All European eyes should be on Ireland now. In the wake of last week’s Dublin riots, the Varadkar government is fast-tracking draconian hate-speech legislation that would decimate liberty in the Emerald Isle. The Irish people face being ordered by their woke government, under threat of jail, to acquiesce silently in their country’s colonization via migration.
What would the new legislation do? Let’s quote it precisely, from the proposed law itself:
If you have in your possession a book, photo, meme, newspaper, or anything at all critical of a “protected” class—including racial and sexual minorities, transgender people, and migrants (because “nationality” is a protected characteristic)—you can be guilty of a hate crime.
Note that under the proposed law, they don’t have to prove you incited violence or hatred. All you have to do is to possess material that is likely to do so, in the judgment of authorities. Any Irish person who has a critical thought about the system attempting to turn their children trans, say, or the mass migration overtaking the country—he had better keep his mouth shut and not write, tweet, or TikTok anything about it, or face prison.
After the Dublin riots, it was reported that Conor McGregor, the mixed martial arts champion, is now under police investigation for his social media comments critical of the government for its role in opening Ireland’s borders.
As I wrote here last week, in the last twenty years, Ireland has added about 30% to its population, most of that through migration. To get a sense of how traumatic this is to a country with such a small population, it would be as if the United States added roughly 100 million people to its population in only two decades. And America is far more culturally and ethnically diverse than Ireland, meaning it has the experience and flexibility to deal with immigration that Ireland, through no fault of its own, does not.
Nevertheless, the progressive Irish government—there are few conservatives in Irish politics—have fallen all over themselves to signal to Brussels that they have put Ireland’s ‘shameful’ past of priestcraft and Paddys behind them, and are eager to be servile. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar even gave a speech in 2020 in which he bemoaned the fact that the civil service in Ireland—a country that is 95% white—is too white, and needs to undertake programs to increase ‘diversity.’
Meanwhile, the Irish people are living through a profound housing crisis, and unable to afford homes of their own. But their government continues to import more migrants, including ‘asylum seekers’—young males from the Third World, for whom there is little work. What’s more, migrants from Poland and Ukraine, for example, assimilate fairly well, given their Christian and European background; criminal violence has been more a problem with African and Middle Eastern aliens.
It is astonishing what a democratically elected parliament proposes to do: make it illegal not to criticize sacred minorities in the country, but illegal simply to possess material that might inspire people to criticize sacred minorities in a way of which the state disapproves.
This would be a mortal blow to democracy. You cannot have a meaningful democracy without freedom of speech. Without free speech, democratic peoples cannot discuss and debate public issues. There are surely few public issues more important that who is allowed to settle within one’s country. This is something the Irish government prefers to decide for itself, without benefit of hearing from the Irish people. If this new law passes, then they all will have been put on notice not only to watch their mouths, but also guard their phones, their mail, and their home libraries, to keep out information that stands to be counterrevolutionary.
Worse, this law would advance more deeply the cause of totalitarianism. It’s a word that the ruling class institutions sneer at, accusing those who drop the T-word to describe the rising tide of censorship and thought control of being alarmist. Don’t you dare believe them! What’s happening now, and what has been happening for at least the past decade, is the systematic attempt to train free Western people to stop thinking for themselves. To get them to believe that their history and culture is nothing but shame, exploitation, and the oppression of others (yes, even the Irish, who neither colonized nor enslaved anyone). To get them to hate the past, and to hate themselves, and to see adopting servility towards the Other—migrants, minorities, LGBT people, and so forth—as redemptive.
It’s working. As Lois McLatchie Miller pointed out last week on GBNews, almost a quarter of 18 to 34 year old Britons say they would favor banning parts of the Bible deemed ‘hateful.’ Research by Prof. Eric Kauffman of London’s Birkbeck College has shown that the Generation Z cohort in both the UK and the U.S. are far less supportive of traditional liberties (e.g., free speech, freedom of religion) than older generations in those countries. As this magazine’s Harrison Pitt has written, if we don’t turn this fight around, and soon, the Western democracies will become woke soft totalitarianisms.
Once again, I met over the weekend a visiting American journalist, and explained to him that the Big Lie about Hungary—a lie spread by the Western media and governments—is that Hungary is unfree. In fact, there is far more freedom to speak your mind in Hungary than in many Western countries. If the government of Hungary were proposing the same hate speech law that the Irish government proposes, European Union bigs would be screaming bloody murder about the rebirth of fascism. But because the Irish state proposes these extraordinary measures in defense of diversity, equity, inclusion, and migration, we hear not a peep out of Brussels.
It is past time for Europeans who actually believe in liberty and sovereignty to refuse the self-abasement proffered by Varadkar and others, and to rally to the cause of the Conor McGregors: men of virtue who are tired of being told by the ruling class that they deserve to be silenced by self-hatred and fear of prosecution. Harrison Pitt said earlier this year that the Hungarian example is instructive:
How have the Magyars shielded themselves from the West’s obsession with divisive identity politics? To foster a culture where, especially among young people, patriotism, critical thinking, and a commitment to improving the nation’s reputation in the world can thrive?
Apart from anything else, the governing Fidesz party has been willing to employ the commanding heights of political power. This means that the task of defending national tradition is not left purely to the invisible hand of the market or the initiative of strong-minded individuals. Unlike the British Conservative Party, Fidesz appreciates the need for institutional action. Any country ashamed of its own roots will not survive long in a hostile world. The wildfire of ‘woke’ fury is not just an indulgent spectacle that can be blissfully ignored; it destroys the sense of gratitude and self-worth that holds countries intact across time and gives the young especially a sense of belonging. When these feelings no longer grip the hearts and minds of those growing up within a national culture, the game is up.
Not every country is Hungary, mind you, but the virtue of Hungary’s example is that it shows what a people can accomplish with aggressive political leadership taking the side of the people there, as opposed to favoring loyalty to globalist bureaucrats. Even in Germany, the hard-left maverick politician Sahra Wagenknecht understands that mass migration hurts the prospects of the native-born working class, and only benefits global capital. Enough Dutch appear to have been awakened by the mass pro-Hamas protests across Europe after the October 7 massacre to have voted for anti-immigration stalwart Geert Wilders. The established political parties there will do all they can to prevent Wilders, whose party led balloting last week, from forming a new government. And that will only prove the populists’ point: that Europeans are largely governed, both in the state and civil institutions, by people who hate them.
What the Irish leadership—and the leadership of most political and civil-society institutions—want to do is totalitarian precisely because they are trying to conquer the minds of their peoples. They are attempting to manufacture consent to the self-dissolution of peoples, their traditions, and their liberties. As Polish-born Zbigniew Janowski, who grew up under Communism, writes in his 2021 book Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy In America:
The outcome is likely to be the same as it was under communism: the private realm, under the pressure of legislation, is bound to disappear, as it has in the U.S. and Europe. Regulating every aspect of one’s life will deprive man of privacy, and will render him totally transparent, easily traceable, manipulated, mindless, as a result of a unified educational system and methodology, and subservient to the bureaucratic state machinery operated by millions of robot-like security officers. Individual freedom will be something totally unknown.
And, do this for long enough, and young people who have never known what it was to live in freedom will cease to long for it, because they won’t be able to imagine it. They will only know that to dissent from what the state and Big Business, the media, academia, and other institutions of its civil-society apparatus, declares is just and right is to be a vile bigot who deserves to be eliminated. The Irish, like the Americans and almost every other people of the West, are being conditioned by their rulers to acquiesce to their own disinheritance, and to love it. You will own nothing—no country, no history, no society, no culture of your own—and you will be happy.
It will not get any better in Ireland, in Britain, or anywhere else if the public simply sits back and waits for better times. Polls show that roughly three out of four Irish reject the proposed hate speech law. If those people don’t take to the streets peacefully to stare down Varadkar’s government and make it retreat, they may not have the liberty to do so in the near future. All in the name of protecting Ireland from the indigenous Irish, you see. Under the woke paradise that Eurocrats like Leo Varadkar are building, all citizens are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Those who grew up under Communism know exactly how this scam works. Do you?