It is amazing to be here in Budapest. I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization. But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is.
Western civilization, rooted in Man&#8217;s individual liberty and his collective duty; in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously; in his property rights and in his familial obligations; in the right to the equal application of the law; is unique. It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress.
Western civilization did not come from nowhere. It came from Biblical wisdom; the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition. It came from the Bible&#8217;s admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason. When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, our civilization decays.
And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay.
We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands. 
We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental, free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls and behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality. 
We can see it in the push for an ever growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church. in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue.
We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism and flying rainbow flags.
What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization?
The key force is the force of Western post-modern leftism. Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians, who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon.
But the question really isn&#8217;t radical Islamists. They, after all, are doing just what they have always done: invading and conquering.
The question is why the West allowed them in.
And the answer is that the West, thanks to that post-modern Left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood-guilt. A guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/battling-for-the-heart-of-western-civilization-cpac-hungary-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Perhaps the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frantz Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers; that they ought to unleash, in his words, “red hot cannonballs” and “bloody knives.”
Frantz Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wife of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had, and Sartre, a Western leftist, agreed. The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer. Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature.
Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims. He said, “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor, and the man he oppresses at the same time. Then there remains a dead man and a free man.”
In other words, Sartre advocated civilizational suicide, and the West largely complied.
But why did the West comply? Now, part of the answer lies in the West’s pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance. Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture, a culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality and says that when we fail, we are guilty. This means that we feel bad when we sin.
That&#8217;s actually one of our virtues.
<div id="attachment_927555" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/battling-for-the-heart-of-western-civilization-cpac-hungary-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-927555" class="size-large wp-image-927555" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: DailyWire/CPAC Hungary" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>Screenshot: DailyWire/CPAC Hungary</div>
But there are many other cultures, shame cultures like, say, the Islamic cultures or the pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan, or the modern Left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated.
For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness. Because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizational suicidal impulses.
Our enemies don&#8217;t. They&#8217;re happy to blame us for their problems and unfortunately, we&#8217;re all too happy to blame ourselves. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, “The duty to repent forbids the Western Bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed. Our only right is to remain silent.”
But why should we feel uniquely guilty? The West seems to bear a unique amount of guilt because we have come to believe a giant lie, a great giant lie about ourselves.
And that lie is that we, the West, are uniquely evil.
We hear this lie all the time. Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British Crown, and then he read a land acknowledgment to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada.
The very concept is ridiculous. Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane. And yet this kind of nonsense is imitated at nearly every college event across the West.
But that&#8217;s the lie: that the West is uniquely evil, and that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century.
We were told often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed.
We were told that the Nazis and their allies were natural outgrowths of Western civilization, rather than perversions of it.
We were told that if we abandoned Biblical values in favor of a namby-pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, their secular dogmas, not their Biblical adherence that led to their assault on humanity.
We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins, even though it was craven cowardice in the face of transnational Left-wing movements like Nazism and Communism that led to their domination of the European continent and proud, resurgent patriotism that stopped it.
We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though obviously the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves. It was not Western civilization or Biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century.
It was the rejection of the West&#8217;s core values that led to those horrors.
But too many in the West believed the lie that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it. And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it. We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists who sought to rule us from above and from without. We opened our nations to groups that sought to destroy our history and our unity.
Now it is time to reverse that process. We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has, of course, committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils.
But the truth — the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, since the Garden of Eden — is that all human beings have a capacity for evil. Human evil is a universal truth.
But the glories of Western civilization are not universal. They come from a particular philosophy, a particular history, a particular culture.
Western civilization isn&#8217;t uniquely evil. Western civilization is uniquely good.
Slavery was a human universal. It was Western civilization that ended it.
Poverty is a human universal. It was Western civilization that has exponentially mitigated it.
War is a human universal Western civilization has wildly reduced it.
And the secular, post-modern leftists who refuse to admit this are engaging in evil of their own.
This country, the very country these secular, post-modern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals.
This supposedly Nazi country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke.
It is a country where children don&#8217;t actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse, anti-Biblical Left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children.
Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn&#8217;t perfect because no country is.
But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization. And that is a thing that is worth fighting for.
And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well.

MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-44-PM-349

Hungary And The Fight For Western Civilization: Shapiro’s Budapest Speech

Ben Shapiro

Europe

Hungary

Marxism

Opinion

Radical Islam

Western Civilization

BUDAPEST—European nations are waking up to the consequences of their own censorship, a former senior advisor to President Donald Trump argued on Wednesday — a cultural shift due in large part to Trump&#8217;s return to the world stage.
Jason Miller, a longtime political strategist and the founder of GETTR, spoke at the EU-US Summit at the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest, where he discussed the European Union&#8217;s ongoing attempts at censorship of European citizens with former White House director of the Domestic Policy Council Joe Grogan and Matt Mowers, president of the global strategies firm Valcour and a State Department veteran.
Miller held up a copy of The Economist that featured a startling headline in bold: &#8220;Europe&#8217;s Free Speech Problem.&#8221; The Economist is far from a right-leaning publication, the former Trump advisor joked, emphasizing that &#8220;Free speech is a massively big deal here in the EU, as well as the U.K.&#8221;
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&#8220;This is something that everybody realizes is huge,&#8221; he shared, holding up the magazine, &#8220;because what happens with the EU, what happens with the U.K., what also happens with free speech in the United States, all impact each other.&#8221;
As an example, he referred to the United Kingdom&#8217;s request for a “back door” to Apple&#8217;s iCloud encryption to help the British government access Apple iCloud user data. The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-tulsi-gabbard-to-probe-national-security-implications-of-uks-demands-to-apple">broke the news in February</a> that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was probing the potential implications of such a request.
<div id="attachment_926099" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/european-nations-grapple-with-growing-free-speech-problem-under-trumps-gaze/img_3136" rel="attachment wp-att-926099"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-926099" class="wp-image-926099 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/IMG_3136-864x576.jpg" alt="Photo courtesy of the EU-US Forum." width="864" height="576" /></a>Photo courtesy of the EU-US Forum.</div>
On Wednesday, Miller shared that &#8220;the U.K. government is telling the United States that if Apple still wants to continue doing business in the U.K., that they have to give access to iClouds.&#8221;
&#8220;Of course,&#8221; he noted, &#8220;they say it&#8217;s only to stop the worst of the worst, to stop the bad actors. Anyone in the U.S. intelligence side will tell you, if you open up people&#8217;s individual iClouds&#8230;it will take hackers and other people five minutes, tops, to hack into everybody&#8217;s iCloud. Dangers like this become very, very real.&#8221;
Thanks to Trump&#8217;s comments on the issue, as well as Vice President JD Vance&#8217;s remarks at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, much more attention is on the European leaders leading the charge to censor their citizens.
&#8220;President Trump and the administration are calling attention to [censorship in Europe] and I think really putting the bully pulpit to use,&#8221; Miller told The Daily Wire in an interview following his remarks. He argued that it is &#8220;way too easy for countries to sweep under the rug&#8221; stories like that of Lucy Connolly, whose angry, aggressive post calling for mass deportations <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3nn60wyr6o">earned her 31 months in jail</a>. 
Miller argued that what Connolly said was certainly unacceptable, &#8220;but it&#8217;s not 31-months-in-prison unacceptable.&#8221;
&#8220;I think the punishment has to fit the crime,&#8221; Miller said.
The president and his administration have made free speech a main focus &#8220;because what happens in one country will impact the U.S.,&#8221; Miller noted. What happens in the European Union, or is dictated by the European Union, will almost certainly happen next in the U.S. unless checked, he argued. 
&#8220;Ultimately, when they start putting restrictions on their free speech then other outlets, whether it be a social media platform, whether it be technology platforms such as Apple or Google or things of that nature, when free speech is suppressed then ultimately what&#8217;s gonna happen is so many of those same policies will be put in place in the United States,&#8221; Miller said.  
&#8220;You see that often there&#8217;s a symbiotic relationship between the two,&#8221; reflected Mowers in an interview with The Daily Wire. &#8220;What you&#8217;re seeing is good policies and bad policies emanate on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/JasonMiller?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JasonMiller</a>: ‘Many of these decisions aren’t made by individual countries, they’re being made by bureaucrats in Brussels who are unelected and unaccountable.’ <a href="https://t.co/WOYzkHvb6c">pic.twitter.com/WOYzkHvb6c</a>
— EU-US Forum (@EUUSForum) <a href="https://twitter.com/EUUSForum/status/1927629813864690034?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 28, 2025</a></blockquote>
&#8220;We&#8217;ve been shining a light on that since we started the EU-US Forum in the early part of last year,&#8221; he explained, noting, &#8220;We&#8217;re seeing election results bear out that Europeans are fed up with the status quo, the bureaucrats in Brussels, the over regulation, the over taxation, the fact that they&#8217;re clamping down on free speech, they&#8217;re doing nothing to address the unchecked migration that is jeopardizing security and jobs.&#8221;
Their comments come as a group of senior State Department officials head to France and Ireland this week to push both countries to respect citizens’ rights, part of a State Department effort to fight “egregious examples of democratic backsliding” and “violations of basic natural rights” in Europe, a senior State Department official shared with The Daily Wire.
The initiative, launched by the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, is especially focused on defending freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to privacy. In France, the State Department delegation will meet with government officials to discuss the recent arrest of French politician Marine Le Pen. In Ireland, their discussion will focus on concerns that a new European Union law could be used to censor free speech.
As Vance highlighted in Munich, the Trump administration sees real threats facing its allies in Europe “from within” — particularly cases of governments targeting their own citizens and particular forms of political and religious speech. Those targeted are disproportionately Christian, conservative, or nationalist.
“It’s not a coincidence that these kinds of global forces are using similar tactics to those that were used on this side of the Atlantic against President Trump and his supporters over the past eight years,” the State Department official shared.
Vance&#8217;s remarks in Munich continue to dominate discussions of free speech across the globe, and will likely continue to do so during CPAC Hungary 2025, where conservative leaders and commentators are gathering this week. Miller suggested that Trump&#8217;s and Vance&#8217;s statements on censorship as of late are a &#8220;loud wake up call&#8221; to European nations and a &#8220;pretty clear signal that President Trump and Vice President Pence are not going to back down.&#8221; 
&#8220;They&#8217;re gonna stand up and fight for free speech all around the entire world, and I think that&#8217;s a good thing,&#8221; he argued. &#8220;Ultimately that supports the sovereignty of individuals and nations that are, say, members of the EU, that free speech has to be defended.&#8221; 
&#8220;It&#8217;s been monumental,&#8221; Mowers said of the Trump administration&#8217;s impact on Europe. &#8220;You&#8217;re seeing it right now play out in the trade relationship that President Trump has been negotiating with the EU, and recent developments that are happening in the last few hours, where they are saying now by early July they have a goal of getting a framework in place.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/JasonMiller?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JasonMiller</a> on the weaponization of government from the left:
‘The last line of defense for the extreme radical left is the legal system&#8230; people should be able to embrace the sovereignty and individuality and the rights that they hold as citizens.’ <a href="https://t.co/C764l03NTI">pic.twitter.com/C764l03NTI</a>
— EU-US Forum (@EUUSForum) <a href="https://twitter.com/EUUSForum/status/1927633391790547220?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 28, 2025</a></blockquote>
Mowers praised Vance for arguing that the United States&#8217; relationship with Europe is strong, but that it must be based on an honest conversation about the problems at hand — namely, that the EU has been trampling free speech, failing to honor the outcomes of elections, and disenfranchising political leaders with whom they disagree.
&#8220;If we&#8217;re going to talk about the uniqueness, and the real pedestal we want to put our relationship on, which is worthy, we&#8217;ve got to start acting it too,&#8221; Mowers said.
&#8220;That&#8217;s not going to happen with some outside influence, it&#8217;s going to happen from within, and you&#8217;re seeing European voters vote that way as well, because they&#8217;re expressing their frustrations with the leaders who have ignored the actual challenges in their lives.&#8221;

IMG_3136

European Nations Grapple With Growing ‘Free Speech Problem’ Under Trump’s Gaze

Donald Trump

European Union

Jason Miller

Before it&#8217;s possible to discuss any policy position that&#8217;s supposedly &#8220;progressive,&#8221; the first step is always to escape the world of euphemisms and start talking, in explicit detail, about what&#8217;s actually happening. This might sound straightforward, but every single organ of the Left is committed to making sure you don&#8217;t do this. They would much rather you debate the abstract concept of &#8220;a woman&#8217;s right to choose,&#8221; for example, than discuss how children are dismembered and discarded like trash. They would also prefer that you use terms like &#8220;gender-affirming care,&#8221; instead of discussing chemical castration. And on and on. Euphemisms are one of the most potent tools these people have. They are everywhere, in every single debate on every issue. And in every case, they&#8217;re a gross misrepresentation of reality. They need to be neutralized immediately before any actual discussion can begin.
To that end, take <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/14/hungary-poised-to-adopt-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-lgbtq-gatherings">this headline</a> from the other day. It ran in The Guardian: 
<blockquote>Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ gatherings.</blockquote>
The Associated Press ran a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-amendment-orban-gay-rights-lgbtq-155ec12cbbde7cc6be0f96adb323de77">similar story</a>:
<blockquote>Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ public events, seen as a major blow to rights.</blockquote>
The article explains that Hungary&#8217;s parliament just overwhelmingly passed an amendment that will outlaw, &#8220;public events by LGBTQ+ communities.&#8221;
If you&#8217;re just skimming these headlines, this might seem like a surprising development. You might wonder: What are &#8220;public events by LGBTQ+ communities,&#8221; exactly? And what precisely is an &#8220;LGBTQ+ gathering?&#8221; If you take these headlines literally, then it sounds like the government of Hungary has just made it illegal for gay people to appear in public, for any reason. It&#8217;s a total crackdown on figure skating, musical theater and art exhibitions. Gay people can&#8217;t even get together and watch “Glee” reruns on the couch without getting hauled to prison. This is the current state of Hungary, if you believe The Guardian and the Associated Press.
In reality, of course, Hungary has not banned gay people from assembling in public. What they&#8217;ve banned are disturbing and morally objectionable public displays of sexual hedonism that can easily be observed by children. That includes Hungary&#8217;s annual pride parade. Pull up any footage of this parade that&#8217;s posted online, and you&#8217;ll quickly see exactly what I&#8217;m talking about. Here&#8217;s some of it, or at least the parts we can play. This is from Budapest several years back:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Budapest gay pride" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hMLRsBLKnEU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And again, this is the most sanitized footage I could play. This is what the corporate press means when they say Hungary has banned &#8220;LGBTQ events&#8221; and &#8220;LBGTQ gatherings.&#8221; This is the truth behind the euphemism. They mean that Hungary has banned public indecency that everyone — including children — can see. In fact, in many cases, these public displays are explicitly directed at children. This is what &#8220;pride parades&#8221; always entail, as we&#8217;ve discussed dozens of times on this show.
If you actually look at the text of the amendment that just passed in Hungary — and again, it was an overwhelming vote in Hungary&#8217;s parliament, passing by a margin of 140 to 21 — then you&#8217;ll immediately understand why it passed. This is not simply an amendment about &#8220;pride parades&#8221; or &#8220;gay gatherings&#8221; or anything like that. It&#8217;s not, as the Associated Press claims, an amendment that constitutes a &#8220;major blow to rights.&#8221; In reality, it&#8217;s the exact opposite.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1577-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
This amendment, with very forceful and unapologetic language, affirms the right of everyone — and in particular children — to enjoy public spaces without being confronted by someone else’s sexual obsessions. As far as I know, this is the first major piece of legislation, and certainly the first constitutional amendment, to explicitly state that gay and trans activists are not, in fact, the only people on the planet with rights that deserve protection. Until relatively recently, that didn&#8217;t need to be spelled out.
Here&#8217;s the National Review&#8217;s <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hungary-approves-constitutional-amendment-banning-public-lgbt-events/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">summary</a> of the amendment:
<blockquote>The amendment forbids LGBT pride parades that conservative lawmakers argued threatened the well-being of children. One of its provisions specifically declares that children’s rights to moral, physical, and intellectual development supersede the right to peaceful assembly and almost every other right, except the right to life. Hungarian authorities are also allowed to use facial recognition software to identify and potentially fine demonstrators at the newly prohibited pride parades if they are held in defiance of the law.</blockquote>
Yes, this amendment — which codifies a law passed by the parliament a few weeks ago — states that a child has a right to be protected physically, morally, and spiritually, and that this right supersedes the right of gay people to celebrate their sexuality in the town square. That&#8217;s exactly the right way to frame this situation. It&#8217;s certainly the honest way to frame it.
Virtually all of our cultural and political debates, regardless of the particular topic, ultimately come down to a battle of competing rights and interests. That&#8217;s not how you normally see policy debates framed, but it&#8217;s the truth. Even something as simple as a speed limit involves weighing various rights and interests. On the one hand, you have people&#8217;s reasonable interest in traveling to their destination quickly. On the other hand, you have people&#8217;s reasonable interest in not being killed in a high-speed car accident. These two interests are obviously in tension. If we wanted absolute safety on the highway, we&#8217;d set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. But we don&#8217;t do that, because we&#8217;ve decided that other interests are more important. Every functioning society has to weigh competing interests like this, in every single area of policy.
The only way to sort through this mess is to come to some kind of understanding about which rights are most fundamental. With this amendment, Hungary has decided that, apart from the right to life, the most fundamental right is a child&#8217;s &#8220;right to protection and care for their adequate physical, mental and moral development.&#8221; You can agree or disagree with this philosophical claim — and of course I strongly agree with it. But regardless of your particular stance on the issue, you can&#8217;t deny that, at the very least, they are dealing with these questions in a clear and coherent way.
The opponents of the amendment, on the other hand, are not responding coherently. Instead, they&#8217;re reacting in exactly the kind of hysterical manner you would expect. They&#8217;re lying about the content of the amendment, as we just discussed. They&#8217;re also setting off smoke bombs in Hungary&#8217;s parliament and blocking the entrance to government buildings. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 smoke bombs protests" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QSWKwOCVHOc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This is the response you expect from people who know they have no actual argument. They&#8217;ll blockade buildings. They&#8217;ll spread propaganda that has no basis in reality. They&#8217;ll detonate smoke bombs in parliament. But the one thing they won&#8217;t do — because they can&#8217;t do it — is rationally explain why you&#8217;re wrong, and they&#8217;re right. In this case, these LGBT activists simply cannot articulate any reason to oppose this amendment. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One of the reasons, of course, is that these so-called &#8220;pride parades&#8221; are indefensible, morally and practically. Every sane person knows that they should be banned from public streets. Anyone who&#8217;s ever seen footage of one of these parades understands this.
But the more fundamental issue is that, even if the pride parades weren&#8217;t bizarre, explicit, and objectionable, these activists would still have a problem. Put simply, the Leftist conception of human rights gives no real basis for objecting to this constitutional amendment. These people believe that rights are social constructs, codified by the government. They generally reject the idea that rights come from God. After all, it&#8217;s hard to make the case that the right to abort a baby created by God somehow comes from God. But if rights are social constructs, then society can abolish a right just as easily as it creates it. And that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s happened here. Hungary, through its democratically elected government, has decided that the absolute right to gay pride displays no longer exists in their culture. As a result, it makes no sense for the Leftist to object.
They can&#8217;t say that the rights of LGBT people are being infringed in Hungary. How could they? The right doesn&#8217;t exist anymore. There is no authority higher than society and government (according to them), and those authorities have spoken on the matter. That&#8217;s all there is to it.
In other words, gay activists are melting down in Hungary right now because they&#8217;re realizing, if only subconsciously, that their ideology can be erased just as quickly as it took hold. As it turns out, a fiction that&#8217;s maintained by a patchwork of laws and government policy can also be eliminated by law and government policy. And it&#8217;s not just the so-called LGBT community in Hungary that&#8217;s coming to this realization. In this country, as we&#8217;ve <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtFCCDy__os" target="_blank" rel="noopener">discussed</a>, &#8220;pride parades&#8221; are also facing serious problems, mainly because the major sponsors are pulling out and people are losing interest. They&#8217;re going door-to-door in San Francisco right now to cover a multimillion-dollar funding shortfall for their pride events this summer. In every respect, these people are now weak and desperate.
If there were ever a moment to implement a Hungary-style ban on &#8220;pride parades&#8221; in this country, now is that time. Yes, activists in this country would inevitably act out, just like they&#8217;re doing in Hungary. But there are some things that are a lot more important than the feelings of screeching Left-wing protesters. One of them is the right of children to grow and develop and have their innocence protected. Hungary is now finally enforcing that right. For the benefit of every child in this country, we should do the same.

Protest Against Amendment Banning Pride In Budapest, Hungary

LGBT Activists Panic After This Huge Move In The Fight To Protect Children

LGBTQ

Matt Walsh

Parade

Parliament

Pride

According to Radio Free Europe, Hungary plans to <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/hungary-israel-netanyahu-iccc-arrest-warrant/33366535.html">withdraw</a> from the International Criminal Court, potentially making it the first European country to exit the organization, though it&#8217;s yet to be officially confirmed.
The Hungarian government had been considering the move for some time. The formal procedure would involve offering a resolution proposal to the Hungarian Parliament and initiating the withdrawal if the Parliament approves, which could take as long as one year. “According to our source, the text of the draft resolution may soon be posted on the website of the National Assembly,” Szabad Európa <a href="https://www.szabadeuropa.hu/a/tuzson-bence-zart-korben-arrol-beszelt-hogy-magyarorszag-kilep-a-nemzetkozi-bunteto-birosagbol/33362063.html">reported</a>, adding, “We understand that the political decision to withdraw Hungary was actually made weeks ago, but the government was still waiting to see what U.S. President Donald Trump would say about the ICC.”
On February 6, President Donald Trump announced he was imposing sanctions on the ICC, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/imposing-sanctions-on-the-international-criminal-court/">stating</a> that “the International Criminal Court (ICC), as established by the Rome Statute, has engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel. The ICC has, without a legitimate basis, asserted jurisdiction over and opened preliminary investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel, and has further abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.  The ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel, as neither country is party to the Rome Statute or a member of the ICC.”
“The ICC’s recent actions against Israel and the United States set a dangerous precedent, directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest.  This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States Government and our allies, including Israel,” he continued.
A <a href="https://www.szabadeuropa.hu/a/tuzson-bence-zart-korben-arrol-beszelt-hogy-magyarorszag-kilep-a-nemzetkozi-bunteto-birosagbol/33362063.html">source</a> told Szabad Európa that after Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC, “the Hungarian government took this as a green light.”
Hungarian conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a staunch supporter of Israel; he is meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Budapest on Wednesday. In November, after the ICC issued the arrest warrant, Orban <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/hungarys-orban-invites-israeli-pm-194508337.html">ripped it</a>, calling it “outrageously brazen and cynical,” UPI reported.
“Later today, I will invite the Israeli prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu, to visit Hungary, where I will guarantee him, if he comes, that the judgment of the ICC will have no effect in Hungary, and that we will not follow its terms,” he stated in November. &#8220;There is no choice here, we have to defy this decision.”

Vox Convenes A Summit With European Far-right Leaders

Hungary Could Be 1st European Country To Withdraw From ICC

Global Politics

International Criminal Court

Israel

World

Sen. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/lindsey-graham" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lindsey Graham</a> (R-SC) defended some of former President Donald Trump&#8217;s recent remarks over the weekend during a combative news interview, saying that he is far more concerned about how President Joe Biden&#8217;s policies are destroying the world rather than Trump being able to destroy democracy.
Graham made the remarks during a Sunday NBC News interview with Kristen Welker when Welker asked Graham about Trump meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
&#8220;Just for our viewers, to remind them, Orbán believes that liberal democracy doesn&#8217;t work,&#8221; Welker said. &#8220;He&#8217;s packed Hungary&#8217;s courts with loyalists. He seized control of the media outlets. He&#8217;s friends with Putin. He&#8217;s friends with Xi.&#8221;
Welker then played a clip of Trump saying nice things about Orbán and praising his leadership style.
&#8220;Do you think Viktor Orbán&#8217;s leadership is something that Trump aspires to in a second term?&#8221; Welker asked.
&#8220;I think the best way to judge President Trump&#8217;s second term is by what he did in his first term,&#8221; Graham responded. &#8220;You know, Russia didn&#8217;t invade on President Trump&#8217;s watch. Hamas didn&#8217;t try to destroy Israel on his watch. In Afghanistan – the Taliban weren&#8217;t in charge on his watch. So, here&#8217;s what I would say: If you&#8217;re worried about the world being on fire, you&#8217;re right. If you think Joe Biden&#8217;s policies lack a deterrence and he&#8217;s weak in the eyes of our enemies, you&#8217;re right. So, if you want to get the world back in order, you&#8217;d better vote for Trump.&#8221;
&#8220;There&#8217;s a liberal jihad against everything Trump. I&#8217;m not worried about Trump destroying democracy,&#8221; Graham added. &#8220;I&#8217;m worried Joe Biden destroying the world.&#8221;
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WATCH:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Sen. Graham says Israel-Hamas war ‘will not be over’ if hostages are released: Full interview" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2oALZ-U3b10?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Sen. Lindsey Graham

Graham: ‘I’m Not Worried About Trump Destroying Democracy, I’m Worried About Biden Destroying The World’

Elections

Joe Biden

Lindsey Graham

Politics

This is a portion of a speech delivered by Michael Knowles at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary, on July 28, 2023.
The liberals have levied all sorts of vague and preposterous attacks on Hungarian conservatives in recent years. But even the liberals can’t dispute one particularly conspicuous achievement, which is Hungary’s unique success at beginning to reverse the decades-long trend of demographic decline. And how have you done it? By supporting families. You’ve provided financial and political support for people to get married and have babies. You’ve provided more support the more babies people have. You’ve taken steps to protect babies in the womb. You’ve prioritized the good of your citizens over the desires of foreigners beyond your borders. You’ve defined what a marriage is and always must be and defended that definition.
That’s just common sense. I’m not suggesting it’s been easy, but it is simple enough. Egghead masters-of-the-universe in far-distant capitals would have us all believe that statecraft is too complex for ordinary patriots to understand. But politics, it turns out, is not rocket science, no matter what the liberal technocrats would have us believe.
This pro-family, pro-people policy did not arise in opposition to a neutral political order. It arose in opposition to an intentional liberal campaign to destroy the family — a powerful and longstanding political campaign to destroy the family by redefining marriage out of existence, discouraging and delaying marriage for those who still seek it, promoting contraception and “planned parenthood” for married couples, subsidizing the destruction of babies through abortion, reducing the ability of families to educate and raise their children as they see fit, and establishing an economic order that makes it ever more difficult for families to pay for their basic needs.
The liberal order pretends to be neutral, but it is not. Like all regimes, liberalism incentivizes certain behaviors and discourages others. In the social sphere, liberalism encourages disordered and deviant habits, most notably of late in the sexual realm, justified by an ever-degrading definition of individual freedom. In the economic sphere, liberalism encourages selfish habits of production and consumption which so radically reject the notion of a common good that they leave as an inheritance to successive generations little more than mounting piles of debt.
Normal people throughout the West are waking up to the reality that what we were told would make us free has actually enslaved us. Of course it did: because the liberal conception of freedom directly contradicts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom that built our civilization. Liberty, it turns out, is not the ability to do what we wish but the right to do what we ought. We’ve fallen for the false freedom of the addict.
I know Hungary understands this fact. While countries around the West are rushing to legalize all sorts of drugs, from the Peruvian parsley — the old devil’s lettuce — all the way up to the harder stuff, Hungary has held the line on drugs. As well you should. Drugs are the perfect way to understand how the liberal conception of liberty goes so wrong.
The liberal view is that liberty is nothing more than the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it. According to this view, a heroin addict in some alleyway in Amsterdam is the freest man in the world. As long as he’s got a couple of bucks in his pocket and a place to shoot dope without fear of being arrested, that man is the pinnacle of freedom. Right? No, of course not. The heroin addict isn’t the freest man in the world; he’s a slave. He’s a slave to his appetites. He’s a slave to his addiction. He couldn’t stop himself from shooting up even if he wanted to.
This is why our Lord tells us that the man who sins is a slave to sin. He tells us that, if we are to be free, we must take his yoke upon us. Unlike the yoke of sin, the wages of which are death, the yoke of Christ — of truth and goodness himself — is easy and the burden light. But it is a yoke. This is what St. Paul means when he tells us that we can be slaves either to sin or righteousness. And crucially, this is what he’s describing when he laments that the things that he wants to do he does not do, but the things he doesn’t want to do, he does.
Modern liberalism, for all its incessant blather about free will, fails to grasp the defining feature of the will, which is that it’s split in two. We have a lower will, which is the appetite, and a higher will — the rational will — traditionally understood to mediate between the lower will and the divine will. The lower will tells us we want to eat that third dessert; the rational will tells us to put the cupcake down because we’ll regret having eaten it later. 
And our appetites, by the way, are not fixed in stone. If we give free rein to our basest passions and desires, they will become more pronounced to the point that our rational will won’t be able to exert much control at all. That’s the heroin addict. But if we follow our rational will and discipline our appetites, soon our desires will change. Soon we won’t have quite so strong an affection for the fifth cupcake. Soon we won’t have so strong a desire for things that are liable to harm us. Soon enough, we might even develop tastes and appetites for things that are actually good for us. 
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h4>
This is, in theory, the purpose of liberal education —“liberal” in the classical sense — literally training in freedom — the type of education that befits free men. I say “in theory” because today liberal arts education tends to do precisely the opposite: it’s a four-year bacchanal, at best, and, at worst, an initiation ritual into a cult of absurdities designed to stamp out the last shreds of common sense that a student might possess. The modern university is failing to train students in the virtues that will help to make them free. The modern university primarily trains students in vices that will keep them ignorant and enslaved. 
So what are we going to say? And believe? And teach? The answer can’t be “everything,” just as it can’t be “nothing.” All societies for all of history have had some standards, norms, and taboos. All cultures perform rituals. All people worship something. As that great political philosopher Bob Dylan once observed, “Everybody’s gotta serve somebody.” What a culture worships will define that culture. A culture that worships money will be materialistic. A culture that worships sex will be licentious. A culture that worships God will be godlier.
So what does liberal culture worship? Liberal culture worships the self. At every turn, liberalism insists that we prioritize the self in all its subjectivity over every other consideration. When reality says that you’re a man, but you yourself say you’re a woman, well, we must defer to you. To self-conception. When you conceive a child but decide for whatever reason that you don’t want the baby; well, you must be given free rein to do whatever monstrous act you see fit. When you no longer like your spouse, to whom you vowed a lifelong commitment; well, you must go on and get a divorce. Parents getting old? Stick them in a home. Don’t care for your nation? Fine! Who needs a nation? Who needs patriotism? You don’t owe anything to your country. Whatever liberalism meant half a century ago, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, it doesn’t mean that today. Today, liberalism mocks the notion that you might ask what you can do for your country. Today, liberalism impels its adherents to ask only what your country can do for you. It’s all about the individual, all the way down. And a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package indeed.
This, I think, is why nothing you Hungarians have done has shocked and irked liberals throughout the West quite so much as your family policy. Both progressives on the Left and libertarians on the Right have attacked Hungary’s family policy alternately as anti-feminist and as anti-laissez-faire-capitalist. In fairness, I suppose they’re right. The family policy, by rewarding families, undermines radical feminism, which opposes family. And the policy is anything but laissez-faire. It takes a hands-on approach toward achieving a clearly defined social end. But, of course, as we’ve already discussed, supposedly laissez-faire liberalism is also more hands-on than liberals like to admit. While other nations throughout the West have adopted liberal policies that make society more individualistic — so successfully that those nations are all literally dying and, now, rely on mass migration to keep their economies afloat — Hungary has implemented a policy to make society more family-focused.
What appears on the surface to be a tactical disagreement about how to tinker with public policy to achieve outcomes we all desire, in fact, represents a fundamental philosophical disagreement over the basic structure and purpose of politics. For liberals, the basic unit of politics is the individual; for conservatives, the fundamental political unit is the family. For liberals, man is an atom; for conservatives, man is the political animal. For liberals, the purpose of politics is to maximize man’s individual autonomy; for conservatives, it’s to enable and encourage man’s flourishing in accordance with his nature, which is intrinsically social.
It is no surprise, then, that the effect of liberal government has been to alienate citizens from virtually all bonds and especially from unchosen bonds: bonds to country, to family, even to ourselves.
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GDWOODMANMK29 (2)

Three Cheers For Hungary

Leftists

Liberals

Michael Knowles

Readers Pass

Much to the chagrin of progressives everywhere on Friday, Pope Francis <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/pope-francis" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reminded</a> the world that, yes, the pope is still Catholic as he soundly rejected radical gender theory and advocated the complimentary and divine differences between man and woman.
On Friday, The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pope-francis-condemns-gender-ideology-as-nefarious-path-that-leads-to-tragic-defeat-during-hungary-visit" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that the Vicar of Christ made his comments before the Hungarian government.
“This is the nefarious path of ‘ideological colonization,’ which eliminates differences, as in the case of so-called gender culture, or puts reductive concepts of freedom before the reality of life, for example, boasting as an achievement a senseless ‘right to abortion,’ which is always a tragic defeat,&#8221; the pope said.
He also encouraged Europe to pursue pro-family policies, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done, rather than enact laws and regulations that advance materialism.
&#8220;How much better it would be to build a Europe centered on the human person and on its peoples, with effective policies for natality and the family – policies that are pursued attentively in this country,&#8221; the pope proclaimed.
After previous meetings, Orban has said that Pope Francis praised his government&#8217;s policies — such as certain tax incentives that encourage the growth of families — and for his defense of the Catholic definition of marriage and family.
Pope Francis, Orban <a href="https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-pope-francis-family/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>, “sees that there are great forces at work, especially in Brussels … and he spoke as firmly as I have perhaps never been able to. He said that relativization of the family must not be allowed.&#8221;
The pope, contrary to the legacy media&#8217;s portrayal of him, firmly believes in Catholic teaching on gender roles as well as the barbarity of abortion.
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Last month, Pope Francis said that sex-denialism and gender rejection procedures represented one of the most &#8220;dangerous&#8221; ideologies in the world today.
&#8220;Why is it dangerous?” he <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/03/11/pope-francis-gender-ideology-is-one-of-most-dangerous-ideological-colonizations/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in March. &#8220;Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”
&#8220;All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.&#8221;
Indeed, there are plenty of things the pope has done or said which might confuse the faithful — for example, his treatment of the Traditional Latin Mass — but as it relates to the topic of so-called &#8220;transgenderism,&#8221; he is an outspoken critic of no uncertain terms.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Pope Francis

Newsflash: Pope Still Catholic, Rejects Radical Gender Ideology

Catholic Church

Religion

Transgender

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis condemned gender ideology and abortion rights as part of a “nefarious path” which ends, not in &#8220;progress,&#8221; but “tragic defeat” during a speech to civil and religious leaders on the first day of his trip to Hungary.
With Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s first female president, Katalin Novák, in attendance, Francis praised the Eastern European country&#8217;s efforts to restore culture, tradition, and family values. He also lauded Novák, whose controversial <a href="https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/10/hungary-just-elected-its-first-female-president-and-shes-pro-life-and-pro-family/">pro-family policies</a> as the former State Secretary for Family and Youth Affairs were considered essential to reversing a demographic decline in the country.
“How wonderful … to build a person- and people-centered Europe, where there are effective policies for birth and family. We have countries in Europe with the average age of 46-48 years, carefully pursued in this country, where different nations are a family in which the growth and uniqueness of each is cherished.”
Pope Francis has often lamented the decline in birth rates in Europe, and during his speech, he condemned &#8220;ideological colonization&#8221; of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pope-francis-blasts-gender-ideology-as-one-of-the-most-dangerous-ideological-colonizations">gender theory</a> and other leftist values. 
“I am thinking, therefore, of a Europe that is not hostage to (political) parties, becoming prey to self-referential populism, but neither does it turn into a fluid, if not gaseous reality, into a kind of abstract supranationalism, oblivious to the lives of people,” the pope said. “This is the nefarious path of &#8216;ideological colonization,&#8217; which eliminates differences, as in the case of so-called gender culture, or puts reductive concepts of freedom before the reality of life, for example, boasting as an achievement a senseless &#8216;right to abortion,&#8217; which is always a tragic defeat.” 
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During his speech, the pope thanked the Hungarian government for its humanitarian work around the globe, including aid to persecuted Christians in Syria and Lebanon. He cited Hungary&#8217;s history of suffering during war and prayed for peace in Ukraine.
Pope Francis will continue his three-day journey in Hungary by meeting with more of the country&#8217;s leaders and with young people. His visit will culminate in Holy Mass celebrated in Budapest’s Kossuth Lajos&#8217; Square on Sunday.

Pope Francis Visits Hungary – Day One

Pope Francis Condemns Gender Ideology As ‘Nefarious Path’ That Leads To ‘Tragic Defeat’ During Hungary Visit

Pope Francis Condemns Gender Ideology As 'Nefarious Path' That Leads To 'Tragic Defeat' During Hungary Visit

The Vatican

For the second year in a row, President Biden has <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/23/biden-democracy-summit-turkey-hungary/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">snubbed</a> Hungary, excluding them from his “Summit for Democracy,” which has a guest list of 120 countries.
In October 2020, one month before the presidential election, Biden called the conservative, anti-woke Hungarian government led by Viktor Orban “totalitarian,” declaring, “You see what’s happening from Belarus through Poland and Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world.”  Neither Poland nor Hungary recognize gay marriage and they both have laws restricting gay adoption.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
&quot;You see what&#39;s happening in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world and this president embraces all the thugs in the world,&quot; said <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JoeBiden</a> at his town hall event last night <a href="https://t.co/Ix8R8bhQNc">pic.twitter.com/Ix8R8bhQNc</a>
&mdash; Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) <a href="https://twitter.com/notesfrompoland/status/1317020071374487553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Roughly two weeks ago, Hungary&#8217;s justice minister, Judit Varga <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/hungary-anti-lgbt-law-eu-court-varga/32310497.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> the Orban government would fight in the Court of Justice of the EU to defend an education law that was passed in 2021; it banned the use of materials promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools.
In August 2022, Orban <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/international/3588530-hungarys-orban-tells-cpac-we-must-coordinate-a-movement-of-our-troops-to-fight-liberal-order/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> CPAC, “We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. &#8230; To sum up, the mother is a woman. The father is a man, and leave our kids alone, full stop, end of discussion.”
Zoltan Koskovics of the Budapest Center for Fundamental Rights told <a href="https://www.heritage.org/europe/commentary/biden-takes-the-culture-war-hungary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Heritage Foundation</a>, “The woke sect that has taken over the Democratic Party does not like the pro-Western stance of our government. We need a strong America in a dangerous international situation. But not a woke America.”
In July 2022, the Hungarian government confirmed the Biden administration’s termination of the 1979 income tax treaty with the United States. It would cease to have effect starting in January 2024. The Biden administration <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-moves-to-end-tax-treaty-with-hungary-11657311739" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reportedly terminated</a> the treaty because Orban’s government opposed the EU Directive, which wanted to force a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%.  The Biden Treasury Department <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0872" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> it terminated the treaty because of Hungary’s “Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with Respect to Taxes on Income.”
In October 2022, Péter Márki-Zay, Orbán’s biggest opponent, <a href="https://hungarytoday.hu/opinion-will-hungary-be-invited-to-bidens-2023-summit-for-democracy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">admitted</a> that his Hungary for All Movement (MMM) had received millions of euros from the United States during his election campaign, funds reportedly transferred to his movement via an American foundation called Action for Democracy. He admitted his movement used the funds to pay for campaign bills.
Action for Democracy had reportedly <a href="https://hungarytoday.hu/hungarian-opposition-received-millions-from-the-usa/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">named</a> Italy, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, all led by conservative governments at the time, as targets of their movement.

Collage Maker-23-Mar-2023-08-37-PM-3771

Biden Excludes Hungary’s Conservative Government From ‘Summit For Democracy’ — Again

The Chicago Field Museum bought a bronze age sword from the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/hungary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hungarian</a> National Museum in the 1930s thinking it was a replica. Now, nearly 100 years later, an archeologist for the Hungarian museum says there must have been an error at some point, the Field Museum <a href="https://www.facebook.com/fieldmuseum/posts/pfbid03r6s7z591Pp7qf6uYRndu2CgMQPk7LMgvZrGtTTkdA8u1CSGNR2udX7KXSPzznR2l?__cft__[0]=AZW00ZWYW1Mp4QKI2yQHSyo-1Ut1usoI9CcX7r5tqG4runtXmoZlTMyFY4mSFTkMPcjgwMrBl3I8JQeMtKNCzGFBpFQySwVCD8bWKtHDVzwAjXSTZgxWynNO_vH-66GDIR7TZaBCU6rLOTlfcTYTZ04KbSTBSe05gINC8DQpw329_DL1OAk7Ortz6V7rPX--2BQ&amp;__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> Tuesday.
The 3-foot-long “replica” sword is actually 3,000 years old. It was initially discovered at the bottom of the Danube River, the second-longest river in Europe, in the 1930s in Budapest, Hungary. The Hungarian archeologist uncovered the truth behind the sword last summer during a visit to the Chicago museum.
&#8220;So I pull it out and he said after half a minute, this isn&#8217;t a replica, this is a real sword,” Bill Parkinson, the Chicago Field Museum curator of anthropology, <a href="https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/3500-year-old-bronze-age-sword-discovered-chicago-field-museum" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>. &#8220;This is a real 3,000-year-old sword that was thrown into the Danube River at the end of the Bronze Age. And usually it goes the other way. It&#8217;s seldom that you&#8217;ve got something in your collection that said in the collection records for 100 years, ‘this is a replica,’ that you find out that no, it&#8217;s actually the real deal.&#8221;
“I think there was a clerical error when it got here,” Parkinson <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-and-culture/2023/1/17/23559126/field-museum-first-kings-of-europe-exhibit-sword" target="_blank" rel="noopener">added</a>. “Someone just wrote it down wrong.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
It was found more than 100 yrs ago in the Danube River in Budapest, stored at the <a href="https://twitter.com/FieldMuseum?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FieldMuseum</a> ever since. It was labeled a &quot;replica&quot; but it turned out to be a real 3500 yr old Bronze Age sword. Coming up today <a href="https://twitter.com/WBBMNewsradio?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WBBMNewsradio</a>, the story behind the museum&#39;s newest display.⚔️ <a href="https://t.co/UBuOUjLRda">pic.twitter.com/UBuOUjLRda</a>
&mdash; Lisa Fielding (@Lisa_Fielding) <a href="https://twitter.com/Lisa_Fielding/status/1615429804601270279?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 17, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
To confirm that the sword was actually from the Bronze Age, researchers compared the chemical makeup of the museum’s artifact with known swords from the Bronze Age using an X-Ray fluorescent detector, according to <a href="https://www.audacy.com/wbbm780/news/local/bronze-age-sword-at-field-museum-dates-back-3-500-years" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WBBM NewsRadio</a>. The testing showed that the comparison produced nearly identical makeups of bronze, tin, and copper.
During the Bronze Age, which lasted from <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/bronze-age" target="_blank" rel="noopener">approximately</a> 3300 BC to 1200 BC, throwing swords into rivers was commonplace as a way to celebrate treaties, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-and-culture/2023/1/17/23559126/field-museum-first-kings-of-europe-exhibit-sword" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Parkinson says</a>. This tradition helps explain why swords from the Bronze Age are often found at the bottoms of rivers. Metal weapons and tools were first used in the Bronze Age, replacing stone, according to <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/bronze-age" target="_blank" rel="noopener">History.com</a>.
The discovery was made while preparing for the museum&#8217;s upcoming exhibit called &#8220;The First Kings Of Europe.&#8221; The sword is now on display in the Field Museum’s Stanley Hall and will be included in the new exhibit, according to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/field-museum-sword-is-real/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CBS</a>.
“Starting their journey 8,000 years ago during the Neolithic Period and ending 2,500 years ago in the world of Iron Age kings, visitors will encounter archaeological finds that have never been shown in North America,” the museum <a href="https://www.fieldmuseum.org/traveling-exhibitions/first-kings-europe" target="_blank" rel="noopener">says</a> of the exhibit. It will also include weapons, tools, and jewelry to “tell the story of how individuals gained power and influence by amassing wealth and controlling trade, technology, rituals, and warfare.”

They Thought Their Bronze Age Sword Was A Replica. It’s The Real Deal.

They Thought Their Bronze Age Sword Was A Replica. It's The Real Deal.

Archaeology

Chicago

History

weapons

The Left is having a reckoning abroad.
In <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/conservative-giorgia-meloni-claims-victory-as-italys-first-female-prime-minister" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Europe</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/brazilian-prez-bolsonaro-drags-dicaprio-again-i-know-progressives-you-want-to-change-the-entire-world-but-never-yourselves" target="_blank" rel="noopener">South America</a>, a wave of elected officials, all with at least some conservative policies, have soared to victory and taken the reigns in the upper tiers of government.
The pendulum swing comes to the chagrin of their leftist opponents, who would prefer to keep any politician with a single conservative policy out of power.
These five newly-minted leaders are taking on the leftist political players in their countries.
<h3>Italy: Giorgia Meloni</h3>
On Monday, Giorgia Meloni claimed victory as Italy&#8217;s first female prime minister, to the chagrin of Italy&#8217;s left.
She led her party, Brothers of Italy to victory with a platform that was staunchly pro-NATO, pro-Italy, and cautiously <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-22/italy-front-runner-meloni-says-eu-is-wrong-to-antagonize-hungary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">critical</a> of the European Union.
Meloni, 45, is a Catholic mother who has also passionately emphasized family values, condemning abortion, gay marriage, child gender transitions, and euthanasia.
&#8220;Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening?&#8221; Meloni <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_Z1LClnhsk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">asked</a> in 2019 while speaking to the World Congress of Families conference.
&#8220;I can&#8217;t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother, no,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I must be citizen x, gender x, parent one, parent two. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators, the perfect consumer.&#8221;
When her victory appeared imminent, Meloni was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/italy-giorgia-meloni-far-right-nationalist-prime-minister-mussolini-rcna48506" target="_blank" rel="noopener">attacked</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/24/giorgia-meloni-is-a-danger-to-italy-and-the-rest-of-europe-far-right" target="_blank" rel="noopener">as a</a> &#8220;far-right nationalist,&#8221; and &#8220;a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe.&#8221;
Meloni is a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy and has also chaired the European Conservative and Reformist group in the European Parliament. Her victory comes as Italy continues to recover from the pandemic and struggles with spiking food and gas prices.
<h3>Britain: Liz Truss</h3>
British Prime Minister Liz Truss, while not as right-wing as Meloni, has embraced several fiscally conservative policies that have irritated her left-wing opponents.
The Conservative Party leader, 47, has pushed for a robust economic agenda that includes aggressive tax cuts and slashing regulation.
Truss became the United Kingdom&#8217;s prime minister on Sep. 6. Before she had been on the job for even two days, Queen Elizabeth II died, plunging the country into official mourning and marking a tumultuous start for Truss.
After the mourning period ended, Truss on Friday debuted her plan to cut $48 billion in taxes. Also on Friday, the Conservative Party government scratched a corporate tax hike and lowered the basic income tax rate to 19%.
“For too long, politicians have fought over how to slice up the economic pie,” Truss wrote Saturday in an <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11246335/LIZ-TRUSS-long-politicians-fought-slice-economic-pie.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">op-ed</a> for The Daily Mail. “We will focus instead on growing the pie to the benefit of families and businesses.”
She has already been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/28/europe/uk-truss-crisis-labour-starmer-gbr-intl-cmd/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accused</a> of pushing &#8220;radical policies&#8221; and of <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/09/liz-truss-moral-right-prime-minister" target="_blank" rel="noopener">having</a> &#8220;no moral right to be prime minister.&#8221;
Truss is a former Liberal Democrat and <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2022/9/5/23332419/liz-truss-uk-prime-minister-conservative-leadership-brexit" target="_blank" rel="noopener">supported</a> Brexit before leaving the party and changing her view.
<h3>Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro</h3>
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is much further to the right than Meloni or Truss, but he is still significant right-wing presence internationally.
The conservative populist and political outsider, or &#8220;Tropical Trump&#8221; as he is sometimes <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/11/27/tropical-trump-where-will-brazils-bolsonaro-stand-with-biden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">nicknamed</a>, was elected in 2018 and ran on a platform of bringing order back to a corrupt Brazil. His views have been frequently <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/brazil-presidential-election-who-jair-bolsonaro-popular-candidate-more-dangerous-ncna925011" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called out</a> for being significantly harder-right than those of the American right, including <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20180930-brazil-presidential-candidate-bolsonaros-most-controversial-quotes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a string</a> of discriminatory comments. At the same time though, he has rejected left-wing social values.
Bolsonaro, 67, is up for reelection in October and is currently trailing in the polls to his left-wing opponent, although the gap appears to be shrinking.
In his July reelection campaign launch, Bolsonaro emphasized law and order and family values.
“Today we have a president who believes in God; represents the military and police; believes in the family,” Bolsonaro told the crowd, some of whom shouted &#8220;mito&#8221; or legend.
Like several other right-wing leaders, Bolsonaro has been <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220816-bolsonaro-brazil-s-polarizing-far-right-president" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called</a> &#8220;far-right&#8221; by critics.
Despite his conservative brand, Bolsonaro has also <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/08/31/906215778/coronavirus-hit-brazil-considers-major-public-funds-for-poor-and-unemployed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pushed</a> for generous government assistance to Brazil&#8217;s poor, a move that <a href="http://media.folha.uol.com.br/datafolha/2020/08/14/da7301f937d9224fe7ddf4cc81bcdf87ab.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">boosted</a> his approval in the dog days of the pandemic.
<h3>Hungary: Viktor Orban</h3>
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has the longest presence on the world stage out of these five political leaders.
Like Bolsonaro, Orban has been criticized for having extremely hard-right tendencies and holding discriminatory views. Critics have <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/ukraine/news/orban-is-the-poor-mans-putin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dubbed</a> him &#8220;the poor man&#8217;s Vladimir Putin&#8221; and have slammed him for curtailing the press and damaging judicial independence.
However, while other European countries have found themselves in crisis after accepting waves of immigrants, Orban has stringently restricted immigration into Hungary. He has also encouraged families to grow by offering generous government support.
Orban won his last election with a slight majority of 52.5%, more than he won by in both 2018 and 2014.
In August, he delivered a speech at CPAC during which he came out swinging against &#8220;globalists.&#8221;
“The globalists can all go to hell,” Orbán said to applause.
“Politics are not enough,” Orbán said. “This war is a culture war. We have to revitalize our churches, our families, our universities and our community institutions.”
<h3>Canada: Pierre Poilievre</h3>
Pierre Poilievre may not be Prime Minister, but he was elected leader of Canada’s Conservative Party earlier this month.
The fiery new party leader was elected in a landslide 68-16% vote over his more moderate opponent.
“Tonight begins the journey to replace an old government that costs you more and delivers you less with a new government that puts you first, your paycheck, your retirement, your home, your country,” Poilievre <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGn-E826dAU" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vowed</a> to applause and chants of “Freedom!” during his victory speech.
Poilievre, an energetic firebrand populist, has aggressively taken aim at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s progressive agenda. Now, the newly-minted Conservative leader is positioned to be a thorn in Trudeau’s side at the very least and a formidable force that hobbles the Liberal Party prime minister’s agenda at most.
Earlier this year, Poilievre voiced <a href="https://twitter.com/pierrepoilievre/status/1488264488457367552" target="_blank" rel="noopener">support</a> for the anti-vaccine mandate trucker convoy that blocked the U.S.-Canada border. His election comes as Canadians look back on over two years of draconian COVID restrictions that have harmed Canada’s post-pandemic economic recovery.

PM Liz Truss Takes Her Place At Number 10

These Five Foreign Political Leaders Are Taking On The Left

These Five Political Leaders Are Taking On The Left Abroad

Brazil

Canada

Great Britain

Italy

Jair Bolsonaro

Liz Truss

The American left has a new bogeyman these days. This latest grave threat, as progressives see it, is an emerging international coalition of conservative politicians, pundits and thinkers who are loosely working together to preserve and protect the Western values that animate the right. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, delivered a speech at CPAC this month that occasioned much sturm und drang from American liberals, and has become the latest tool for fear mongering from the left.
Another speaker at CPAC in Dallas, Nigel Farage, also stands in the company of the New Right. The former British MP and UKIP leader was the face of the Brexit battle in the UK in 2015. Many political commentators viewed the successful fight to get Britain out of the European Union as a tremor that presaged the earthquake of Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 victory in his run for the White House.
The throughline between Farage and Trump was a deep suspicion of trade deals and global organizations trying to create a one world approach to problems like climate change, poverty, and migration. And there is an important point here. The global left has long formed international coalitions to achieve their goals. The official song of socialism is literally called, ‘The Internationale.’ But apparently when conservatives use similar tactics it is suddenly dark and nefarious.
The current iteration of fear regarding a rising global right centers on Orban. His approach to leadership has focused on Hungary as a Christian nation, promoting family formation (often with generous government subsidies) and on maintaining cultural cohesion by strictly limiting immigration. The latter issue got him in some hot water recently as he criticized the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/viktor-orban-cpac-dallas-speech/">race mixing</a>” of much of Western Europe. For Americans and others in the West this understandably raised eyebrows, but it is important to understand that Hungarian is an ethnicity, American is not, and so prying apart cultural and ethnic identities is not so clear cut.
Another supposed terror spun by the left is that the global New Right seeks to impose a Christian theocracy. And yes, Christianity does lie at the core of much of this new coalition. Importantly though, there is a scale at work regarding the place of religion in Western states. Many Americans are appalled that Hungary would allow the teachings of Christianity to be at the center of so many of its policies. In our own system a state religion is barred by the constitution. But the UK has Christianity as its official religion, and even has a Church of England. This has never made Americans view the British system as a scary, illiberal theocracy ripped from the pages of the Handmaid’s Tale.
The fact is, it is impossible to even discuss the history and values of the West without discussing the role of Christianity. For most of its history the West was known as Christendom. When conservatives in the West seek to conserve its traditional ideals, those ideals cannot be divorced from the 2,000 year old religion which gave them shape and form. To surrender the core Christian underpinnings of our societies and cultures out of vague fears regarding separation of church and state would be to surrender the battle for our civilization itself without firing a shot.
The central idea animating the Trumps, Orbans and Farages of the global political scene is that the nation state must remain the primary source of power in a world increasingly given over to global institutions. If much of 20th century American conservatism was a battle to maintain power in the states against a jealous federal government, in the 21st century this battle has shifted to maintaining the power of the American state in a sea of creeping globalism.
Here is how Farage put it in his CPAC speech, “this battle on behalf not just of America, but on behalf of the whole of the free world [is] to save everything our forebears built, designed and defended against the world.” Part of this is of course economic, but the more important part, the piece that drives this global conservative mission is cultural. Something like the fight over the definition of what a woman is does not know clean national borders. As leftist international organizations work to codify transgenderism it is necessary for the forces aligned against such redefinitions to cooperatively confront them.
This has led to some leading figures on the American New Right being castigated for foreign alliances the left deems unholy. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has come under blistering attack for his embrace of Orban, and for broadcasting his show from Budapest. Others like Compact Magazine founder Sohrab Ahmari have been lambasted for finding elements of Chinese communitarianism that they believe America could emulate.
Disagreement with Carlson, or Ahmari, or anyone else is fine obviously, but the idea that they represent some grave threat to American democracy is laughable. In fact, the opposite is true. Their overwhelming concern is that Americans, Brits, and Hungarians decide for themselves and their nations what their future should hold rather than a global leviathan.
Hysteria in the US has reached a bizarre fever pitch. All over social media are images of a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, the left seems to truly believe that international New Right politics is a harbinger of fascism. It’s absolutely absurd. There is no call for dictatorship, for expunging anyone from the body politic, for the persecution of minorities. All of this is invented by a global left that sees the emerging global right as a check on their heretofore unchecked power. 
For decades now the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and a whole alphabet soup of international organizations from Denver to Davos have pushed a far left agenda across the globe.
This new scrappy band of international conservatives is nothing for Americans or the people of any nation to fear. The only people who should be afraid of it are those trying to enforce a top down globalism on the nations of the world. But we are not citizens of the world, we are citizens of our countries and the New Right aims to keep it that way.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Paranoid ‘Fear of the Global Right’ Is Delusional

The Left’s Paranoid Fear Of ‘The Global Right’ Is Delusional

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Globalism

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