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“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians.
Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.
Symbolism matters. National symbols concentrate and proclaim what a nation thinks of itself, and how it wants other nations to think of it. Speaking on Saturday of the Olympics opening ceremony debacle the night before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán noted archly, “At the end of the day, every nation has the right to show its true colors; that’s what we saw.”
It’s interesting to consider a tale of two cities—Budapest and Paris—and of two rivers, the Danube and the Seine. Every August 20th, the national feast day of St. Stephen the King, the Orban government ends its light show over the Danube by having drones form a giant cross of light. Contrast that with the corpulent lesbian Christ figure surrounded by writhing drag queens, re-enacting a blasphemous Last Supper on a bridge over the Seine.
True, Hungary is not as religious as the floating Cross of Light would have you believe. Nor, for that matter, is France a nation filled with trans-loving blasphemers. The point is, what does the leadership of these nations consider to be their nations’ highest values? The goals to which they aspire?
In France, as in so much of the West, the general answer is: inversion, which is what critical-theory academics mean when they speak of “queering” something. It means to turn the meaning of something inside-out, as our governing and cultural elites have done to our civilization’s values. We are told that we must be diverse, which means punishing those who hold non-progressive views. We are told we must be equitable, which means majorities must accept as just their permanent second-class status, and all the humiliations that go with it. We are told that we must be inclusive, which means excluding Christians, whites, and males.
What’s more, the Inversionists seek to compel everyone else to accept the radically abnormal as normal. What do you think the new Democratic Party campaign to brand Trump running mate J.D. Vance as “weird” is all about? He’s an ordinary white male, a military veteran from a working-class family in the American heartland. Naturally, the party of race riots, men in women’s bathrooms, military drag queens, and sex changes for children are mounting a media offensive to smear Vance as bizarre.
It is likely that Thomas Jolly really does think that he mounted an “inclusive” spectacle in Paris. For these left-wing elites, people unlike themselves don’t exist, except as a dark and dangerous Other to be overcome. Their moral self-righteousness often blinds them to the world as it truly is. Since the Obama years, the United States has made advancing LGBT rights a cornerstone of its foreign policy. The U.S. has used its soft power to browbeat many non-compliant nations to accept things that violate their deep moral convictions.
Those days are rapidly coming to an end. As Viktor Orbán observed over the weekend in his annual Tusványos speech, opposing LGBT extremism at home, as Russia has done, is a form of soft power that is effective in parts of the world where nations would like to progress materially without accepting the decadence that has overtaken the West.