A Tale of Two Flags: The Ruling Class’s War on Normality

These pictures tell a story. The one on the left is the famous 1945 image of U.S. Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima. The one on the right is U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman carrying the flag at the front of the American delegation to the LGBT Pride parade in Budapest last weekend.

The story these images tell is one about the evolution of American power projection—and, indeed, the kind of America whose power its agents (Marines, ambassadors) project onto the world stage. Do these images represent decadence or progress? How you answer that question shows where you stand in the culture war.

It is not hard to imagine what the men who raised the flag over Iwo Jima would have made of the Stars and Stripes manifested in a foreign capital to advocate for homosexuality and transgenderism. They would scarcely have been able to comprehend that the senior leadership of the U.S. Armed Forces in 2024 would consider them to be deplorable for holding such views. They would not have been able to process the fact that the United States (selectively) attacks allied nations for not allowing their children to be catechized in the tenets of LGBT life and liberation.

That is the difference between 1945 and 2024. Observing the way the U.S. used the advance of LGBT rights as a propaganda weapon against the Russian invaders of Ukraine, I once speculated, half in jest, that America was waging proxy war to “queer the Donbass.” It was less of a joke than I intended. As Washington journalist Helen Andrews put it in a piece detailing the U.S. government’s taking up of LGBT rights as a diplomatic weapon:

The story of how gay rights came to play a role in American foreign policy is a curious one. It started under Barack Obama and continued, surprisingly, under Donald Trump. It was folded into our broader support for human rights at a time when every single referendum on gay marriage here in the United States had failed and support for gay marriage at home was far from unanimous. … Yes, in fact, we are fighting to queer the Donbass. The average American may not be interested in that goal, but our State Department is.

In a recent speech, Amb. Pressman alleged that pro-government Hungarian media insinuated that he—a partnered gay man and father of two—is a potential pedophile in a recent TV report. Said Pressman, “The cameras of the government-controlled media were trained on me—as they are right now—and filmed us as he introduced me to his five-year-old child. The news that evening reported on ‘spotting’ my interaction with this child, and sinisterly described that I was seen ‘interacting with children.’ They didn’t need to finish the sentence—they let fear do the rest.”

If this is true—and not being a viewer of Hungarian television, I can’t know—then it is indeed offensive. Once upon a time, gay men were routinely and cruelly slandered as child molesters. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

That said, to make his case, Pressman relies on the fundamental decency of people—folks who refuse to believe the worst about gay men—and the refusal of the media to tell the whole complicated truth about gay male sexuality. Pressman and his allies among the Budapest diplomatic corps, many of whom signed a recent statement criticizing the Hungarian government for its LGBT policies, expect to rally Western publics by shaming the Orban administration as bigoted—that is, of being motivated by irrational anti-LGBT animus.

On the same weekend as the Budapest Pride march, a couple of stunning Twitter threads appeared, both authored by openly gay men, both angrily challenging the prevailing narrative churned out by Pressman and the mainstream media. The occasion was the exposure of Mike Knaapen, a gay Democratic Party activist in Maryland, for sending lewd texts to what he thought was a 14-year-old boy. Knaapen actually communicated with a team of pedophile hunters, who confronted him about the texts, and recorded his video admission that he had found talking dirty to a teenage boy “thrilling.”

In response, Chad Felix Greene, a gay conservative writer who describes himself as “happily married” to a man, unleashed a furious barrage of tweets, calling out what he believes is the hypocrisy of the gay community about preying on underage boys. It begins with this mic-drop of a line:

Greene goes on to say that he, a gay man, does not condemn LGBT people as such, only a culture that seeks to groom young gay males into sex with older ones—and to cover up the fact that it is doing so. He goes on:

We have to understand we are working from two very separate moral foundations here. Leftwing LGBTQ sees nothing wrong with adults engaging in explicit sex with minors because they see it as empowering and positive. Our worldview is simply incompatible with theirs.

While Amb. Pressman and the Pride crowd took to the streets of Budapest, U.S. gay conservative podcaster named Josh Slocum tweeted:

Facing a torrent of criticism, Slocum later responded:

Nope, I won’t be going back in the closet, and I’ll fight those of you who try to make me. I’m a gay man who is fed up with the degeneracy of the queer set, and make common cause with all normal and respectable people to get this filth off the street and away from children.

Those are views of somewhat prominent gay men that you will never hear in the media. Both write of being sexually exploited by older men when they were coming out as teenagers. Greene says school administrators in 1998 outed him to his homophobic father—something that many schools explicitly disallow today. Yet Greene praises the school’s actions, saying it might have saved his life: he had been sneaking out of the house to have sex with men he met online, and was feeling suicidal over it all. He needed his parents to save him from himself.

It is difficult to know the scope and characteristics of the phenomenon—gay men having sex with minors—because of the endemic dishonesty of the media on the topic. For example, in 2002, when the Catholic sexual abuse scandal broke big in America, the U.S. Catholic bishops commissioned an independent study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to discover the boundaries and details of the problem. The 2004 John Jay Report found that in the period between 1950 and 2002, 81% of abuse victims were male. And, 78% of victims were aged 11 or greater—meaning they were almost certainly sexually mature, in a physical sense.

The conclusion was obvious: the priest sexual abuse scandal was not exclusively about pedophilia—sexual desire for pre-pubescent children—but rather primarily about adult gay males molesting sexually mature boys. Yet it was all but impossible to say so in the mainstream media.

When I covered the 2002 Catholic bishops’ meeting in Dallas, the first such gathering since the crisis arose, a network news correspondent told me they had received explicit instructions from the boss not to include the homosexual angle in their coverage. This kind of thing was common back then. The media did not want to know. They still don’t. In 2018, after the Church itself outed prominent American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as a serial gay molester, the media continued to blame bishops and others in the Church who said there is a homosexual problem in the clergy.

Why is this important? Because, as Chad Felix Greene said last weekend:

This all matters because LGBTQ activists are fighting legal wars to keep parents as far away as possible from queer education, social groups and teenage autonomy. They are explicit in their demands teenagers be free from parental limitations. Knowing the reality is necessary.

Along these lines, it is necessary for parents to understand what exactly teachers, activists, school librarians, and others mean when they talk about serving LGBT youth with supportive books and other materials. Normal people might assume this is simply about publications and programming that help youth who are sexual minorities, or who suffer from gender dysphoria, feel that they aren’t alone, and that they should not hate themselves. Who could oppose that?

The reality is often very different. Parents groups have challenged popular LGBT titles in U.S. school libraries after finding that they depict explicit sex, sometimes between minors and adults. A U.S. federal court is now considering the constitutionality of the Iowa legislature’s ban on school library books depicting sex acts. In a court statement, plaintiffs’ attorneys framed their objection in innocuous terms:

Iowa students are entitled to express and receive diverse viewpoints at school. But the State — taking aim at already vulnerable LGBTQ+ students — seeks to silence them, erase from schools any recognition that LGBTQ+ people exist, and bully students, librarians, and teachers into quiet acquiescence.

“Diverse viewpoints.” “Silence them.” “Erase.” “Bully.” “Quiet acquiescence.” Sounds horrible, right?

In fact, the Iowa law is explicitly detailed in the kinds of sex acts it bars—making clear that what crosses the line are descriptions that could be construed as pornographic, or that at least many parents would consider inappropriate for minors.

It is aimed at books like Maia Kobabe’s graphic young-adult novel Genderqueer, which features drawings of explicit sex (see here; images doctored to be safe at work), and George Johnson’s memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, in which the narrator details his teenage sex acts with older men.

In 2023, at a U.S. Senate hearing about so-called “banned books,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana shocked spectators by reading aloud passages from both of these widely celebrated titles. While I apologize in advance for the explicit nature of this testimony, it’s important to know what we are talking about. While it is too revolting to publish here, you can watch a video of Sen. Kennedy, addressing the Illinois secretary of state, who was testifying in defense of his state’s law banning book-banning.

I’m going to try to understand what you’re asking us to do. I’m going to read from two books that have been much discussed. The first one is called All Boys Aren’t Blue, and I will quote from it. … The second is another much-discussed book. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. It’s called Genderqueer. Let me read an excerpt from that…

Now, Mr. Secretary, what are you asking us to do? Are you suggesting that only librarians should decide whether the two books I just referenced should be available to kids? Is that what you are saying? Tell me what you are saying.

The Illinois state official had no good response. He could only say that if parents have the right to make these decisions, schools will be on a “slippery slope” to mass censorship. This stance is the one that managerial liberals everywhere take: We, not bigoted parents, are the only ones who can be trusted with these decisions.

Genderqueer and All Boys Aren’t Blue are the kinds of books that the 2021 media law passed by the Hungarian parliament are designed to keep out of the hands of Magyar youth. The law enraged European governments, and even prompted then-Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte to call for Hungary’s expulsion from the European Union. At the time, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban said it is the right of parents to decide when and if their children are exposed to this material.

Last week, the U.S. Embassy in Budapest issued a public statement marking Pride, one that was signed by the ambassadors of most European nations. Said the statement, in part, “We emphasize the importance of access to diverse and pluralistic information, the representation of LGBTQI+ people, and their full participation in public, cultural, and online spheres.”

Do these ambassadors expect Hungarian mothers and fathers to acquiesce in the exposure of their children to written and visual depictions of kinky sex, including gay sex? Do they demand that Hungarian parents allow their children, even kindergarten-age children, to receive information telling them that they might be the opposite gender, or no gender at all?

Yes. Yes, they do. And they get away with it because the media hide the appalling details of these books behind euphemistic language about “diversity,” “representation,” and “bullying.” They use the excuse of teaching “Pride” to students to radicalize them in sexual behavior and gender theory. As Chad Felix Greene reported recently, the Scholastic Bookfair, for decades a trustworthy and valued event for schoolchildren, is now in the hands of hardcore ideologues. He writes:

Rather than the argued goal of simply introducing diversity and opening the worldview of kids to see different kinds of people, these efforts seek to present a world in which queer is the norm, experienced through hundreds of slight variations, and the “allocishet” is an outdated and limited version of humanity that should be shunned and considered with suspicion.

Where else can parents go to avoid this saturation of LGBT ideology? When activists become the people directing the curriculum, selecting the materials, and promoting only one worldview, publishers who want to remain relevant will select content that aligns with those ideological preferences. This is no longer just acceptance that gay people live in our society. This is overt indoctrination, and it’s coming from the most trusted authorities of children’s education and literature.

Why do books and stories matter, especially biographical ones? According to new research published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, “a direct, realistic story is the only effective means of teaching children about transgender identities and reducing belief in gender immutability.” Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright said of the study, “They are literally testing how to most effectively indoctrinate young children into the gender cult.”

This is the ugly truth of the matter. This is what the parades with flags and noble rhetoric conceals. This is the lie that the Hungarians, to their great credit, refuse to accept, no matter how intense the gaslighting.  

If it is fair to uphold Amb. Pressman’s objection to being smeared, implicitly, as a putative pederast—and I believe it is—then it is also fair to ask him and his supporters why it is so important to introduce to children’s and minors’ books and educational material that sexualizes them. Why is it so important to destroy their sense of normal gender, and indeed to demonize normality? Why do children experiencing same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria have to become acquainted with kinky sex in order to feel self-worth, and to fight bullying?

These questions are perfectly justified. Plus, it is just, and indeed necessary, to put the ambassador and other advocates on the spot by confronting them with direct quotes from this material, as Sen. Kennedy did in the hearing, and demanding answers. All decent people want to stop the bullying of LGBT kids in school. But why on earth does that require giving kids access to pornographic “literature” about a teen boy being sodomized by an older man?

In the United States, the great-grandchildren of those Iwo Jima Marines are of the generation being taught that this is normal and good, and that anyone who objects is a hater who should be driven to society’s margins. This is the crusade in which the U.S. ambassador proudly carried that very same banner, on behalf of the West’s cultural elites, trying to shame the Hungarian holdouts into surrendering their children and their moral sanity, as many Americans (and Europeans) have already done.

Chad Felix Greene said it best: “Knowing the reality is necessary.” Now you do.