Weimar West

Mr Dreher looks at how the West is becoming Weimar Germany, but 'without the good art and music'. 'The rot goes all the way to the top.'

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher, BA

Look:

This is the elite governing class of the West, scampering behind a tranny hooker, or pro-hooker tranny. The male-to-female topless transsexual twerker is carrying a sign advertising “SEX WORK”; on the other side was the name of St. Mary Magdalene, meaning that this creep is also a blasphemer. Shows you where this stuff comes from, does it not? Over the weekend at Vienna Pride, there was a contingent of “Diplomats For Pride” marching in the parade. I swear, it’s like the Weimar Republic, without the good art and music. You’re not supposed to notice this decadence, unless it is to praise it.

This kind of thing was always part of Pride parades. I remember seeing footage of Pride parades in Washington DC in the early 1990s. I believe it was Pat Robertson’s CBN that recorded footage of the parade and aired parts of it. They were condemned as bigots at the time, simply for broadcasting what actually happened at DC Pride. What has changed is that this kind of thing — the kink — has been embraced and celebrated by the globalist ruling class.

Something big is happening to us. Something very big.

A reader writes that Pride month is celebrated with all the fervor of the high holy days precisely because it has been so effectively commercialized and fits extremely nicely into the Western model of creating a completely atomized society where everyone exists alone and without any support. Those who play by the rules get customized soma products, whereas those who do not end like Winston Smith. This is being heavily driven by commercial forces that discovered in the 1990s that gays and their activist allies are the easiest consumers who will buy anything with the Pride label. Now that accusations of homophobia will silence the overwhelming majority of middle and upper class normies, there is no reason not to pursue this strategy.

Meanwhile, another terrible disease rages, but AVOIDING HATE is the most important thing, according to the Washington Post:

Monkeypox had arrived in Salt Lake County, with two men testing positive after returning from Europe, the epicenter of a global outbreak concentrated in gay and bisexual men.

Officials there faced a dilemma. They wanted to warn men who have sex with men that they were at higher risk for exposure to the virus. But they feared unintended consequences: heterosexual people assuming they’re not susceptible, closeted men in a heavily Mormon community avoiding care so they’re not seen as gay, and critics exploiting the infections to sow bigotry.

It’s not just Utah officials who are struggling to find the right message. As the United States confronts its largest-ever monkeypox outbreak, with nearly 50 probable cases, public health authorities navigate a delicate but familiar balancing act. In the 17 U.S. cases in which the sexual behavior of the patient is known, all but one involve men who have sex with men, mirroring trends in Europe. It’s something never recognized before in outbreaks of the virus.

In Salt Lake County, health officials consulted with advocacy groups and decided to get the message out to gay and bisexual men without making the message about them. At a booth during the Utah Pride Festival in Salt Lake City this month, Health Department staff distributed business-card-sized monkeypox warnings urging people to avoid close or sexual contact with anyone experiencing a rash or flu-like symptoms. The warning didn’t say anything about the gay community.

“We don’t need to put rainbows all over and make clear it’s only for [men who have sex with men] because it’s not,” said Nicholas Rupp, who oversees public outreach for the Salt Lake County Health Department. “The virus, of course, doesn’t see sexual orientation.”

Yeah, right, Nicholas Rupp. It’s weird, though, how the virus is different in the West, versus Africa — just like AIDS.

I’m old enough to remember when AIDS debuted in the West. We were all told that anybody could get it. Anybody! In fact, my journalism career started with an editorial in the campus newspaper — an editorial that won a national college journalism award — about how all of us were vulnerable to AIDS. Not long ago a straight friend a bit younger than me told me, laughing, about how back in the day, he had unprotected heterosexual sex, and scared that he might have been exposed to HIV, went for a test. He said the health workers laughed at him in a friendly way, and told him that the odds of catching HIV from conventional (e.g., non-anal) heterosexual sex were tiny. The health warnings were all propaganda to keep people from hating promiscuous gay men.

Lies, lies, lies. Our ruling class demands that we all deny the evidence of our eyes. Here is some more Pride Month copium from the Washington Post:

As Pride month gets underway around the world, and LGBTQ communities take stock of accomplishments and challenges, Ukraine’s is contending with a strange new reality. War here is causing tragedy and hardship for every Ukrainian, but it may accelerate their movement for equal rights.

There are practical factors — for instance, Ukraine has formally applied to become a member of the European Union, a process that would require steps toward greater rights and protections for LGBTQ people. But more powerful, said activists who have organized the community for the past decade, is a budding sense of national unity that is inclusive and tolerant — and unlike Russia in every way.

Look, I think Russia’s invasion was morally wrong, and I hope that Ukraine kicks the Russians out — even as I think the US should stay out of it. But it’s really interesting to observe how our media frame the war. To whom but a Western liberal journalist would it occur to frame Russia’s savage invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to advance gay rights, as an anti-Russian strategy?

As the gay journalist Andy Ngo points out, the Ukraine cause has been grafted into the progressive Grand March, even though actual Ukrainians are pretty conservative on LGBT matters:

How many volunteer Pride battalions have gone to Ukraine to fight? Compare that to the Muslims from the West who went to Syria to fight jihad. The strength of the Weimar contingent is that they have all the institutional power. In a society as demoralized and atomized as the West has become, this counts for a lot.

In Vienna over the weekend, I was struck by the large number of girls, aged 13 to 16, who were at Pride, all decked out in rainbow gear and facepaint. This is a huge thing for that age group, it seems. A reader sends in this photo of a Pride Month display at the entrance to a Target’s section for adolescent girls:

They’re getting them young for the Cause.

Overnight I received an email from one of my sources for Live Not By Lies, a man who fled to the West from a Communist country back in the 1980s. He said that if he had known that democracy was going to deliver us to where we are today, he never would have supported it. That was very striking to me. This man is a staunch anti-communist, but he believes that we in the West are sick and suicidal. He tells me he is not alone — that others of his generation who came to the West seeking liberty and normalcy are equally pessimistic. One of them even moved back to Eastern Europe, to the country from which he fled. It’s a democracy now, but he said that at least there normalcy has a fighting chance. America and western Europe, this man believes, are lost.

History shows that what comes after this efflorescence of decadence is horrible. Either the West will step back from the brink, or we will face something worse than most of us living in the West today have never seen. We are not going to be able to go on like this indefinitely. I want to make it perfectly clear that I absolutely detest the idea of fascism! But you’d have to be a total fool, utterly ignorant of history, not to see the risks we are running with our continued indulgence of decadence and atomization. Hannah Arendt warned that embracing transgressiveness for its own sake is a precursor of totalitarianism!

UPDATE: A reader sends in this essay his wife wrote for an online support group of parents grieving their children caught up in the trans cult. Excerpts:

In 2021, my 19 year old son walked from his college campus to Planned Parenthood and was prescribed wrong sex hormones on his first visit, no therapy required. There was no differential diagnosis. Some days, it’s an effort to walk my dog and cook dinner, let alone write an essay about the nuances of what my family is enduring. But I can write about sadness in bullet form, which is apropos, since my family has been fired upon by insidious gender ideology like a spray of bullets, hitting us randomly from all directions.

More:

Photos: I’m sad every time I walk by the family photos that hang in the hallway. Do I take down these photos of our family on a boat ride, at the beach, of my son as a toddler grinning with his sister on a carousel?  No. Though my memories are tainted, I do not deserve to have them deleted. Some days, I allow a glimpse of my handsome son in his senior photo before he graduated high school. This photo, now in a drawer, used to be on the fridge, but it was too painful there. In the living room, my wedding photo pains me too. On that special day, it was inconceivable that my future child would try to escape his own body, and that his self-harm path would be sanctioned. I struggle to hold onto the reality of the goodness of my family and the meaningfulness of years filled with the daily effort of raising my son. My confused son deadnames his birth name and devalues his family. Along with the present and the future, the trans cult stomps on my memories. There is sadness in every direction.

And:

My son: Mark is an exceptionally intelligent, quirky person with a great smile. He has a history of speech delay, affect dysregulation, anxiety, constrained food preferences, rigidity, and difficulty making friends. He is likely on the autistic spectrum. He was unlucky to be a teenager in the digital age when this social contagion spread. In high school, he flirted with the trans cult, but my husband and I thought we had helped him find his way back to material reality. Of course, his anxiety has not magically gone away with wrong sex hormones, and an SSRI joins his mix of daily pills. Mark was a tall teenager on the verge of thriving as a young adult. Today he is a tall, gullible young man who believes his longer hair, small HRT induced breasts, and costume of dresses or skirts fools others. During his formative college years, his mind and body have been hijacked by an evil mind virus that was and continues to be aided and abetted by Planned Parenthood, others institutions, and many gaslit people. It’s terribly sad.

 

Read it all. It’s crushing, and it’s evil, but it’s real. This is really happening to families, and it is celebrated by our ruling class, for which it is a religion. I happen to know something about this reader. These people are not religious or conservative. If the normies don’t somehow find a way to fight back effectively, the only ones who will are the extremists — and they will attract the support of normies who are so sick of having this decadence shoved down their throats, and even stealing their children.

UPDATE.2: I received an e-mail from a Navy officer who retired not long ago. He asked me not to use his identifying information, so I’m going to redact that. I verified his name and identity. He writes:

I am often asked why I chose to retire now. I have been in the Navy [over two decades] but I chose to retire at the earliest possible opportunity at this paygrade, which for some people seems surprising. The attached photo should explain it all, though it is a symptom of a larger cultural malignancy that grips our culture.

The reader goes on:

I am no longer interested in carrying the water for an organization that so regularly lies to itself, and distracts itself with indulging the dominant culture. And while the likelihood of such a deployment is quite low, I have ZERO interest in continuing to risk my well-being to maintain the Global American Empire. [XX] years of sea duty and a year in Iraq are quite enough.

I spoke on background to a reporter after the 2017 collisions and commented that if the reporter really wanted to get a sense of the poor cultural state of the Navy, to ask how many officers would want their kids to follow them into the service. (I certainly did … my father was in the Navy for [decades]). I wouldn’t say my recent polling of that question is unanimous, but it certainly appears to me that the overwhelming number of current officers would not recommend that their children follow them into the Navy. A sizable portion of that cohort are quite vociferous in that position.

I am overwhelmingly grateful for the experiences that the Navy afforded me. But the rot is too deep, both in the service and in the culture. My daughter is very small, and I dread the day that we walk into the library, some store, or my workplace and I have to field the question about rainbow flags. But I live in [a liberal city], so it’s coming and my family and I need to prepare. But what I absolutely refuse to do anymore is pretend that this culture deserves my continued service.

Thank you, sir, for your service — and thank you for the courage of recognizing that what our elites — I’m looking at you, Gen. Mark Milley, but you’re not the only one — have done to our armed forces, and how they have made military service alien to those who hold to traditional values.

Where do people like this man and his wife go? Who defends them? Who speaks for them? I wish I knew.

UPDATE.3: The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Hon. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of San Francisco:

The rot goes all the way to the top.