Last Weekend Of Pride Month Really Stuck It To The Nazis
From Budapest to way out west, crowds showed up for the last weekend of Pride month.
In the final days of Pride month, celebrations rang out around the country and the world, and conservatives can suck a lemon and sit on a tack about it!
Perhaps the most poignant Pride parade of all was in Budapest on Saturday, which was Hungary’s biggest ever, with around 200,000 people! There, any public assembly supporting LGBTQ+ rights has been outlawed under the rule of their waxy, liver-spotted authoritarian Prime Minister-for-life Viktor Orbán, who insists that gay and trans people are all pedophile criminals who must be driven back into the closet for the sake of the children. Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, from the six illegitimate partisan hack fascist ghouls on the Supreme Court last week, and every right-wing conservative nut since forever. Hey, what number are they up to on that Right-Wing Sexual Predator spreadsheet? Oh, 1,436? Okay then.
Anyway, against Orbán’s wishes, the Mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, sanctioned the parade anyway, as a municipal event. Orbán even deployed facial-recognition technology to deter marchers, with cameras mounted on lampposts, and threatened arrests and fines, but the crowd was not deterred. Some even waved for the cameras. Look at those happy crowds!
And to be extra dicks about it, Hungarian authorities granted permits for opposition protesters to gather at the end of a bridge, trying to force a confrontation. But police separated the crowd from all three of its haters, and no confrontation happened.
Could it be that a tipping point of people are getting sick enough of Viktor Orbán’s crap?
Orbán is up for re-election next year, and he’s scrambling to try to crack down on any opposition speech. His main rival, Péter Magyar of the TISZA party snipped, "Viktor Orbán became the king of Pride in Europe yesterday, because no one else has ever managed to mobilise such a large crowd for a demonstration against himself by inciting hatred." Burn!
Orbán has been a right-wing darling in the US, ever since Roy Cohn and Roger Stone’s guru, Arthur Finkelstein, helped him successfully devise the art of culture-war squealing about gay people, immigrants and (((GEORGE SOROS))), then swoop in for a power grab, 15 years ago. Since then, he’s been a guest at CPAC and the Heritage Foundation, crowing about the “illiberal democracy” he’s made in Hungary, and for sleepovers at Donald Trump’s Florida fascist flophouse more than once, where he ogled Melania and awkwardly jammed to classic rock.
Read more about all that here!
The day he’s run out of office will be a happy and gay one indeed. Let us laugh at Orbán stomping his tiny little foot and calling the march “disgusting and shameful," and whining that the marchers were from Brussels. About 70 members of the European parliament did attend:
Brussels has issued an order that there must be a Pride in Budapest. Their puppet politicians have carried out the order. This is proof of what life would be like if our country were not run by a national government defending our sovereignty. Orders from Brussels, puppet politicians in Budapest in hats, TISZA, [social democrat] DK and Karácsony [Mayor of Budapest] voters in the streets.
People dancing to music and happy in the streets, how terrible!
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs claimed on X that the crowd was sent by Brussels.
Pathetic.
Meanwhile, back in America, in spite of many grinchy fairweather corporations pulling back their contributions this year, Pride came, just the same. Shame on you, Amtrak, Anheuser-Busch, Benefit Cosmetics, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Citi, Comcast/Xfinity, Deloitte, Diageo, Garnier, Goldman Sachs, Lowe’s, Mastercard, Meta, Nissan, Pepsi, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Skyy Vodka, Target, Visa and Walmart! And good for you Disney, Bank of America, Starbucks, L’Oreal and Deutsche Bank (never thought we’d say that).
In Minnesota, after the dicks at Target pulled their $50k contribution, supporters were able to crowd-fund more than twice that amount.
San Francisco’s parade attracted more than a million people and raised enough to deploy a four-mile rainbow-laser Bat Signal, and the Dyke March returned after a six-year hiatus. The theme was “Queer Joy is Resistance.”
And if you’ve never been to Pride in the Castro, put it on your bucket list, because those pride puppies don’t tone it down for anybody. Watch the whole parade, why not?
Over in New York on Sunday, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani set conservative triggers ablaze marching with Attorney General Leticia James, while waving a trans pride flag. Current Mayor Eric Adams marched too, and got a middle-fingers-and-boos reception, while Andrew Cuomo stayed home.
Here’s a heartwarming compilation.
St. Petersburg Florida, get it, ladies!
Chicago’s parade was among the largest of them all, with nearly a million people estimated attending, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker marching.
Watch it all!
And Seattle was graced with big, bold crowds too. The theme was “Louder.”
A very good theme. Fascists hate nothing more than a proud, happy, dancing crowd that’s unafraid of them. Let’s all celebrate Pride throughout the year by rubbing joy in their miserable, angry faces, as often and loudly as possible!
P.S. Bonus footage, from the first gay pride parade and “gay-in” in 1970, commemorating Stonewall the year before. Enjoy!
And now, having delivered an actual happy post to you, this is your OPEN THREAD.
Where I have my desk located there is a window directly to my right, I get a really nice breeze and a great view of the gas station. It is a very busy gas station and makes for good people watching as it has a little convenience store also. Today was a WTF should I call 911 moment. A mom fueling up, driver's door open, a boy maybe 8 next to her. The kid pulled the nozzle out and sprayed gas on himself, his mom's feet, the inside of their car and the ground. Her shriek is what made me look. She grabbed it from him. She then wiped him off and took off her shoes which got soaked. Then they got in the car just drove away. That seemed incredibly dangerous. I turned to Harry and asked if he had just seen what I had just seen and he agreed people are stupid.
Open Thread Chat June 30. Monday is bun day! https://substack.com/chat/1783367/post/a852108a-335b-43bf-8772-6180a7673188