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Bernard-Henri Lévy in Budapest and the witch hunt against Scruton: here’s the tyranny of liberalism’s political correctness

The French “public intellectual” Bernard-Henry Lévy paid a visit to Budapest this week. He offered his deep assessment of the Hungarian prime minister, calling him “the most obnoxious bastard,” who is, by the way, “building an authoritarian rule in Hungary.”

And with his remarks, he gave us a classic example of how the disciples of today’s liberalism go after anyone who dares defect from their ranks and challenge their ideology and all it embraces – multiculturalism, globalism, open borders and immigration.

During the course of his visit to Budapest this week, the French “star philosopher” mourned Prime Minister Orbán’s breaking faith with liberal orthodoxy. In an interview in Hungarian media he essentially called the prime minister a “bastard” who is building an “authoritarian” regime and said, after meeting the prime minister for coffee earlier this week, that the young, liberal fighting politician is dead.

Prime Minister Orbán’s cardinal sin? He opposes today’s liberalism because it’s broken.

“Liberalism today no longer stands up for freedom,” PM Orbán said in an interview in 2015, “but for political correctness – which is the opposite of freedom.” The prime minister shows us what happens when a conservative leader has the audacity to point out the failings in liberalism’s ideology, to oppose immigration and multiculturalism and dare to say that Europe’s Christian culture and identity must be protected.

The prime minister is not the only one to feel the wrath of liberalism’s crusaders. Recently, the conservative philosopher and advisor to the UK government, Roger Scruton got a similar dose.

“Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed facts,” Scruton said a while back, adding that it is “nonsense” to accuse PM Orbán of anti-Semitism and similarly ridiculous to accuse of “islamophobia”. These are, needless to say, reasonable claims.

But not so to the liberals who cannot tolerate such language. Labour MPs in the UK demanded, unsuccessfully, that the government sack Scruton for such blasphemy.

“You expect people who spend their lives on Twitter to have this store of malice,” said Scruton in an interview, “but when it comes up in parliament, as it did, I was astonished.”

In Hungary, we’ve grown accustomed to it, unfortunately. The intolerance of liberalism does not astonish us anymore.