(This article was written by Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. Pride flags symbolize powerful political interests, not the will of the American people)

June has been nationally designated as LGBTQIA+ Pride Month and rainbows are displayed on everything from children’s merchandise displays to coffeehouse chains to churches. Whether or not you celebrate Pride, it’s impossible to get away from. In spite of national recognition, city parades, and even constant bowing and scraping from corporate America, this is not enough. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also authorized the Pride flag to fly on US embassies around the world, including the mission to the Holy See, signaling to foreign people the policy and position of the United States.

To most of these countries, this is a slap in the face–a disrespect of their religious views and sovereignty. The result is the erosion of public goodwill toward the US and endangered relations with the socially conservative countries of Africa, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, where the majority of populations believe these Pride-centric social ideologies are “morally unacceptable.”

Why does our government elevate the LGBT community above other minorities around the world? Where are the flags for the persecuted women and Christians? What about the extreme persecution of Muslim minorities, such as the one million Uyghurs interred in “reeducation camps” in China, many of whom have endured forced sterilization and abortion?

In some countries, women are sentenced to stoning or flagellation for adultery. Women in many countries still lack basic rights, such as property ownership or legal rights over their own children. Girls are still being barred from attending school. Women and girls account for 60 percent of victims of global human trafficking each year, including sexual exploitation and forced labor. Thirty-seven percent of girls in the least developed countries are married by age 18 and ten percent are married before the young age of fifteen.

What about the more than 360 million Christians worldwide that face persecution or discrimination for their faith, including murder, abduction, rape, sexual harassment, and attacks against churches? Christians are “harassed” (verbal abuse, physical violence, killings) in more countries than any other religious group in the world. The Christian flag is over 100 years old and symbolizes peace, fidelity, and sacrifice. This flag represents at least 7.3 billion people, about one-third of the world’s population. Why doesn’t the Christian flag have a place at US embassies?

If the answer is that not all Americans are Christians, then it should also be considered that most Americans still take a traditional view of marriage and sexuality. Should Christians, Muslims, and those who believe in traditional families (or science, in the case of “gender identity”) be forced to celebrate homosexuality and gay pride even if it violates their conscience or beliefs?

The left applies strong political pressure to push their social agenda all around the world. Biden’s ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, routinely labels Hungary as a country in “democratic backsliding,” or as an abuser of human rights simply because Hungarians, much like Americans twenty years ago, respect the privacy of homosexual couples in their country. At the same time, they will not accept sexual identity curriculum in their schools, nor the normalization of transgenderism in their society.

But why are LGBT activists so politically powerful? In large part, because leftists fund nonprofit organizations as an integral part of their strategy–a strategy promoted by cultural Marxists for decades, with the intent of spreading communistic ideology worldwide –Marxism’s forced obedience and conformity to one truth and ideology. Leftists are great at this strategy and the right has not yet realized the importance of funding NGOs to the same degree.

Tools like the Corporate Equality Index, developed by activists at the Human Rights Campaign, an NGO funded by organizations like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, have changed the fabric of American society. This group compels, threatens, and pressures corporations like Target, Nike, Budweiser, and many others into sexual identity obsession and compliance in order to achieve a “perfect” index score. The fact that even the Fox News employee handbook offers employees a “workplace gender transition plan,” allows transgender people their choice of bathrooms, and encourages “proper” pronoun use – in the pursuit of a perfect Corporate Equality Index Score (which incidentally, Fox has achieved) – should give us a clue about the power of leftist NGOs in the U.S.

While living in Central Europe for the past couple of months, I have endured the embarrassment of hearing Europeans talk about the US obsession with sexual orientation, like drag queen shows on US military bases. The US is not being taken seriously, especially in our foreign policy; we have become a laughingstock. I often hear, and this pains me to say, Europeans express that the US is in decline.

Recently, I spent the afternoon in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hometown of Felcsút, with men and women old enough to remember the communist occupation of the Soviet Union (1945-91). During the occupation, Hungarians looked to the US as an example of a nation where family, freedom, and religious belief could flourish. But Hungarians believe the US is now immersed in the “woke” cultural Marxism that they fought so hard to destroy in their own country.

One gentleman in Felcsút, gravely concerned about current US leadership and its childish “wokeism,” asked me (with tears in his eyes) if there was hope for the US. I assured him, biting my cheek to keep from crying too, that America doesn’t belong to the Biden administration or to the sexual activists funded by the rich leftist elite.

America belongs to the people, and the American people are sane even if our corporations are faddish and cowardly, and our government has given itself over to political activists and silly, empty nonsense. Americanism has nothing to do with “gender identity,” and American citizens are much greater than their sexual orientations, preferences, or desires. Our Constitution guarantees the rights of all Americans – not just the select groups fixated on defining people by sex.

Shea Bradley-Farrell is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Breznev en Bruselas)

The European Union has entered a frenetic drift of legislative and regulatory production that cuts back the freedoms, rights and room for maneuver of individuals, communities, companies, families and nations too. It does so with centralizing, interventionist, collectivist and social-engineering ideological objectives that were at no point set out or proposed to the affected nations. They have already turned the European Commission into a government with centralized and global executive powers, something never agreed upon, which it exercises with an arbitrariness as absolute as became evident in the purchase of vaccines and in the management of the pandemic. General obscurantism, a lack of transparency and the non-existence of any minimal means of holding this power to account by anyone, neither by the national parliaments nor by the European Parliament.

The EU has become, without consultation or announcement and without any legal basis, an executive tool of ideological control and imposition. No Treaty justifies it and it does not have the approval of the affected nations, which were never consulted on the matter. It would never have had the blessing of the Founding Fathers of that community of law of sovereign states.

This term of the European Parliament, of whose five years of life one remains, launched into a set of regulatory initiatives by the Commission under Ursula von der Leyen with a radicalism throughout the entire ideological discourse of the left. Carried into policy and into Community directives, it has imposed measures that largely violate their will and freedom and gravely harm their interests. It has moreover set itself up as a punitive power which, like Moscow under the Brezhnev doctrine, arrogates to itself the right to impose punishments on those who deviate from its ideological postulates.

Mrs. Von der Leyen reached the presidency thanks to the violation of the rules in the first place. Macron did not want the one whose turn it was, Manfred Weber, and pulled out of the hat Merkel’s disastrous Defense minister, heavily discredited, with a pending case over a scandal and hounded by accusations of destroying evidentiary material. But Merkel accepted and there Von der Leyen was installed, skipping over all the much-touted ethical criteria. Thus it was seen once again how and by whom the things that matter are decided there.

Who really rules was made quite clear with that ghostly European investment plan in China which aimed to demoralize industry and agriculture even further toward the Asian monster, and which was announced after an agreement between Merkel, Macron, Von der Leyen and the dictator and idol of the Davos Forum, Xi Jinping. It was announced on December 30, 2021, still in the midst of the pandemic and without the remaining 25 member countries having the faintest idea about it. The deterioration of relations with China caused that brutal plan to fail, a plan that would have left us even more exposed to the whims of the communist giant in Beijing.

Von der Leyen, of the European People’s Party, has been the radical vanguard of a social-democratic majority that spans from the PP and PS to communist extremism, and she has spent four years producing instruments of aggression against nations, sectors, regions, groups or social segments of the European nations, in order to impose everything from LGBT education for children to the eradication of livestock farming. Full-bore against Hungary and Poland for their conservative governments, and protection and vast sums of money for Pedro Sánchez with all his misdeeds because ideologically he fits into the equation. That majority of Agenda 2030, as it should be called, is the one that already has under way the plan to destroy Europe’s entire primary sector. About those Green Deal plans and the revolts of the European nations against these truly criminal objectives I will write next time.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Periodismo, acción política y esperanza)

I turn to these pages of El Debate to greet its readers and to announce that I will be here regularly to set out my opinions on what is happening. Not too often, do not be alarmed. But it is a good moment to speak to you from a very definite perspective about events in Spain and beyond. I assure you that many things are going to happen in the near future, and I also guarantee that not all of them will be bad. That is why, when my dear friends Bieito Rubido and Ramón Pérez Maura, the chiefs at this outlet, invited me to give my opinion and analysis as a member of the European Parliament, I accepted.

We are at a decisive moment for the future of us all, of our grandchildren and of future generations. And not because planet Earth is going to explode, as those who make business and totalitarian politics out of the fear of the end of the world would have it. What is at stake is the survival of our civilization, of our memory and our way of life and of our understanding of the human being.

Some say the die is cast and that we who defend a civilization that believes in freedom, in conscience, in the sacred and transcendent character of the human being, in history, in the family, in the nation, in honor, in tradition, in love and forgiveness, have already lost. We know that we are in danger, but in addition to all the treasures just enumerated we also have the treasure of hope. And we believe that we can win this contest and save, defend and strengthen this way of human life in which the beautiful, the good and the true are possible.

When I bade farewell to journalism back in the summer of 2019, in a Tercera column of an ABC that still had something to do with that conservative, monarchist and national newspaper which is already great history of Spain, I feared that I would greatly miss the craft of daily writing that I had practiced for almost forty years. I had just accepted Santiago Abascal’s offer to go to the European Parliament as a VOX deputy, to do politics, not to narrate it.

Today I assure you that I do not miss journalism. And that I am infinitely grateful to Abascal and to VOX for the opportunity to take part in this historic project of reconquering freedom, rights, integrity and prosperity for Spaniards. It is a thrilling undertaking that barely leaves me any desire to write in the press or in books. And I read the press with far more stinginess of time. Born in a house that was a newsroom, to which 20 or 25 newspapers in four languages and magazines from all over the world arrived every day, today I read less press than ever. I do not think I am less informed. Today many challenges press upon us.

I do write for our Fundación Disenso, in support of its commendable and increasingly effective work of promoting both thought and political activism at once. I write something in its Gaceta de la Iberosfera, which has changed the way of reporting on Ibero-America, or when parties allied with VOX ask me to explain the preposterous political situation of a kidnapped Spain or the delirious drift that some want to impose on everyone else in the European Union toward a totalitarian, interventionist, hoarding and impoverishing socialist project.

Today I am delighted to come to El Debate, one of the few media outlets in Spain that withstands the challenge of resisting the total debasement and cheapening of the message and of purpose. Cardinal Herrera Oria must have something to do with all of that.

It is true that my disaffection toward the evolution of journalism in general, and especially in Spain, which arose decades ago, has by now turned into open aversion to the barbaric abuses, the vileness and the shamelessness in the habitual practice of so very many members of those militia hordes that have taken over most of the media. After the March 11 bombings, when the prior conspiracies of caseríos and Perpignans triumphed, there came to power in Spain politicians who often border on criminal abuse and always on the totalitarian vocation of a socialism proper to societies far more primitive than ours. Their foremost representatives are the felon who today ruins us and bullies more than he governs, and the one who came to power over 192 corpses of Spaniards and today is the surrendered servant of that greatest murderer of America, Nicolás Maduro. The others, those who should have defended us from them, were busy with their businesses and their sports pages. Journalism adapted fully to the character of the rulers, and today the servility of the vast majority of the media and the obsequiousness of their journalists toward power are as offensive as they are sickening.

There is much to write about. We are already in the reconquest of all those spaces that were handed over, out of indolence, ignorance, neglect or cowardice, to a left that did come with elaborate plans, concrete objectives and finely tuned messages. The cultural battle has not been lost because it has not been fought. Here there have only been false defenders of civilization who surrendered the strongholds without a fight. Education, information, communication, culture, the church, (supposed) science, urban planning and ecology, all taken over by the well-organized cadres of a left that has used them to keep mutilating common sense, rationality, dignity, probity and integrity and, of course, freedom.

The cultural battle has begun now and it will be bloody, because those who have won all these conquests without a fight will try to resist and use all their resources to annihilate us. But today we are much better off than fifteen or ten years ago, when there was barely any awareness of the threat or perception of the enemy. Today the battle is already unfolding across all of Spain, across all of Europe and across all of the West. Nothing guarantees that we can win in the short or medium term after so much yielding and so much advantage senselessly granted over the past half century. But we have truth, reality and common sense as weapons that they can never wrest from us. And with fear of nothing and no one, the times of prostration before abuse, lies, injustice and vileness are coming to an end.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.