What If We Lose?

Political And Religious Conservatives Had Better Face A Stark Possibility

If you are a conservative like me, you are finding yourself standing here wondering how on earth Kamala Harris is doing so well against Donald Trump. Unless you were born two weeks ago, you are old enough to remember a time when Harris was widely considered to be a bad joke. She had very high unfavorable ratings, and she was known chiefly for two things: 1) her unintentionally hilarious word salads, and 2) failing at the one task Biden assigned her — fixing the border.

And now she has pulled even with Trump, an admittedly flawed candidate (we know, we know), but one who was thought to have had the election in the bag after he survived an assassination attempt, and with his face bloodied, pumped his fist into the air, and chanted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That’s primal stuff. And had Joe Biden remained the nominee, Trump backers would be picking out now what they planned to wear to the Inaugural Ball.

But that didn’t happen. The various parts of the Machine — the Democratic Party, the media, the tech masters, and others — have come together brilliantly to show how easy it is to manufacture reality, and therefore consent. Kamala Harris is no different today than she ever was. It’s just that the Machine has reframed her. That, and there is a deeply felt need among liberals and Trump haters of all kinds to have someone capable of preventing Big Orange’s return. It is now easy to foresee that Harris could run the veep equivalent of a Rose Garden campaign, like Biden did in 2020 during Covid, and win this thing. Normally you would expect the media to call her out for not having press conferences and giving interviews, but we all know that’s not going to happen, not this year, and not any year for an opponent of Donald Trump.

And I worry that Trump is going to screw this up. Even a great candidate would struggle against the Machine colossus. Trump is not a great candidate. I can’t get over how badly he botched the most important speech of his life: his Republican Convention address. Trump had only days earlier dramatically survived an assassination attempt, and in so doing unwittingly produced one of the great images of American history. There were Americans who did not like him who were willing to give Trump a fresh look now. He had the chance to re-introduce himself to America, to take advantage of the wave of sympathy, or at least of awe (however grudging), that had accrued to him because of the murder attempt, and the way he handled it in the moment.

He blew it. He gave a long, rambling speech that utterly failed the gravity and opportunity of the moment.

I hope he can turn it around. I won’t start taking any of these polls seriously until after Labor Day. I am among the Very Online, and we pay attention to politics way, way more closely than normal people. It’s no bad thing for Team Trump to get scared right about now, so they get more serious about a plan of attack against a candidate who is all of a sudden far more formidable than we thought, owing to all her natural advantages with the media and tech.

Let’s not forget how confident the Hillary Clinton campaign was of her victory, even to the very end. I think back at the moment to the summer of 2016, when I was living in Baton Rouge, which was then suffering from a 500-year flood, a true catastrophe that was like that city’s Hurricane Katrina. On one weekend immediately following the flood, candidate Trump flew into the city to visit people who had lost their homes, and everything. That same day, Hillary was at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser at Lady Rothschild’s beach home in Martha’s Vineyard. Overconfidence!

This is an election that the Republicans cannot afford to lose. Kamala Harris really is the most left-wing Democratic nominee ever. It’s not even close. She has advocated for positions on the farthest left of her party. She’s for the entire panoply of the LGBT agenda, and has stated in an interview that she believes the government should pay for sex changes for transgendered inmates. If you saw the travesty in Paris this week, when an intersexed “female” boxer, with testosterone surging through his/her veins, pummeled an Italian female boxer into surrender, then you had better understand that this is exactly the kind of thing Kamala supports. I’m serious.

It’s also true that she is and always has been all-in on the DEI program. You will likely never hear from the mainstream media about any of this during this campaign. But here’s something from Reason during the 2020 fall campaign:

"There's a big difference between equality and equity," says Harris. "Equality suggests, 'Oh, everyone should get the same amount.' The problem with that, not everybody's starting in the same place."

Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment, which means "we all end up at the same place."

Watch the short clip in which Harris lays it out. Robby Soave of Reason commented:

This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government should be obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. The government cannot deny rights to certain people because they are black, female, Muslim, etc.—this would be unequal treatment.

A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people. In accordance with this thinking, the authorities might be justified in giving some people more rights than others. Indeed, this would arguably be strictly necessary, in order to create a society where everyone ends up in the exact same situation.

More:

If the Biden-Harris ticket triumphs on Election Day, expect some of these people to find themselves staffing the vast federal bureaucracy, taking jobs in the Departments of Education, Labor, Housing, and elsewhere. There are a million different ways for these bureaucrats to make marginal, under-the-radar policy changes that support an equity-over-equality worldview. That's a far greater danger than Harris's earnest and clumsy attempts to woo the wokest of the woke.

Is this what America wants? Because it’s what America is going to get if Harris wins. This kind of thing is far, far more important than whether or not Kamala is “black” or not. This is the kind of stupid crap that fascinates Trump.

Conservatives have to hope that the Republicans are busy making ads that remind Americans of just how radical Kamala Harris is. We know that the media are committed to hyping the psy-op “J.D. Vance is weird” meme to counter the truly extreme positions and people with whom Harris is legitimately associated. But Trump himself is going to have to show far more of the thing he conspicuously lacks: discipline.

It would do us conservatives a lot of good to think hard about what a Harris victory would mean for us and the things we care about. This is an interesting thought from a conservative Twitter account:

I have noticed over the past decade or so that many conservatives, especially conservative Christians, have a powerful mental block that keeps them from taking progressivism as seriously as they ought to do: the fundamental belief that wokeness is an aberration that will eventually burn out as the People stand up to it. As you regular readers know, I keep pointing to the great book The Final Pagan Generation, by the historian Edward J. Watts, which explores how many fourth-century pagan elites in Rome were oblivious to the revolutionary changes happening in their culture and civilization. They really did believe that this Christian business was of little matter, ultimately; Rome had always been pagan, and once the masses came to their senses, they would return to form.

This is us! We are not fated to succumb to wokeness, but the deep currents of our culture are taking us there, and there is far too little paddling against those currents. And most conservatives, especially conservative Christians, have no plan. Indeed, they call people like me “defeatist” for imagining the worst as a possibility for us.

Look at Britain today. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news from there about the white civic unrest and the Starmer government’s reaction to them. Whenever British people of color, including Muslims, riot, the government is largely silent. But when whites rioted recently over the alleged knife murder of little girls by a black British teenager whose family migrated from Rwanda, it became a national emergency for the Starmeristas. Note well that Britain is in so much trouble with ethnic strife in large part because the Tories, those useless fake conservatives, opened the floodgates of migration, and governed according to the prejudices of the elite class, which never, ever allows itself to look upon non-whites as actual human beings, but instead as innocents whose existence serves only to be Victims™ of the racist white mob.

Britain is going to face more race riots and racial strife because the elites have miserably failed. And the elites have miserably failed because wokeness, even in a moderated, Torified form, has replaced old-fashioned liberalism as the core ideology of the Ruling Class. Of course it’s true in America as well. Why do you think that the Democrats can brazenly pander racially — e.g., “White Dudes for Harris” — but the GOP doesn’t dare to appeal to its base in similar racial terms? The point is not that Team Trump should imitate the Democrats. In fact, I think that this kind of racialized politics is deadly for liberal democracy in a diverse polity. The point rather is that wokeness really is what Wes Yang called the successor ideology to liberalism. It is the new normal among elites, who have busily spread it to younger generations who have not been inoculated against it by memories of a time when Americans believed in the liberal, Christian principles taught by Martin Luther King.

If the media can get a candidate who is the walking embodiment of wokeness elected President of the United States, it will be a watershed moment. It will be the moment in which the woke revolution has become institutionalized. Why? Because it will show that even a candidate who is unambiguously extreme on matters of DEI and LGBT can still command enough votes to be elected president. We can (and will) gripe about how unfair the media were, and all the rest, but that won’t negate the fact that Kamala Harris will be president, and will continue to institutionalize the revolution throughout the government. We who say, “But if only the Republicans had nominated someone like Ron DeSantis, this wouldn’t have happened” — well, we will be right, but Kamala will be president. This will be the cost of our dicking around with Trump. A country that might have been pulled away from wokeness by a smart, fearlessly anti-woke normie president will have missed that chance.

Look, I get it: we don’t have the luxury of coulda-woulda-shoulda now. Whatever Trump’s flaws, he is the only alternative to Kamala. I’m on board, and if you are a conservative, you should be too (“Vote For The Windbag. It’s Important.”) I’m not asking you to be as pessimistic as I am — I really do believe that conservatism as we have known it is on “an inexorable march to extinction,” but I hope I’m wrong — but you do need at least to inhabit the Worst Case Scenario headspace for a time, to imagine what it would be like if we are right.

Let’s return for a moment to the symbolism of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. It is massively important, for a reason that London-based writer Mike Starkey explains in this must-read blog post. Starkey focuses on liberal Christians who dismissed other Christians’ objections to the blasphemous pageant. More broadly, he’s talking about the coping strategy that conservatives and normie liberals use to deal with things like this. Excerpts:

The context was the opening ceremony of an event that more than any other stands as a symbol of unity in a divided world.

The French have, of course, been poking fun at Christianity for centuries (a). My undergraduate degree was in French literature, and I enjoyed the provocations of Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre et al. There’s a place for robust debate about the existence of God, the failings of the Church, and religious satire. No faith should be immune from having fun poked at it.

But the Olympics opening ceremony wasn’t a seminar room, or satirical review. It was the unifying ceremony of a global celebration of sport and goodwill, a celebration keen to encourage underrepresented regions of the world to take part.

The Cène on the Seine featured Western arty types parodying an iconic image of a faith which today is overwhelmingly African, Latin and Asian, and by far the most persecuted in the world. It was Westerners punching down – in a camp, knowing, superior sort of way.

In social justice circles today, imperialism and racism are viewed as original sins of Western culture. By a supreme irony, the drag parody of the Last Supper managed to be a distilled expression of both. It featured camp, arty, and mostly male Westerners, poking fun at a faith that is globally poor, ethnically mixed and majority black, persecuted, and predominantly female.

This is such an important point! We all should know by now that the terms “diversity” and “inclusion” are Orwellian terms that mean the opposite of what those who deploy them as culture-war weapons say they mean. I had not thought until Starkey brought it up that the Olympic Games are the only globally shared event that stands for the essential unity of humanity, through athletic competition — and the French, those provincial cosmopolitans, used it to mock a religious faith that, globally speaking, is mostly poor, non-white, and female.

Don’t you get it? This is fundamentally about the queering of Christian norms, about their inversion. There is a reason that the black masses celebrated by occultists typically invert the Christian rite. These people who hate Christianity nevertheless understand its power. They operate under what is sometimes called the “Law of Reversal,” which commands occultists to access the power of inverting Christianity. When an apostate from Aleister Crowley’s cult came to my former parish in Baton Rouge, he told me he was startled to discover how much the Crowley-authored black mass had in common with the Divine Liturgy. He had participated in Crowleyan ceremonies, and saw with his own eyes, in an Orthodox Church, that the Crowley followers inverted the Christian liturgy.

This is what is happening at a society-wide scale. This is what the Olympics Opening Ceremony meant. If you doubt me, watch this 25-minute breakdown by Jonathan Pageau, who is a peerless guide to the symbolic meaning behind the cultural revolution now overtaking the West.

In the lecture, Pageau said we shouldn’t be surprised by the Opening Ceremony, which is just a continuation of what has been going on in Western culture for the past two decades. He begins by laughing at the capacity of some Christians to accept gaslighting, in the sense of claiming that ackshually, it was not a parody of the Last Supper, but of a Dutch painting. (This doesn’t surprise me; again, I have found that the aversion to seeing what it plainly in front of one’s eyes is commonplace.)

Pageau says that what is going on in the broader culture — and the Olympics ceremony was merely a distillation of it — is the breaking down of differences, the shattering of identities and the dis-integration of symbols, for the sake of reconstituting them into a new and “higher” reality.

Pageau says that the Last Supper, famously depicted by Leonardo, is a symbol of communion, of unity in Christ. Christians consider it to have been the first Eucharist. The multiplicity of the disciples came together at the table around the person of Christ, who gave us the Eucharist. This is my Body, this is my Blood, said Jesus. The disciples at that table “ate” their God — as do the Orthodox, the Catholics, and some Protestants every Sunday. This is a mystery that is at the heart of the Christian faith. And, as Pageau emphasizes, the Last Supper is a symbol of the faith that unified the West.

So, in the blasphemous parody, the god served at the queer banquet was Dionysus, the god of chaos and revelry. Note that the worship of Dionysus (Bacchus) was an orgy, the “Bacchanalia”; similarly, as Pageau notes, the god Dionysus served as the pseudo-eucharistic meal, sings of the virtue of “nakedness,” as the music becomes more sensual. Pageau points out that the scene then goes into a segment labeled “Darkness,” culminating in John Lennon’s nihilistic anthem, “Imagine.”

Pageau shakes his head at the utter cluelessness of Christians who can’t or won’t see what’s happening here. “What we’re seeing is the return of Dionysus. … Civilization is being undone.”

He cautions at the end that we mustn’t attribute too much awareness to the orchestrators of this pageant — meaning, they may not really know what they’re doing. They might simply be following the natural logic of values with which they identify. You don’t have to be consciously anti-Christian, in other words, to have given yourself over to a profoundly anti-Christian symbolic pageant.

Pageau also says that it is not enough simply to get alarmed and angry over the Paris event. We cannot afford to neglect to build structures and ways of life that will allow us and our Christian descendants to resist, in faith, the “new systems of control” that these post-Christians are putting into place. In other words: take the Benedict Option.

One thing Pageau doesn’t mention, or at least doesn’t dwell on, is that the cult of Dionysus/Bacchus featured the maenads — frenzied women whose ecstatic worship was sometimes considered a threat to public order by the Romans. In Euripides great play The Bacchae, the maenads murder King Pentheus by tearing his body to pieces. This symbolizes primal female frenzy destroying male authority by dis-integrating that authority in the person of the king’s body.

This is what’s going on throughout the West today. When you see people complaining that “white liberal women” are leading the destruction, in a very real sense they are right, in a Bacchic sense. But the woke elites take it even further, using pseudo-females to invert even sexual identity. What we watched in Paris was a pseudo-female frenzy symbolically destroying Christ’s authority by substituting the god’s body with Dionysus’s.

At this point I want to return to Mike Starkey’s discourse. He writes:

The drag queen at a glance represents the most hallowed values of our age: tolerance, diversity, freedom to be your true self, fluidity of identity, playfulness. BBC News Online has become particularly obsessed with drag, daily trotting out the most trivial of stories that happen to involve a drag queen.

Kamala Harris pointedly launched her campaign for the US presidency in July 2024 on RuPaul’s Drag Race. What better way to flag up a programme of progressive values?

It was natural that a global event dedicated to inclusion would reach for the drag queens. Who could possibly object to the group that, at a glance, communicates inclusion?

More:

To a certain post-evangelical and liberal Catholic mindset, the drag queen has assumed the status of a hallowed, redemptive figure, one who mediates healing and atonement. In some circles, drag queens have become a new sacred caste. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on this.

Inclusive, liberal Catholic and post-evangelical Christians characterise their movements as motivated by a rethink of theology (questioning archaic dogmas), and extending the scope of social justice (centred on liberation and equity). Less often admitted is the extent to which liberal Christianity is motivated by a very personal angst about one’s own past.

Liberal-minded Christians who grew up in conservative evangelical, Pentecostal and traditionalist Catholic churches are likely to have encountered teachings and pastoral approaches they now find narrow and exclusionary, and a church culture they now shudder at.

Of course, revisiting and interrogating earlier expressions of faith is entirely healthy. Real faith is self-critical and unafraid of hard questions.

But a determined flight from hurt or shame in childhood can leave people vulnerable to looking for healing and redemption in dodgy places (a classic trope is the ex-Catholic drawn into a cult).

It was natural that a Christian movement dedicated to inclusion, and in reaction to a narrow faith from the past, would reach for today’s cultural icon of inclusion, the drag queen, and make them centre stage. The presence of a drag queen adds a halo of warm inclusivity; it blows a raspberry at the puritanical pastor or prejudiced priest from the past. It tells the world, ‘I’ve broken free’.

For a certain type of liberal-minded Christian, the drag queen represents faith in the creative, limitless possibilities of the liberated self; freedom from legalism and judgement; the possibility of a life unburdened from shame.

When conservative Christians slammed the drag Lord’s Supper, they were unwittingly blaspheming against a redemptive icon of today’s progressive church: the new Queen of Heaven.

What we saw in Paris was a globally televised celebration of Dark Enchantment. In my forthcoming book Living In Wonder (pre-order here from Amazon, or click here to order a personalized copy exclusively from Eighth Day Books), I talk about how the world is becoming re-enchanted whether we see it or not, and that re-enchantment does not mean exclusively Christian re-enchantment. If we Christians do not find our way to a way of re-enchanting our experience of God, we risk losing our children to neo-pagans (I use the term loosely) who offer an experience of enchantment.

In the book, I cite Jonathan Pageau as a prophetic guide to understanding the moment, and navigating through it as a Christian. Though Pageau is Orthodox, his insights are vital for all Christians, and even non-Christians who nevertheless seek to resist cultural disintegration and dark enchantment. From Living In Wonder:

“Materialism has played itself out,” Pageau tells me. “After World War II, the philosophical materialists and reductionists claimed they could explain everything in terms of purely material reasons. But you can’t do that with consciousness. People have begun to see that there is a necessary patterning to reality, a patterning that seems to have something to do with our capacity to perceive reality and to participate in it consciously.”

For all its gifts, science alone can’t offer any of us a reason to live, or the patterns by which we must live, if we are to flourish. In Pageau’s view, much of contemporary Christianity (he came to Orthodoxy from evangelicalism) lacks the mythological depth to be an island of meaning in the storm-tossed sea of liquid modernity. On the other hand, ancient Orthodoxy has preserved a framework of imagination and practices through which time and place are patterned and made sacred. In the twenty-first century, Orthodox Christianity resembles the primitive forms of faith discussed by Mircea Eliade—and therein lies its particular power to speak to the post-Christian modern world.

This, says Pageau, offers a lifeline to moderns who are tossed around by their passions, told they are free to choose everything—but have no idea what to choose. In Orthodoxy, they can find not merely a story and a set of moral and theological beliefs but also a profound description of how reality works. This includes patterns, hierarchies of patterns, and patterns embedded in Scripture, mythology, the natural world, ritual, and elsewhere.

This is a coherent reality that people don’t create but rather discover, if they can escape their radical subjectivity—the prison inside their own heads.

Related to all this is a phenomenon observed by the Evangelical author Megan Basham in her new book Shepherds For Sale, which attacks some Evangelical pastors and other leaders for selling out Biblical truth for progressive politics. The book was just released, and has caused some controversy. Some figures she criticizes have said she did so unfairly. I am in no position to pass judgment one way or the other, because I’m not part of that community, and don’t have a way to evaluate Basham’s claims and counterclaims. But the Basham book excerpt published in First Things (“The Plot To Queer Evangelical Churches”) seems pretty straightforward. Basham writes in detail about how well-funded pro-LGBT initiatives have gained a strong foothold in many Evangelical churches, in part because influential pastors have decided to act deceptively to mainstream it. She concludes the essay thus:

Many pastors, doctrinally sound but unaware of the boot camp efforts that have been under way for years, have, out of a desire not to appear judgmental or overly focused on one sin to the exclusion of others, been successfully shamed into barely mentioning homosexuality, transgenderism, or the rest of the LGBTQ array. Given this imbalance in commitment to our respective beliefs, faithful Christians can hardly wonder at the fact that the LGBTQ movement is chewing up ground and claiming new converts as quickly as evangelical churches are meekly ceding the field. 

These shepherds should recall the warning of John Calvin: “Ambiguity is the fortress of heretics.” Well, the heretics are here. They are all around us, and their numbers are growing. Pastors need to remember that while evangelism is important, it’s not their first responsibility. Their first responsibility is to feed the sheep, to equip the saints. For too many pastors, concern for showing compassion to the lost means they’re not protecting the sheep from false teaching. They are, in fact, starving the sheep to appease goats. John 10:12–13 has a word for them: “The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.” 

This is certainly true, and it’s true for all churches. You’ll recall how disturbed I was a few years ago by an Orthodox parish priest — a conservative — telling me that he won’t have any talk about transgenderism and gender ideology in his parish, because he wants to keep “politics” out of parish life. This is an excuse and a cope.

You see things like the Paris Olympics opening, and you realize that something very dark and powerful is overtaking this civilization. People need to wake up — and that means coming to understand that their religious leadership is not necessarily trustworthy under these circumstances. I was texting last night with an Orthodox friend in the US, and told him that I wondered if I will live long enough to see my Benedict Option idea — the idea that Christians have dramatically lost the culture and civilization, and have to come up with new ways to live, especially in community, to avoid being dissolved by the post-Christian culture — become conventional Christian wisdom. He predicted that I will be like Russell Kirk: that I will live to see it, but won’t get credit for it.

Maybe. I’m less interested in credit than I am in the ideas being taken seriously enough to be implemented. This fall, in conjunction with the UK release of Living In Wonder, my publisher there, Hodder Faith, is coming out with British versions of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies (go to the Amazon.co.uk page to pre-order any or all of them). Our UK Christian brothers and sisters are now living out a preview of what’s coming to America. Of course there are far more Christians in America than in Britain, but the US is on the same general track towards secularization and the permanent institutionalization of wokeness.

The British case is helpful for American Christians too, in a particular sense. One of the biggest burrs in my saddle about the Benedict Option has been Christians who say that we shouldn’t retreat from the public square, but should fight. For the eleventy-millionth time: that’s not what The Benedict Option says! It says that we have to fight as hard and as long as we can — but that we would be fools to imagine that we can’t lose. For one, we find ourselves in this weakened position because the world is simply living out the consequences of no longer believing that Christianity is true. For another, politics alone cannot save us. If we keep woke anti-Christians out of public office, all that does is give us room in which to move to do the work of evangelism and discipleship. Boomer conservative Christians who thought that it would be sufficient to gain political power have now been discredited.

I keep talking in this space about how Hungary’s Viktor Orban tells his people that the best politics can do is create space for meaning-giving institutions (churches, schools, families, etc.) to do their work. In a modern democracy, politicians aren’t priests, philosophers, or patriarchs. No aware Christian in Britain or any European country can possibly believe that it is enough to have a government that supports and defends them. Because churches and others (including families) have failed for generations to fulfill their mission of handing down the faith to the next generation, we are governed by those who think the faith is menace, an ideology of bigotry.

The Benedict Option is not only an option for the future, but for right now. It’s what we should do not only to prepare for a dark future, but to live faithfully in the darkening present. Look, Live Not By Lies features testimonies and counsel from Christians who lived through actual totalitarian persecution, and who see something similar rising now in the West. We must never forget what Kamila Bendova (and others) say in that book: that most Christians under Communist dictatorship kept their heads down and conformed. These are the Soviet-era version of the Christians who want us all to pretend that the only people who care about the Paris Olympics blasphemy are weirdos and threats to the peace.

Remember the words in Live Not By Lies of Yuri Sipko, an old Russian Baptist pastor whose pastor father was taken away by Stalin. He reflected in a Moscow interview with me that the faith survived in his community during that hideous persecution through small groups. He says that though there is far more religious liberty in Russia today, Russian Christians need the Benedict Option:

Today, it is easy to obtain a Bible in Russia, easy to meet for worship services, and easy to find religious teaching on the internet. Yet something among contemporary Christians has been lost, the old pastor says— something that was held dear by those small groups.

Sipko goes on:

Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation. Now it’s all about career, material success, and one’s standing in society. In these small groups, when people were meeting back then, the center was Christ, and his word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable to your own life. What am I supposed to do as a Christian? What am I doing as a Christian? I, together with my brothers, was checking my own Christianity.

More:

“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy. It’s just a search for comfort,” says Yuri Sipko, the Russian Baptist pastor. “When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”

… “You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”

The Paris Olympics ceremony is both a religious ceremony and a sign of the times. Do not be fooled. Maybe “weirdos” like me and Pageau see something that you don’t. You, conservative, and you, Christian, need to face fully the possibility that we are living in a world in which people who believe in things like traditional religion, the family, the biological reality of males and females, the worth of nations and distinct peoples, and all the rest — are being turned into the marginalized, the hated, and the persecuted. Paris is the new black mass. What, you thought that the “J.D. Vance is weird” coordinated hatecraft was only about poking a Republican candidate?

With Yuri Sipko in Moscow

Orban, Enemy Of The Disaster

Here is a link to my European Conservative essay lauding Viktor Orban as a deep geostrategic thinker. You will have seen some of this already in this newsletter. Even if you dislike Orban, I urge you to read this essay. I can’t think of another figure at his level who understands as deeply the reality through which we are all living. In the end, he is pursuing a geostrategic Benedict Option for Hungary: that is, trying to pioneer a new way of living so that Hungary can endure and even thrive in the new world order coming into being now.

I wish you all a good weekend. I am sending today’s newsletter to all subscribers, even unpaid, to remind you paid subscribers who haven’t been getting newsletters that indeed I have been writing every weekday, faithfully. The problem is a glitch in your Substack software. Go to the help page of Substack to learn how to fix it; I don’t have the ability to do it for you. Plus, you can always read my subscriber-only essays on the Rod Dreher’s Diary page, which somehow allows paid subscribers access.