The working class of Hungary have spoken. The people are not going to stop supporting Prime Minister Viktor Orban, their grandfatherly, pragmatic economic nationalist and populist leader. However, the U.S., NATO, Globalists, World Economic Forum and western alliance group, run by and from the CIA/State Dept operational headquarters, are not happy. Not happy at all.
Orban represents a visible middle finger to the interests of the one world order society, as he refuses to accept the era of western controlled “democratic norms.” You know, the modern catch phrase popularized by those who weaponize democracy in order to attain totalitarian objectives via modern multinational fascism (see: COVID mandates, rules and lockdowns).
HUNGARY – (via Guardian) – Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has declared victory in national elections, claiming a mandate for a fourth term following a campaign dominated by rows over the war in neighbouring Ukraine.
In a 10-minute speech to officials and supporters of his Fidesz party at an election night event in Budapest, Orbán addressed a crowd cheering “Viktor!” and declared it was a “huge victory” for his party.
“We won a victory so big that you can see it from the moon, and you can certainly see it from Brussels,” he said.
While votes were still being tallied, it appeared clear that the question was not whether Fidesz would take the election, but by how much. With nearly 75% of votes counted, it appeared possible that Fidesz would win another constitutional majority in the 199-member parliament.
It has previously had a two-thirds supermajority that has enabled it to radically restructure the country’s politics and social policies during its 12-year reign, transforming Hungary into a self-styled “illiberal democracy” that has flouted western norms and frequently been at odds with the EU.
A similar victory would come despite mounting international criticism of Orbán for failing to wholeheartedly condemn Vladimir Putin over Russia’s war on Ukraine. (read more)
In the big picture, Viktor Orban’s easy victory makes NATO war with Russia harder for Joe Biden…
So far this year, events are rapidly unwinding in chaos both at home and abroad. Inflation is soaring; the nation’s southern border is effectively dissolving; violent crime is escalating in many cities, seemingly unchecked; radical indoctrination is replacing proper education in public schools; and Russia is emulating the Nazis’ savage blitzkrieg-cum-genocide strategy of conquest, with relative lassitude by America.
It is vital to reflect on what autocratic Democratic rule—yes, rule, not governance—in Washington, D.C. has produced since Joe Biden’s inauguration and the leftist seizure of near-total control of the national legislative agenda. Such reflection can emanate from a myriad of perspectives, both mundane and esoteric, but there is a cultural lens I’d like to peer through here in this critical election year.
Those who value fact-based realities over “social constructs” meant to facilitate and justify ideological imperatives like identity politics and tribalism accept that there are two—and only two—sexes. Social “innovations” such as “gender fluidity” and the heated efforts exerted by their proponents to normalize them are designed to confound, disrupt, and ultimately destroy the organic social order that has evolved over centuries of experimentation across many societies. These proponents euphemistically label this “fundamental transformation”; those well-acquainted with world history and the relentless delusions of social utopians, foreign or domestic, more accurately call this “social engineering.” Usually, decadence in all forms attends the drive towards “perfecting” society by “perfecting” all the people who live in it. Rampant amorality, the debasement of all civilized norms of behavior, and the successful elevation—even glorification—of perversions of all kinds become milestones on the way to “utopia.” The result? Narcissistic elites prosper, and everyone else slides into misery and poverty as mere tools for the elite’s aggrandizement of power and lucre.
One of the modern whipping boys to advance this savage menace has been “toxic masculinity,” embodied in and epitomized by white, hetero, generically (but not exclusively) Christian, middle- and working-class males. Traits of this supposed scourge include tendencies toward emotional aggression, physical intimidation and violence, attitudes of patriarchal disdain and supremacism, and the usual laundry list of demonic isms and phobias: racism, sexism, various LGBTQ-centric phobias, and Islamophobia. In a word, men are the problem, and particularly white, heterosexual men who possess natural masculine attitudes, values, and predispositions.
This perspective deliberately ignores the positive traits of masculinity that have long been esteemed and celebrated in America and throughout all organized societies. These include the capacity to design and build structures and organizations; the ability to preserve and protect through exertion of physical strength; the ability to produce and amplify material wealth by the use of rational thought and physical labor; and the ability to produce food and water supplies. “Toxic masculinity” is really just a propaganda meme of the utopian Left created for the purpose of besmirching the strong individualism and independent mindset of society’s motivated producers, who, predominantly, happen to be male.
So, what of femininity? If in fact there is a tangible taint known as “toxic masculinity” beyond just being an inflammatory meme designed to divide and alienate people from one another for purposes of aggrandizing political power, is there something rightfully labeled “toxic femininity”? I assert there is, and it is likely even more menacing.
If “toxic men” can be overly aggressive and intimidating, then “toxic women” may be overly passive-aggressive and covertly conniving, working behind the scenes to get what they want by subterfuge. If “toxic males” can be too direct and “in your face” with their demands, needs, and wants, then “toxic females” can be intentionally indirect, coy, sly, and even deceitful to get whatever they want. If the former can be physically violent based on emotions gone awry, then the latter can be emotionally manipulative towards others, playing on their personal fears, vulnerabilities, and sensitivities.
If men and women share both masculine and feminine traits, in varying degrees, then this discourse can hardly be defamed as a diatribe aimed invidiously at women as women. Rather, these behaviors exist in the politics, ideological conflicts, and rivalries bedeviling our nation today—modes employed by both men and women.
Today, Democratic politicians at every level of government and their ideological cohorts in major media, academia, Hollywood, and Big Tech are increasingly being outed as serial liars, deceitful spin artists, subversives, and cynical manipulators of our people’s basest emotions and instincts. Their predations did not start with the 2020 elections, of course. However, in achieving greater normalization, they threaten to subvert and topple not only our own civil society and republican form of government, but the world order, which is predicated on unparalleled American military strength, economic power, and historical values.
If not checked decisively this year by the sane, the rational, the historically literate, and the spiritually conscious, historians of the future may well ascribe America’s devolution and ultimate collapse as a free, independent, and sovereign nation primarily to a pandemic of “toxic femininity.”
It is, to be emphatic, a fully inclusive, “pan-gender” affliction embodied in men and women of all “gender orientations.” That said, the biological men in power today acting as “toxic females” will be most to blame. There are many: Biden, Blinken, Austin, Garland, Kerry, Mayorkas, Buttigieg, Milley, Schumer, Schiff, and Nadler. So, the ladies will have to move over. They have once again been usurped.
A week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have said, is a long time in politics. Poor Joe Biden would doubtless agree, assuming that he remembers what a week, what a long time, and what politics are. It was just about a week ago, on March 26, that he said, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.”
I wonder who thought of that play on words? The ruble is rubble. Ha, ha, ha.
The Russian currency did take a sharp dive. But then, almost immediately, it recovered. Why? There are several explanations. The conventional headscratchers hold that it is largely because the nefarious Vladimir Putin has nefariously blackmailed the weak-willed Germans and others who prefer bucking the sanctions in order to heat their homes. What cowards.
A better explanation, I think, is that Putin, having played this game before, more or less knew what to expect when he invaded Ukraine. The Western press was full of gloating stories about how Mastercard and Visa stopped handling transactions when Biden announced the sanctions. That’ll show ’em. But those companies had done the same thing back in 2014 when, with Barack Obama at the helm in the United States, Putin gobbled up Crimea. This time, Putin was ready. He had already implemented his own card payment system. Mastercard and Visa piggybacked on it. One irony of the situation, as the web site Daily Reckoning observes, is that “instead of Visa and Mastercard getting the fees, Russia’s central bank collected 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $94 million at current exchange rates. Russia actually profited from Visa and Mastercard sanctions.”
File that under “unintended consequences.”
The Daily Reckoning columnists believe we’ll be witnessing a lot of unintended consequences in the coming weeks and months. I and many other commentators have already noted that the “Russia sanctions” are likely to hurt the sanctioners at least as much as the sanctioned. Consider this:
Blocs of nations have long been chasing dollar alternatives. These latest sanctions have merely forced the pace.
The world will no longer consider the dollar a dependable monetary bedrock. If the United States can kick Russia from the international payments system, it can kick other miscreants from the international payments system.
And yes, the world is full of people and states that the U.S. government considers miscreants. Is there world enough and time to sanction them all? Bill Kristol is going to be awfully busy.
Certain cracks in the façade seem to be appearing. Google, for example, must be worried that the agreed upon narrative about Ukraine—Putin bad, Zelenskyy good—is under stress because it just announced to publishers that it was temporarily “demonetizing” content that said unapproved things about the war in Ukraine. The “pause,” the ad giant explains, “includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.” That is going to make it tough on those who, for example, were thinking of reporting on the activities of the Azov Battalion, the neo-Nazi anti-Semitic activists who are credibly accused of widespread rape, torture, and murder in and around the Donbass.
I have elsewhere cited the work of the “realist” foreign policy commentator John Mearsheimer. In a lecture from 2015, Mearsheimer explained why he thought that the debacle already evident in Ukraine was primarily the West’s fault. Last month, he sat for a long interview with a writer for The New Yorkerin which he expatiated on that contention. Before February 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer argues, the United States did not regard Putin as the aggressor in Ukraine. “That,” he says,
is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anyone in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.
Mearsheimer’s perspective is obviously sharply at odds with the regime narrative put abroad by our masters in Washington and their megaphones in the press. But his larger point revolves around the question of where America’s real interests lie. “Russia,” he points out, “is not a serious threat to the United States.” Unfortunately, “We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today.”
That hard truth has bubbled to the surface every now and then in recent years. Now it seems to have been shelved in favor of applauding Zelenskyy and eschewing Russian vodka, Russian dancers and conductors, and even Russian literature.
Meanwhile, Mearsheimer argues, “We should be pivoting out of Europe to deal with China in a laser-like fashion, number one.” There are people in high places that might agree with that. But remember when Donald Trump said it would be a “good thing, not a bad thing,” if America got on well with Russia? That is Mearsheimer’s “number two” point: “we should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians,” he said.
The Russians are part of our balancing coalition against China. If you live in a world where there are three great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger. Instead, what we have done with our foolish policies in Eastern Europe is drive the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.
This brings me to some comments by the financial analyst James Rickards about the prevalence of lies in wartime.
Here’s the first clump of lies and misrepresentations, aka the official narrative: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, Putin’s three-day blitzkrieg of Kyiv has failed, Russian forces are bogged down and valiant Ukrainian troops are putting up a powerful defense and regaining lost ground with the help of weapons from NATO.”
Rickards, like Mearsheimer, offers a different interpretation. According to him, the “real story” is that “Russia’s invasion is the end result of 14 years of provocation by the West, including repeated declarations that Ukraine will join NATO and a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2014 that displaced a pro-Russian president.”
Many news sources will tell you that Russia’s “blitzkrieg” against Kyiv failed. But, as Rickards points out,
Russia never planned a blitzkrieg on Kyiv. That’s a Western invention intended to make Putin look like a failure. In fact, Russia is slowly and methodically taking territory in the south and east of Ukraine in order to control the seacoasts, eliminate pro-fascist elements in Mariupol and establish pro-Russian autonomous zones in Donbas.
Hmmm. But what about Zelenskyy, the “new Churchill”? On the plus side, Rickards acknowledges, he has “succeeded in presenting himself as a strong wartime leader, standing up to the big, bad Putin.” He’s telegenic, a fighter, and a PR genius. No wonder the U.S. Congress gave him a standing ovation. But he is also a complicated figure. As Rickards also notes, Zelenskyy is “a corrupt oligarch with millions of dollars hidden offshore. His acting skills have enhanced his propaganda efforts, but it doesn’t take much training to see how phony he is.” Moreover, “innocent civilians, including women and children, are dying under his failed leadership and inability to come to terms with Putin before the invasion began. In a nutshell, Zelenskyy bet on support from Biden and the West and lost.”
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a tragedy for that star-crossed country. But the Western response, although it has afforded many opportunities for virtue signaling, is very likely to make things worse. Sanctions, Rickards points out, will not stop the war. They never do. Ultimately, they will “harm everyday citizens and consumers most.”
Inflation was baked into the U.S. economy many months ago by Biden’s attack on fossil fuels and his incontinent spending. But it has been put into overdrive by the anti-Russian sanctions. The pain is not, and will not, be confined to Russia. Sure, things will be bad for ordinary Russians. But Rickards is right: “the pain on the American people has only begun. It’s about to get much worse. U.S. consumers and investors will suffer as prices soar, growth lags and stocks collapse.”
That’s not the ending Bill Kristol or Francis Fukuyama forecast. But in this respect, they and their ilk are like Holiday Inn: the best surprise is no surprise.
GBNews pundit Neil Oliver uses his weekly monologue [Transcript Here] to ask what is this new madness that forces us to suspend disbelief in order to accept it?
Curiouser and curiouser we find ourselves muttering as those who operate the global funhouse mirrors bend the reflected narrative to give the appearance of fat made skinny, boys made girls, and contorted views of their political truth. WATCH:
[Transcript] – “I wonder how far all this will go. By “all this”, I mean the headlong push, always in the same direction, always away from the world I recognise. To me it seems as though a pendulum is swinging, has been swinging for years now, but always and only one way – further and further from the point where I stand. I wonder too, how far that pendulum can swing before it must stop and, inevitably swing back the other way, and with a vengeance. Every action, after all, has an equal and opposite reaction.
To me there seems no avoiding the conclusion that, as a key part of all this, official misinformation and propaganda all over the world has been shaped to make reasonable people feel like they’re simply going mad, that they have lost the ability to understand and interpret events and make decisions for themselves. Many people have felt the only option was to toe the line – even when it seemed pointless, or counterproductive, even insane. The name of the game was avoiding the anger of those shouting loudest.
Last week US President Joe Biden spoke in front of millions about how: “there’s going to be a new world order out there”
New World Order: three words that have been floating around on social media like something unpleasant that just won’t flush. Hardly were the words out of the president’s mouth before commentators – on his side of the line, at least – were gleefully reporting his statement … while somehow simultaneously offering the opinion that only the tin-hat-wearing, swivel eyed loons (which includes people like me, apparently) had been triggered by his language.
The Independent website, for instance, reported the story under a headline reading: “Joe Biden said New World Order and conspiracy theorists lost it”
This is no more than a clumsy attempt at a verbal sleight of hand, yet another reminder that the official line has it that only crazy people ever suspect that something, somewhere might be amiss.
In a speech delivered to the Australian National University in Canberra, Sir Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, told his audience that the pandemic, followed by war in Ukraine, added up to: “a period of generational upheaval.”
Both Biden and Sir Jeremy – to take just two prominent spokesmen speaking at the same moment in history – seeking to normalise the thought that every few generations, the world must change whether we want it to or not, as though the world has always changed every two or three generations, which it hasn’t.
New World Order, generational upheaval, always the pendulum swinging one way and one way only. Forget how things used to be, that’s over now, get ready for change, for something new, whether you want it or not. What’s a person – a person bedevilled, anyway, by a cost-of-living crisis, the dogged pursuit of Net Zero, a reawakened fear of nuclear war and still coming to terms with the will-they-won’t-they uncertainty of Covid rules left smouldering like embers that might reignite at any moment – to make of such unsettling prophesying?
More verbal gymnastics followed when Mr Biden said recently that Mr Putin should no longer be in power in Russia. The president had told his audience in Poland that Putin: “…cannot remain in power”. But yet more verbal contortions somehow enabled the White House to say that regime change in Russia was not US government policy.
How can both statements be true at the same time?
How can this inside out, upside down line of thinking do anything but leave the average reasonable person feeling they simply do not have a clue about what’s going on anymore?
I say the average reasonable person – which is how I still understand myself, even after all this time of madness – but clearly those on the other side of the debate from me, that viciously polarised debate, now regard me and millions of other reasonable people as wild-eyed extremists, politically to the right of Atilla the Hun.
And yet I look on at the la-la land of Hollywood, at actor Will Smith slapping comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars and then getting a standing ovation for winning the statuette for Best Actor. What does a reasonable person, or even a wild-eyed extremist even begin to do with such a sequence of events compressed into such a short space of time? If I hit someone at a work event I might expect to be fired, rather than given a standing ovation and the award for employee of the year. But that’s showbiz, apparently.
The Oscars have been growing increasingly unbearable for years, of course. Watching millionaires in receipt of goodie bags worth more than what 99 percent of the world’s population earns in a year, while speechifying and shedding crocodile tears about the plight of the poor and the oppressed, had long required a muscular suspension of disbelief. But now surely the pretence of the Oscars as moral spokesman for the world is finally over, and forever, the bubble well and truly burst. I can’t look at it anymore, not after metaphorically watching A-listers on the toilet all these years.
Everywhere you look there’s more to confuse and disorientate. Talk of white privilege, men in women’s sports, big tech censorship. Last week Florida passed a bill to prevent the sexualisation of children up to the age of seven or so. A large majority of Floridians – both Republican and Democrat – agreed it was common sense that children so young should not receive instruction in the classroom about “sexual orientation” or “gender identity”. You might think third graders and younger would do best to get to grips with “The Cat Sat on the Mat” in preparation for later learning what a pronoun actually is – maybe in the context of an English lesson – before being invited to pick pronouns to describe their own understanding of their genders.
Over in the Magic Kingdom, in California, Disney joined those taking strenuous exception to the Florida bill and pushing a blatant lie that it was about stopping teachers saying the word ‘Gay’. All at once the bill was, according to Disney, and other showbiz types, about: “Don’t say gay.”
In fact there was no use of the word gay anywhere in the bill, and in polling, the majority of people of all stripes agreed with it. But that didn’t stop Disney and others insisting that word was being banned in Florida schools and kindergartens.
At the same time, Disney announced it had done away with any and all references to “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” at any of its theme parks. Never again, presumably, will a little girl be welcomed as a “princess” as had previously been a commonplace. How much money Disney had made selling princess dresses to uncounted millions of little children hardly bears thinking about. No more, we might assume.
Many parents have known a child insist on dressing as a princess one week, and superman the next. Most of those parents have understood those steps not as permanent life choices, but as the multicoloured stages of being a child growing up.
To be frank, I have never understood the pressure about pronouns, either. I was brought up never to refer to anyone – anyone actually in the room with me – via a pronoun. To point to someone and call them ‘she’ – referring to that person in the third person singular while that person was actually standing in front of me, was to invite, from a grown up, the withering putdown, “Who’s ‘she’, the cat’s mother?”
The use of ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘he’, ‘him’ in regard to a person who was RIGHT THERE, was simply rude, regardless of any other consideration. Good manners dictated that each person in the room was to be addressed and referred to by their name. If you experienced the small agony of forgetting the name of someone you’d been introduced to … too bad … you just had to apologise for the lapse and ask them to say their name a second time. Third person pronouns were for the mention of someone who was elsewhere, absent from the scene. In my world there should be no need for those pronouns while actually with a person. And so what sort of self-obsessed narcissist tries to dictate how others talk about them when they’re not even there?
And always, woven through the confusing madness like dry rot, is the sinister obsession with children and also with the family.
In my homeland of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish government has already seen to it that children as young as four can pick a different gender while in school – without the need for their parents to know anything about it. Previously the Scottish government pursued a so-called Named Persons bill – that would have seen a state sponsored stranger slipped between every child and parent in the land. That named person would have been able to establish a relationship with the child, have conversations with the child about anything and everything under the sun – again without the need for parents to be informed.
The Daily Mail had a story last week about a London-based psychologist reporting a sharp rise in the number of people calling his clinic to report symptoms of what he has called ‘Doomsday anxiety’ – which he describes as “fear of the end of the world or life as we know it.”
I know that feeling and I’m not surprised in the least that more and more people are burdened by hopeless, doom-laden thoughts. After all, the incessant pushing of the pendulum has left more and more people no other choice but to fear the worst.
What interests me more and more though, as I said at the top, is how much further away from me, and millions like me, the pendulum must swing. How much further CAN it swing? How much further away must we watch the pendulum pushed away – away from everything so many of us know to be common sense, decent, honourable and true? How much more will we watch them do to marginalise and then break up the family? How much longer will we let our youngest children watch and listen to lectures about sex, to be encouraged to contemplate things sexual instead of enjoying a handful of years being welcomed as boys and girls and pretending to be princesses one day and superheroes the next?
However far the pendulum swings, it must and will eventually swing back the other way, faster and faster. How far will it swing then, and where will it stop?{LINK}
Disney Shareholder Warns the Company: Stop Wasting Money on Political Crusades
One of the consequences of Disney’s woke agenda for its bottom line
is the very real threat that shareholders will take a hike if the stock
price plunges or if they perceive Disney management to be poor
caretakers of the Disney brand.
DisneyBizJournal.com editor Ray Keating is sounding an alarm for Disney management — specifically CEO Bob Chapek.
“Here’s a suggestion for Disney CEO Bob Chapek: Get back to business,
that is, excellence in storytelling, and stop wasting shareholder’s
money on political crusades that have nothing to do with Disney’s
business,” Keating told Fox News Digital.
Keating, who has written about
how Disney’s activism is bad for business, said Disney’s decisions on
the Florida bill has meant the company is catching heat from both sides
of the political spectrum. Ever since Chapek spoke up, critics on the
right have condemned Disney as being too “woke” and even talked of boycotting the resort.
“Disney’s management succumbed to political pressure from activists
on the Left, and now it’s getting hit from the Left and the Right,”
Keating told Fox News Digital. “If I weren’t a shareholder, I’d find it
amusing.”
Keating references one of economist Milton Friedman’s most important
essays on “the social responsibility of business” to make his point. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”
was written in 1970 — another time of great social upheaval when calls
for an end to capitalism were even louder than they are today.
“The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business’ are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor.”
“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate
executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct
responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the
business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to
make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of
the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical
custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different
objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an
eleemosynary purpose – for example, a hospital or a school. The manager
of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objectives but
the rendering of certain services.”
Keating is trying to make the point that Chapek and the rest of
Disney management who are embracing this crusade are taking money from
the pockets of those whom, by law, they have a fiduciary responsibility
to protect.
In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be
spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as
his actions in accord with his ‘social responsibility’ reduce returns
to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions
raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money.
Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending
their money.”
Chapek may be the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, but DeSantis has the
majority of the country on his side. And that counts for a helluva lot
more to protect the sensibilities of children and allow them to maintain
the innocence of childhood a little longer than a few hysterical LGBTQ
activists and their allies who are deliberately misinterpreting a law.
Orban represents a visible middle finger to the interests of the one world order society, as he refuses to accept the era of western controlled “democratic norms.” You know, the modern catch phrase popularized by those who weaponize democracy in order to attain totalitarian objectives via modern multinational fascism (see: COVID mandates, rules and lockdowns).
