Author: Mr Paul du Quenoy

Newsmax – Until last week, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk was merely the savior of free speech. Poised to buy full ownership of Twitter, he stood on the verge of liberating the influential social media platform from pervasive, politically-biased censorship by its woke employees.

As a senior engineer at Twitter candidly admitted on video, his colleagues do “not believe in free speech” and are “actually censoring the right and not the left.”

Leftist attitudes soured further when Musk posted a series of tweets criticizing Twitter’s old management for its aggressive wokeism and apparent manipulation of algorithms to control the flow of information.

He suggested significant layoffs, hinted that former president Donald J. Trump might be allowed to return to the platform, and revealed that he will from now on vote for Republicans instead of Democrats because he believes the Democrats have become “the party of division & hate.”

Powerless against Musk’s billions, and confronted by mounting evidence of unsavory practices at Twitter, cranky legacy media scolds could only cringe at the prospect of fellow citizens exercising their civil rights and indulge in unconvincing bouts of reductio ad Hitlerum whenever Musk’s name was mentioned.

Musk is a smart man and knew what was coming next. On the same day he signaled his new political allegiance, he presciently tweeted “political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.”

As if on cue, they arrived within a matter of hours. The next day a “friend” of a former SpaceX flight attendant divulged that Musk’s space exploration company had paid $250,000 to settle a sexual harassment claim brought by the former employee, who had signed a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement in exchange for the payoff.

According to the allegations, in 2016 Musk exposed himself to the flight attendant during an in-flight massage and suggested that he would give her a horse if she sexually gratified him.

There is no evidence that the alleged incident ever happened. Musk admitted no amount of guilt as a condition of the settlement and has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

This would not have saved him in an America where #MeToo continued to be a potent force, however. In the sanctimonious “reckoning” foisted upon our society by social justice zealots hysterically seeking revenge for Trump’s election five years ago, Musk would have been presumed guilty, forced out of his companies, erased from public recognition, compelled to issue a platitudinous apology to all those whom he may have hurt, and vaporized out of public life.

Twitter would have been spared his purported right-wing whims, horses-for-happy-end quid pro quos, and toxic masculinity. More importantly, it would have continued to function as an unchecked censor of disfavored people and views.

That certainly seemed to be the intention of the leaker, who moralized that “someone with that level of power causing that kind of harm and then throwing some money at the situation, that’s not accountability.”

But none of the usual consequences materialized. The magnitude of the Twitter deal’s free speech implications, together with Musk’s unabashed political statements on the eve of the revelation, left little doubt about what this #MeToo eruption really was — a desperate attempt to blacken his name and possibly prevent a massive liberation of free speech in an important public forum.

Musk has remained defiant and connected the dots for anyone dense enough not to see the obvious and predictable. “The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens,” he tweeted to the general public, “this is their standard (despicable) playbook — but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech.”

He offered multiple logical analyses of the allegations — if he’s a sexual harasser, why did nobody say so at any other time in his 30-year career? Why did the accusation only surface at the most politically sensitive moment of his life, and not years ago, when the harassment allegedly happened?

Astutely realizing that tyranny cannot withstand ridicule, Musk proceeded to mock the allegation. “Finally, we get to use Elongate as a scandal name,” he tweeted, cheekily observing, since he was alleged to have flashed a full erection at the complainant, that the word “elongate” was “kinda perfect” to describe his current problem.

He challenged his accuser — “the liar” and “far left activist,” as he called her — to “describe just one thing” on his body “that isn’t known to the public.” He also doubled down on legal protection, announcing a new “hardcore litigation department” at Tesla that will “directly initiate & execute lawsuits.”

This is the finest defense against defamation we have these days, but Musk also benefits from the parallel drama of Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, whom Musk coincidentally dated just after she split from Depp. For all its nauseating vulgarity, the Hollywood court battle, in which Musk’s name has come up, has independently cast powerful doubt on the premise that all women should be believed.

A few leftist commentators have argued that Musk manipulated the timeline and declared himself a Republican opportunistically, only after he learned the leak was coming. But hardly anyone of consequence is convinced.

Musk’s companies show no sign of any shareholder revolt or human resources intervention. Nobody in the legacy media has urged Musk’s destruction. No activists have emerged to femsplain the discredited canard that women never lie about sexual harassment.

Mainstream outlets have cited expert opinion that the allegation will have little or no effect on the Twitter purchase. Even The New York Times has finally admitted that #MeToo has seen “muddled cases” of “overreach and backlash” that might have been handled wrongly.

The former paper of record’s new opinion writer Pamela Paul admits “we still haven’t thought enough about how to handle all accusations with proportion and fairness.” The plain truth is that many no longer believe them any more than they would believe witchcraft allegations leveled against the good people of Salem, Massachusetts.

And for that we have Elon Musk to thank.

The Spectator – At last we’re free from the government’s performative safetyism.

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation.

After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington. For nearly two years, they had demanded compliance, despite “the science,” which had shown again and again that masks are of little to no use in stopping the spread of Covid and can cause serious psychological harm.

Mme du Quenoy offered up a celebratory “woot” as she and young Master Charles breathed freely again.

By the time I’d heard her secular version of the Easter season’s triumph of light over darkness, two other friends on planes had messaged me with similar stories. Within minutes, social media lit up with videos of Americans applauding and cheering as the news reached them at 30,000 feet.

It is hard to settle on which post was the most moving. Candidates include one plane’s flight crew blasting “Celebration” after the announcement was made. Another featured two flight attendants embracing because they could see each other’s faces for the first time after months of working together. In still another, a man exclaims “Finally!” after the pilot announces that masks are to be consigned to the dustbin of aviation history.

For many, the emotional effect was like the Berlin Wall coming down. “It’s just glorious,” said Robert Mihlbaugh, a pilot with a major airline who told me he was “overjoyed,” adding, “it’s a great day for free choice!” “Vive le dix-huit avril!” wrote an Éric Zemmour-supporting French friend, as though the date of Judge Mizelle’s ruling were a grand journée in a new revolutionary epoch. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in whose freest of states Judge Mizelle issued her ruling, spoke for the country he will likely lead one day when he praised her decision to follow the law, tweeting, “airline employees and passengers deserve to have this misery end.”

Alas, not all Americans are freedom-loving anymore, and the Biden administration clearly wants the misery to continue. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who is leaving her job for an equally objective role at MSNBC, announced that the administration was “disappointed” by Judge Mizelle’s ruling and urged the flying public to continue wearing masks.

To be fair, the administration seemed dazed by the countermanding of its cruel edict. It was still reeling from yet another embarrassing video, this one of a visibly confused Biden being led away from a reporter by an official dressed in an Easter Bunny suit.

But further down the American left’s rotting food chain, those who were happy to live under near-house arrest for two years doubled down on the hysteria they would like to make a permanent national characteristic. The public transportation systems of Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and, of course, New York announced that they would continue to enforce mask mandates. Some claimed to be “studying” Judge Mizelle’s ruling, but by defying it they have raised the awkward question of whether they are now in violation of federal law.

Rather than challenge her legal reasoning, the intolerant left has tried to demonize Judge Mizelle personally. The ever-courageous Daily Beast derided her as “Trump’s worst judge” for having the audacity to exercise her constitutional role. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern tweeted that “no sane democracy would permit this system of government,” meaning one in which a woman confirmed by the United States Senate can reach a legally binding decision he disagrees with.

Others took issue with Judge Mizelle’s age, arguing that her thirty-five years — despite meeting the constitutional age requirement to hold the American presidency — were insufficient to make big decisions best left to octogenarian medical bureaucrats. Failed former secretary of education Arne Duncan was reduced to begging his Twitter followers: “For my safety, and for the safety of my family, friends and everyone I come in contact with, please keep wearing a mask when you travel.” He promised “to do the same” and sanctimoniously thanked his followers for “saving lives.”

The Biden White House is so insular, conceited, and tone-deaf that it may yet try to have Judge Mizelle’s ruling overturned. But whether it does or not, whatever pretense of moral authority it once claimed is now gone for good. Free Americans will never again submit to the power-hungry tyranny lurking behind its performative safetyism.

When my wife and son boarded their connecting flight to Dublin only a few hours after the ruling was issued, no announcement had to be made that masking was over. In all probability, we will never hear its like again.

The Spectator – Mayor Eric Adams says ‘come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want.’ Yeah, right.

In his latest desperate attempt to prove that New York is “back,” the city’s hapless mayor Eric Adams has taken a hysterical potshot at Florida — a much happier jurisdiction to where many of his constituents have had the good sense to move.

Adams announced that private funds made available to his cash-strapped city would be used to place billboard and digital ads in five booming Florida markets: Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. These ads invite Floridians to “come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want.”

The jibe is directed at Florida’s recently approved Parental Rights in Education bill, which prohibits instruction in sexuality and gender identity for children from kindergarten through third grade. Opponents have labeled it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” even though the word “gay” does not appear anywhere in it, and none of its provisions would prevent anyone from saying the word “gay” or any other word. In lockstep with the progressive left, of which he is a typically mindless member, Adams has angrily denounced the Florida law as a weapon in a “shameful, extremist culture war targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”

Mayor Adams is delusional: he requires two-year-old nursery school students to be masked, burdens his groaning subjects with America’s highest tax rates and instructs those horrified by a sharp rise in subway murders to “change their perspective.” Yet Adams has convinced himself that people will voluntarily return to the ghastly concrete gulag he presides over because of an education bill that bars six-year-olds from learning about the vaginoplasty options.

One may rightly wonder why Adams and those who share his politics are so emotionally invested in expanding the sexual horizons of small children. Regardless, relying on leftist zeal to boost New York’s declining population and tax base is just poor salesmanship. According to a recent poll that accurately relates the language of the Florida bill, 61 percent of Americans — including 55 percent of Democratic voters — support it, while only 26 percent agree with a mayor 1,200 miles away who thinks it should be legal to teach second graders about dental dams.

Even Floridians tempted to relocate would be hard-pressed to find New York a place where they could “say and be whoever you want.” They might solicit the opinion of former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett, who was forced to resign in June 2020 after he greenlighted an op-ed by a US senator suggesting the army be deployed to control Black Lives Matter riots — a fully constitutional measure supported at the time by 58 percent of Americans. Would-be New Yorkers looking forward to shoplifting deodorant with impunity may wish to consult, too, with star Times editorial writer Bari Weiss, who followed Bennett out the door after suffering enormous harassment for defending the principle of free speech.

Dissidents from Florida might also want to ask former New York Magazine contributor Andrew Sullivan why he was forced to leave his publication after opposing critical race theory in print. And speaking of publications, a down-on-his-luck Floridian who cannot find a job in a state with functional full employment but thinks he has better prospects in a city with 8 percent unemployment would be well advised to take a close look at New York’s publishing industry. There, he would have the pleasure of working with hundreds of colleagues who signed an open letter demanding that people who served in the Trump administration “not have their philosophies remunerated and disseminated through our beloved publishing houses.”

Anyone willing to trade Florida’s extraordinarily clean, efficient and privately operated Brightline train for the horrors of Metro-North would be ushered into a city where New York’s literary elite are sacked for “saying what they want.” Literary agent Sasha White was fired from her job in August 2020 after tweeting that “denying biological sex” was something less than “wonderful.” In April 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher at the once-prestigious Grace Church School, lost his job after criticizing the school administration’s embrace of woke ideology, a program that included deriding “objectivity” as a characteristic of “white supremacy” and dropped the words “mom” and “dad” to refer to parents.

A Floridian exile dreaming of the good life may also be disappointed by a New York Times investigation of wokeness in New York City private schools, which found no teachers and only one parent willing to go on the record, with many citing fears of serious consequences if they spoke out.

Miami party people willing to move to a place where dining after 9:30 p.m. has all but disappeared due to lack of interest would not find a lively, intellectual community secure in its constitutional right to “say whatever it wants.” Rather, while wallowing in fond memories of days at the beach, our adventurous Florida expat would see that in Eric Adams’s New York, one cannot even repeat someone else’s words without fear of reprisal. Columbia University legal scholar Dinah PoKempner was fired from her teaching position and unrelated job as general counsel of Human Rights Watch, a left-leaning advocacy organization, because she uttered the N-word while reading aloud to her class from the case record of a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Ku Klux Klan.

Not even the most optimistic citizen willing to increase his state and local tax liability from 0 percent to 14.778 percent to help Adams out could fail to admit that members of the mayor’s own administration are equally vulnerable to cancelation. Just five weeks ago, LGBTQ activists protested three appointments to posts in New York City’s offices of faith-based and immigration affairs due to the officials’ past opposition to gay marriage. All three men were reportedly put on notice that their views are “unacceptable” and that they may only continue in office if they do not state them. These men cannot “say whatever they want.” Less fortunate was their short-lived colleague Kathlyn Barrett-Layne, who lasted just six hours as a member of the mayor’s Panel for Educational Policy before it was revealed that she had published anti-gay comments in a book released in 2014.

If Floridian readers are still tempted to become New Yorkers, I leave you with this: on the very day Adams announced his Florida ad campaign, city legal counsel Daniela Jampel was fired after daring to ask the mayor when he would “unmask our toddlers.” At the time, the unamused Adams was standing beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Come to the city where you can say whatever you want.” Any Floridian who believes him should immediately book a flight, secure in the knowledge that he is no loss to the freest state.

American Greatness – If stagflation, rising urban crime, and a weak Democratic president did not remind us enough of the 1970s, we now have our very own fall of Saigon.

To the astonishment of many naïve observers, especially those among the polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline (for whom I suggest the acronym “POCAD”) now so foul misplaced atop our discredited foreign policy establishment, Afghanistan’s Taliban shrewdly—and predictably—waited until U.S. forces had nearly completed their withdrawal from the country before launching a massive offensive that has conquered almost all before it.

Outside Kabul’s precariously held airport, the capital has fallen. Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani fled the country and was within a matter of hours replaced by a Taliban mullah. U.S. diplomats destroyed the secret papers (and, reportedly, images of the American flag) while pusillanimously begging the new regime not to attack the embassy, over which the colors no longer fly. Taliban fighters are joyfully lounging in captured bases where they have won huge caches of American military hardware for use against their doomed countrymen, or to supply whatever other terrorist groups take refuge with them.

The Biden Administration rushed in 3,000, then 5,000, then 6,000 troops to cover a helter-skelter airlift of U.S. personnel and vulnerable Afghan allies so numerous that video shows them trying to hold onto C-17 military transport planes rather than the traditional helicopters.

The blame game has already started to assign responsibility for this catastrophic blow to American power and prestige.

Is it the fault of Donald Trump, whose administration negotiated what many regard as a one-sided agreement that ceded the initiative to the Taliban by announcing a unilateral intent to withdraw?

Is it the fault of Joe Biden, who implemented the agreement on a hasty schedule that publicly named the exact and highly symbolic date by which America would withdraw, ignored evolving and diligently reported strategic realities on the ground, and coincided with the most favorable campaign conditions for the Taliban?

Is it the fault of Afghanistan’s fallen government, headed by the newly exiled Ghani, an American University of Beirut graduate with a Columbia Ph.D., which squandered some $1 trillion in U.S. aid over the past 20 years only to find itself defenseless and abandoned before the very same enemies who were removed in 2001?

Should we blame our shifty military, security, civil society, and media elites, who systematically lied about their supposed achievements in order to keep a gravy train of budgets, grants, and consultancies flowing in what they hoped would be perpetuity?

Do we drag elderly neoconservatives out of their worthless think tanks and ridiculous Weekly Standard successor publications to berate them for thinking that they could create a Madisonian democracy by loudly declaiming the Federalist Papers into the caves of Tora Bora?

All are culpable to one degree or another, and their finger pointing will bore us as the chattering classes churn through yawn-inducing New Yorker features, latte-fueled far-left Atlantic diatribes, and soporific CNN specials, with the usual cast of self-proclaimed “experts” offering contrived “fresh takes” that they will claim to have known all along?

No serious investigation will trouble official Washington. The top brass in the Pentagon, who are looking moon-eyed at deep troughs of post-retirement consulting and directorship cash, have way too much to lose.

Congressmen who couldn’t be bothered to examine a largely pork-barrel, trillion-dollar domestic infrastructure bill last week will scarcely wonder about $1 trillion dumped down a faraway rabbit hole over the past two decades, especially if investigating means having to admit that they were easily fooled for longer than many of our recently withdrawn troops have been alive.

Meanwhile, the president is marking our biggest strategic setback in half a century by vacationing at Camp David.

As Biden hides from reporters with tough questions that he probably lacks the cognitive ability to answer, and his feckless military chieftains demoralize our remaining armed forces with critical race theory instruction and contemplate the causes of “white rage,” POCADs up and down the totem pole continue to preen “woke” values that have long made a mockery of any realistic attempt to deal with the Taliban.

Already coursing unchecked through academic, institutional, and cultural life, critical theory has infected security policy as well. It is now almost unthinkable for the standard Washington wonk not to have been required to learn that his/her/their country is racist, imperialist, and generally bad, and that radical Islam is merely a natural and even deserved response to “Western aggression.”

Through that pernicious lens, the Taliban, which created and will now restore a brutal medieval theocracy, must be seen and addressed as a rational actor with a valid point of view. Rather than extirpated, the POCADs feel it should be engaged and treated with respect and even empathy. To do otherwise, they believe, would be racist and wrong, a reprehensible “othering” of what they consider an equally valuable branch of our universal human family, whose natural state is, of course, peace and harmony.

Is it any wonder that Ross Wilson, now in his final hours as our acting ambassador in Kabul and arguably one of the most inept diplomats in American history, could spend the last 10 days tweeting appeals to the Taliban to “respect human rights” while professorially cautioning that their violent ways “have never been sustainable forms of governance” and will only lead them to suffer “international isolation?”

His boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, hummed the same tune, less-than-heroically tweeting that he found reports of Taliban mass killings to be “deeply disturbing.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unconvincingly praised Biden for his “wisdom” while intoning to equally little effect that “the world is watching” the Taliban’s actions.

And did we really hear White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (who is apparently “out of the office” this week) suggest that the Taliban should worry about their future image in the international order, presumably lest they feel embarrassed at cocktail parties?

Even lower-grade fools like Jennifer Cafarella, a national security fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, whose board includes Bill Kristol and David Petraeus among other GOP establishment has-beens, posted recommendations that her colleagues “not share images . . . likely to cause trauma,” and to “reach out” if they experience emotional “trauma” in their cubicles (or, more likely these days, their parents’ basements), and prevent “triggering PTSD symptoms” by, for example, “avoiding the news.”

So much for the quality of today’s conservative policy community, but by every measure of today’s milquetoast D.C. values she is in store for a long and prosperous career in national security.

One hopes that stronger and more stable people may one day lift two decades of American foreign policy out of humiliation and ruin, but until they do the Taliban’s triumphant road to Kabul will remain paved with woke intentions.

American Greatness – Why Vichy conservatives fear a small country in Central Europe.

“Hungary is no model for the American Right,” declared David French in his column in the Vichy Conservative publication The Dispatch last week. While very few people, excepting David French, would even try to argue that he—the man who called drag queen story hours a “blessing of liberty” and more recently tried to advance a “conservative case” for teaching public schoolchildren that they are racists—would know what a good model for just about anything is, he touched a nerve among his confederates.

A number of real and far more popular conservatives—including Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, Tucker Carlson, and Dennis Prager, among others—have recently visited Hungary, a European parliamentary democracy, EU member state, and NATO ally governed since 2010 by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s center-right Fidesz Party. This has French’s hair on fire.

In a lengthy article, the Vichy French (pun intended) analysis proceeded with highly selective data trying to prove that Hungary—which had enjoyed nearly five percent annual GDP growth in each the six years prior to the pandemic, has increased its citizenship by about a million people since Orbán came into office, and has experienced one of the world’s greatest flowerings of cultural and intellectual life in the past decade—is in fact a miserable, benighted wasteland of horror and hypocrisy where no respectable person would ever want to be.

There is no indication that French has ever visited Hungary, but the idea that leading figures of an American political movement in which he no longer possesses even a crumb of influence or credibility feel affinity for that country clearly angers and frightens him.

Not to be outdone, the far-left Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, an old neocon hand, was so affronted by Carlson’s one-week visit to Budapest, which culminated in a televised interview with Orbán, that she could not attribute his interest to anything less than the wicked desire of a “nihilist” to show “how much he despises the United States, its Constitution, and its heritage;” “annoy Americans and everybody else who believes in the ideals of America;” and, simply, “make people angry.” We can pause here to note that Applebaum’s previous Atlantic article offered an apparently serious argument that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell “really could destroy democracy,” so her paranoid hysteria might not be Tucker- or Magyar-specific.

Heroically posting on Twitter, George W. Bush Administration alumnus David Frum piled on that Americans who admire Orbán really admire “plunder of the public for the benefit of a complicit few; suppression of media that report the plunder; racism and reactionary religion as cover for the gullible and/or hypocritical.” One could wonder what he thinks about Hunter Biden’s laptop and paintings, but in addition to being off limits in his current job at MSNBC, such musings might be overwhelmed by a subsequent post in which Frum claimed, based on one visit to Hungary in 2016, that people he encountered there feared for their jobs for expressing the wrong political opinions. For a man of such sensitivities, it is probably a good thing that he does not hold government, corporate, non-profit, or academic employment in the United States, where polls indicate that nearly half the population employed in the white-collar professions actually do have that fear.

Sometime neocon fellow traveler Matthew Yglesias also pronounced on the issue, sententiously declaring that “Hungarian nationalism is not the answer” and ominously suggesting that American “reactionaries” are so twisted and cynical that they have “turned against the country” and “might want to import dictatorial methods to the United States.” Yglesias admits to having little knowledge of anything bad that people say might be happening in Hungary, but still compliantly chimed in on why he believes American liberal democracy is better than Hungarian conservatism.

On the surface, the Vichycons’ ire is perplexing. Just as they angrily denounced Orbán’s government, they also denigrated Hungary as a backwater, a “second-rate” and “rinky-dink” country, as Yglesias called it, boasting a population of just under ten million and living in the landlocked shadow of faded Habsburg imperial grandeur. The Vichycons have long since given up on political pragmatism, but assuming for a moment that they could muster even a modest figment of strategic thought, would a physical, or even just spiritual, exodus of red-meat American conservatives to Budapest not be a welcome development for them, depleting, as it would, the ranks of their main opponents in today’s media?

This paradox raises a question that no one has yet answered—though New York Times token conservative columnist Ross Douthat came close in a thoughtful if inconclusive op-ed on the subject. If Hungary is, in fact, so very small and unimportant, why are his disoriented colleagues so exercised by it? Would it not be better simply to ignore or dismiss right-wing engagement with that country as a bizarre flight of fancy, much as the American Right long regarded leftist interest in equally small and arguably unimportant Scandinavian social democracies as a distraction so whimsical that it scarcely merited discussion?

Instead, the Vichycons write with a confusing mixture of fear and fury, as though World War II-era quasi-Nazi Arrow Cross militants were deployed out on the Pannonian plain training American agents in the service of some kind of Fascist International to be saboteurs of a neoliberal world order so self-evidently good and precious that anyone who would even slightly disagree with any of its tenets must be some kind of dangerous subversive.

Lest this mirror image of pernicious Soviet propaganda efforts sound like an exaggeration, it is hardly a coincidence that Frum meretriciously compared those on the American Right who have recently visited Hungary—a democratic ally of more than two decades—to “Western intellectuals who toured and gushed over Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s PRC, Castro’s Cuba,” while Applebaum scolded her audience of Atlantic-reading wine moms with a similarly accusatory comparison to “intellectuals and journalists who were disgusted by capitalism and democratic politics, and who believed the Soviet Union’s lies about its own prosperity.” “Orban’s visitors” she intoned to those still awake after reaching the end of her article in bed over yet another bottle of Sancerre, “serve the same end as Stalin’s.”

Therein lies the answer. Vichy conservatives are well aware that their status is the contingent product of a Faustian compromise. As long as they concede unquestioned social, cultural, and ideological hegemony to the progressive Left, their jobs, careers, board memberships, expense accounts, and blue state social lives are safe. Like Vichy accommodationists, they even enjoy some space to dissent on policy issues that matter to them provided they accept the dominant party’s leading role in the prevailing new order and lose graciously on demand. Unlike conservatives who resist, they will never be harassed at home or in public, doxxed on social media, targeted by hit pieces in mainstream publications, or place their livelihoods at risk—all without ever having to list their pronouns in their Twitter profiles or submit to any of the other litmus-test indignities that leftist intellectuals must suffer to climb the ladder.

In a paradox that not all Vichycons may grasp, they also closely resemble the thin sliver of non-communist intelligentsia types who survived in Cold War Central Europe, able to practice their professions amid a nominally hostile larger group provided they mouth the right shibboleths in favor of “social progress” or “world peace” or whatever other mantra necessary to qualify as “one of the good ones.”

Perhaps worst of all for the Vichy conservatives, they must reconcile themselves to the reality that populist nationalism—centered on the patriotism, pro-growth economic policies, traditional social and cultural values, and national pride—was not merely a fluke of American politics in 2016, but a broader international trend that they could neither foresee nor successfully combat.

With a reinforced pro-Trump Republican sweep looming in the 2022 midterms, the near-total elimination of anti-Trump Republicans from national politics (likely in the coming months), and a real contest for the presidency in 2024 on the horizon, the idea that they might be as wrong about America as they have been about Hungary can only terrify them. They face the prospect of being even less relevant to the Right and more vulnerable to the Left than they already are. And with Orbán’s muscular example flourishing on the Blue Danube, they are clearly aware that “it can happen here.”