Sometimes, it’s the little things. Yesterday I had to go into a pharmacy in Vienna. I was immediately struck by the fact that none of the products for sale were locked away. It was all out there for sale, even the razor blades, like Austria is a normal country … like America used to be, before this:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1534557955529396227

Earlier this week, voters in San Francisco recalled (with a 60 percent majority) that city’s loony-left DA, Chesa Boudin, under whose reign crime, especially violent crime, has gotten out of control. It’s interesting to see how the voting went by demographic. From New York magazine:

Still, his rejection reflected visible grassroots anger at both these conditions and his policies, particularly Boudin’s unwillingness to bring heavier charges against shoplifters and other kinds of petty thieves that had come to define, in the popular imagination, 2020s San Francisco. Wealthy, older voters were eager to dump Boudin, as were middle-class non-white voters, particularly Asian Americans. Victimized by a surge in hate crimes, Asian voters felt Boudin had not responded properly to their plight. In 2021, Boudin drew sharp criticism for failing to describe the murder of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai man, as a racially motivated crime. While denouncing the crime, Boudin said the defendant was “in some sort of a temper tantrum” and said there was no evidence to charge him with a hate crime. His office would later charge him with murder and elder abuse, but it wasn’t enough to assuage anger in the community. Like with the school-board recall, the organizing work of Asian Americans paid off. The Asian vote, in particular, is a warning for Democrats; they are not a demographic the left can take for granted or assume will easily fall into their coalition in the future. No Republican was on the ballot Tuesday, but right-leaning candidates who speak the language of law and order will be able to campaign for their support and win.

Good. But I live in a city where the district attorney is no liberal at all, and where you don’t see the kind of open thievery that has become a staple of social media. Still, the city is more violent than it has been in a long time, with violent crime moving into areas that once were peaceful. And if you don’t see shoplifters brazenly filling sacks in stores, you still see consumer items that you used to be able to buy easily now behind locked cases. Somebody is doing the stealing.

Meanwhile, how is life in Hungary, which our media and our foreign-policy elites have assured us is an authoritarian hellhole? Let’s see:

Hungary🇭🇺 had the 2nd lowest robbery rate in 2020 according to the latest @EU_Eurostat report! The number of crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in HU was only 6.2, much lower than the EU average of 40.8. This is further proof that Hungary is among the safest countries. pic.twitter.com/PdUl8kwtdo

— Balázs Orbán (@BalazsOrban_HU) June 9, 2022

Chesa Boudin is literally a George Soros poster boy. They can’t stand George Soros in Hungary, because PM Viktor Orban believes the kind of world that Soros spends lavishly to bring about would destroy the possibility for a decent, normal life for ordinary people. He’s right.

Of course Hungary is a very different society than the United States is, so comparisons can only go so deep. You don’t get the feeling when you’re in Hungary that you have to be afraid of the police. Hungarians are naturally more law-abiding than we Americans are, overall. What’s interesting, though, is how Orban is constantly condemned by Western intellectuals for being “authoritarian” because he attempts to save Hungary from the same diseases destroying the West.

For example, the views of globalist progressive billionaires like Soros. Most people know that Soros favors, and funds candidates who advocate, progressive policies on crime — of that sort that just got Chesa Boudin kicked out of office by the most liberal electorate in the country. Most people also know that Soros is for open borders. Back in 2018, when Orban shut down parts of the Soros-funded Central European University in Budapest, I wrote that I wasn’t going to support the move as a matter of principle, but that I wasn’t going to be quick to judge Orban about it. I blogged then:

From Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe:

In October 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, criticised Soros publicly as one of a circle of activists who “support anything that weakens nation states.” Soros responded publicly to confirm that the numerous groups he was funding were indeed working for the ends described by Orban. In an email to Bloomberg, Soros said that it was his foundation which was seeking to “uphold European values,” while he accused Orban of trying to “undermine those values.” Soros went on to say of Orban: “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The dialogues ceased before anyone could ask Soros how long those European values might last once Europe could be walked into by people from all over the world.

In his email to Bloomberg Business, Soros referred to this plan, which you can read in full on the Soros website (GeorgeSoros.com). Excerpt:

First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly – a principle that a qualified majority finally established at last Wednesday’s summit.

Soros continues:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has now also produced a six-point plan to address the crisis. But his plan, which subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders, threatens to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built and violating the laws that are supposed to govern it.

Orban was exactly right! Soros believes that borders are less important than moving a million “refugees” into Europe each year, indefinitely. This is not a secret. The globalist billionaire Soros is — was — funding a university in Budapest whose purpose is to radically undermine the political and cultural order of Hungary.

From the NYT’s report:

Piret Karro, a 27-year-old from Estonia who came to Budapest to get a master’s degree in gender studies, learned that Mr. Orban banned the subject this year. She said that while the university would survive in Vienna, she worried what the move meant for academic freedom in Hungary more broadly.

“Other academic institutions in Hungary will still have to deal with Viktor Orban curbing free speech and eliminating critical thinkers,” she said.

Wow. What will Estonians do without their gender studies degrees?

I published that in 2018. Today, I would be sympathetic to Orban’s move. Why? Because we have lived through, and are living through, seeing what happens when university-educated elites take radical progressive ideals into other elite institutions throughout a society. They destroy it, as they are destroying America. A friend sent me today an e-mail from a friend of his — I can’t publish it, but he wanted me to see what was going on — in which she is considering quitting her job because her company has beyond woke-beyond-woke on Pride month, and is requiring all the employees to affirm extreme things that she cannot in good conscience affirm. This is normal now. As normal as locking toothpaste and razor blades behind a clear plastic case at the drugstore.

(They don’t do this in Hungary either, by the way. I noticed it in Vienna because I had just spent a month back in Baton Rouge.)

I talked earlier this week with an American magazine reporter, who wanted to know what I, as a conservative, would like to see an American conservative president, or conservative politicians, bring to our country from Viktor Orban’s governance. I emphasized that Orbanism is not plug-and-play; America is a very different country from Hungary, and what works there is not necessarily going to work for us.

Nevertheless, there are a few general things. First, I would like a US president who was serious about defending our borders. Relatedly, I would like a US president who could speak in robust terms about the American nation, emphasizing what binds us together, not what is tearing us apart. This is why I would want an American president who fights identity politics not just rhetorically, but in terms of strong policies. Fourth, I want a president who understands that part of maintaining unity is allowing for some diversity — and that means respecting local sovereignty within a broader unity. Let Massachusetts be Massachusetts, and let Alabama be Alabama — within reason.

All of these things are fairly anodyne conservatism. What I also want — and this is where Orban has a lot to teach us — is a president who is willing to fight the culture war as hard or harder than the Left. This requires a systemic understanding of how progressive elites and their fellow travelers on the Right use their power within networks to institutionalize destructive ideals, like gender ideology and Critical Race Theory. I want a president who, like Viktor Orban, is a small-d democrat who understands that liberalism, in its current form, destroys the conditions under which a healthy society can develop and maintain itself.

For example, Orban banned gender studies in the countries universities, not by executive fiat, but by withdrawing accreditation and funding for those programs. He wasn’t going to have this corrupt discipline injecting its poison into his country. Like a good classical liberal, I have thought for most of my adult life that the state should keeps its nose out of the affairs of universities. But now that the entire country has become a college campus, and college campuses have become extraordinarily illiberal places, the source of ideas and practices that, having spread widely throughout middle-class American life, are wrecking the nation, I would consider backing the state intervening in some situations. Maintaining liberalism cannot be a suicide pact.

Finally, I hope an Orban-like American president uses the power within his office to smash bureaucratic cabals. This is what Trump meant by “drain the swamp.” A friend of mine who used to work in Washington at a senior level in a key federal agency has described to me how it became heavily politicized internally. I can’t say more out of respect for his privacy, but he can testify to how real the Great Awokening is among federal bureaucracies. The point is that an American Orban would have to be aware of the systemic power within institutions and institutional networks arrayed against him and against the people who support him, and act boldly to even the playing field.

A key example: Purge the military of wokeness. Get it back to doing what it’s supposed to do: fight actual wars, not the culture war. Demote all the generals and senior officers who support wokeness in any form. Promote those who believe in traditional American ideals of fair play.

What we need is a return to order. Not just law and order, but a deeper sense of order, of normality. This is going to require recognizing that the kind of individualism that Americans today consider to be normal is no longer workable. It is destroying us. Watch Matt Walsh’s “What Is A Woman?” film for a powerful and instructive example of how the ideas of elites (physicians, scientists, professors, politicians), shared by them, and enforced by them, wrecks the lives of ordinary people. Watch them be unable to define “woman,” and unable to say what truth is. We have become a society in which people are afraid to assert that there is any such thing as truth — but are eager to exercise their power to defend “their truth.”

The Walsh film — see the trailer here — is more unsettling than it seems at first (and believe me, it is plenty unsettling!). Why? It’s the question of truth. All of these pro-trans experts — again, including leading medical ones — evade the question of Truth. They want what they want, and if getting it means denying that truth exists, then that’s what they are willing to do. It’s right there in the open in the film. At least two of them chastise Walsh for even asking the question.

Now we know, thanks to whistleblower documents obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Josh Hawley, that the Biden Administration was planning to use its now-abandoned Homeland Security disinformation management board to control political narratives and go after dissidents. Here’s a link to the letter Sen. Grassley and Sen. Hawley sent to the Homeland Security chief, Alexander Mayorkas. Read it all. This is how soft totalitarianism works: the State working with private industry (in this case, social media giants), to suppress dissident opinions and advance a particular political narrative. This is happening right now, in our country, within government and private bureaucracies.

Along these same lines, read this piece by Princeton professor Robert George, about the controversy that ended with the university firing Prof. Joshua Katz. Robby George is widely respected by both liberals and conservatives. He served as an advisor to Katz during his ordeal. Finally, Prof. George weighs in publicly with his views. It is shockingly clear, according to George’s account, that Katz was the victim of a political purge at the university, in which truth and justice were tossed out the window for the sake of punishing a dissenter who questioned the woke narrative.

Princeton is a private institution, and that means it had the legal right to fire Katz. But make no mistake: what happened at Princeton is extremely illiberal and unjust, and is, yes, an example of the soft totalitarianism I warn about in Live Not By Lies. If your employer wants to get rid of you for being a political dissident, and can get away with it legally, they’ll likely do it. Ending Joshua Katz’s 25-year career at Princeton sent a message to everybody else there: do not cross the woke faculty and students, or you’ll be out too.

Truth and fairness don’t matter anymore to these left-wing activists and their institutional allies. Only achieving the desired result. This is where our country is now.

This morning I woke up to learn from a friend that the US Marshals Service has issued a warning, with suggested actions, to federal officials concerning anticipated violence if the Supreme Court this month overturns Roe v. Wade. The friend received one of these warnings himself. This comes days after US Marshals arrested an armed man outside of Justice Kavanaugh’s house; the man allegedly confessed that he had come there to murder the justice over Roe, and in so doing to give his life “purpose”. Straight out of Dostoevsky, right?

We saw in the Summer of Floyd what the Left is willing to do to this country and its social and civic order. I fear we are about to see it again, if Roe is overturned. All that would do is to put abortion back into the sphere of democratic politics — but this stands to bring about violence from unhinged elements of the Left, who are already setting out to assassinate Supreme Court justices, and firebombing pro-life counseling centers.

A country in which pharmacies and other retailers have to lock products behind barriers to prevent open theft is a country that has lost a sense of internal order. It’s one of those “broken windows” signals that we used to talk about — that is, a small but telling outward sign of inner disorder. The United States is a broken country. Politics alone cannot fix it, but if enough Americans are disgusted with what the ruling class has done to our country these past two decades — the endless wars, the soft totalitarianism of wokeness, the constant propaganda trying to sexualize children and turn races against each other — then maybe we can elect political leaders who have the courage and the intelligence to stop it in its tracks, and even turn back the tide of chaos.

I hope so. We are not going to vote ourselves out of this crisis, but politics can and does play an important role in protecting the liberty of those who can rebuild the culture, to act. I told the magazine reporter that my big fear is that Viktor Orban, or an American version of Viktor Orban, may ultimately end up being a Julian the Apostate figure: the fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to reverse the Christianization of the Empire by imperial fiat, but who failed because the deep cultural forces that ended Roman paganism were already too advanced.

We don’t know yet if we are headed into an unstoppable night, or if this can be reversed. If we are to go down, we have to go down resisting — and that means building Benedict Option structures within which we can resist for generations under a tyrannical regime. I gave a brief talk last night at a social gathering of Austrian Christians, telling them about Father Kolakovic from next-door Slovakia, and urging them to do as he did, and use what may be the last years of freedom for a long time to prepare spiritually and materially: by building networks of solidarity and practical assistance across denominational lines.

In the US, we will know within a few weeks if Roe will be overturned, and what the Left is prepared to do about it. Here is a preview. Ryan T. Anderson, who co-wrote a book with Alexandra DeSanctis critical of abortion — Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing — has seen the audiobook publisher cancel the contract after woke employees complained:

We now have clarity on what’s going on. The audiobook distributor cancelled the contract with the audiobook publisher after the Alito opinion leaked and staff complained. But it’s only now that they’ve canceled with Amazon and all other retailers. So all audio pre-sales canceled.

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) June 9, 2022

This is soft totalitarianism: the idea that certain opinions are intolerable, and that those who hold them should lose their livelihoods. It’s not the gulag, heaven knows, but it’s not nothing, either. Remember, Amazon canceled sales of Anderson’s book critical of transgenderism after employees complained. This is all perfectly legal, but it is creating a public square where only certain people are allowed to say what they think. What’s happening to Ryan Anderson is another broken window.

A lot of windows are about to get broken in America, in this Summer of Roe — literally and figuratively. Be ready.