63 search results for "Carlson Orban"

Carlson, Bannon and Orbán sittin’ in a tree

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

After several days of controversy over his insistence that white supremacy in America is a hoax, Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson is tired. He announced on Wednesday night that he’d be going fishing for a few days. Fox News insists that this was a scheduled vacation but as CNN’s Oliver Darcy notes, Fox News hosts who start dumpster fires often “take a few days off” when advertisers’ customers feel they’ve gone too far and the boys in the boardroom start to feel too much heat. In the case of Bill O’Reilly, he abruptly went away on “vacation” one day and never returned.

It’s unknown whether Carlson will be back next week. According to the Hollywood Reporter, after he said last December that immigrants made America “dirtier” he lost 26 sponsors. They speculate that he won’t lose his job over this latest controversy because his show now depends upon smaller direct-marketing companies which are unlikely to flee. We’ll know soon enough.

But it’s possible that part of the reason he was sent off to the woods is something that goes beyond his insistence that White Supremacy is a hoax. As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it’s important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News.

Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.

Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:

And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.

It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.

But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.

Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)

In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:

Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.

And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:

[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.

There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now. The results speak for themselves:

The rub: 80% Dems, 67% of indies, but only 36% of Repubs say growth of nonwhite population will be positive change. 61% of Repubs believe shift to being a majority-nonwhite country will be a mostly negative development. https://t.co/KX9PuAAFve via @prripoll— Francis Wilkinson (@fdwilkinson) August 8, 2019

What do Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban have in common?

by digby

Tucker Carlson recently made a bit of a splash by adopting a sort of right-wing populism that a fair number of progressives found intriguing. I’ve been watching Carlson for a very long time and I don’t see anything but malicious trolling in virtually anything he does so I’m not the best judge of his “ideas.” Maybe this is the first time he’s ever been sincere about anything in his life, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I thought of these comments of his in a recent Salon article this morning:

I know you said you’re not trying to advocate specific policies, so let’s be a little more abstract. What type of society would you view as ideal, in terms of how a human being should be able to live from birth until death? What should the function of government should be in nurturing that human and protecting them from harm?

This is all a fairly delicate balance between freedom and coercion and central planning and organic growth. All the intentions that are inherent in life and certainly that are inherent in policy. OK, so there’s never any kind of bumper sticker that solves the problems. What I’m arguing for is a reorientation of the way we think about this stuff.

Formulation of policy needs to begin with a clear-sighted picture of what the goal is: What do we seek to achieve by doing this? What’s the final stage of awesomeness we’re hoping to get to? In the final stage, in my opinion, it is a society in which most families — which is to say married couples with children — can subsist and thrive to some extent on one income, because one thing that no one ever mentions, which is a defining factor in people’s lives, is raising your kids, and people kind of want to do that themselves.

There’s been a huge debate over how much money we should give people to hire someone else, usually from another country, to raise our kids. Without even weighing in on that debate. I would just make the obvious point, which is that we’re falling pretty far short of where most people would like to be, which is how can parents stay at home and raise the children? If you allowed people the freedom to do that, if you said, I’m going to give you enough money so that when you have kids, a parent can stay home and raise them while they’re little? My sense is that an awful lot of people will take advantage of that. An awful lot.

Like everything, it would be a trade-off. I mean, there are certain perks that you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home. I mean, I get it. OK, but I’m just saying if the average person has the choice, I sincerely believe that a very large number of people would take that option, and I think they should be allowed to. By the way, I’m with Elizabeth Warren on this. She wrote a whole fucking book about it. She wrote a whole book on this called “The Two-Income Trap,” and she made the case that when our society changed in such a way that it took two incomes to support a family, everybody got poorer and less happy. I agree with that.

“There are certain perks you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home.” Yes indeed. It’s called financial independence which is what freed women from having to stay married for economic reasons. But whatever. No biggie, right?

If you want to see the Tucker Carlson model in action look at right wing populist hero Viktor Orban:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called for larger Hungarian families to combat the country’s low birth rate and shrinking labor force.

In exchange for all the baby-making, he’s willing to provide financial benefits and programs for women. Benefits include loan expansion programs, subsidies for cars, and for women with four or more children, no required income tax.

Related: These women are challenging Hungary’s ‘men in suits’ politics

“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West to this is migration. They want as many migrants to enter as they are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up,” Orbán said in his annual state of the nation address. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

Orbán and his wife have five children.

The World’s Marco Werman sat down with Kim Lane Scheppelle, an expert on Hungary and a professor at Princeton University, to chat about the motives behind Orbán’s latest pro-baby policy (this is not the first time) and how women fit into Hungarian society. 

What do you make of Orbán’s announcement over the weekend that women with four or more children won’t have to pay income taxes? What’s that about?

Orbán has backed himself into a corner and he’s using a way to get out of that corner that we’ve seen before. So the corner he’s in is that Hungary really has a failing economic model. His policies have driven, some say, up to a million Hungarians out of the country and yet he’s also come down very hard against any form of immigration. So, the question is: “How [can] Hungary maintain a labor force if it’s losing its population?” And his answer is: “Let’s get women to have more kids so that there will be Hungarians to actually hold up the economy.” Now, it’s all very familiar because Orbán has a terrible track record on women and so the idea that women are going to bail him out of this problem is something that I think is familiar to a lot of us who watched him in action for a long time. So, women are going to bear the burden of Orbán’s failed economic policies. 

I mean, it’s obviously oppressive for women. Is Orbán also trying to create kind of, Hungarian human facts on the ground, kind of an anti-immigrant policy?

Yes. Well, this is part of his policy to shore up Hungary for the Hungarians. I mean Hungary, like many of the countries in Eastern Europe and, for that matter, like many advanced democracies around the world, is having a declining birthrate. And if they don’t have immigration or some other way of bolstering the population numbers, they’re going to be a declining country and now that Orbán has come out so strongly against immigration, this is his way back. One thing I think it’s important to say about Orbán and his policies about women is that he’s long been an advocate of big families. He himself has a big family. This is something that very much comes with the territory of Hungarian nationalism. And right now, the group in Hungary that has the largest families are the Roma minority who have really taken a hit under the Orbán government. So it’ll be interesting to see whether his policy really applies universally or whether it applies only to the Hungarians.

Related: As Orbán rises, Hungary’s free press falls

How does Hungary’s treatment of women in 2019 compare to the Communist era?

Well, in the Communist era, of course, women were recruited into the workforce and were actually promoted at much higher levels than they are now. So, in some ways, the Communist era was a golden age for women. Now, it was a golden age and it wasn’t — since it was so awful for everybody — having a great fate in a golden age means that you’re not so well-off. So, you know women were overwhelmingly all of the all of the judges, all of the doctors, some professions that we think of as relatively prestigious professions were actually completely dominated by women during the Communist time. Now, of course, they were dominated by women because they weren’t such high-status professions then. But still, women have really had a lot of education and a history of great accomplishment in Hungary. The post-Communist period saw women really getting knocked back into very traditional roles.

Job ads started being highly gendered. So, you know there would be an advertisement for a manager and it would literally say “we want a man for the job” or “secretaries with flirtatious abilities.” And those would be jobs for women. So this kind of segregation of men and women has happened throughout the post-Communist time and Viktor Orbán’s party has simply made that worse.

Right-wing “populists” are snakes and progressives should beware of being seduced by their alleged economic determinist rhetoric into ignoring their underlying agenda.

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It’s not benign. It’s dangerous.

I’ve been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They’re doing it again in April with Orban once again doing the hosting duties.)He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the “illiberal democracy” ideology here in the US which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent.

Orban CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together “Project 2025” for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.

Trump himself doesn’t seem completely sold on that idea since he’s pushing for mass round-ups and deportations of non-citizens by national guard troops and a total lock down of the country to keep foreigners who “don’t like our religion” (or Israel) out of the country. And he’s promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” which leans more in the direction of Putin’s Russia or Pinochet’s Chile. But Orban’s ideas about how to make the government bureaucracy into a patronage operation, gerrymander the legislature in ways that pretty much stranglse real democracy while turning the independent media and academia into impotent irrelevancies are being observed very carefully by the Trump 2.0 planners and they will be implemented if they gain power. (It’s also the case that Orban demonized migrants as a political strategy and even built a fence to keep them out, so they do have that in common as well.)

After the Heritage meeting Orban made the pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. (Notably, he wasn’t invited, nor did he ask, to meet with the actual president of the United States.) Trump was very impressed with his guest. He apparently feted him at the usual party that takes place every night at this social club and introduced him to the crowd of paying guests saying, “He’s a non-controversial figure because he says this is the way it’s going to be, and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.” 

Trump honors Viktor Orban for being an autocrat: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He says, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.” pic.twitter.com/Fz91sbsHi1

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 9, 2024

I’m not sure why anyone questions Donald Trump’s intentions when he says things like that. It’s always been clear that he is an instinctive autocrat. He couldn’t understand why the Department of Justice didn’t act as his personal lawyer, for instance or why he was constrained by the constitution from exercising power over the entire government. He said repeatedly that he had “an Article II” which allowed him to “do whatever I want” and that the president has “total authority.” Even today he argues that the president has “total immunity” which is now pending before the Supreme Court. Of course he admires dictators and autocrats and believes that’s what the presidency should be.

It’s pretty clear that Orban sees Trump as an important ally. He’s even cutting campaign ads for him on that theme, calling Trump a “man of peace” which is so ludicrous it makes you dizzy:

President @realDonaldTrump was a president of peace. He commanded respect in the world, and created the conditions for peace. During his presidency there was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. We need him back more than ever! Thank you for the invitation, Mr.… pic.twitter.com/4nSqwoYxMV

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) March 10, 2024

The truth is that Orban may need Trump more than Trump needs Orban. He’s isolated in Europe and in order to fulfill his larger agenda he needs a friend in the White House and Joe Biden will not be that. Over the past month his party has been in turmoil with the resignation of the president and former justice minister over a pardon scandal involving a notorious child sex abuser. This has placed Orban in a difficult position since he has waged a Ron DeSantis style crusade again LGBTQ rights and pedophilia (which he conflates for political purposes.)

He has been the last holdout in the EU for Ukraine aid and allowing Sweden to Join NATO and both issues were finally resolved in the wake of the scandal just in the past couple of weeks. There’s no rsense that Orban is in serious trouble but cracks are beginning to show. It turns out that his Potemkin democracy still has some tiny life left in it, with some independent journalists able to use the internet to get the news out even though all the mainstream news sources have been coerced or co-opted into doing Orban’s bidding. It’s just possible that his hold is shakier than it has been in years.

If Trump wins all that changes. Orban sees his friendship with Trump and Putin that puts him right at the center of a major new alliance and it’s not at all an unreasonable assumption. He and Trump and his lackeys in the US Congress have, so far, successfully given Russia a major gift by refusing to authorize funding for the Ukraine war effort. Trump even went so far as to say that he would tell Putin to “do whatever he hell he wants” to any NATO country he deemed to be sufficiently “paid up.” We have every reason to believe that if Trump wins, Ukraine is gone and Putin will have prevailed. What happens to the Ukrainians if that happens is going to be a nightmare.

All of this is very peculiar in light of Orban’s central thesis about “national sovereignty” which he spelled out in this video (featuring such luminaries as Steve Bannon and Vivek Ramaswamy) which he made after his meeting with the Heritage Foundation. Apparently, Ukraine is not entitled to that particular privilege nor is any NATO country such as Hungary if Putin or Trump decide otherwise.

The greatest fight in international politics is between the globalists and those who believe in national sovereignty. I was happy to see at the @Heritage Foundation that we sovereignists have many friends in the US as well. pic.twitter.com/Y32CQbyl6a

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) March 8, 2024

This alliance between Orban, Trump and the American right is very disturbing. It’s easy to dismiss a Hungarian Prime Minister as just some guy from a small European country who is punching way above his weight and isn’t really relevant. But this is one of those moments when you really have to wonder if you aren’t watching the beginning of a tectonic shift in the world order. The movement to appease Putin and force Ukraine to surrender has taken hold on the right and the threat to Western Europe that flows from that is very real. If Trump wins the chances of a major escalation are very high. Trump and Orban like to call that “peace” but it’s actually just a demand for capitulation. That’s what dictators do and that’s what they are.

Salon

Coming soon to a RW propaganda outlet near you

So, “House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot,” Axios reported Monday.

Yes, the same Carlson who Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit filings last week showed described then-President Donald Trump as ”a demonic force, a destroyer” off the air. Carlson demanded a Fox fact-checker be fired because she was bad for Fox’s stock price. God bless America.

McCarthy giving 40,000 hrs of Jan. 6 tape to a pro-Putin journalist is an astounding ethical collapse. What security precautions were taken to keep this from becoming a roadmap for 2024 insurrection? Why isn’t it available to all media & public? Smell the MAGA propaganda coming.

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) February 20, 2023

You won’t have to guess what the co-producer of the “completely off the rails,” three-part series, “Patriot Purge,” will do with all that security footage. Carlson’s documentary reinterpreted the history of Jan. 6 into a false-flag operation by deep-state opponents of Donald J. Trump.

As The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum panned it, “Good people, honest people, true Americans, patriots, people just like you, are being cheated. Sinister forces inside the American government arranged all of this bad imagery in order to oppress you, to remove you, to eliminate you.”

Now Carlson will have Jan. 6 footage from every camera in the Capitol complex to edit and present to reinforce the narrative of “Patriot Purge.” Courtesy of Speaker of the House and empty suit, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California.

Kevin McCarthy turned over Jan 6 videos to right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson.

A man who spews Kremlin talking points. Suggests Jan 6 was a false flag. And spreads the Big Lie.

Make no mistake: This isn’t about transparency, it’s about fueling dangerous conspiracy theories.

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) February 20, 2023

Some of the footage is sensitive because along with camera locations it reveals exit routes officials used to escape to safety from Jan. 6 rioters. It could provide “a roadmap for 2024 insurrection,” tweeted Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat.

“It’s hard to overstate the potential security risks if this material were to be used irresponsibly,” House Homeland Security Committee ranking Democrat Bennie Thompson (Miss.) said in a Monday statement.

Kevin McCarthy just turned over the location of every security camera in the Capitol to Tucker Carlson.

Just so the next time the terrorists attack the Capitol they'll have all the details of the security system.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 21, 2023

Tim Mulvey, a former January 6 committee spokesman, told CNN:

“When the January 6th Select Committee obtained access to US Capitol Police video footage, it was treated with great sensitivity given concerns about the security of lawmakers, staff, and the Capitol complex,” Mulvey said. “Access was limited to members and a small handful of investigators and senior staff, and the public use of any footage was coordinated in advance with Capitol Police.”

If McCarthy as indeed granted that access to Carlson, said Thompson, he “owes the American people an explanation of why he has done so and what steps he has taken to address the significant security concerns at stake.”

“Once the capabilities of a U.S. Capitol interior surveillance camera, including its position and whether it pans, tilts or zooms, is disclosed to the public via the release of a single video from that camera, the cat is out of the bag,” Justice Department prosecutors wrote in a July 2021 court filing.

Carlson has shown us who he is. Repeatedly. We know to what lengths he will go to promote antidemocratic authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump.

Now Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, the weakest speaker in the republic’s history, has shown himself equally debased. McCarthy is willing to risk the security of the Capitol complex to placate the rabid MAGA base he cut deals with to secure his dream job two steps away from the presidency.

No national security concerns are as important to faux-patriot Carlson as maintaining Fox’s stock price. What are the chances that former Project Veritas selective film editor, James O’Keefe, just tossed out on his ear, will find a new gig helping Carlson turn those hours of security footage into a masterwork of speculative MAGA fiction?

Defenders of democracy had better get ahead of their narrative the way President Joe Biden just got ahead of Putin’s spring Ukraine offensive. We know what’s coming.

DeSantis is running it

I’ve been making this point for a while but here’s some direct evidence that DeSantis is consciously copying the Hungarian prime minister (and Tucker Carlson’s) “illiberal democracy” playbook from Media Matters:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University.

DeSantis appointed Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda, to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.

Right-wing media personalities and activists in the United States have extensively praised Orbán in recent years, including after he gave what his own adviser called a “pure Nazi speech” in which he decried “race mixing” among Hungarians. During a May 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference event in Hungary, Orbán referred to Fox News star Tucker Carlson as a “friend” whose show should be “broadcasted day and night.” (Carlson passionately defended Orbán in 2021, characterizing his views as “moderate and conventional.”) A separate event known as the National Conservatism Conference also served to strengthen the ties between the illiberal Hungarian leader and his stateside admirers. 

Whether DeSantis and Rufo are deliberately modeling their efforts on Orbán’s — or the similarities have arisen naturally from the authoritarian ideologies all three men share — isn’t clear. Regardless, Rufo himself appeared to endorse Orbán’s targeting of CEU in a tweet to conservative writer and Orbán fanboy Rod Dreher.

Other members of DeSantis’ inner circle have praised Orbán’s administration. During the National Conservatism Conference in Miami last September, Christina Pushaw, a longtime DeSantis aide, “told the audience that Orbán’s government gave her inspiration” for icing out mainstream journalists, as reported in New York magazine.

“The New Yorker wrote to Orbán and asked for comment on their hit piece, and they received a response that was just perfect. It said, ‘We are not going to participate in the validation process for liberal propaganda,’ ” she recounted, “and I don’t think we need to participate in that validation process either.” Instead, she noted, DeSantis gives access to conservative sites, which then get quotes and scooplets they can use to build their audience.

At the same conference, an Orbán adviser praised DeSantis and used the governor’s policies to justify and normalize Hungary’s own. From New York magazine: 

At one panel, The Federalist’s Sean Davis asked Balázs Orbán, an adviser (no relation) to Viktor Orbán, how his government is preventing the fake-news media from poisoning the minds of the youth. “Just as is done in Florida,” Orbán replied, explaining that the Hungarian regime used state power to prevent the left from indoctrinating the country in its ideology. (His spokesperson explained that he was referring specifically to “gender propaganda.”) He mocked the idea that the regime was behaving autocratically: “You can say I am autocratic, pro-Putin, pro-everything that is bad, but look, in Florida, in the United States, the Republicans are doing the same.”

The similarities in the campaigns that DeSantis and Rufo in Florida, and Orbán in Hungary, have waged against a particular institution of higher learning are striking. Beginning in 2017, Orbán set his sights on CEU, one of Budapest’s top universities. Founded in 1991 by liberal philanthropist George Soros, who was born in Hungary, the school was meant to serve as a model of post-Cold War openness and cosmopolitanism. Orbán saw it as a threat — a bastion of liberalism that threatened his far-right regime. 

Orbán, who studied law at István Bibó, a college in Budapest, moved to impose requirements on CEU that appeared to be impossible to meet by design. As The Atlantic reported:

Although the legislation didn’t mention CEU by name, the school was its obvious—and only—target. The bill would suddenly make CEU’s existence in the country dependent on quickly meeting a series of impossible-seeming requirements. As a foreign university, it would have to operate a campus in its country of origin. (CEU was chartered in the state of New York, but it didn’t have any faculty or facilities there.) Its national government would need to enter into a bilateral accreditation agreement with Hungary. (In the U.S., accreditation agreements are the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government.)

The law passed, ultimately forcing CEU to close its campus and relocate to Vienna, Austria. 

Orbán’s broader intrusions into school curricula also anticipate DeSantis’ own attempts to exert control over classroom instruction. The Atlantic writes:

Textbooks and curricula, once the domain of municipalities, have been centralized and now inculcate the regime’s politics. “The government is quite clear that patriotic education is as important as transferring knowledge,” Péter Kréko, the political analyst, told me. An eighth-grade history book praises Orbán as a “foundational figure.” A high-school textbook opens a section on “multiculturalism” with an image of refugees huddled at the Budapest train station, accompanied by a quotation from the prime minister: “We consider it a value that Hungary is a homogeneous country.”

Rufo has been alternately open and cryptic about his plans for New College. He sometimes describes his efforts almost modestly, as in a closing paragraph on his blog at City Journal:

My proposals include redesigning the curriculum to align with the classical model; abolishing DEI programs and replacing them with “equality, merit, and colorblindness” principles; adopting the Kalven statement on institutional neutrality; restructuring the administration and academic departments; recruiting new faculty with expertise in the classical liberal arts tradition; and establishing a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.

But in the same post, he endorsed DeSantis’ chief-of-staff’s comment that the goal is to remake New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the far-right Christian college in Michigan.

As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote (emphasis in original):

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.

Rufo has made clear that New College is just the beginning. “If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states,” he wrote at City Journal.

Orbán was successful in driving CEU out of Hungary. Whether DeSantis and Rufo can remake New College remains to be seen, much less whether their actions are scalable. Regardless, Rufo has stated that his ambitions do not end with the DeSantis administration. In a recent video titled “The Strategy Behind the Campaign to Abolish DEI Bureaucracies in Public Universities” posted to his YouTube page, he says that his goal is to “get it done in one state, in the state of Florida, and then see a domino effect of other states following suit.”

But it would be wise to take warning from CEU’s president, Shalini Randeria.

“We are a textbook case because what we need to realise is that all of these ‘soft authoritarian’ regimes, as I call them, are learning from one another. There is a playbook they are carefully watching to see what works in one case or another,” she said in an interview with University World News. “We need to study this carefully to see there is a certain toolbox they’re using, and no university is safe.”

There are a lot of things that aren’t safe with these people including the press and democracy itself. DeSantis isn’t an original by any means. He’s following the playbook.

Orban in America

“My country Hungary is the lone star state of Europe” pic.twitter.com/4DrckE6ht1

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2022

"We should unite our forces."

Says the man whose recent push for racial purity was so brazen that a longtime ally called it a "Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels" that appeals to the “most vile racists.” https://t.co/aH7OAb9RJd

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 4, 2022

They love him:

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has consolidated autocratic power with hard-right opposition to immigration and liberal democracy, addressed a crowd of thousands of American admirers in Dallas on Thursday with a red-meat speech that could have easily been delivered by any Republican candidate on the campaign trail this year.

Orban presented the two countries as twin fronts in a struggle against common enemies he described as globalists, progressives, communists and “fake news.”

“The West is at war with itself,” Orban said. “The globalist can all go to hell. I have come to Texas,” he added, stumbling over a famous slogan attributed to Texas legend Davy Crockett.

The speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) went ahead despite Orban’s latest controversy: a speech in which he railed against Europe becoming “mixed race,” saying that Europeans did not want to live with people from outside the continent. One of his own close advisers resigned in protest, calling the speech “pure Nazi.”

But Orban has found defenders among prominent American conservatives, including former president Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance. On his way to Dallas, Orban stopped to visit Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. In a statement, Trump called Orban his “friend” and said he valued his perspective. “Few people know as much about what is going on in the world today,” Trump said.

On Wednesday, Carlson defended Orban from the negative media coverage of the speech.

“So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?” Carlson said. Carlson helped raise Orban’s U.S. profile with a special broadcast from Budapest last year, during which he praised Orban’s Hungary, a country of less than 10 million people with the 17th-largest economy in the EU, as a role model for Americans.

Orban did not address his “mixed-race” remarks on Thursday. But he did indirectly defend himself by saying, “Don’t worry, a Christian politician cannot be racist,” and falsely portraying the Nazis as having been anti-Christian.

He also blamed enemies in the press and on the left for wanting to silence him.

“I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman — the Trojan horse of Putin — holds speech at the conservative conference,” Orban said. “They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us. They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you.”

Matt Schlapp, who leads the American Conservative Union that organizes CPAC, has defended Orban’s invitation in the name of free speech.

“Let’s listen to the man speak,” Schlapp told Bloomberg News. “We’ll see what he says. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”

Some at the convention Thursday said they had hopedto hear Orban clarify his remarks on race.

“As a person who, I am mixed race, I’m in a mixed-race relationship, I would like to see what he is going to say to that, put something positive to that,” said Raven Harrison, an unsuccessful primary candidate for Congress from outside Dallas. “I’m not willing to villainize him for that at this point.”

Orban spoke to a half-full but enthusiastic ballroom, receiving a standing ovation and frequent bursts of applause and cheers. “Welcome to Texas!” one attendee shouted when he took the stage. When he described himself as the “leader of a country that is under the siege of progressive liberals day by day,” someone in the audience called back, “Yes!”

His speech was peppered with pop culture references, quoting Clint Eastwood’s dialogue from “Unforgiven” and describing Hungary’s stance against LGBTQ content for minors as “less drag queens and more Chuck Norris.” There was loud applause when Orban described the surge of Syrian refugees toward Europe in 2015 as an “invasion of illegal migrants” and likened them to the armies of Genghis Khan. (Orban did not mention which nation the migrants were fleeing or the conflicts driving them abroad.)

“To stop illegal immigration, we have actually built that wall,” said Orban, who referred only briefly to the negative coverage of his CPAC appearance.

The crowd booed when Orban brought up George Soros, a Hungarian American investor who is one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors and who is Jewish. The applause was even louder when Orban talked about traditional families, and the fact that Hungarian women, upon the birth of a fourth child, paid nearly no taxes for the rest of their lives.

“If you are not married yet, you should immediately find a Hungarian wife,” Orban said. Later, he read from the country’s updated constitution, as amended in 2011.

“The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone,” Orban said, cracking a smile as many in the crowd got up and cheered. “Full stop. End of discussion.”

He concluded by looking to elections that will be held in both the United States and European Union in 2024.

“These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization,” Orban said. “Today we hold neither of them yet. We need both. You have two years to get ready.”

Orban’s appearance in Dallas comes after a CPAC spinoff hosted in Hungary in May, featuring a videotaped address from Trump in which he said he was “honored” to endorse Orban’s recent reelection.

In power since 2010, Orban has come to dominate and reshape Hungary’s political system not through a Soviet-style police state but rather through constitutional changes and the weakening of civil society. He has alienated NATO allies with opposition to punishing Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. Orban’s increasing isolation in Europe has added urgency to his long-running overtures to bolster relations with the United States through the Republican Party.

CPAC Hungary was a celebration of Orban’s policies, including its sidelining of mainstream media. Several of the outlets that applied to cover the conference were denied credentials. Schlapp said that didn’t do much to change the coverage.

“I went out and gave a press conference and they still called me a white nationalist,” Schlapp recalled. “I was like, I don’t know if it does any good, if that’s what their editors are intent on them writing.”

In his own speech at CPAC Hungary, Orban called his country “the laboratory in which we tested the antidote to dominance by progressives,” listing 12 points for conservative success — from prioritizing economic growth to “expos[ing] your enemies’ intentions.”

That approach has clicked with American conservatives. Under Schlapp’s leadership, the American Conservative Union has organized more CPACs around the world and also invited right-wing populists to address the crowds in the United States.

A year before voters in Britain voted to leave the European Union, Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage got a high-profile CPAC speaking slot. Three years later, the crowd got to hear from Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a politician and niece of Marine Le Pen, standard-bearer of France’s far-right party. After the 2018 election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Schlapp’s group began holding conferences in Brazil, where politicians from the leading right-wing party discussed how to defeat a left that “denies family values.”

Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, said at a conservative academic conference last year that the “childless left” was undermining America, and he pointed to Orban’s policy of generous tax breaks for parents who have three or more children.

“Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

After Orban’s party won this year’s election, One America News anchor Jack Posobiec celebrated on a podcast hosted by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. “He stands for nationalism. He stands for borders,” Posobiec told Kirk. “He stands for sovereign national identity for his people, and standing up for a new type of conservatism where it’s not about tax cuts to corporations; [it’s] about taking the family unit and centering it.”

Both Vance and Posobiec will speak to the conference Friday.

Standing ovation from the crowd here pic.twitter.com/jYHRc650Qn

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2022

It's hilarious watching the US Right cheer the anti-globalist shtick of a leader whose ministers are currently begging the EU for more money as the Hungarian economy gets driven into a ditch https://t.co/s7K965F0zc

— Alexander Clarkson  (@APHClarkson) August 5, 2022

Also, just saying:

DeSantis is enacting the Viktor Orban agenda

Gosh, it seems like just last week that I was saying this very thing. In fact, it was. But Zack Beauchamp at Vox digs deeply into it and I am more convinced than ever that this is an important observation:

In June of last year, Hungary’s far-right government passed a law cracking down on LGBTQ rights, including a provision prohibiting instruction on LGBTQ topics in sex education classes.

About nine months later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” up through third grade. According to some knowledgeable observers on the right, these two bills were closely connected.

“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did last summer,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. “I was told this by a conservative reporter who … said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

(When I asked DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw about a possible connection, she initially denied knowing of Hungarian inspiration for Florida’s law. After I showed her the quote from Dreher, she did not respond further. Dreher did not reply to two requests for comment.)

It’s easy to see the connections between the bills — in both provisions and justifications. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described his country’s anti-LGBTQ law as an effort to prevent gay people from preying on children; Pushaw described Florida’s law as an “anti-grooming bill” on Twitter, adding that “if you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer” — meaning a person preparing children to become targets of sexual abuse, a slur targeting LGBTQ people and their supporters that’s becoming increasingly common on the right.

This is not a one-off example. DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.

Most recently, there was DeSantis’s crackdown on Disney’s special tax exemption; using regulatory powers to punish opposing political speech is one of Orbán’s signature moves. On issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power.

Orbán has recently emerged as an aspirational model for many on the Trump-friendly right. During his presidency, many observers on both sides of the aisle compared Trump to the Hungarian autocrat — and not without some justification. But after a 2018 visit to Hungary, I concluded that Trump was not competent or disciplined enough to implement Orbán-style authoritarianism in America on his own. The real worry, I argued, was a GOP that took on features of Orbán’s Fidesz party.

DeSantis’s agenda in Florida is evidence that the Republican shift in this direction is continuing, maybe even accelerating. He has shown little interest in moderation or consensus-building instead centering his governing philosophy on using policy to own the libs. While Trump may have been an ideological catalyst for the GOP’s authoritarian lurch, DeSantis is showing how it could actually be implemented in practice. The consequences for democracy in Florida, and America in general, could be dire.

The many places where DeSantis and Orbán meet

There is no doubt that Hungary, an authoritarian state in all but name, is becoming more and more important in the American right-wing imagination.

Tucker Carlson, the most influential media figure in today’s GOP, is at the forefront of this effort. In January, Carlson released a “documentary” on Orbán’s government lionizing his regime and encouraging Republicans to emulate it. That same month, Donald Trump endorsed Orbán for reelection, calling him a “strong leader” who has “done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary.”

This makes the echoes between DeSantis’s agenda and Orbán’s especially notable — with the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and the ensuing fight with Disney, being the most glaring examples.

Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step: Stand up a feared or marginalized group as an enemy then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power. Targets have included Muslim immigrants, Jewish financier George Soros, and most recently LGBTQ Hungarians. Hungary’s version of the “Don’t Say Gay” law — which the government labeled an anti-pedophilia bill — expanded both government control over curricula and its powers to regulate programming on Hungary’s airwaves.

You see a similar logic in DeSantis’s Florida. Alleging that classroom education on LGBTQ topics somehow threatens children, the governor and his allies pushed through a vague and broadly worded bill that empowers both the state and private citizens to go after schools that teach about LGBTQ identity. A moral panic about alleged LGBTQ “grooming” serves to justify the imposition of ideological controls on public education — and the speech rights of progressive and LGBTQ teachers. (Relatedly, both Orbán and DeSantis have taken aim at curricula and textbooks used in K-12 schools on expressly political-cultural grounds.)

Predictably, the Florida bill provoked a backlash from corporate America — which DeSantis used as a justification to engage in even more Orbán-like behavior.

After Disney put out a statement criticizing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis moved to strip the corporation of its special tax status in a 40-square-mile area around Disney World. In this area, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida allows the mega-corporation to essentially function as a local government, giving it the power to, for example, collect taxes (from itself) and build roads. These privileges, first granted by the state in 1967, are hugely beneficial for the company — and, on Friday, DeSantis signed a bill revoking them.

In doing so, he was very explicit about his reasoning: This move was direct punishment for Disney’s stance on the “Don’t Say Gay” law. In a fundraising email, DeSantis wrote that “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer.” In an appearance on Newsmax, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez noted that Disney had “changed what they really espouse,” lambasting the company’s “very public agenda to indoctrinate our children.”

This use of regulatory power to punish political opponents is right out of Orbán’s playbook. In 2015, Lajos Simicska — an extremely wealthy Hungarian businessman and longtime Orbán ally — turned on his patron, using a vulgar term to describe the prime minister.

In retaliation, the government cut its advertising in Simicska’s media outlets and shifted contracts away from his construction companies. After Fidesz’s 2018 election, Simicska sold his corporate holdings (mostly to pro-government figures). He moved to an isolated village in western Hungary; his last remaining business interest was an agricultural firm owned by his wife.

DeSantis isn’t the first Republican to follow Orbán here. Trump tried this kind of move a few times, most notably attempting to block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner because he hated CNN’s coverage of his campaign and administration, according to Jane Mayer’s reporting in the New Yorker. But he failed to follow through, whereas DeSantis actually made good on his threats (at least for now).

Higher education is another area where DeSantis, like Orban, has taken special aim. On April 22, DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act”, a bill that, among other things, expressly regulates what professors are allowed to teach about race and gender in college courses. In a letter to Florida State University, the free speech advocacy group FIRE argued that the bill (also known as HB 7) was so obviously an unconstitutional abridgment of speech that administrators might simply “refuse to enforce” the bill.

“By barring any ‘instruction’ that ‘espouses,’ ‘promotes,’ or ‘advances’ a prohibited concept, HB7 chills vast swaths of academic discussion and inquiry protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE writes. “Florida’s new prohibition will silence discussions on (among other topics) systemic racism, the gender pay gap, affirmative action, [and] reparations for slavery or indigenous peoples.”

Orbán’s assault on higher ed has been even more striking. In 2018, his government issued a decree removing accreditation for Hungarian gender studies degrees, a move that effectively banned Hungarian universities from teaching the subject. Later that year, his government forced Budapest’s Central European University — a widely respected liberal arts college founded by Orbán’s foil, George Soros — to leave the country altogether.

For both men, the focus on academia is unsurprising: Universities are places where cultural liberal views flourish, and a forceful conservative agenda should take the fight to them. Conservatives believe state power can and should be wielded to prevent professors from “indoctrinating” students into a left-wing worldview (which doesn’t actually happen).

On another hot-button culture-war issue, social media, DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.

In February 2021, Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga proposed a bill to regulate “the Hungarian operations of large tech companies” to counteract what she earlier called their alleged restrictions on “Christian, conservative, right-wing opinions.” While Varga’s bill never passed, a version of it became law in Florida just three months after her proposal. Florida Senate Bill 7072 gave state regulators the power to fine social media companies if state authorities determined they improperly “deplatformed” a political candidate for office. (Shortly after its enactment, a court ruled that the bill violated the First Amendment; oral arguments for Florida’s appeal are set for mid-May.)

Finally, the Hungarian and Florida governments share a penchant for extreme gerrymandering (as, to be fair, do quite a few other Democratic and Republican state governments).

Shortly after its initial victory in 2010, Fidesz created a new set of single-member districts that gave its supporters outsize representation in the country’s parliament. In the 2022 election, Fidesz won 53 percent of the vote nationally and 83 percent of the seats in single-member districts — including a whopping 98 percent of seats in districts outside of Budapest.

During the current redistricting cycle, DeSantis rejected a congressional map drawn by Florida’s Republican legislature, instead insisting on new maps that would give the party a substantially larger leg up in House elections. The statehouse complied, producing new maps that are so biased that, by one estimate, they could swing the national House bias a full point in the GOP’s direction.

There’s more at the link but you get the gist. I didn’t know that DeSantis’ toxic spokeswoman had actually admitted it. Very interesting.

I’ve been following the American right’s obsession with Orban for a few years now. CPAC is having their meeting there this year. Tucker has been there twice to broadcast from his authoritarian utopia. This is real. And DeSantis is the guy who’s taken up the mantle.

It’s about time

Remember, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is the template for Tucker Carlson’s America. It’s crooked as hell:

Brussels sent a stern message to Hungary on Wednesday: fix your rule-of-law problems or risk losing EU money. How that message lands will reverberate across Europe.

For years, the EU has struggled to address the issue of democratic backsliding among its own members. One particular irritation has been Hungary, where civil liberties groups and international watchdogs say Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has overseen a decade-long campaign to erode traditional checks and balances, strangle the media and dole out EU funds to friends and family. 

On Wednesday, the European Commission took its most serious step to date to try and change Orbán’s behavior, formally triggering a powerful new mechanism that could result in Hungary losing EU funds over rule-of-law violations — the first time the bloc has deployed the authority. 

In an internal note, seen by POLITICO, the Commission said “there are reasonable grounds” to conclude that structural issues in Hungary “are indicative of breaches of the principles of the rule of law.” 

The decision marks a significant moment for the EU. With its move, the EU has set a new precedent and sent a warning to other European countries facing problems handling EU funds and respecting democratic norms. How the ensuing process with Hungary unfolds will determine how that warning is received.

The Commission’s note ticked off a few of the issues it sees in Hungary: “systemic irregularities, deficiencies and weaknesses in public procurement procedures.” 

It cited an “unusually high percentage of contracts” awarded in single-bidder competitions and the funneling of contracts to “specific companies” that have grabbed large market shares as a result. These issues stretch back years, the note argued, citing audits going back to 2007.

The Commission also flagged “possible irregular auctioning of state-owned agricultural land” and pointed to “limitations to effective investigation and prosecution of alleged criminal activity.” 

The note summed up the Commission’s stance: “These issues and their repetition over time demonstrate a systemic inability, failure or unwillingness of the part of the Hungarian authorities to prevent decisions that are in breach of the applicable law.” 

The EU officially gained its budget-cutting powers in early 2021, after numerous countries decided the bloc’s existing tools were incapable of policing wayward members.

But a court battle and political considerations prompted the Commission to wait for over a year before formally triggering the authority, which allows the bloc to slash payouts to members when rule-of-law problems threaten the EU budget. 

Hungary has now become the test case for that authority.

The Commission had been seeding the ground for months to go after Hungary but repeatedly delayed the final signoff. Earlier this month, the Commission finally announced its intentions to trigger the mechanism, only two days after Orbán won a fourth consecutive term. On Wednesday, the EU commissioners met to give the official go-ahead. 

The formal kick-off heralds the beginning of a months-long process that could end with Hungary losing a significant amount of EU funds, with the decision ultimately up to the Council of the EU, composed of representatives from each country. 

The US apparently doesn’t have a mechanism to stop right wing corruption in our government so we’ll be able to see where this leads when they take full power and implement their plans. Should be interesting. They’re already dominating the media, after all, and it’s getting worse by the day.

They used to make pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire. Now they go to Budapest:

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday he’s hopeful the majority-conservative Supreme Court secured during the Trump administration will overturn abortion rights in the United States, according to AP.

Pence made the comments at a biennial forum held in Budapest by conservative leaders concerned about changes in demographics, family values, fertility rates and illegal immigration into Western countries.

 “We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself,” Pence said during his speech at the forum, according to AP. “The erosion of the nuclear family marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates.”“

We may well have a fresh start in the cause of life in America. It is our hope and our prayer that in the coming days, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life at the center of American law.”

Pence praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been recently commended by other American conservative figures, for falling abortion rates under his leadership.

Orban has been accused of eroding Hungary’s democratic institutions and discriminating against minorities, including asylum seekers and LGBT people, according to AP.

Mike Pence made a pilgrimage to to right’s new European epicenter. I guess he figures he can out-Trump Trump? Uhm, not gonna happen.

But nobody can doubt his credentials when it comes to forced childbirth.

As America grapples with yet another surge of COVID-19 and the ongoing erosion of its democracy at the hands of the Republican Party, Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson is off getting tips from Europe’s most successful anti-democratic leader, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:

We’re in Budapest all this week for Tucker Carlson Tonight and a documentary for Tucker Carlson Originals. Don’t miss our first show here starting tonight at 8pm ET on #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/avZLoc0fD0

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2021

Carlson is in Hungary for MCC Feszt, a conference convened by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a government-funded association dedicated to creating a right-wing future. He is set to deliver a speech on Saturday with the fatuous title “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” which, to paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins, would no doubt sound better in the original Hungarian.

Carlson is one of a handful of right-wing elites who are in thrall to what Orbán calls his philosophy of “illiberal democracy,” which includes government support for churches, (he calls Hungary a Christian democracy) a program to coerce women to have more “true Hungarian” children so as to reduce any need for immigrant labor and a ban on legal rights for transgender people. He even built a wall on his country’s southern border to keep immigrants seeking asylum from entering the country in the name of preserving Hungary’s (white) national character.

In other words, Orbán is a great general in the culture wars which makes him a hero to quite a few right-wing intellectuals. For instance, prominent blogger Rod Dreher is one of Orbán’s most passionate defenders and has written numerous posts exalting his program. He was even planning to take up a fellowship in Hungary before COVID turned the world upside down. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp described Dreher’s admiration for Orbán in this piece about the Hungarian prime minister’s American fan club:

A sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities.

All of this suggests that the main accomplishment of Viktor Orbán is his open pursuit of the right’s list of cultural grievances. But there is a method to his madness and it presents a far greater danger to America and other liberal democracies.

Orbán serves as a model for the modern autocracy that is now being tried in the U.S. He has successfully made it almost impossible for his party to lose elections with tactics such as rewriting campaign finance laws to benefit his Fidesz party, packing the courts and election bureaucracy with his supporters, extreme gerrymandering and completely taking over the media. The effect is that his “Christian democracy” is no longer a democracy at all since the opposition has been rendered electorally impotent. Sound familiar?

While it appears that Orbán is inspiring the American right, it is actually much more complicated than that. As Sarah Posner reported in The New Republic in 2019, Orbán’s program was heavily influenced by Republican strategists and lobbyists from the very beginning. In 2008, Orban hired the legendary right-wing strategist and provocateur Arthur J. Finkelstein, a master of culture war politics and character assassination, to help him win the 2010 election. Posner wrote:

In his work for Orbán, Finkelstein took his signature strategy of political polarization and masterminded a campaign that cast Hungary as a victim suffering at the hands of the United States, the United Nations, and other purveyors of Western liberal democracy. Finkelstein was, according to Politico, behind the anti-immigration billboards that have proliferated in Hungary over the past decade. Thanks at least in part to Finkelstein’s strategy, Orbán won his reelection bid in 2010.

According to Posner, Orbán also hired some high-powered GOP lobbyists to help him craft his appeal to U.S government officials. It’s pretty clear that the Hungarian Prime Minister has been as influenced by the American right as the American right has been influenced by him.

But while Tucker Carlson and others have been lauding Orbán for his anti-wokeness, they apparently have not been paying close attention to the actual results of his program. Dalibor Rohac pointed out in The Bulwark that the Putinesque economic polices of “renationalization” have produced an economy that has real incomes lower than its neighbors and that for all of the blather about national pride there has actually been a substantial exodus of Hungarians to other countries in Europe. Despite the push for Hungarian women to stay home and do their duty to repopulate the motherland, their fertility rate remains significantly lower than in countries such as Sweden, France and Denmark. To top it all off, less than 20% of the population in Orbán’s “Christian democracy” considers itself religious.

That’s not even the worst of it, as Rohac writes:

Finally, there is the ugly stuff—the incumbent entrenchment, which has forced the entire opposition, from left liberals to former neofascists, to join forces in order to stand a fighting chance in the 2022 election; the grotesque corruption, which is worse than in other countries of the region; the siding with Russia, Belarus, and China against its neighbors and allies. Just this past weekend, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest to protest against the planned construction of a new campus of China’s Fudan University in Hungary. The project is expected to cost $1.8 billion, more than the annual budget of all Hungarian universities combined, funded largely by a Chinese loan.

That’s a high price to pay for owning the libs.

Before the last election and the events of January 6th, one might have thought that people like Carlson were taking the Orbán line for theatrical purposes. After all, it’s pretty much just repurposed American conservative movement strategy, jazzed up as 21st-century right-wing populism. But after witnessing their reaction to Trump’s Big Lie and the events of January 6th, it’s clear there’s something much more insidious about this relationship. Orbán has successfully degraded Hungary’s democracy in the same ways that we are seeing the Republicans attempt to do here in the U.S. If they manage to get back into power, we are likely to see what “the world according to Tucker Carlson” really looks like and I doubt we’re going to like it very much. 

Salon