To make sense of the current war on the family—and make no mistake, there is one—we must travel back to early 20th-century revolutionary Russia and then pass by Hungary on our way home. Because, odd as it may seem, recent snapshots from across our nation are all related. The Department of Justice targets parents for challenging the school’s racialist curriculum. Police officers arrest a dad after he exposes that his daughter was raped in her school’s bathroom by a boy in a skirt. A politician declares, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” These scenarios reveal the perverted logic and revolutionary aims of a new Bolshevik Revolution.

Supported by the imperial German government at war with his country, the young Vladimir Lenin applied the principles of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto to his homeland. Guided by a utopian fantasy wherein peasants turn plowshares into factory timecards, Lenin envisioned a society free of social classes and economic inequality, united under an almighty state. To achieve his goal, Lenin coalesced all power under the Soviet Communist Party. All other Russian social institutions, such as church and family, were brought to heel.

What resulted was a dissolution of the very notion of privacy. The Party policed every aspect of life, down to one’s thoughts. It was not enough for the so-called “enemies of the state” to confess fake crimes; they were obliged to feign belief in them. After all, the state alone determined what was good, true, beautiful, and most of all, real.

So began a series of violent persecutions on an enormous scale, from the Red Terror to the Great Purge and beyond. Russia’s regime under Lenin and his successor Stalin was bloody and violent, but, even worse, it was psychologically crushing. The state police reserved exceedingly sadist interrogation methods for those who refused to betray a neighbor or bring accusations against a family member. Often enough, the police would release the accused and then send his loved one to a prison camp instead.

American Bolshevism

America today is not yet Lenin’s Russia. There is no Gulag, though political prisoners like the January 6 protesters are languishing without bail in solitary confinement. There is no reign of terror, though millions of Americans are facing job loss due to an unconstitutional vaccine mandate. There is no state absolutism, unless we include the president smearing a 17-year-old for the crime of defending himself from a mob.

But make no mistake: the rationale behind Bolshevism has reached American shores, primarily in the form of our radical education philosophy. Many radical leftists seek primarily to target kids, and for good reason. Lenin knew that the key to perpetuating the cultural revolution was influencing—that is, morally corrupting and psychologically brainwashing—the next generation. “Give me five years to teach the children,” he is reported to have said, “and the seed sown shall not be uprooted.”

Like their ideological forebears, American radicals know too that kids play a unique role in the revolution. These “critical theorists” are disciples of radical philosophers like György Lukács, who served as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the provisional Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Under his teaching, they strategically target our youth.

To the horror of his fellow Hungarians, Lukács pioneered a sex education curriculum for Hungarian public schools that promoted early childhood sexualization and promiscuity. By introducing sexual activity and pleasure to children at a young age, Lukács believed he could eradicate an idea he considered a chief roadblock to revolution: that of “innocent childhood.” Lukács understood that stable societies based on family life and strong on child protections tend not to produce radicals.

Transing the Kids

Once the Hungarian Soviet revolution fizzled, Lukács emigrated to Germany. There, he helped found the Frankfurt School, the propaganda center of neo-Marxist ideology during the last century, as well as the training ground for modern American leftists.

Understanding the radical Russian and Hungarian roots of our American authoritarian moment allows us to make sense of cultural spectacles such as Drag Queen Story Hour. DQSH features drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores to capture the “imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood” and “give children positive and unabashedly queer role models”—with little regard for the opinion of parents, of course.

The ruthless sexualizing of children is a critical component of a broader plan to create a gender-fluid society that normalizes LGBTQIA+ sexuality and downplays “heteronormativity.” The primary benefit of sexually exploiting children is the likelihood of their growing into confused, angry, radical adults. And the goal of sexualizing kids into radical adults is to delegitimize parental control and destabilize the social order. In a nutshell: hasten the revolution. 

Bolshevism? Köszönöm, Nem!

Hungary today stands tall as a free nation that, sadly, once gave rise to the likes of György Lukács but also bravely endured over 40 years of Soviet domination. As such, it is a country immune to the siren call of Communism, however faint.

In a recent speech at the 4th Budapest Demographic Summit, the Hungarian Prime minister soundly rejected “the ever-wider and faster spread” of woke movements which “seek to miseducate our children already in nursery school, want to use children as Pride activists,” and encourage children to question, reject, and try to transform their biological sex.

A few years ago, after Hungary passed pro-family legislation, curious condemnation came from a European neighbor, comparing it to Nazism. So what was the policy’s great evil? Chiefly, it incentivized national demographic stabilization and growth via pro-family incentives and supports rather than immigration-dependent ones.

Last summer, the administration passed legislation aimed at protecting Hungary’s kids from hyper-sexualization by prohibiting the dissemination of pornography and the promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism in public schools. It also defined fathers as male and mothers and women.

But, as expected, European Progressives and their American sympathizers immediately cried foul.

The New York Times, a long-time critic of Hungary’s current administration, condemned the law as “anti-LGBTQ.” The administration’s response to the Times’ screed:

When it comes to protecting our children, there’s no question: We have zero tolerance for pedophiles and insist that educating children about sexual orientation must be protected as the sole right of parents.

Later, the Prime Minister further piled on:

They’re now setting off alarm bells across Europe over Hungary’s new laws to punish pedophiles and protect our children severely. But, let’s face it, this movement is eternal, and its new slogan is no longer “Proletarians of the world, unite!” but “Liberals of the world, unite!” This, of course, reinforces the Central European conviction that today’s liberals are, in fact, Communists with degrees.

This fall in a radio address, Mr. Orbán described a meeting with the Pope in which the two discussed the state of the European family. The Prime Minister reported that the Pope

Also sees that great forces are working, especially in Brussels, in the Brussels bureaucracy, to relativize the family, and he has articulated as hard as I have never done before. He said families could not be allowed to relativize. Family, father, mother, child, period…. There is no debate about it. In fact, he said go ahead, which means you just do it, go ahead, and we’ll do it.

PM Orbán’s message was clear: the family in the West is under attack from within. We know it, the Pope knows it, and he blesses Hungary’s efforts to protect families. Period.

Reject the Bullying

Mercifully, a ray of hope pierces the rather dark horizon. Unlike the followers of Bolshevism, Hungary recognizes the difference between public and private jurisdictions. The government acknowledges parental rights over children. The current administration seeks to create legal protections—against demographic decline, against degradation of children, and government overreach—so that families and children can flourish.

In America, we are suffering an authoritarian moment. Media condemn a small Central European country for enacting essential support for the family and protection for children. Public libraries groom children for abuse and ultimately revolution by normalizing sexual deviancy. A politician undermines parents’ fundamental right to educate their children.

Together, we must work to decouple the private from the public. We must re-legitimize the natural authority of parents in family life. We must love our neighbor and stand for truth. That is our only hope of defeating the Bolshevism that threatens kids and parents at every turn.