Muslim and Migrant Fatigue

At a Fidesz party meeting last weekend, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán opened his remarks by noting how Donald Trump has been forced to deal with extraordinary efforts by the liberal establishment to destroy him. 

One day earlier, anti-Trump forces around the U.S. gathered for coordinated public protests called “No Kings 2.0.” It was kind of a joke, honestly. Critics noted the disproportionate presence of white liberal Baby Boomers. Well, it turns out that a conservative research team relying on publicly available information discovered that the No Kings movement is funded by—surprise!—George Soros and other progressive oligarchs. 

It’s the same kind of Color Revolution plan that Hungarians who support the Orbán government know all too well. This time, the oligarchs are turning their attention to the United States. So far, it’s not working. 

Orbán went on to tell the crowd of supporters that this is all part of the general crisis overtaking the West, especially Europe. 

“[L]et me just note that if a system of governance is unable to provide answers to the questions that people consider most important, the inevitable result is crisis—and crisis breeds aggressiveness, fear of losing power, a desperate struggle to retain power,” said Orbán. “Our Western world is now experiencing this.”

The prime minister talked about the related crises of mass migration and Islamization in Europe. These are the most important issues in the eyes of European peoples, but the governing class across the continent cannot deal with them. One reason Hungary has been spared these crises overtaking the United Kingdom, France, and Germany is because the Hungarian government has gone against the European elite consensus by maintaining a strong anti-migration policy.

Meanwhile, in the fairy kingdom of Brussels, the EU ruling class last week announced a plan to spend billions of euros in part to bring Arab Muslim students into Europe, as part of its Erasmus program. This will happen under the auspices of the EU’s “Pact For The Mediterranean” program.

Note well that for the past three years, Hungarian universities have not been able to participate in Erasmus, as a method of punishing Hungarians over Brussels’s displeasure with the Orban government’s policies. Meanwhile, students from those well-known liberal democracies Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and the Palestinian lands, will get to study in Europe, thanks to European taxpayers. Call it “The Camp Of The Students”. 

I have long believed that the European establishment’s attitudes towards Hungary has as much to do with psychology as politics. Orbán is right to say that Hungary doesn’t struggle with these civilizational issues precisely because Hungarian voters, by returning Fidesz to power in several elections, have resoundingly rejected the absurd multicultural fantasies that are now bringing Western Europe to the brink of catastrophe. Rather than face the consequences of their own grotesque misgovernment, the establishment parties and figures prefer to demonize Hungary and its leader for making more reasonable choices. 

Take France, for example. On Monday, the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles published a shocking interview with Jean-Louis Sanchet, who from 2021 to 2023 commanded the national police’s elite unit for fighting urban violence. As other national security insiders (like senior anti-terrorism lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, in his pungent new book France: La Choc Ou La Chute (France: The Shock Or The Fall) warn, France is hurtling towards civil war.

Sanchet said the “ethnic factor” is near the center of the crisis. He explains that French cities are now home to large non-French communities whose gangs compete with each other in the drug trade, among other things. They find their identity in their ethnicity and/or their religion (Islam).

“These are populations who put their culture forward, in order to withdraw into themselves,” he told the magazine (translation by Google).

“We are witnessing a Mexicanization of France,” Sanchet said, by which he meant significant parts of the country are falling under the de facto control of drug gangs and cartels. The collaboration of Islamists with France’s radical Left magnifies the force of disintegration.

This, in turn, could prompt a reaction from right-wing Frenchmen, who, said Sanchet, would feel it necessary to “defend their neighborhood, their homes against the suburbs in particular. They feel more able to defend themselves and no longer expect anything from the state and the police”

“All these cross-cutting crises will converge, said Sanchet. These multiple hotbeds of protest will then seek to destabilize the Republic and the State. And this organized disorder will combine all these threats into a single, serious crisis.”

It is easy to foresee things coming to a head within the next five years. Experts like UK academic David Betz and lawyer Montbrial are sounding the same alarm. In Sanchet’s view, a civil war will cause the fall of the Fifth Republic, the imposition of martial law for a time, and a recovery of France’s control over its borders. One does not need to be a political expert to imagine that a catastrophe of that sort in one of the core European Union states would take down the EU with it. 

And if that should happen, it will mean the end of liberal democracy as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Elites on both sides of the Atlantic have allowed themselves to believe that liberal democracy can work with a highly diverse population. In fact, the United States, with its enormous ethnic diversity, has long been an example of how liberal democracy can function, even with ethnic diversity.

What has become clear now, though, is that liberal democracy may not depend on shared ethnicity, but it absolutely depends on a shared culture. In America, until the 1970s, that shared culture was Christianity. Europe, of course, has been de-Christianizing for over a century, though the full cost of a nation losing its religion only became obvious when large numbers of Muslims migrated to Europe. Whatever one might say about Europe’s Muslims, they at least have no doubt about their religious identity.

But ethnicity is still a major factor if a polity becomes illiberally focused on tribal identities and calls it progressive. The American ruling class, in both government and private institutions, unthinkingly promoted “multiculturalism” in the sense of promoting identity-consciousness based on race, gender, and sexuality. In so doing, they undermined the fundamental liberal principle that everyone is equal under the law. 

Martin Luther King and the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s did not demand special privileges for black Americans. They only wanted equality, and in so doing appealed both to the shared Christianity of the American people, and to America’s constitutional promises. Sixty years later, a growing number of Americans regard movements like Black Lives Matter as undemocratic and illiberal—and they are correct!

This month, the popular white conservative podcaster Steven Crowder visited a black barbershop for a long, extraordinary dialogue with a group of black men there. (See Part One here, and Part Two here.) Crowder introduced his interlocutors to the concept of “black fatigue,” a term that refers to the exhaustion many non-black Americans have over the persistence of black crime, black failure, and the never-ending demands of American blacks for special treatment.

It makes for riveting viewing, because Crowder courageously told the black men what many whites, especially on the Right, are thinking and saying among themselves. The black men become quite angry with him. Their basic stance can be summarized like this: The bad things whites see in our community aren’t happening, and if they are, it’s the fault of whites anyway. 

As an American, it’s very painful to watch, because it reveals not only that racial reconciliation seems impossible, but also that the American elites, by abandoning the kind of liberalism advocated by Dr. King, have created conditions that could easily lead to the collapse of liberal democracy, even in America. 

Why? The best answer is probably found in the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scots-born American thinker who died earlier this year. MacIntyre, who was a Marxist earlier in his career, saw that liberal democracy had fatally undermined its own foundations. As Nathan Pinkoski writes, MacIntyre saw over forty years ago that a society that makes liberating the individual from any loyalties aside from exercising his own autonomous will makes society impossible. Said Pinkoski:

MacIntyre grasped the irresolvable character of our social conflict while most Westerners were still convinced that we could rediscover some elusive political or economic consensus. MacIntyre explained why that aspiration, so dear to the postwar world, was now impossible. Our position was not the result of a few contingencies, whether a few elections or some other factor. It lay in the way we had organized our whole civilization.

It has been said that it is hard to get a man to see something when his paycheck depends on him not seeing it. This is the problem the European elites face today. Fewer and fewer ordinary Europeans believe in the utopian promises of the European Union. As Viktor Orbán put it over the weekend, when a governing system cannot cope with the problems that concern the people they govern, it will not survive. 

This does not mean that people do not wish to live in a democracy. After all, despite what you read in the newspapers, Hungary is a democracy, and it is entirely possible that Hungarians will vote next spring to change their government. What it means, though, is that if democracy in Europe is to survive, it will have to abandon decadent late-stage liberalism, and re-found itself on principles that can be lived, and defended. 

What does this mean in practice? It’s hard to say, at this point, but it is clear to everyone but the elites, playing their violins in Brussels while European cities burn, that this cannot go on forever. Anything that cannot go on forever, won’t.  

I suspect that when it all breaks down, the collapse will be sudden and violent, as Jean-Louis Sanchet and others predict. The ‘hate speech’ laws and other measures European authorities have imposed on European people have made it difficult for citizens to say what they really think. Consider the outrageously anti-democratic measures the German government has taken to suppress the Alternative for Germany party, and its supporters. The Soros class is living on borrowed time. One should expect them to become even more aggressive in their attempts to hold on to power.

Think about it: It would be fascinating to watch a white European podcaster go into an Islamic migrant barbershop to confront the men there about “Muslim fatigue” or “migrant fatigue.” That would never happen, though, because such a podcaster, if a man of such insane courage exists, would not leave the barbershop with a haircut, but without a head.