Is The Gay Empire Coming For You?

There’s this article from the right-wing website Revolver, published 8/11/2020 and containing the headline “The New American Colonialists: The Anti-Imperialist ‘Woke’ Left Exports Cultural Poison to the Entire World,” that I come back to rather often. In it, Niccolo Soldo tries to explain how the left is using foreign policy to push their agenda — or some such nonsense.

The article shows the worst (and most contradictory) aspects of right-wing isolationism combined with a heavy focus on misrepresenting reality. Take this claim:

When a country comes under the protective American umbrella of either NATO or some program akin to it, one of the first requests by the State Department is for that state to hold a Gay Pride Parade. The stated intent is to show that this country has left behind its intolerant past and willingly accepted liberal democracy and its (frequently changing) mores.

His source for this is a BBC article from 5/25/2013 about the first pride-parade in Ukraine. The article never mentions that Ukraine is only holding a pride-parade (by the way, pride parades are usually not state sanctioned) because NATO forced them to such — and even if NATO tried to do such a thing, it’s unlikely it would have much of an impact because Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

If you actually read the BBC article, you’ ll find the Ukrainian government was not too fond of this. Here’s the second paragraph of the article linked by Soldo:

Police arrested 13 people for trying to break up the rally — in a country where homophobia is widespread and generally accepted.

Of course, this article also runs under the implication that a country becoming less homophobic is a bad thing — because the author believes that to be the case. In the process, he’s using the rhetoric of anti-imperialism in order to stoke the ire of his readers — as if British rule over India can be compared to Ukraine not banning being gay.

Of course, those on the nationalist-right have been doing this for years. On 4/16/2021, Matt Walsh tweeted the following:

The “Latinx” bullshit is an actual legitimate example of white people colonizing a foreign culture and trying to impose their own values and ideas onto it. But the white people doing it are LGBT leftists so they get a pass.

What values is Walsh talking about exactly? Does he mean the letter “x”? Because the letter “x” exists in Spanish, I’m not sure that Matt knows this.

However, with Pride Month ranging on, the nationalist-right has been in overdrive trying to find examples of imperialism at the hands of the left. On 6/1/2021, the twitter account of the US embassy in the See of Rome tweeted a picture of a rainbow flag the walls of the embassy with the following message:

The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See celebrates #PrideMonth with the Pride flag on display during the month of June. The United States respects the dignity and equality of LGBTQI+ people. LGBTQI+ rights are human rights.

This quickly angered the nationalist-right. Sohrab Ahmari tweeted:

You’re guests on sacred ground, you high-tech American barbarians. Saint Peter is buried not too far. Anyway, the Catholic Church has seen off all her enemies for two millennia. You will be no different.

(Side note: Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian immigrant. Is he one of those ungrateful immigrants who has no interest in assimilating and just wants to take over our culture the right keeps warning about? If so, does that mean we can deport him? Because I’m normally against deportation, but if he wants to his home country his “enemy” and a group of “high-tech . . . barbarians,” then I’m not convinced he deserves American citizenship.)

Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative on 6/2/2021, said that while he was outraged by this, it’s actually the fault of the Catholic Church for not being anti-gay enough:

There’s a principle in law that says if a company refuses to protect its brand over time, it will lose the legal right to that brand. That’s why if you use the word “Dumpster” as a common noun, you might hear from the legal department at the Dumpster company telling you to stop. It’s important that they act to protect their brand, or it will be dissolved into popular usage. The same principle (though not legally) is at work here, for the Catholic Church. It will be interesting to see if the Vatican files a formal diplomatic protest against the US for the Embassy flag. If not, what conclusion should one draw?

Dreher has in the past advocated for what he calls “the Benedict Option” (the topic of his 2017 book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation). Basically, it means that Christians should distance themselves from society and form their own communities instead of trying to live among the mainstream. Dreher first outlined this theory in an article for Time dated 6/26/2015, in which he wrote:

I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

Dreher wrote this in response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. It has been almost six-years since that decision, and the persecution of Christians that Dreher warned us about (the article is literally headlined “Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn To Live as Exiles in Our Own Country”) has not occurred. Although that has not stopped Dreher from writing another book on this topic, so check out Dreher’s 2020 book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Maybe you can read it while waiting for the next Supreme Court decision that says religious people are not required to follow safety orders during a pandemic — you know, because they’re so oppressed. (Seriously, Christians are allowed to use their religion to ignore safety orders during a pandemic — which isn’t what “religious liberty” actually means, I should note — and yet we’re supposed to believe they’re oppressed.)

This is all worth noting because, to put it as simply as possible, nobody in America today hates American culture more than American-nationalists. I remember seeing a guy named Zachary Miller tweet the following in response to the aforementioned rainbow flag controversy:

If I’m forced to choose between the United States and the Vatican, I’m choosing the Vatican without a second thought.

Is this the America First movement I keep hearing about? But seriously, this is what nationalists think of America, they think it’s a horrible country that is not worth preserving. Sinclair Lewis once said:

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

That quote, that’s 21st century American nationalist. It’s fascism coming to America wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

The nationalist does not want Americans to believe their culture is above any other culture, first so it will stop being spread and second so it will stop being defended. Instead, we are to believe America is, at best, a nation among many and, at worst, an evil empire with the goal of turning the entire world into nothing more than a dystopian hellhole. This is specifically so you will not defend your culture when it’s under attack, and, despite what many of you have been conditioned to believe, nobody is doing more to attack American culture than nationalists. The values of representative government, open debate, and equality in the eyes of the law — values that have informed the American point of view for generations and which countless men have fought and died for — are constantly under their attack.

America should be openly hostile to cultures that do not share our values, because those values are worth defending. This does not mean we should invade and conquer them or anything like that, but that does mean that we should make it clear that our culture is better than theirs and that they are on thin ice in our minds.

This is for one simple reason; American culture is worth defending against enemies domestic and foreign. Let the nationalists mock it as they become increasing irrelevant, allow their laughs to be nothing more than their final words as they remain in the past. Welcome to the future, everyone is invited.