a Finnish court of hate speech — for quoting the Bible, and for criticizing LGBT ideology. She was represented in court by ADF International. She was twice acquitted, by the Finnish state was so determined to get a conviction that they tried her a third time — and got what they wanted, at last. Here’s information about her case.

I’m telling you, Christian readers, you really need to put some of your tithe towards ADF, either its American branch or its international branch. I’ve seen with my own eyes how, when nobody will come to your legal defense, when you are thought to be a hate criminal, simply because of your faith, ADF will be there for you. I cannot say enough good things about them.

I arrived at this conference yesterday, too late to hear Päivi’s talk. In it, I was told, that Päivi was told on her flight here from Finland that she cannot go through London’s Heathrow airport on the flight back. Why? Because she’s a convicted hate criminal! The UK has determined that her presence in Britain — even simply making a connecting flight in the airport! — is unwelcome.

Can you believe it? See, this is why I ultimately decided not to settle for a while in Britain, at The Moorings in Cambridge, though I wanted to. It was unlikely that I would get into trouble with the state, my friends there said. But I couldn’t believe that confidently. Now that I hear someone as innocent and gentle as this Finnish granny has been forbidden by the British government even for setting foot in their international airport (which isn’t technically UK territory) — well, it confirms my suspicions. If I were deported from the UK over my writing, I could never return. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

Look what appeared in my Twitter feed this morning, from a French free speech advocate (this is a translation):

This afternoon [yesterday — RD], the European Parliament voted on the urgency of Chat Control—the scanning of your private messages. Not the final vote: that's Thursday. The maneuver is more interesting than the result.

Parliament had already rejected this text. The derogation expired in April. So the Council resurrected it in second reading—the procedure where you need an absolute majority of 361 votes to block it, where abstentions count as yeses—timed precisely for the last session before summer when half the hemicycle is already on vacation. The Council's own legal service says it violates Article 7 of the Charter. They know it. They do it anyway.

But here's what no one wants to see.

The problem isn't that these people are malicious. They're probably not. Brussels technocracy will likely never use this tool to crush you—it's too soft, too procedural, too busy justifying itself.

The problem is that you never build infrastructure for the power you have. You build it for the power that's coming.

And what they're assembling, brick by brick, "voluntary" derogation by "voluntary" derogation, is the perfect arsenal. The day a real economic crisis brings to power people who, unlike them, will have no scruples, they won't need to invent anything. It'll all already be there. The generalized scan, normalized, legal, operational. A loaded gun sitting on the table, ready to be picked up.

Hayek understood it: the road to serfdom is paved by well-intentioned administrators. You don't surrender your freedom all at once. You surrender it line by line, "to protect the children," "to fight terrorism," always for a reason no one dares contest.

History won't remember these people as protectors of anything. It will remember them as the architects of the cage. Those who built the apparatus and handed it over, smiling, to those who knew how to use it.

It’s happening. They’re building the control mechanisms. I don’t know what precisely they’re doing in the US now in this respect — thank God, literally, for the First Amendment — but I am confident that the government will do whatever it can to widen the surveillance state. This is not a right-wing or a left-wing thing exclusively, in my view.

After reading that, I reached out to a European lawyer and free speech activist whom I once met at some conference over there, to ask him about all this. I can’t quote him directly, and I got the impression he hadn’t heard of this move exactly, but he was not surprised. In general, he said, the security services across Europe (including the UK) know very well how disaffected the populations are, and how they have lost trust in their governments. They can and do monitor online chatter; this new move, to enable monitoring of people’s private, encrypted chats, is just an expansion of their powers (done in the name of “protecting children,” of course). They have made the decision that it’s easier to police native Europeans than to confront Muslims and other volatile migrant communities.

This was the reason the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain were allowed free reign. This is why everybody knows that on the Continent, large Muslim enclaves in cities are treated as no-go zones by the police. (I met a European friend here at this ADF conference who said that in her city, this is absolutely the case.) My European contact said it’s only going to get worse, because the state finds it easier to crack down on Christians and others who do things like homeschool, than it is to go after the people and populations who are actually destabilizing European public order.

I asked my friend if he had seen the film “Citizen Vigilante” yet. No, he had not. Watch it, I told him, then described what it’s about. I told him it is a very dark film, one that explicitly encourages vigilante violence. This, I told him, is a preview of what is to come if things don’t radically change in Europe. I sensed that my interlocutor agreed with me, because he brought up how quickly Yugoslavia descended into homicidal communal violence in the 1990s, and he talked about the example of Northern Ireland during the troubles, as what happens when the state loses authority, de facto, over armed and angry populations.

He predicted that in the years to come, whether or not “civil war” comes, Europeans like him will be living under greater and greater state control and censorship. The ruling classes across Europe are so fanatically dedicated to their political and anthropological model (which teaches them that all people are basically the same, and if migrants are not being fully integrated into European society, then that’s the fault of the natives), that they will take extraordinary, illiberal, undemocratic measures to protect that ideology, against their own peoples. AI, of course, will give the state vastly more powerful tools to control dissent.

In that respect, I think Päivi is a canary in the civilizational coal mine. The progressive bureaucratic order in European countries would rather attack faithful Christians as Enemies Of Society than deal with the actual problems they have. We can expect more of this. It’s a Finnish Lutheran lawmaker and grandmother today; it could easily be you tomorrow.

Once again, I bring to your attention the example of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Catholic priest who arrived in Slovakia in 1943, fleeing the Nazis. He told Catholics there that the Germans were going to lose the war, but the Soviets would be ruling their country when it was over — and that the first thing the Soviets would do is persecute the Church. Most people didn’t believe him, but a lot of young people did, and they helped Father Kolakovic build the foundation for the underground church in that country, to prepare for the coming persecution.

I dedicated Live Not By Lies to the memory of Father Kolakovic. He is speaking to us now. He really us. Listen! We should try to stop what’s happening if we can, wherever we are. But at the same time, we should prepare in concrete ways, both spiritual and material, for resisting in case we cannot stop the incoming tide of dictatorship under the guise of saving liberal democracy from Christians, nationalists, and other dissenters, including ordinary people who are sick and tired of what their leaders are doing to them and their countries.

Päivi Räsänen, an elected European lawmaker, cannot travel through Heathrow Airport on the way back home, on orders of His Majesty’s government. Why? Because she is a convicted hate-speech criminal, for quoting the Bible in public. That’s where we are.

Gender Ideology & Weimar

I’m listening to a talk right now featuring female high school athletes who went to court to fight for their right to compete without facing males pretending to be women. This is the most insane thing! One of the young women said in her local school board meeting over the issue, all the male board members voted to support the rights of biological females — but all the female board members voted in favor of the trans athletes. The young woman said, from the stage, that that was shocking and disappointing.

Women turning against women! Suicidal empathy. It’s so often the women who are the worst on these issues affecting women! Migration included.

I’m sitting here in awe of the courage of these young women. One of them just said that when she showed up in her homeroom class wearing a t-shirt that said “SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS,” her teacher told her, “I see you as less of a human because of that.”

Gang, when woke comes back into power, as it very will might, they’re going to double down on this. The most committed wokes don’t see us dissenters as human. And you know what that means.

This is all hitting me in a particular way because on the flight here, I finished a terrific book, Hitler In Our Selves, by the philosopher Max Picard, a Swiss German Jew who converted to Catholicism. He wrote it in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of Nazism’s defeat. The general point of the book is that what happened in Germany was not a one-off. Remember Solzhenitsyn’s warning that what happened in Russia — the triumph of totalitarian Communism — could happen anywhere on earth, under the right conditions? That’s what Max Picard says too, about Nazism.

Picard’s basic point is that modern conditions created an atmosphere that was prepared to accept Hitler. Why? Because it effectively destroyed Christianity, and, more deeply, the faith people had in the existence of a binding transcendent order that allowed them to make sense of the world.

This allowed chaos to develop in the human soul — “discontinuity” is the word he uses — such that people lost a sense of organic connection to the past, and to any values outside of themselves. They were left rootless, fragmented, and essentially alone (this is what Arendt meant when she said that “social atomization” was the prime factor by far in the triumph of totalitarianism in both Germany and Russia).

In Weimar Germany, writes Picard, people lived only for the moment, and lived lives that were “disjointed” — where nothing had to relate to anything else. The prevalence of mass media (“radio”) helped create this sense of false reality (if only Picard had lived to see the Internet!). In such an environment, people began to think that their emotions, and emotional needs, were the basis of truth.

Picard credited God, and the Allied powers of the West (America and Britain, chiefly) where people still believed in God, or at least in the Christian foundation of morality, with Hitler’s defeat. And yet, he wrote that the conditions that brought Hitler to power exist everywhere in modernity. He wrote:

This monstrous tower of evil that went up in Germany demonstrated not only for Germany but for all mankind that no human being, no nation, and no world can stand upon the foundation of dissolution and evil.

More (emphases in the original):

[I]t is up to the other nations to realize that the evil which towered in Germany was a monument for their own evils, too, and that this evil monument collapsed not only to punish the Germans but to warn other nations as well. It collapsed in order that the evil’s back would be broken, not only in this one country, but in all countries.

… In Germany there was manifested as a whole and collapsed as a whole what, as a disposition, exists within all nations.

I have to thank my friend Eddie LaRow for giving me this precious book. I am rewriting now the final chapter of Weimar America in light of it. Picard — again, an ethnic Jew who converted to Catholicism — points out that anti-Semitism had obviously long existed within Christendom, but that Christendom still had the internal resources to combat it. Absent Christianity and the authority of the Bible, there’s nothing. It’s all will to power.

This is the point of Weimar America — Picard’s point, ultimately: that we exist now in a time of spiritual and philosophical chaos, and that we, like the Germans of the 1920s, are prepared to receive our own new, and doubtless very different, Adolf Hitler. He could be a man of the left or the right. He could be a man of no particular ideological roots. All he has to do is to find a way to speak meaningfully to the overwhelming anxieties of rootless, lonely, frightened people, people who have lost faith in institutions, activate their sense of grievance, and give to them a Narrative that will give them a way to understand their own suffering, and a way to redeem it.

As both Picard and Arendt say, it doesn’t have to make logical sense. It only has to be internally consistent. We are no longer talking about the realm of rationality. We are talking about psychology. Ultimately, we are talking about spirituality. We are talking about Evil and the conditions it needs to triumph.

After reading Picard, I am less shocked by the horrifying outbreak of raw Jew-hatred among Zoomers of both left and right. This generation has no memory of the Holocaust, or of Nazism — at least no memory that binds and directs their thinking and action. What’s more, as I will show in Weimar America, growing up shaped by the Internet has created within them an “imaginary” (Charles Taylor’s word) that is the very model of chaos and fragmentation.

I don’t know how to fight this. I have some ideas, and will explore them in the book. But in the end, if we don’t recover a strong form of Christianity — and not these fake, anti-Semitic, misogynistic forms that are gaining strength among Zoomers — we are doomed.

Back to the gender ideology thing: see, this is a primary example of what Picard is talking about. When we no longer perceive a natural connection between biology and sex, that is a clear sign that we are living in a society that has lost its gravity, and is spinning out into nihilism. It is encouraging to see signs that maybe, just maybe, society is regaining its sanity on this (at least in the US), but the fact that it emerged in the first place, and became an unquestionable dogma within science, the media, the judiciary, and institutions — well, that tells us something. That tells us something big.

Trump And Economic Discontent

I see that the war with Iran is back on. I’ve been saying in this space that based on what I observed in Hungary, with Viktor Orban’s landslide loss, that Donald Trump had better be very, very careful about his own corruption and misgovernment while the country he governs is suffering economically. To repeat what an Orban supporter told me when I first arrived in Hungary: we all know that Fidesz, Orban’s party, sustains a lot of corruption, but we can overlook it as long as the economy is okay. But if that ever turns, it’s lights out for Fidesz. And that’s exactly what happened.

Orban thought that he could ride back into office by pointing out how bad, how liberal, his political challengers were. He was wrong.

There’s a new poll out revealing growing political discontent among Trump 2024 voters with the president, based on the economy. Excerpt:

…54% of Maga faithful think the government is the most responsible for the rising prices of goods and services. Contrary to the repeated claims from the White House, 41% of them believe economists’ observation that American consumers bear most of the costs of Trump’s tariffs. Only 31% buy Trump’s argument that foreigners pick up the tab.

Maga voters have not abandoned the president. By recent counts, 62% of rank-and-file Republicans identify as Maga, up from only 38% in September of 2022. 57% of them trust that the government considers the affordability crisis a top priority. And 69% believe the government is capable of fixing it. Still, misgivings are creeping in: just over a third of Maga faithful think the government has made it worse.

Beyond the growing angst among Trump’s most loyal followers, what should most worry the president is the brewing discontent outside the borders of his base, which is still a minority of the overall electorate. If Maga Republicans are finding themselves at odds with their leader, other voters – including many Republicans – have an even more jaundiced view of his endeavors.

The share of Republicans – Maga or not – who believe the economy is getting worse hit 38% in the latest Harris poll, up from 33% of Republicans surveyed in April last year. The share of Republicans who think the economy is getting better declined from a year ago, from 31% to 27%. The opinion of independent voters is probably the best barometer of where the electorate, on average, will land in the fall. Forty-four per cent think their financial security is deteriorating, almost three times the share who believe it is getting better.

In July, just four months before the midterm elections, these signs of voter discontent all the way through to Trump’s core partisans might presage a devastating Blue Wave to dramatically reconfigure the political profile of Congress. And yet, for all the damage caused by Trump’s policies on the American people, Americans are not quite convinced that Democrats would do any better.

Yes, this is The Guardian, but you’d be foolish to say “I don’t believe a liberal UK rag.” I can report anecdotally that these findings are accurate. I’ve had a number of conversations with Trump supporters since I returned, and all of them say the same thing: that the rising cost of living, and Trump’s preoccupation with getting personally rich on crypto and other schemes, as well as his tariff bungle and this war he started, and alienating them.

They are not to the point of voting Democratic, and probably won’t get there. But these are convinced conservatives. Elections in America are decided in the middle, by independents. As these things go, people don’t have to have faith that the other party will fix things in order to vote them into office, as a protest against the status quo. Trump is playing a dangerous game here, and so are the Republicans.

The deeper story is the growing loss of faith among Americans in either political party, in the face of economic distress. If neither Republicans nor Democrats can provide a realistic solution (and I think this persistent inflation is because both Trump 1.0 and Biden printed boatloads of money to stimulate the economy during Covid) to the cost of living crisis, people will start to look for more radical alternatives. You know as readers of this newsletter that there are radicals of both left and right waiting in the wings to give them those alternatives.

Recently I heard somebody, can’t remember where, say that things had gotten so bad in Venezuela in the early 1990s that people voted in the left-wing populist Hugo Chavez, thinking that things couldn’t get much worse. Oh, but they did: much, much worse, both economically and politically. Things can always get worse. But nobody thinks of that when they are stressed to the max trying to pay their bills, and the politicians in charge seem indifferent to their suffering, or impotent to relieve it.

Demons In Tennessee

Here’s a fairly jaw-dropping story from the great features writer Stephanie McCrummen, who writes in The Atlantic about what happened when some freelance deliverance ministers came to Maryville, a small east Tennessee town, and confronted the lesbian owner of a progressive bookstore. McCammon interviewed me for the piece a while back; I gave her the interview because I know her work, and I trust her. She quoted me accurately and fairly, though the piece itself made me think hard about something difficult and unpleasant. I’ll get to that in a second. Excerpt from the beginning:

There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.

By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.

The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.

They ended up moving to Maryville, and set up shop across the road from a progressive bookstore that was a local hub of progressive politics, drag shows, and so forth. The owner, Lisa Misosky, is an out lesbian. The Brewers and the people at the storefront charismatic church, the Well, decided that the bookstore was a demonic stronghold, and led a campaign against it. It got ugly:

The fundraiser went on, but Misosky remained unsettled. She blamed the Well for “putting a target on our back” and providing “moral cover” for people who might want to justify violence. She spent the night of the protest and several nights after that camped out on the floor of Southland with a .38, a 9-mm, a shotgun, and a baseball bat.

Mike told me that he and Andrea were merely bringing the reality of demonic activities at Southland to light. “The truth hurts,” he said. “We won’t resolve our differences, our worldviews. I would never physically harm anyone, but I will bring an awareness.”

In McCrummen’s telling, I enter the story simply to talk about my belief in the reality of the demonic and spiritual warfare. She’s trying to explain to readers that this belief is not confined to radicalized storefront charismatics — and she’s right. She points out that J.D. Vance, among others, has talked about his belief in them.

Here’s the thing: reading the story, I felt sorry for Misosky — even as I believe that whether she knows it or not, the things that happen at her bookstore are ultimately demonic. If I live there, and felt convinced of this with relation to her bookstore, the kind of spiritual warfare I would undertake would be far, far quieter. Why? For one thing, the Brewers seem to have zero discernment or humility. They come off as fanatical, and utterly unconcerned with the possibility that they might be stirring up violence against Misosky and her customers. Misosky tells the journalist that she has no idea what they mean by calling her and her bookstore demonic. She could be dissembling, but I think she’s likely telling the truth.

That doesn’t mean that the spirit of evil isn’t involved at some level. But come on, to try to turn the whole town against this woman and her customers, based on your belief that her bookstore is a synagogue of Satan?!

I can’t get behind that, not at all. And yet, is Mike Brewer not correct when he says that there is no way to reconcile with spiritual evil? Would my far more subtle approach be a form of compromise?

Maybe. But as you know, I’m reading Carlos Eire’s history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and learning how quickly crowds can come to believe that their opponents — even fellow Christians! — are in league with the Devil, and therefore there is nothing to be done with them but burn them at the stake. This mentality led not only to witch-burnings, but to the burnings of heretics, by both Catholics and Protestants — sometimes of Catholics by Catholics, and Protestants by Protestants!

I guess in my case, I have stark terror of the power of the crowd, the mob, to become fanatical. In Weimar Germany, as I’ve learned, Hitler came to power in large part by giving the German people an Other, or Others, to focus their hatred on. He called the Jews (but not only the Jews) the mortal enemies of the German people, and of all things good and true. He construed them as subhuman. We know what happened next.

In general, I support Christians who undertake spiritual warfare. But it has to be done in a spirit of discernment, of humility, and maybe most of all, a love for the people one believes are possessed, or otherwise serving evil spirits, such that you seek their liberation, not their destruction.

If I had been living in Maryville while this was going on, I like to think that I would have gone to the Brewers and said listen, I’m generally on your side. Demons are real! Spiritual warfare is necessary! But you need to think long and hard about the way you are going about this. You might get some people killed. Is that what you want?

You are behaving, I would have said, inhumanely. If Lisa Misosky and her customers really are serving the Devil, I would have told them, then your ultimate goal should be to help them find deliverance from spiritual bondage. Lisa Misosky is not your enemy, in the end; if you are correct, then she is just a pawn in the Devil’s game. And the crude, brutal way you are going about this strikes me as more likely to serve the Devil’s purposes than God’s. The Devil hates humanity, and he would be quite happy to see Misosky and her bookstore destroyed, if only to bring shame and discredit onto Christians.

I don’t know, my mind is unsettled about this. What do you all think about this topic? What do you think about what the Brewers did?

The deep question here is: If we believe the Devil is real, and that he manifests in this world, in part through the deeds of people who serve him, wittingly or unwittingly, then how should we react to this? When I listen to how Father Carlos Martins treats possessed people in his “Exorcist Files” cases, I hear a man who sees the possessed person not at the enemy, but as a pawn of the enemy, a suffering soul who needs liberation.

Father Martins never, ever compromises with what he regards as evil. But he also knows how evil works. Evil can get very far when those fighting it come to believe without doubt that they are on God’s side, and those people who oppose them are in some basic way inhuman. I mean, look, you know that I believe that Antifa, Nick Fuentes, trans activists, and people like that are not on the side of what is good and true and holy. Yet they are human beings. What then?

As you know, there is a history of the KKK in my own town, even in my family. I have known personally men who were in the Klan. They served evil, no question. I didn’t know that they had done this when I knew them as a child and as a teenager, but I learned it later. I had seen the humane side of these men. I knew they were capable of great good — but also great evil. Both inside the same persons! Absolutely, what they stood for should have been fought, and fought hard. But to stir people up to the point of considering burning down their houses, for example? How can that be godly?

There has to be a better way, a more authentically Christian way, of resisting the Devil.

‘Not Of This World’

I became aware this morning, via a friend, of a documentary in process of production called “Not Of This World: Catholic Faith In The Age Of Disclosure.” It’s by a Catholic filmmaker, Sam Sorich, who previously made an acclaimed documentary about Rene Girard. Sam sets out to explore what the Catholic Church, including theologians and informed laymen, think about the whole UAP topic. Here’s the trailer, based on interviews he’s done so far:

As you can see, he’s got some big names in it, including theologian Larry Chapp, who is an experiencer (!), and David Grusch, the well-known whistleblower, who says that this is phenomenon has a spiritual dimension, and the Church ought to be involved.

I’m told that Sam is still doing interviews, but needs funding to continue. If this topic interests you, follow the link to watch the trailer, and learn how you can contribute. Based on the trailer, I can’t wait for the movie to come out. Fundamentally, I believe, the UAP phenomenon is a spiritual one, even in its material manifestations. Most people in the churches don’t want to think about it, in any way. But we have to think about it. It’s here, and the disclosures are only going to increase.

Whether you are a pastor or a layperson, you need to become informed about this discussion. Don’t trust everything you hear or read. There is a lot of deception and outright wackadoodlery in this world. But you need at least to read serious books and discussions about it, so you will know how to think about it, and how to act in the face of things that are yet to come out. (I know more than I can say about this, but I can at least put it to you that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.) I would start with Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic and Jacques Vallée’s Passport To Magonia (1969). Any of you who are serious about the topic, I invite you to suggest other titles in the comments.

I’m sending today’s Diary to the entire list, but if you are a free subscriber, I hope you will consider taking out a paid subscription. I write every weekday, about an eclectic series of topics (today’s is typical). And by the way, if you are a subscriber but you aren’t getting this newsletter regularly in your mailbox, that’s because of a glitch in the Substack software. I can’t fix it on my end, but you can on your end. Go to the Help section on your Substack account page.