Good news from the U.S. Supreme Court. From The Daily Caller:
The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision Monday that a Georgia college’s speech code policy violated the First Amendment and that a student who was harmed by the policy can seek damages.
Justice Clarence Thomas issued the opinion of the court Monday, siding with Chike Uzuegbunam, a former student at Georgia Gwinnett College, and affirming his right to share his Christian faith on campus. The opinion reversed an Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which said Uzuegbunam didn’t have standing to sue the college over its policy that severely restricted his speech.
Peter Heltai has a great piece in the New York Post on why the West hates Hungary. An excerpt:
For the peoples of the post-Soviet bloc, such as Hungarians and Poles, rejoining the European political family after more than four decades of Communist occupation was an outstanding opportunity. We looked for allies who shared the core values that we believe underpin the prosperity and decency of Western civilization.
Then we had a rude awakening. It turned out the so-called mainstream parties of the center right and center left paid little more than lip service — if that — to sovereignty and self-determination, the diversity of nations, the traditional family and Europe’s Judeo-Christian foundations. So long as we toed the globalist and liberal line from Brussels and Washington, we were accepted. But as soon as we democratically chose a different path, we were called “undemocratic.”
Orbán — the single most democratically popular leader in Europe — has been called worse. Yet all his decisions that have drawn the ire of the Euro “mainstream,” including the EPP leadership, were pragmatic solutions to real problems — solutions, moreover, that were more faithful to the legacy of the EU’s founding fathers than anything offered by the Eurocrats…
Or take family policy. The Hungarian government offers generous subsidies to promote marriage, family formation and childbearing — to forestall demographic collapse and to ensure that there are future workers and taxpayers to support aging populations. In 10 years, the number of marriages has been doubled, and demographic decline has started to reverse. (Compare that with France, whose birth rate is at its lowest point since 1945.)
Thanks to a recent amendment, the constitution also defines marriage, like most civilizations across most of human history have, as the union of man and woman, ordered to the nurturing of children. Governments in Germany and France may disagree with this. But isn’t it the Hungarian people’s right to make that determination, as an overwhelming majority of their duly elected representatives did in voting to amend the constitution?
These positions, too, have opened up Hungary to charges of “fascism” from Europe’s liberal salons, where “family policy” amounts to whatever the most extreme nongovernmental organizations and gender ideologues dictate. But I wonder, which policies would be more familiar and genial to Europe’s devoutly Catholic founding fathers (men like Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman): Budapest’s or the Brussels mandarins’?
Read the whole thing. As Orbán noted at a conference in Rome recently, it isn’t populism when you run on a platform and then implement that platform—it’s democracy. The decaying West just thinks Hungarians are doing it wrong.
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Under Joe Biden, sex change surgeries for soldiers will now be funded by the taxpayer. From the Washington Examiner:
Taxpayers will now foot the bill for gender reassignment surgery for active military personnel and veterans, with some treatments costing upward of $200,000 under an executive order signed by President Biden.
Unsurprisingly—and we’ll be seeing much more of this.
At Unherd, Dan Hitchens has a fascinating essay on how vulture capitalism and changing economies are granting Marxism a resurgence. An excerpt:
The two faces of modern work — one cheerful, one ruthless — are the subject of a couple of new books, Jamie K McCallum’s Worked Over and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. They tell similar stories, of stressed and burnt-out workers ruing the broken promises of the “Follow your passion” economy. Wealth, of course, has flowed upwards: in the last 30 years, according to the policy analyst Matt Bruenig, the US’s top 1% has increased its net worth by $21 trillion, while the bottom half has lost $900 billion and, once you factor in debt, literally owns less than nothing.
Read the whole thing—there’s a lot of food for thought.
