Extraordinary e-mail from a reader in Mexico City, commenting on my “Quo Vadis, America?” post:

Good piece this morning, well stated. The disengagement of the American public from the American project — though not, at least on the right, from the idea of America — will be fatal for the republic if unreversed.Here in Mexico City there is obviously no celebration of the Fourth of July outside of what the local American Society is producing, but we do have very much in evidence the same forces that are laboring to bring the American experiment to an end — in the name of an alien and elite-imposed ideology that rejects the foundational values of the United States and Mexico alike. To illustrate, I am attaching here two photographs from the tail end of “pride” month — el mes de orgullo — here in Mexico City.

The one with the giant Mexican flag is from the Zocalo, the historic center plaza of the great city. This was the center of the old Aztec city as well — you have to imagine it ringed with stepped pyramids and human blood — and now it sports much more prosaic structures in the European style. The important thing is that they are festooned with what you see here: gigantic sexual-identity banners. This kind of thing doesn’t happen, on the Zocalo, without state endorsement.

The other photograph is of the building that houses the municipal legislature — basically the congress of Mexico City — and it too is draped with sexual-identity flags, this time at explicit government order. What does the Mexican state (presently under a brand of socialist-left leadership) endorse and promulgate? Well, it’s this. These are its core values. Note especially the centrality of the transgender flag, placed between the two rainbow flags. Whether it is meant to send a message or not, as metaphor it is near perfection.It’s quite extraordinary on several levels. The disconnect from Mexican history and the values that animated it is profound: the Mexican War for Independence began with an insurgent army carrying a banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and ended with a rebel army carrying a flag symbolizing the “Three Guarantees” of “Religión, Independencia y Unión” — by which was meant independent Mexico would be an explicitly Catholic state with liberal equality for all its citizens. It is impossible to reconcile its founding with this thing now: if anything, we could expect the heroes of Mexican independence in Morelos, Guerrero, Hidalgo, et al., to likely rise up against the current regime. Moving forward a century to the era of the Mexican Revolution, there is absolute certainty as to what socially conservative figures like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa would have thought.The disconnect from the Mexican present is equally profound. The Mexican state is generally agreed to have lost control of 30% to 40% of its sovereign territory to criminal cartels in the past ten to fifteen years. The middle class, ascendant a decade ago, is now staggering under a combination of insecurity and economic stagnation brought on by a combination of endemic armed conflict and leftist-governance bungling. You can’t wander Mexico City, as I have, without eventually encountering some heartbreaking plea — expressed in a protest encampment, a poster, or a permanent exhibit — for children and loved ones who have been “disappeared” by the military, by police, or by criminal cartels, assuming there is much difference. The murder rate here is spiking (which, in a Mexican context, is really saying something), and business is fleeing. Mexico, which possesses immeasurable potential in its extraordinary people, grand cultural inheritance, and immense natural riches, is gripped in existential crisis.So what does the regime here focus on? Rainbow and transgender flags. There was a big “pride” march last Sunday where the mayor — and likely next Mexican president — Claudia Sheinbaum, appeared. Sure, your neighborhoods in Itzapalapa are wracked by crime, no one in the city has clean drinking water from the municipal supply, and someone executed a group of young men in tourist-favorite Coyoacan last week, but just look at what the city provides now. You can change your gender identity on government documents! You can marry someone of the same sex! The city runs sex-change clinics! We’re painting crosswalks in rainbow colors!

Hemos otorgado más de 6 mil actas de identidad de género, se han celebrado más de 100 bodas igualitarias y se ha atendido a más de 3 mil 600 personas en la Clínica Trans.

En la Ciudad de las libertades, la diversidad es un orgullo.#ViveTuOrgullo

¡Buenas noches! pic.twitter.com/5Glr2qkOmY

— Claudia Sheinbaum (@Claudiashein) June 29, 2022

This leads me to the final disconnect at work here, which is that none of this is even remotely indigenous to Mexico. Everything above will be broadly familiar to Americans who live under a similar regime — with the exception that we are blessedly free, so far, from Mexico-level ultra-violence — that pushes its ideology of sexual libertinism with aggression even as the pillars of middle-class lives and dignity are kicked away. But to our shame, we originated this stuff. Mexico has a robust leftist tradition, to be sure: much of the 1920-1940 period was spent with the Mexican state executing priests and flirting with Soviet Communism. But that tradition is very much focused upon an industrial-left agenda — labor unions and class struggle — that would be very familiar to the middle of the twentieth century.Modern American progressivism, which casts most of that agenda aside in favor of an obsession with gender ideology, is not native to this country. That madness was formulated in humanities departments in Boston and San Francisco, not in parishes in Morelos, nor in neighborhoods in Sonora. It was imported and adopted by a Mexican elite for whom concurrence with Acela Corridor values is more personally important than the stewardship of their own nation.Sure, those Mexican elites are at fault. But so are we. I grew up in an America where foreign nations could come to learn about democracy, about good governance, about representation of the people: call it the “Hello Freedom Man!” country. We exported all that, consciously, and we were good at it. A good portion of the globe lives in relative liberty now thanks to us, and I take great pride in that. But now we export the rainbow ideology with all its evils to deeply vulnerable and stricken lands — and this, on the Fourth of July, is also a source of shame.

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