Victor Orban Bak

12 23

2nd on white house invite visit sadly primary 1/22 tucker docu

hero for ~ immigrant / gt replacement

pioneer of alt rt eur / authoritarian

see academic suppression

no merri

html deanofstudents@berkeley.

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AN 2 26

The United States is facing a major test of American democracy as experts warn that the Trump administration is dragging the nation into “some form of autocracy,” NPR reports.

The U.S. has already crossed the threshold and become an “electoral autocracy,” Staffan I. Lindberg, the director of Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, told NPR.

“I would argue that the United States in 2025-26 has slid into a mild form of competitive authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. “I think it’s reversible, but this is authoritarianism.”

“Under competitive authoritarianism,” NPR explained, “countries still hold elections, but the ruling party uses various tactics — attacking the press, disenfranchising voters, weaponizing the justice system and threatening critics — to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.”

Levitsky cited several critical points in September as examples, including the Trump administration’s threat against ABC parent company Disney following host Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks on the killing of Charlie Kirk.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said.

He also cited Trump’s proposal to use American cities as “training grounds” for troops.

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military,” Trump said, as the Military Times reported.

The president “told the commanders that defending the homeland was the military’s ‘most important priority’ and suggested the leaders in attendance could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City.”

“No different than a foreign enemy,” Trump said, “but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”

Levitsky, NPR reported, “said this is the kind of language dictators in South America used in the 1970s — leaders like Augusto Pinochet in Chile.”

NPR notes that the “next big test” could come during the midterms.

Kim Scheppele, a Princeton University sociologist who has studied the authoritarian tactics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, warned that in 2014 Orbán’s government “disenfranchised almost all the Hungarians in the U.K., most of whom were oppositional to Orbán,”

Dartmouth College professor of government Brendan Nyhan warned, “The way Election Day works in this country, there are no do-overs.”

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AN 4 25 ROBT R

A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orban took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orban, and Orban started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.

John believes Trump is emulating Orban’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orban was Trump before there was Trump.”)

Orban’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:

One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.

IFrame Content

Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.

Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.

Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”

Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.

Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.

Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.

John noted that Orban’s influence now reaches across Europe.

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orban playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.

In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orban, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orban model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.

What lessons can be drawn from all this?

John believes that the best way to respond to Orban’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.

He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orban playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.

When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orban and Donald Trump.

John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.

I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.

Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.

National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.

For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.

These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.

NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/."

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RWW

04/07/2025

Peter Montgomery

Vice President J.D. Vance showed up at the Heritage Foundation last week to celebrate the premier of an Angel Studio documentary series based on his friend Rod Dreher’s 2020 book, “Live Not By Lies.”

Dreher is a conservative blogger who chronicled his own radicalization into far-right authoritarianism. Dreher is such a fan of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his repressive Christian nationalism that he moved to Budapest in 2022 after his wife filed for divorce.

Vance is closely aligned with anti-democracy intellectuals and funders who have pushed the U.S. right-wing to embrace Orbán-style crushing of dissent, attacks on civil society, and capture of the media and the judiciary. Vance, who praised Orbán for seizing control of state universities, has called for “aggressively” attacking universities in the U.S.

In his comments at the Heritage event, Vance unwittingly gave what could be solid advice to leaders of law firms, media outlets, and universities who are tempted to submit to the Trump administration’s intimidation and blackmail. They were not, to be certain, Vance’s intended audience, but here’s what he said: “The way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth, is to live not by lies…You’re going to sacrifice your soul, you’re going to sacrifice your civilization, you’re going sacrifice your family, you’re going to sacrifice your country, if you give into the easy pathway.”

Given the lawlessness, cruelty, and censorship that are the defining traits of the Trump administration, other Vance comments sounded like particularly Orwellian propaganda: “We can rebuild the kind of society where virtue and freedom and our ancient liberties are preserved and enforced and facilitated by our government rather than torn down by our government.”

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts hosted the premier. Roberts, who oversaw the development of the Project 2025 policy agenda now being imposed on America by the Trump administration, has called Orbán the model for MAGA governance.

And it’s not just Roberts. Religious-right activists at the World Congress of Families adore Orbán for his “pro-family” and anti-LGBTQ policies, which reached a repressive new low last month with a ban on Pride celebrations. The Conservative Political Action Conference has teamed up with Orbán allies to host CPAC events in Hungary; at this year’s CPAC outside Washington, D.C., Hungarian groups were on hand to distribute pro- Orbán propaganda.

At Heritage last week, Vance called Dreher a friend and said Dreher’s promotion of Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy” was responsible for its bestseller status, which lead to Vance becoming a public figure, senator, and ultimately vice president.

The admiration is mutual. In an article for a conservative Hungarian publication last summer, Dreher compared Vance to a young Orbán and said Vance “embodies” Trumpism. At Heritage last week, Dreher gushed about Vance, “That man is the future of America, I believe.”

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an 11 24

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have both upheld Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán's regime as a model for Trump's second term in the White House. One former member of Hungarian parliament who witnessed Orbán's ascent is now pointing out ways Democrats can avoid the mistakes of Hungary's opposition.

In an essay for Politico, former Hungarian MP Gábor Scheiring noted that there are numerous similarities between Orbán and Trump. Both men are authoritarians bent on expanding executive power and crushing institutional opposition. Both are former presidents who lost elections and then returned to power. And both are strident culture warriors who are intent on dominating the media. Scheiring wrote that Orbán deployed populist "software" and "hardware" that paved the way for his far-right power grab, and alerted readers to watch for certain things that Trump will borrow from Orbán in the coming years.

In describing the "software of autocracy," Scheiring noted that the Hungarian leader exploited a "folksy outsider" label allowing him to pose as a populist hero of the working class, and noted that Trump has done the same on multiple occasions – like donning an apron and working the drive-thru window at a McDonalds restaurant. Orbán and Trump also share an intense anti-immigrant platform, and demonize immigrants as a means of dividing and conquering the working class while simultaneously playing on racist and xenophobic sentiment.

Another critical piece of "software" is "economic nationalism," with both Orbán and Trump combining cultural grievance politics with palpable frustration among their nation's working-class voters about economic insecurity. Scheiring observed that "right-wing populists glorify 'makers' over 'takers,'" which he said resonates with "working-class voters who value hard work."

"This narrative also serves to cement an alliance between plutocrats, billionaires and workers, which might seem paradoxical, but it isn’t," he continued. "They are all portrayed as hard-working value creators as opposed to 'lazy bureaucrats' and 'benefit scroungers.'"

Scheiring explained that the "hardware" of the far-right authoritarian state Orbán built in Hungary is fourfold: Strengthening executive power; disciplining the judiciary; changing election processes, controlling the media and controlling their political party. In accomplishing these four things, Orbán has managed to stay in power consistently since 2010. While Trump is almost 80 years old and is prevented from seeking a third term due to the 22nd Amendment, Scheiring warned that Trump copying his Hungarian counterpart could lead to MAGA cementing power for decades. He encouraged Democrats to focus their opposition on litigating Trump's policies in courts, fighting back at the state and local level and waging war in the media by inserting their own narratives.

"Hungary’s key lesson is you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people," Scheiring wrote. "Only a democracy that works for the people is sustainable."

Click here to read Scheiring's full essay in Politico.

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11 7 24 thom

Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state.

While it’s not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy. A strong administrative state is the only thing that protects entrepreneurs and small businesses from being squashed like bugs by monopolistic behemoths, and small businesses are our nation’s main growth engine.}:

:{For example, over 70 percent of all new jobs created since 2019 were created by small businesses, producing almost 13 million new jobs over the past 25 years. Small business creation is up 50 percent over Trump’s years because the Biden administration has been enforcing the rule of law, including taking on the giant tech monopolies. Small businesses now account for over 43 percent of all American economic activity.

A strong administrative state is also the only thing that can protect the environment from those who’d destroy it for their own profits. It’s the only thing that can protect consumers from defective or even deadly products and food or drug contamination. It our only defense against predatory banks, airlines, and insurance companies, among others. A strong administrative state that follows and enforces the rule of law — as opposed to the kind of grift-driven kleptocracies typical of strongman governments — is essential, in other words, to a functioning national economy.}:

Here in America, we see this best in the contrast between lightly bureaucratic and largely unregulated Red states and more bureaucratic and regulated (and taxed) Blue states and counties. While Red and Blue states are represented in Congress about 50/50, as the Brookings Institution found a few years ago: > “Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy.”

But now the administrative state is in the crosshairs of the incoming Trump administration, and their planned assault on it will almost certainly cause a loss of economic vitality, probably even leading to a major recession (every*Republican president since Nixon has had a major recession after tinkering with tax and regulatory policies;none*of the Democratic presidents have created one since Carter, and his started under Nixon). We also see this at the level of the nation-state. As Professor Timothy Snydernotes: > “Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country. The profits from its oil and gas are in the hands of a few oligarchs. > >

“Hungary sits in the middle of the European Union, the most successful trade project of all time. And yet Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors, in part because the Orbán regime corruptly channels EU resources to friendly oligarchs. > > “The lesson is clear. Democracy is a method of checking corrupt rulers. When there is no functioning democracy, corruption is unchecked. And democracy is an element of a more fundamental guarantor of prosperity, the rule of law. In Hungary and Russia, the rule of law has been bent and broken, to the benefit of the few, and to the detriment of the many. Ending the rule of law is the Trump-Vance platform.”

Gutting the administrative state is the first and imperative aspect of ending or weakening the rule of law. Because, as Steve Bannon famously told America, the main goal of the Trump administration is “the ‘deconstruction’ of the administrative state.” He added: > “Every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is also the regulation. I think the consistent …[thing] is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is, if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”

We saw this movie before, during the last Trump administration. He put a coal lobbyist in charge of EPA, an oil lobbyist at Interior, a Telcom lobbyist and lawyer at FCC, a professional union-busting lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, an advocate for replacing public schools with religious ones in charge of the Education Department, etc., etc. But that was more mere corruption than a wholesale destruction of administrative agencies. Since the Chevron deference decision by the Supreme Court this past year, though, it’s now possible that Trump could actually destroy the American administrative state.

Even whenChevronwas still intact eight years ago, the result of Trump’s corruption in his previous administration, just like with Reagan’s and Bush’s deregulatory campaigns, was a massive recession that started*before*Covidcame along. Trump will fire Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, blowing up the antitrust efforts of the Biden administration; the fat cat billionaires already are eagerly anticipating running amok (which is why they threw billions at Trump’s campaign). The result, predictably, will be another Republican economic disaster for America’s working class.

Interestingly, our country’s most famous investor also seems to be thinking along these same lines. Warren Buffett has recently sold over $325 billion in stock and is simply sitting on that huge pile of cash. Why? Probably the Oracle of Omaha can see the same thing I’m pointing out here: Trump is preparing to turn the economy over to Musk and his billionaire buddies and the result will be a disaster.

A disaster, by the way, that will be very useful to Buffett and other billionaires; recessions and depressions are when America’s largest fortunes are typically made or expanded because they represent great buying opportunities to those with cash, while at the same time the small companies being squeezed are willing to sell for a song.

:{:{ So get ready; we’re in for a bumpy few years as America descends into a strongman-run oligarchy while the Supreme Court and Trump’s toadies rip apart the protections of the administrative state we’ve so carefully constructed in the years since the Civil War and the Republican Great Depression. It may well be a disaster for your 401(k), and millions will lose their jobs in a recession. If Musk cuts $2 trillion from the federal budget, as promised, it will almost certainly impact Social Security and take a huge bite out of programs for veterans, children, and the disabled. It would probably also have to end all subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and end hundreds of billions in federal aid to infrastructure construction programs. Get ready now, to the extent that you can. Forewarned is forearmed. }:

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y 12 23

...want to know what Republicans have in mind for America’s future? Just visit Hungary.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was meeting with President Biden this week to ask our help defending his democracy against the brutal, violent aggression of Russia, Republican lawmakers in DC were meeting behind closed doors at a Heritage Foundation event with representatives of Hungary’s strongman president Viktor Orbán. It got almost no press coverage at all, other than The Guardian.

Orbán has been cozying up to Putin for years and is now blocking EU aid to Ukraine on Putin’s behalf (the EU is meeting today about the crisis he’s provoking); his representatives were reportedly trying this week to get Republicans in Congress to join them so, together, they can hand Europe’s largest country over to Russia.

At the same time, Orbán himself was overseeing a new round of laws in Hungary criminalizing any sort of free press in that nation. Under the rubric of “defense of national sovereignty,” Orbán’s new law, as Barron’s reported Tuesday, “could be used to crack down on dissent against nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government.”

Reporting for Barron’s, Géza Molnar wrote:

“The Council of Europe in November called on Hungary to abandon the bill, which ‘poses a significant risk to human rights.’

“Prominent rights groups, including Amnesty International Hungary, have said the package of laws ‘serves to protect the arbitrary exercise of power.’

“They fear the new authority could target rights groups, journalists, companies, churches, trade unions and municipalities, who lack legal recourse against any investigation or procedure against them.

“America’s envoy to Budapest David Pressman said the law ‘made Moscow's foreign agent law look mild and meek’.”

— Orbán has now gerrymandered Hungary so thoroughly that he’ll never lose an election.

— He’s shut down the free press, replacing it with a toady-type media landscape that would make Fox “News” blush.

— He attacks religious, gender, and racial minorities, bans books, oppresses women, and throws his opponents into jail or denies them the ability to make a living.

And Republicans are loving it. They appear to have adopted Orbán as their official role model; CPAC recently held a conference in Budapest, and Orbán was a featured speaker at CPAC and a private GOP event in Texas this year, as well as this week’s DC meeting.

When Orbán’s spoke at CPAC in Budapest last year, the Hungarian “soft fascism” strongman president told the audience, to a standing ovation:

“Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”

Orbán’s Fidesz Party and the GOP in most Red States have become virtually indistinguishable, from cronies owning the media, to packing the courts, to rigging elections through purging voters and gerrymanders, to putting polluting businesses in charge of regulatory agencies.

Now both have their sights set on the American federal government.

Seriously, both.

Orbán is now inserting himself into American Republican politics in a big way: last August he gave a major speech to Republicans in Dallas. Orbán has become a personal role model for many American conservatives, particularly those in the GOP’s growing pro-Putin Caucus.

Steve Bannon celebrated Orbán as “Trump before Trump,” and Casey Michel on the NBC News site*Think noted*:

“From targeting migrants to inflaming an ethnonationalist base, from attacking the press to whipping up nativist conspiracies, from ushering in unprecedented corruption to tearing down basic democratic protections, Trumpism is increasingly indistinguishable from Orbánism.”

So, who is this guy, and what can we learn about the direction Republicans want to take America from his example they appear to be following?

I first heard of Orbán in August of 1989, when my best friend Jerry Schneiderman and I spent the better part of a week sitting in outdoor cafes on the Buda side of the Danube River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old hotel, and generally exploring Budapest.

Two months earlier there had been massive pro-democracy demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people demanding that the Soviet Union let Hungary go. The summer we were there, over a quarter-million showed up in Heroes’ Square for the reinterment of the body of Imre Nagy, a hero of the ill-fated 1956 rebellion against the USSR.

The final speaker was 26-year-old Viktor Orbán, a rising politician who would soon be a member of Parliament. To an explosion of enthusiastic cheers, Orbán defied the Soviets (the only speaker to overtly do so) and openly called for “the swift withdrawal of Russian troops.”

Nine months later, in March of 1990 and with the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev, Hungary held its first real elections since 1945; in 1999, it joined NATO; and in 2004, it became a member of the European Union.

And then, when he acquired power, Viktor Orbán succeeded in pulling off what Donald Trump had only tried and failed at.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt neofascist oligarchy. Europeans refer to it as “soft fascism.”

In the few short years after he was elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself, succeeded in transforming his nation’s government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic and oligarchic regime of single-party neofascist rule.

Republicans now want to do the same here, and the Hungarian strongman has dedicated himself to showing them how.

Orbán took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional “conservative” political party like the GOP, with the themes: “Restore Christian purity” and “Make Hungary great again.” His rallies regularly drew tens of thousands.

He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary’s southern border to keep out the brown-skinned “rapists and murderers” fleeing Russian violence in Syria, a promise he has largely kept.

He altered the nation’s Constitution to enable what we’d call gerrymandering and voter suppression in much the same way Republicans are now doing across Red State America, ensuring that his party, Fidesz, would win a majority of the votes in pretty much every election well into the future.

He’s packed the courts just like Trump and McConnell did, particularly Hungary’s equivalent of the Supreme Court, so thoroughly that even the most serious legal challenges against him and his party go nowhere.

Under Orbán, Hungary passed laws requiring “conservative” sex education in schools (“gay is bad” and “abstinence only”) and criminalized any positive portrayal of LGBTQ+ people on TV. In public campaigns he’s conflated homosexuality with pedophilia and the penalties are draconian. The latest anti-gay law passed the Hungarian Parliament by a vote of 157 to 1.

Republicans are trying to do the same here. Ron DeSantis is running, in Florida, a virtual clone of Orbán’s agenda in his effort to become the US president. Right down to creating his own private army and police force answerable only to himself.

Orbán’s party railed against teaching multiracialism and racial tolerance, instead rewriting elementary school textbooks to proclaim that refugees entering the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist.” Using this logic, he has locked up brown-skinned Syrian refugee children in cages with the enthusiastic support of Hungarian white supremacists.

When the Helsinki Committee objected to the concentration camps he has built for refugees and said Hungary’s “indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman,” Orbán said the influx of Syrian refugees seeking asylum “poses a security risk and endangers the continent’s Christian culture and identity.” He added, in true fascist style, “Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”

Five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” American Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting “We will set your homes on fire!”

Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.” Orbán refused to condemn him or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white “militias.”

Orbán has handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire group of pro-Orbán businessmen (it appears all are men) who have now seized almost complete control of the nation’s economy. Those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been forced to sell their companies, and often fled the country.

Virtually all of Hungary’spress is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to Orbán, with hard-right talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily. Progressive media is functionally banned. Billboards and social media proclaim Orbán’s patriotism.

He told the American CPAC conference in Budapest last year they should do the same in America when Republicans next seize control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said to cheers. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

After his 2022 speech was publicized in the US, many American media outlets were banned from attending CPAC in Budapest. As Vice News reported:

“Besides VICE News, journalists from Rolling Stone, Vox Media, and the New Yorkerwere turned away from the conference on Thursday, despite repeated assurances from the American Conservative Union that access would be provided. Journalists from other non-Hungarian media outlets, including the Guardian and Associated Press, tweeted that they had also been denied accreditation, despite months of requests.”

His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe and inviting American rightwing groups to Hungary to help spread his racist, “soft fascism” message. Tucker Carlson took him up on his invitation last year, broadcasting his poison directly into American homes from his presidential palace.

In his opening comments to this year’s Texas conference, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp echoed Orbán’s strategy, as the Associated Press noted:

“In opening comments, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp said that CPAC in the U.S. had decided to ‘go Hungarian’ in their approach to the media, deciding for themselves ‘who is a journalist and who is not a journalist’ when determining which outlets to allow into their events.”

But journalism isn’t the only institution fascists want to tear down. Orbán recently began dismantling the Hungarian Science Academy, replacing or simply firing scientists who acknowledge climate change, which he has called “left-wing trickery made up by Barack Obama.”

The world, in particular the EU, has watched this rolling political nightmare with increasing alarm, and even the EU’s 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orbán have backfired.

EU criticism of him increased his two reelection margins, as his handmaids in the Hungarian media proclaimed him the victim of a European “deep state.” They say that meddling foreigners, particularly Jewish financier George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for young Orbán to attend college in Britain), are bent on imposing “tyrannical” government strictures on Hungary.

In May 2020, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump invited Orbán to the White House for a state visit; Orbán became one of Trump’s two primary sources of lies about how Ukraine’s Zelenskyy allegedly tried to sabotage Trump.

Orbán has helped violent theocrats fully reinvent Christianity in Hungary, embracing a hard-right movement within the Catholic Church and among Protestant evangelicals.

He reshaped Hungary’s abortion laws to make it extremely difficult for a woman to terminate a pregnancy (it must threaten the life of the mother or be the result of a crime).

The Central European University fled Hungary in the face of growing threats of violence against progressive organizations, a ban on classes, and the tight embrace of rightwing churches by the government. Its rector, Michael Ignatieff, said:

“There’s just no doubt that this is organized as a way of saying that ‘Christianity’ means ‘white conservative Europe’. It’s a trope. Say the world ‘Christian’ and it says everything else that you want to say.”

Thus, Trump told Orbán:

“You have been great with respect to Christian communities…and we appreciate that very much.”

In a rally three months before his White House meeting with Trump, Orbán said that countries that accept non-Christian or non-white refugees are producing “mixed-race nations,” a trope frequently used in American rightwing media today.

Women in Hungary have been marginalized since Orbán came to power, both in business and in government. As theHungarian Spectrum notes:

“According to him, Hungarian politics is built on ‘continual character assassination,’ which … ‘women cannot endure.’”

As noted in The Guardian in 2018:

“Orbán’s Fidesz party and its coalition partners the Christian Democrats have 133 MPs between them, of whom just 11 are women.”

Orbán is now ruthlessly using his own nation’s diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having surrounded himself with corrupt yes-men.

He has increasingly turned Hungary into a place of refuge for corrupt oligarchs and neofascists from other nations, most famously granting “asylum to convicted felon, fascist oligarch, and former Prime Minister of Macedonia Nikola Gruevski” in 2018.

Orbán is the only leader of an EU nation to refuse to condemn Putin for his slaughter in Ukraine, saying he doesn’t want to get “between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian sledgehammer.”

He refers to those in Hungary who support Ukraine as “warmongers,” and refuses to participate in the EU embargoes of Russian fossil fuels.

Orbán has now largely crushed dissent in Hungary, arresting opposition politicians, “troublemakers,” and members of the independent press.

As Zach Beauchamp writes for*Vox*:

“At dawn on a Tuesday in May, the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a ‘dictator.’”

Orbán’s hard-right party is also reaching out to other white supremacist parties in Europe to forge alliances to overthrow the “liberal order” of the EU.

Conservatives in America are taking notice and writing glowing pieces about him, as rightwing movements across the world draw inspiration from both Orbán and Putin.

The international movement away from democracy and toward strongman authoritarian fascist and neofascist government is growing, and Viktor Orbán is one of its rising stars.

According to the Freedom in the World 2020 Reportfrom Freedom House, 25 of the world’s 41 established democracies experienced net losses in 2019, and the report downgraded the freedom scores of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population.

Putin, Xi, and Orbán are leaders of this movement, with Orbán having the greatest influence over the American Republican Party.

The tight embrace he’s held with by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” the GOP, and our domestic conservative movement make clear the danger of America sliding into the sort of “soft fascism” that Viktor Orbán has pioneered in Hungary.

If you want to see the GOP’s vision of America’s future, just visit that nation.

Forewarned is forearmed. Spread the word.

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the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

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an 12 23

Congressional Republicans are meeting in secret this week behind closed doors with allies of the far-right Christian nationalist authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Those allies, including from a Hungarian government agency that reportedly organized a far-right U.S. group’s conference in Budapest, are working to support Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine. GOP lawmakers, especially in the House but increasingly in the Senate, have been voicing strong opposition to the U.S. sending any additional funding to Ukraine.

“Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank,” The Guardian reports. The Heritage Foundation, once considered the premier conservative think tank, by 2016 was a pro-Trump group. Now, Heritage is behind the massive Project 2025, which aims toinstall tens of thousands of pro-Trump loyalists into the federal government if the ex-president re-takes the White House.

“The first day,” The Guardian explains, “includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary.”

Orbán, called “Putin’s Buddy” just last week by Politico, is “a strongman who cultivates close ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and who is widely seen as having undermined democracy and rule of law at home.”

“In other words,” wrote U.S. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL), “Far-right Republicans are conspiring with Hungary’s extremist Russian-sympathic PM Viktor Orbán to help former KGB dictator Putin defeat democratic Ukraine. Ronald Reagan and John McCain must be looking on in utter disbelief.”

Many are outraged that Republicans will be meeting with Orbán’s allies in D.C. while refusing to publicly acknowledge their attendance at the anti-Ukraine events. To date the guest list has not been published.

National security expert, former U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), blasted the GOP’s secrecy: “A list of every representative in that meeting with Orban should be made available to the press. Public servants shouldn’t hide in the shadows— especially when discussing decisions with foreign leaders that could benefit Vladimir Putin.”

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol explained, “Heritage Foundation and Viktor Orbán are not simply against aid for Ukraine. They are against Ukraine. They hate Ukraine, because a) they’re pro-Putin, and b) they hate liberal democracy, especially one fighting to defend itself against a brutal dictator.”

National security and international law expert Eugene Vindman, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose twin brother made national headlines when he blew the whistle on Donald Trump and was mercilessly targeted for his actions, blasted both the Hungarian prime minister and the GOP: “Viktor Orbán is actively interfering in domestic politics and colluding with extremist republicans to help Vladimir Putin. This is dangerous. Republicans must stop putting Putin ahead of U.S. national security interests.”

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AHA SOVERIENTY IS GOD TERM // THE CONST BUT USEFUL IN TERMS OF YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, CONST RT TO DO ANYTHING I WANT

Right-wing media figures exploit anti-immigrant riots in Ireland to demonize migrants and Muslims, and attack legal immigration

Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and others pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and falsely portrayed immigrants as threats to public safety

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES, SOPHIE LAWTON & JACK WHEATLEY

PUBLISHED 11/30/23

Right-wing media figures reacted to anti-immigrant riots in Ireland by demonizing Muslims, falsely accusing migrants of being a risk to public safety and attacking the very idea of legal immigration. Their response is an escalation of the xenophobic rhetoric that right-wing media frequently direct at unauthorized migration, and is a clear attempt to push for policies that would drastically reduce legal immigration levels.

The riots in Dublin were sparked after early reports on November 23 that an Irish citizen who allegedly stabbed five people, including three children, was believed to have been born abroad — thus highlighting the suspect’s perceived foreignness. Subsequent reporting found that although the alleged attacker was apparently born in Algeria, he has lived in Ireland for at least 20 years, according to Irish authorities. Numerous studies have found that increased levels of immigration do not cause a rise in crime rates either in the United States or European countries.

This manufactured panic and demonization of a marginalized group echoes a similar episode from last week, when Fox News invented a terrorism scare over a car crash at the U.S.-Canada border and used the nonexistent plot to paint Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters as the culprits, only to retract its reporting hours later. Anti-Muslim hate incidents have also skyrocketed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on October 7.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon exploited the Dublin attack to spread his anti-immigrant message across multiple platforms, including his own War Room podcast as well as Tucker Carlson’s show on X (formerly Twitter) and Donald Trump Jr.’s streaming show on Rumble, a far-right competitor to YouTube. In several of these segments, Bannon and his interlocutors endorsed versions of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that liberal elites are attempting to change the demographics of white-majority countries through mass migration from the Global South to maintain political and economic dominance.

Prior to Fox News’ firing of Carlson, he was the network’s — and perhaps the entire country’s — most visible proponent of the great replacement theory. During Bannon’s appearance on Carlson’s show on November 27, both figures pushed openly nativist bigotry alongside the racist conspiracy theory.

Bannon referred to migrants to the United States and Ireland as “alien invaders,” adding that Irish politicians have “sold out the sovereignty of the Irish” and that the riots were “natural blowback.”

“The Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the Third World, obviously,” Carlson responded. “But why? What's the justification for that?”

“You talk about the great replacement theory and people are — oh, you know, people get very upset when you talk about it, but just look at the math,” Bannon answered.

“It’s not a theory,” Carlson interjected.

“This has happened across Europe,” Bannon continued. “It's happened in Germany.”

“In 100 years, there'll be a minority of Irish people in Ireland,” Carlson said. “That's a big change, and it's on purpose.”

Later in their conversation, Bannon endorsed mass deportations, saying: “I think illegal alien invaders are coming because they've gamed the asylum system. My belief is those people have to go home. They have to be returned, they have to leave our country or we're not going to have a country.”

Later that day, Bannon appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered to celebrate Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and Irish mixed martial arts fighter Connor McGregor, who had come under police investigation following anti-migrant social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the November 27, 2023, edition of Triggered, streamed on Rumble

Former President Donald Trump fought “for the sovereignty, not just of nation-states, but the sovereignty of the individual citizens in those nation-states,” Bannon said. “I think it's inspired Orban in Hungary. I think McGregor in Ireland standing up the other day was inspired by Donald Trump.”

The discussion then turned to the knife attack in Dublin, with the host claiming Arab and Muslim cultures celebrate anti-social violence.

“In their culture, they can stab people in the streets. It's fine. We must allow them to do that to our children,” Trump Jr. facetiously said, adding, “I mean, the government is taking an actively hostile position against their citizens in favor of, like, seemingly savages in many cases.”

Bannon returned to the subject the next day on his War Room podcast, calling for the “deportation of the 9 million — at least 9 million to 10 million — illegal alien invaders coming in the Biden regime.”

“What happened in Ireland — it's all coming here, folks,” Bannon warned ominously. “It’s all coming here.”

His guest the following hour was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been increasingly embraced by right-wing media in recent years. Jones falsely claimed that “illegal aliens or migrants” are responsible for “the majority of muggings, rape, and murder in every European country."

That evening, Bannon discussed the violence in Ireland in another episode of War Room, where his guest, author Michael Walsh, again pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory.

“This was the spark that set off what’s become a powder keg across the country, which is the notion — widely held among the Irish people — that they’re being replaced by foreigners,” Walsh said. He added that the Irish government “is committed to this program of quiet replacement and has demonized what we would have called Irish patriots,” referring to the far-right mobs.

Several other right-wing media figures also used the riots to spread anti-migrant bigotry.

BlazeTV’s Steve Deace defended the mob, arguing that “the Irish Proud Boy wannabes” are “not the villain here,” suggesting they “have had enough” and feel like “I’ve already lost my culture to Islam. Now our daughters are getting raped and assaulted” by the “rape-fugees we brought in.”
“Concerned citizens in Dublin, Ireland look on helplessly as busloads of undocumented migrants are brought into their community,” anti-LGBTQ social media account Libs of Tik Tok posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk questioned “how Ireland allowed so many foreigners and Third-Worlders into the beautiful country of Ireland?"
Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer blamed the attack on a “Muslim migrant."

"Across the West, the status quo has become intolerable,” Loomer added. “The endless waves of immigrants, the devastation of our culture, and the crackdown against anyone who dares to stand against it has all become too much to bear.”

“There can be no doubt that the average person is, at last, awake to the gravity of the situation, and their anger is brewing,” Loomer continued. “White people, in particular, have taken all of this on the chin for the last few decades, but that appears to be coming to an end.”

Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis argued that regardless of the suspect’s citizenship status, he “was an immigrant nonetheless,” claiming the incident was further evidence that “Europe is at the precipice of falling."

Following the riots, some observers of the far right argued that anti-immigrant sentiment had become a major issue in Ireland in recent years, and that politicians needed to do more to address the rising xenophobia. Right-wing media figures are determined to stand in the way.

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an11 23

2023's most talked-about bombshell in cable news came in April when Fox News fired its top-rated host Tucker Carlson. Since then, the former Fox News star has hosted a show on X, formerly Twitter.

Carlson, post-Fox News, hasn't been shy about promoting former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign — not only in the United States, but in other countries as well. In a report published by Politico on November 29, journalist Sarah Wheaton stresses that Carlson is acting like "Trump's top international diplomat."

"Since his ouster from cable TV," Wheaton reports, "Carlson has been taking his new X show on a world tour — and his interviews with Argentina's Javier Milei and Hungary's Viktor Orbán have racked up hundreds of millions of views. Yet Carlson is also engaging in a sort of shadow diplomacy."

Wheaton continues, "In early November, he popped up in London to visit Julian Assange at Belmarsh prison. Eleven days later, Carlson was spotted on the streets of Madrid, alongside Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox Party, amid protesters against amnesty for Catalan separatists."

On X, Carlson has not only been promoting Trump's campaign — he has also been pointing out the parallels between the MAGA movement and far-right authoritarians like Orbán.

"According to a new book by the former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, Fox executives hadn't authorized Carlson's weeklong mission there, and the flirtation with authoritarianism might have been a contributing factor in his dismissal," Wheaton explains. "There was also Carlson's role in the defamation lawsuit that cost Fox $787 million for on-air lies that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen."

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orban 8 23

https://www.alternet.org/**kari-lake**-2664699441/

6 23

https://www.rawstory.com/hungarian-government-media-train-sights-on-soros-son/

yikes

https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/hungarys-viktor-orban-targeted-central-european-university-gov-ron-desantis-following

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.

[twts]

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 onCEU, one of Budapest’s top universities. Founded in 1991 by liberal philanthropistGeorge 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 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.”

aha-let best defense from fascism, note henry is systemic

an ah 12 22

The MAGA movement suffered a long list of disappointments in the 2022 midterms, which found Donald Trump-backed candidates losing statewide gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and other swing states. But one MAGA candidate who performed extremely well in the midterms was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he did it without Trump campaigning for him.

DeSantis ran a far-right reelection campaign, defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Crist (a former Republican and ex-Florida governor) by 19 percent. Florida, in fact, is the one place where Republicans really did enjoy a major red wave in the 2022 midterms. And some right-wing pundits, including author Ann Coulter, are urging the GOP to nominate DeSantis, not Trump, in the 2024 presidential election — assuming that DeSantis decides to run.

DeSantis doesn’t pretend to be moderate; being a far-right culture warrior is his brand. Journalist/author and scholar Henry A. Giroux analyzes DeSantis’ appeal in a scathing article published by Truthout on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”

“While some pundits have connected DeSantis’ politics to an emerging authoritarianism,” Giroux explains, “they still fail both to name the ongoing development of fascism in the U.S. and to recognize that it takes different forms in different societies and historical formations. They dismiss any talk of fascism by suggesting that its unique historical attributes, such as the genocidal use of concentration camps, have to be repeated precisely in order to assign the term fascism to present events. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past; it is a dangerous ideology that may go into remission but never disappears.”

Giroux continues, “Fascism is a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon and often takes on the cultural and political attributes of the societies in which it appears. The refusal to acknowledge that fascism can appear in many forms, often lying dormant in a society until the emergence of certain forces unleash it, reinforces the willingness of many to retreat into silence or ignore the seriousness of the emerging fascist threat. Expressing ourselves in words, learning from history and making connections among disparate events all matter in the age of fascism.”

Giroux stresses that when one is analyzing fascism, it’s important to recognize patterns and understand how individual events fit into the big picture — events like DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts or Trump having dinner with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

“Fascist politics saturate U.S. society,” Giroux warns. “Ultranationalism, the calls for racial purity, voter suppression, hyper-militarism, required loyalty oaths from higher education faculty, rampant censorship, a ubiquitous anti-intellectualism, and a full-fledged attack on social provisions and public goods make clear that democracy is in crisis. Yet, in too many cases, the larger significance of these incendiary calamities is missed because they are treated as separate from each other…. DeSantis’ publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability.”

Giroux continues, “For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’ passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian, has drawn a great deal of admiration among MAGA Republicans — including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.And Giroux outlines some parallels between DeSantis and Orbán.

“Following in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian leader who has turned Hungary into a fascist country, DeSantis has waged a war on immigrants, targeted gay and transgender youth, purged voters, banned books in Florida schools, limited what teachers can say about racism and other critical elements of American history, and used state power to punish businesses, evident in his ruthless and vindictive attack on Disney,” Giroux observes. “He has also used policing to punish Black voters who disagree with his policies, courted Christian nationalists, supported a white nationalist agenda and waged a war on higher education. There is little doubt that DeSantis has turned Florida into a laboratory of fascist politics.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/right-wing-media-spend-week-rallying-around-viktor-orban-after-he-gave-what-his-own

less gender more ranger, chuck norris

an 8 22

Last Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas. His speech glittered with antisemitic, homophobic, and white supremacist rhetoric including “replacement theory." Orbán even railed against a “mixed-race world," and his address was met with a standing ovation by the audience.

CPAC itself was a weekend jam-packed with right-wing lawmakers and celebrities including former President Donald Trump, who overwhelmingly won its 2024 presidential straw poll.

But according to conservative columnistMax Boot, Orbán's keynote appearance at CPAC's opening night personified the Republican Party's abdication of liberal democracy.

"Something profound has changed in recent years," Boot wrote in an editorial in Monday's*Washington Post.* "Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucuscheering Viktor Orbán. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa."

The evidence of the GOP's descent into fascism, Boot explained, is unmistakable.

"Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was 'rigged.' By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism," Boot said, noting that candidates for secretaries of state in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania "deny the legitimacy" of President Joe Biden's landslide victory over Trump.

"Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory," Boot noted. "Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary last week to a proponent of the 'big lie.'"

Trump-backed hopefuls for governorships and United States Senate are also attempting to out-MAGA each other.

"Guns have become a de rigueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials. Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of COVID-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory," Boot continued. "Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t 'compatible.' Thiel’s 'house political philosopher' is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an 'American Caesar' to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025."

Boot then lamented that "the libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back." The party, Boot added, has weaponized the concept of freedom to further its extremist agenda.

He pointed out that GOP voters at large "want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school," and that "Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda."

Boot alluded to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – widely believed to be eyeing a presidential run in 2024 – as an example of how far the GOP has strayed from the mainstream and its "small government" credo.

DeSantis, Boot said, "is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to 'criminalize personal medical decisions,' such as abortion or 'gender-affirming healthcare.' DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows."

Boot concluded his piece by recommending a new label for what the Republican Party has become.

"The most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right," Boot wrote. He also warned that "if the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbánized."

nazi rhet

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/libertarian-writer-slams-the-gops-creepy-affection-for-viktor-orban/

On Saturday, July 23, far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who is adored by the MAGA movement in the United States — gave a speech in Romania that was controversial even by his authoritarian standards. Orbán used the rhetoric of the Great Replacement theory, a cornerstone of modern White supremacist and White nationalist ideology, and he claimed that a “mixed-race world” is hurting western countries. The speech was so extreme that even Zsuzsa Hegedüs, a long-time ally and adviser, slammed it as “openly racist” and “a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels” when she submitted a resignation letter on Tuesday, July 26.

Regardless, Orbán is still scheduled to speak a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering in Dallas in August that will also feature former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. And conservative/libertarian journalist Cathy Young, in an article published by The Bulwark on July 28, slams Orbán “apologists” in the Republican Party who continue to openly embrace and praise the Hungarian prime minister despite his extremism.Young is especially critical of MAGA journalist Rod Dreher, a senior editor for Patrick Buchanan’s publication The American Conservative.

During his speech in Romania, Young notes, Orbán praised “Le Camp des Saints” (“The Camp of the Saints”), a 1973 novel by far-right French author Jean Raspail. The book has an overtly racist, anti-immigrant outlook and is adored by White nationalists in France and other countries. And Orbán described it as “outstanding,” saying, “I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself.” Typically, those on the French far right who praise “Le Camp des Saints” also praise Renaud Camus’ 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” (“The Great Replacement”), which is considered essential reading among White supremacists and White nationalists.

“Raspail’s novel — the full text of which can be easily found online — is highly popular with the American and European far right,” Young observes. “Erstwhile Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a fan. So is Steve King, the former congressman from Iowa who managed to become a pariah even in the Trumpified Republican Party by wondering aloud why such terms as ‘White nationalist’ and ‘White supremacist’ should be considered offensive. So is Stephen Miller, the immigration policy chief in the Trump White House.”

Young continues, “Dreher doesn’t exactly love ‘The Camp of the Saints.’ He read it back in 2015 in response to refugee crisis in Europe, and reported that it is ‘a bad book, both aesthetically and morally,’ but nonetheless one with ‘something valuable to say to us’ — namely, that ‘the sentimental liberal humanitarianism’ of the West’s elites and their longing for ‘redemption for the West’s sins’ will bring about the death of western civilization by stripping it of the will to defend itself against the invading hordes from the Third World.”

“Le Camp des Saints,” Young notes, “is not just about the ‘clash of civilizations’ but, quite explicitly, about racial warfare: White people versus everybody else.”

“Given the expressions of complicated feelings by some of the book’s sympathetic American readers,” Young writes, “it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Orbán glowingly endorses ‘The Camp of the Saints’ without any kind of ‘yes, it’s awful and racist, but’ disclaimer. Considered together with his comments about ‘race-mixing,’ his unqualified praise for Raspail’s book looks very much like a mask-off moment.”

Young continues, “The enthusiasm for Orbán among American ‘national conservatives’ like Dreher was creepy enough before the speech in Romania,” Young explains. “Orbán’s quasi-authoritarian drift, his demonization of dissenters and aliens, and his fondness for Vladimir Putin are all long-established aspects of his politics and persona. But now, the Hungarian prime minister is rather brazenly flirting with White nationalism — something that the NatCons have strenuously disavowed. If they still want to embrace Orbán and his ‘vision,’ will they have any credibility left when claiming that they stand for a civic nationalist creed and consider racial ethnonationalism abhorrent?”

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-embrace-foreign-authoritarian-leaders

pulldown menu?!

In the past two years, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted global leaders with authoritarian tendencies and embraced anti-democratic regimes on his Fox News and Fox Nation shows.

In interviews with Hungary’s president Victor Orbán, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, and most recently, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, Carlson has pitched softball questions, praised anti-democratic ideas, and allowed lies about some of the regimes to go unchallenged. Carlson has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, excusing his regime’s aggression in Ukraine.

By promoting and celebrating anti-democracy leaders to his audience of over 3 million viewers, Carlson is whitewashing their authoritarian tendencies and inaccurately covering the implication of their policies. Reeling from the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, the majority of voters believe American democracy is already at risk. Carlson's embrace of authoritarian ideologies from around the world only further threatens its future.

no lnx many some vid

Russia

Fox News has a documented pattern of supporting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Tucker Carlson has clearly led this charge.

A month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Carlson praised Nigel Farage for saying, “Whatever we may think of him [Putin] as a human being,” he is “actually on our side.”

Video CitationFrom the March 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Media Matters has documented Carlson’s extensive history of pushing pro-Kremlin talking points on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

He has mocked criticism of the Russian president and downplayed the significance of his invasion of Ukraine. He also suggested the Biden administration backs Ukraine only because of Hunter Biden’s ties to the country and questioned the U.S.’s efforts to support Ukraine, asking, “Why do we care so much” about “Russia messing around in Ukraine or Estonia or Crimea or whatever?” and “Why wouldn’t we be friends with Russia?”

He even went so far as to throw a jab at his Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin’s reporting on the region, accusing her of “lying” while not bothering “to do any reporting whatsoever.”

Putin leads an authoritarian state in which he cannot be prosecuted and officials in his government are protected under strict confidentiality laws. The country has cracked down on free internet access by limiting access to social media platforms, and critics of the Kremlin are labeled “foreign agents” and silenced. A Media Matters report from April 2022 found that Facebook videos featuring 5 pro-Russian segments from Carlson received more than 2 million views and nearly 200,000 interactions.

In 2019, Carlson asked on his show, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am,” in reference to the conflict with Ukraine. (Later in the show he claimed he was joking.)

Video CitationFrom the November 25, 2019 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:

In return for his fealty, the Kremlin has praised Fox and Carlson, amplifying segments of Carlson’s show on its state-run social media accounts and state-run television. A leaked Kremlin memo distributed to Russian media outlets instructed broadcasters to use as many clips from Tucker Carlson as possible.

Brazil

In June, Carlson traveled to Brazil to film a new documentary for his “Tucker Carlson Originals” series. While there, he interviewed Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who, since he assumed the presidency in 2019, has created a government in Brazil that is anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-woman, once even stating he would rather see his son “die in an accident” than have a gay family member.

Despite international attention on Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic regime, Carlson hosted the Brazilian president for a friendly interview, during which they promoted a variety of false claims and conspiracy theories. Bolsonaro and Carlson embraced their similar ideologies, with Bolsonaro praising Carlson’s show and Carlson suggesting Brazil gets its own Fox News Channel.

Video CitationFrom the June 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson and Bolsonaro pushed a number of other right-wing talking points.

Carlson cheered on Brazil’s pro-life and Christian ideology, and Carlson and Bolsonaro agreed “the left” in Brazil will be responsible for the downfall of the good, Christian-centric society. Carlson implied the same would happen in the United States.

Carlson falsely claimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “arms Nazis,” saying Bolsonaro is not like him.

Carlson claimed Bolsonaro is a “liberal” and has “done nothing to stop civil liberties in Brazil” although the president is known to arrest and investigate his critics under a vague national security law.

Carlson and Bolsonaro repeatedly called a man who attacked Bolsonaro in 2018 “leftist” and claimed the stabbing was politically motivated although a judge ruled the attacker was mentally ill after he told investigators he was “acting on the orders of God.”

Bolsonaro shared false claims that he did not need the COVID-19 vaccine because he had previously had the virus.

Bolsonaro also promoted both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective COVID-19 treatments.

Bolsonaro repeated the generally discounted theory that COVID-19 was started in a “laboratory on the other side of the world.”

Responding to a Carlson question about the expansion of gun ownership in Brazil, Bolsonaro claimed an increase in civilian gun ownership is what caused a “drop in the number of people who are killed by firearms in Brazil,” though the president though in reality states where civilian gun ownership increased the most did not see crime fall by any significant amount in comparison to states with less growth of gun ownership.

Dubbed “Trump of the tropics,” Bolsonaro campaigned on heavy military presence, after years of supporting Brazil’s military dictatorship, and violent policing. He had a plan to appoint military leaders to top government posts and following the election he did just that. Bolsonaro also claimed he would not accept the results of the election if he lost and has “threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.”

During the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil, Bolsonaro spread narratives meant to discredit the country's democratic voting system after his party’s candidates lost. He has begun to push for restricting votes to paper ballots only for the 2022 election, echoing Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories about compromised electronic voting machines.

On his first day as president in 2019, Bolsonaro targeted Indigenous lands by preventing new lands from becoming demarcated for protection and has since dismantled the country’s environment ministry through cutting the budget, and overseen increased deforestation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s failed policies resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. Bolsonaro spread false narratives about the pandemic, refused to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations, and even blocked local or state governments that attempted to follow prevention advice such as implementing mask mandates. Federal police have investigated multiple people who criticized the president’s COVID-19 response in public media.

Hungary

Carlson’s coverage of President Viktor Orbán and his governance in Hungary has garnered a flurry of mainstream media press attention in the American press. He has interviewed Orbán, filmed an antisemitic documentary targeting philanthropist George Soros, and spoken at a conference put on in Hungary by a right-wing organization tied to the Orbán government.

Carlson has shown his enthusiasm for authoritarian ideas and frequently connects Hungary’s move to the right as an example the U.S. should follow.

Carlson suggested the U.S. adopt Hungary’s nationalistic immigration policies while calling immigrants “chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”

He hosted Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in an interview titled “Here's what America should learn from Hungary” in which they discussed Hungary’s extreme immigration policies.

Carlson suggested that without Orbán’s strict immigration policies, “there will be no more Hungarians” and claimed that “neoliberals” would rather “import a replacement population from the Third World,” once again pushing the fascist great replacement theory.

Carlson celebrated Orbán’s election victory in 2022, noting, “Orban described the victory as a win for sensible nationalism -- which it certainly is.”

Carlson claimed on his nightly show that calling Orbán a “facist” or “authoritarian” is “the greatest of all” lies. Orbán is widely known for minimizing democratic freedom in Hungary.

While in Hungary, Carlson claimed “left-wing NGOs” are vilifying Orbán for his facist policies and claimed it’s “insane” to consider Hungary less free than South Africa. He was referring the nongovernmental organization Freedom House’s 2022 list saying Hungary was “partly free” due to “antimigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)” created by Orbán’s government.

Carlson has repeatedly promoted Orbán’s policy ideas and supported his political career while repeatedly pushing for similar change to come to the U.S. In an introduction to one his interviews with the Hungarian president, Carlson claimed the U.S. media frequently lies about Orbán and “how repressive Hungary is.” Carlson went on to imply Hungary is a more free nation than the U.S., saying people who “loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden’s policies” are “silenced” and “might very well have to hire armed bodyguards” and falsely claiming “opposition figures here [in Hungary] don’t worry that they’ll be hurt for their opinions.” Carlson commended Orbán’s conservative policies and bashed U.S. leaders who “vilified” him for them.

Video CitationFrom the August 5, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

The admiration goes both ways. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary in May, Orbán described Carlson as a “friend” and told his audience that Carlson’s show should be “broadcasted day and night.”

Orbán recently gave a widely condemned speech during which he railed against “race mixing,” prompting one of his closest advisers to resign. He has downplayed Hungary’s involvement in the Holocaust and promoted antisemetic stereotypes as propaganda.

Orbán’s government has pushed far-right legislation, including banning LGBTQ representation in educational materials and media for kids and passing extreme anti-migrant legislation that goes against the European Union’s policies. Orbán has also undermined free and fair elections in Hungary and tightened his control over national media.

Mainstream media in the U.S. have closely covered Carlson and Orbán’s close relationship. The New York Times has published multiple articles drawing connections between Orbán and the political right in the U.S., and the relationship has inspired a number of think pieces by other media outlets.

El Salvador

Carlson has also interviewed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on his Fox News show. Carlson focused on Bukele’s promise to curb gang violence in the country by increasing police funding and military presence while also applauding Bukele’s conservative stances and pushing for similar policies in the U.S.

Bukele claimed his solution for MS-13 gang violence is to “give more funds to the police, apply tougher dynamics, get the criminals, and put them in jail” and compared El Salvador’s crime rates to those of popular Fox News target Chicago, saying under his new tactics, crime in the country has fallen below that of the city.

Carlson applauded Bukele’s efforts and called the supposed solution to crime rates “obvious.”

In the past, Carlson has repeatedly referenced MS-13 when fearmongering about supposed white replacement and immigration in the U.S.; most well-known was his claim that Biden would release gang members into U.S. neighborhoods. Carlson also defended Trump when he made comments about immigration from “shithole countries,” even suggesting that El Salvador was indeed a “shithole country” or it wouldn't need immigration protections.

Carlson focused his interview with Bukele on his response to gang violence in El Salvador, praising him for cracking down through police and military power. However, Bukele policies has resulted in human rights violations in many of El Salvador’s jails including torture and death of prisoners, according to Amnesty International.

According to the Journal of Democracy, Bukele’s measures to limit judiciary independence following his rise to power in 2019 were a “serious blow to Salvadoran democracy” and his actions include “classic authoritarian behavior.” He claimed electoral authorities and the media were part of a voting fraud conspiracy during the 2021 election despite his party winning a legislative supermajority. As a candidate, Bukele avoided public debates and press interviews during the campaign, which left many to believe he was “intolerant.”

Since his election, Bukele has used the country’s military to bully opposition into voting for his budget and disbanded an anti-corruption body. Bukele has used his supermajority power to consolidate his power, firing high level judges and the attorney general. After his attacks on the judicial system, the top court in the country announced sitting presidents will be able to run again, even though El Salvador’s constitution states otherwise.

Poland

Carlson also interviewed Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and claimed Duda is an example of leaders “who actually care about their people” and who “defended their populations against international interference.” The interview included staples of Carlson’s conversations with conservative foreign leaders including comparisons to the United States, promotion of conservative and Christian ideals, and blatant lies.

VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson started the interview by describing Duda’s efforts to stop the European Union from resettling refugees in Poland in 2015 as fighting back.

When asked about the power of technology companies in Poland, Duda stated the government has never introduced any kind of social media restrictions. Buth in 2021 the government planned to create a “Freedom of Expression Council” as a workaround to social media platforms’ power to ban accounts in the country, shortly after Twitter suspended Trump’s account. They ended the interview discussing the importance of pro-heterosexual family and Christian conservative ideals in government.

Video fileCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Duda has eroded judicial independence in Poland, forcing out sitting judges by establishing age limits and taking control over judicial appointments. An outspoken homophobe, Duda is known for his so-called “Christian values.” His administration has banned gay parents from adopting children, and under his regime “LGBT-free zones” have appeared across the country. Duda himself has called LGBTQ rights a “more destructive” ideology than communism.

His anti-abortion laws prevent abortion in almost all cases — recently, a bill was introduced to ban abortions for cases of fetal abnormalities — and they have rallied pro-abortion protestors and political opposition against the president. Duda’s government has also cracked down on the free press by introducing a new law that makes it impossible for media entities to be controlled by anyone outside the EU and has amended laws to allow the government to choose the heads of state-run media organizations.

With similar ideologies taking hold in the U.S., Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson free reign to embrace authoritarian leaders from around the world. Carlson has gone out of his way to promote false and conspiratorial narratives that have been repeatedly debunked while pushing these ideas onto his audience.

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Liberal economist Robert Reich examines a disturbing trend in an op-ed published by The Guardian GUK] on May 23: millionaires and billionaires funding Republican candidates who are overtly anti-democracy.

“Decades ago,” Reich writes, “America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy. Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America — backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy."

[twt]

in an op-ed for the Cato Institute’s website back in 2009, Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel has also written that the term “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron. And such statements, according to Reich, speak volumes about his outlook.

“Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore,” Reich notes. “The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.”

On May 19 and 20, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held an event in Budapest, Hungary, where the keynote speaker was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The fact that so many MAGA Republicans hold Orbán in high regard, according to Reich, speaks volumes about their authoritarian outlook.

“The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement,” Reich warns. “Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orbán’s agenda as that of a ‘Trump before Trump’…. Orbán has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy — rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary and muzzling the press…. Tucker Carlson — Fox News’ progenitor of White replacement theory — broadcast his show from Budapest.”

Reich wraps up his op-ed by stressing that Thiel’s agenda is a recipe for authoritarianism.

“Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights against arbitrary authority and a voice in what is decided,” Reich writes. “If we want to guard what is left of our freedom, we will need to meet today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his wannabes, and from big money like Peter Thiel’s.”

SEE UMBERTO ECO DEF OF FASCISM ON SCHIZO ENEMY:

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-ads-tucker-carlsons-hungary-vs-soros-documentary-have-been-viewed-millions-times

NO LNX PIX TWT

Facebook ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization -- the season finale of Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation “documentary” series -- have garnered more than 5.2 million impressions.

A new Media Matters analysis has found that Fox Nation -- the streaming service for Fox News “superfans” -- has run at least 56 ads since January 27 promoting the episode, which relies on antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to attack George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. The ad data is not available through the Facebook Ad Library because Fox Nation isn’t running these promotions as political ads, which is the only type Facebook’s Ad Library archives or provides data for. However, external data from Pathmatics reveals that Fox Nation spent more than $48,000 on the ads, earning more than 5.2 million impressions.

Hungary vs. Soros is the latest installment in the “Tucker Carlson Originals” series, which has a shameful record of using shock and awe tactics to push antidemocratic propaganda. Despite Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist brand, the streaming service has heavily relied on the prime-time host to promote and grow the platform.

The “documentary” calls upon antisemitic stereotypes to demonize Soros and puff up the far-right nationalist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has embraced authoritarian tactics and faces reelection in April. Carlson simultaneously pushes many of the same talking points about Soros that Orbán used in his 2018 election campaign. As my Media Matters colleague Nikki McCann Ramirez noted, Carlson portrays Soros in the series “as an insidious, unseen political kingmaker who seeks to destroy the national sovereignty of Hungary and transform its culture by leveraging his money and control of the media" against a backdrop of menacing synth chords and black and white images of Soros.

Facebook is allowing Fox Nation to run ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros despite its authoritarian and antisemitic undertones. In fact, Fox Nation has run at least 56 ads related to the episode, with at least 44 still active at the time of publication. (The other 12 ads are no longer shown in Facebook’s ad library.)

The ads, which have been seen millions of times by Facebook users, include one of four texts that attack Soros for “unchecked political power” and/or praise Orbán for being Soros’ “newest foe.” Additionally, all the ads link to Fox Nation’s website, where users can subscribe to watch it.

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_2

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_1

Some of the ads also include a promotional 15-second video of the episode.

CitationFrom the February 11, 2022, Facebook ad from Fox Nation

Before Fox Nation started running paid advertisements for Hungary vs. Soros, several Fox Facebook pages shared posts promoting it, including pages associated with The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Fox Nation.

It was also repeatedly promoted on Fox News itself, not only on Carlson’s show, but also during his interviews on The Five and Fox & Friends.The Fox News website featured an ad for it on its homepage and published an article on the piece. Fox Nation also sent out a promotional email that said, “George Soros is waging cultural and political warfare on the West, but he’s met his match in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”

The right-wing fixation on Soros is a problem across the Fox brand. According to a transcript analysis from Kinetiq video database, Fox News mentioned “Soros” a total of 435 times between January 1, 2021, and February 8, 2022, with the coverage ramping up starting in November. With Facebook’s long history of profiting from the spread of harmful content, it is unsurprising that the platform is enabling the promotion of this production to millions.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/tucker-carlson-and-george-soros/

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Earlier this week, fans of thehighest-rated host in U.S. cable news were told that one of the most recognizable and demonized Jews in public life is waging a "political, social and demographic war on the West." Hungary, they were told, is this monstrous figure's "main hunting area," but all of North America and Europe are in his sights, and only through the widespread embrace of aggressive conservative nationalism can he be defeated.

In fairness, not all of that is made clear at first. For the first quarter of Fox News host Tucker Carlson's new documentary short, "Hungary vs Soros: The Fight for Civilization," it's hard to tell why it was made. Yes, over the last several years Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proudly "illiberal" Hungary has become the centerpiece of American conservative vision-boarding. Yes, many on the U.S. right would love to emulate Hungary's pronatalist policies to encourage early marriage and large families; its crackdowns on press and academic freedom, including the defunding of university gender studies; its effective ban on Muslim immigration, and its actual bans on same-sex marriage, adoption and LGBTQ content for minors. It's no secret that Soros remains one of the right's foremost villains, blamed for everything from protests against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation to Donald Trump's election loss to migrants seeking entry to America.

But all that aside, the latest "Tucker Carlson Original" looks and feels, at least at first, like old news: a tighter, better produced, chalkboard-free remake of Glenn Beck's three-hour 2010 anti-Soros series, "The Puppet Master," which was widely condemned as antisemitic and is sometimes credited for helping drive Beck's departure from Fox the following year.

Carlson's reboot, which wasn't aired on Fox News proper but its seedier online streaming service, Fox Nation, includes many of the same ingredients as the original. There's the same sort of ominous soundtrack and grayed-out coloring when Soros appears on screen, and the same fixation on Soros as a "globalist" who is allegedly erecting a new world order through his sprawling web of influence and his control of media "storylines."

There's a familiar framing, early in the film, of Soros as being amoral in some difficult-to-specify way. In Beck's version, an opening quote from Soros noted that his mother, in pre-Holocaust Hungary, had been "ashamed of being Jewish." In Carlson's, within the first minute or so we see a clip of Soros telling an interviewer he doesn't believe in God. While Carlson doesidn't repeat Beck's use of ghoulish medieval puppet props, he deploys the same metaphor, accusing Soros of using his money and NGO network "to oust democratically elected leaders and install ideologically-aligned puppets into positions of power." And, like Beck, Carlson cites as evidence Soros's support for various Eastern European "color revolutions," without acknowledging to his audience that those revolutions were almost entirely peaceful protests against communist or post-communist dictatorships.

There are some notable differences in Carlson's update. In establishing Hungary under Orbán as the last bulwark against Soros's allegedly creeping empire, Carlson turns into something of a Budapest tour guide, marveling at airport advertisements encouraging people to have more children, the city's architecture and anti-Soros street signs. ("Will George Soros attack our country again?")

He works in some combat reporter-style helicopter footage as he tours the Hungarian border fence, and lingers long on the faces of two hapless teenage-looking refugees who were caught trying to enter the country, and who Carlson darkly suggests probably aren't Syrian, as they claim. He even stops to appreciate Budapest's "mostly conservative" graffiti, like a wall spray-painted with "Fuck Liberals" (in English) and a symbol that looks a lot like the white supremacist rendering of the Celtic cross.

But the big reveal begins about a quarter of the way through, when Carlson first mentions "nationalism." Orbán was once the beneficiary of Soros's philanthropy, Carlson says, but now understands him as a threat after becoming "a Hungarian nationalist." This is likely to fly under the radar for most viewers, but that is effectively the documentary's guiding theme: Orbán is "the sort of man, the sort of political leader, who has taken these populist nationalist instincts and turned them into effective policy." Furthermore, "Soros opposes Orbán because Soros opposes nation states" and the upcoming Hungarian elections "will be the defining battle in the war between George Soros and Viktor Orbán, in the battle between globalism and nationalism."

None of that rhetoric is anything new when it comes to Orbán, who's made Hungarian national sovereignty the defining issue of his political identity. But it definitely says a lot about Carlson, and how he's helping to mainstream one of the most contentious and troubling ideologies of the contemporary right.

Last November, hundreds of right-wing academics and thinkers gathered in Orlando for the highbrow National Conservatism conference. Much of the three-day gathering focused on trying to develop a new conservative coalition along post-liberal lines. As I wrote in The New Republic earlier this month, the National Conservatives see classical liberalism — meaning old-fashioned, small-L liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and private property, and is embraced by many staunch conservatives as well — as the root of modern society's problems.

A society ordered around unfettered personal and market freedom, they argue, makes it too difficult to raise families according to "traditional" values. A widespread commitment to multicultural pluralism, in their view, has led to an oppressive cultural imperialism where individual countries are prohibited from protecting their borders or upholding their historical cultures. They'd like to see newly empowered national governments that embrace official or public religion, use state power to coerce people into leading virtuous lives (according to their standards) and reassert the sort of proud, unapologetic nationalism that reigned before the horrors of World War II.

Besides academics and writers, the National Conservatism movement has recently been adopted by former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, and is influential enough that the November conference drew a number of leading Republican politicians and contenders, including sitting senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and wannabe-senator J.D. Vance.

Many of the intellectuals heading up the postliberal/National Conservatism movement are Roman Catholic "integralists," who ultimately want to see the country governed according to a conservative Catholic vision of the "common good" (with most details about what that means left strategically vague). Other leaders are avowed nationalists, seeking to reclaim the term from what they see as its unfair association with the likes of Nazi Germany. A number of them have made that case prominently in books published in the last four years, including First Things editor R.R. Reno's "Return of the Strong Gods," National Review editor Rich Lowry's "The Case for Nationalism," and National Conservatism conference organizer Yoram Hazony's "The Virtue of Nationalism."

In both of those camps within right-wing intellectual circles, Hungary has emerged as the most practical model they can aspire to: It's the sort of nationalist "Christian democracy,"as Orbán calls it, that they believe stands the best chance of replication in the U.S. (at least until there's enough support for the right-wing Catholic utopia sometimes described, jokingly or not, as the Empire of Guadalupe). As abundant media coverage has noted, the U.S. right has cheered on most of Orbán's most controversial policies. His government has assiduously courted their support, including through private institutions' offer of visiting fellowships and scholarships to numerous conservative academics and thinkers and Orbán's personal invitation to figures like American Conservative writer Rod Dreher that they consider Hungary their "intellectual home."

Those overtures have reaped undeniable benefits. Fulsome statements of support have flowed in from the likes of Dreher (who plays a starring role in the Fox Nation documentary) and Carlson, who broadcast his top-rated prime-time show from Budapest for a week last August. Orbán's reelection bid has drawn the endorsement of Donald Trump and many of his acolytes, all the way down to, just this week, the New York Young Republicans Club. In tangling with critics about the endorsement on Twitter this Thursday, the club's vice president taunted his foes by writing, "We're literally unifying the international right. …I'm not here to argue. I'm here to win.")

Orbán's regime also had a major presence at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando.There was a promotional table offering free conservative Hungarian books and magazines; a panel on "international nationalism" featuring Orbán's political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), who enjoys a sizable American following; and a plenary address from Dreher on "What Conservatives Must Learn from Orbán's Hungary." (They must learn to unashamedly embrace "state power" in defense of conservative values and build a "conservative deep state" to ensure that entrenched right-wing policies can survive the unfortunate results of electoral defeat.)

Most of Carlson's viewers are unlikely to know much about all the ideological furniture in the background, or to care about it. But he's doing his best to bring them the Cliff Notes version, breaking the ideas discussed by Ivy-educated right-wing elites in Orlando into digestible bite-sized chunks, and delivering them, airplane-style, into mainstream conservative discourse.

One of those chunks is the rehabilitation of nationalism as a conservative virtue. Another is the idea that it's not just acceptable but commendable to use family policy as a means of engineering a country's racial makeup.

For years, Hungary had one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. Combined with high emigration— mostly to other European Union nations — it was losing 32,000 people from its population annually. Orbán's government sought to address this by unveiling an aggressive suite of pronatalist policies in 2019, including interest-free loans to families that are forgiven with the birth of a third child, subsidies for minivans, and a lifetime exemption from income tax for mothers who have four or more kids.

Policies like these have enjoyed support from some conservative quarters for years. In 2007, the international right-wing coalition World Congress of Families called for similar measures while warning about what it called "demographic winter." This was the idea that European countries were producing too few children, leading to both "the graying of the continent" and the creation of dangerous population vacuums that would be filled with immigrants too difficult to assimilate. At the time, as I reported in The Nation, most of the racial hand-wringing was couched in euphemistic terms. But these days that subtext has become text, and sometimes the flashing headline, with the proliferation of conspiracist narratives about "white genocide" and the "Great Replacement," or Trump-era activists calling for a "white baby challenge."

In this new context, Orbán has been embraced by some on the right for framing his pronatalist policies as an intentional barricade against Muslim immigration, saying that while other countries were buoyed by immigration, Hungary didn't merely "need numbers" but rather "Hungarian children," or that Hungary didn't "want our colour, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others." Katalin Novák, the stylish and combative former family minister who became the face of Hungary's pronatalist campaign, warned that countries that abandon tradition will find themselves "condemned to [demographic] death." Conservatives on this side of the Atlantic swooned, with Breitbart dedicating regular coverage to Hungarian pronatalism, the National Reviewcheering:{that Orbánwas "redefining the possibilities for modern social conservatism," and Carlson } $_{praising}_$ :{ the plan as a model of family values during a 2019 interview with Hungary's foreign minister.}:

Orbán is not quite that blunt in Carlson's new special — the second half of which focuses on Hungary's pronatalist initiatives as part of the country's battle against Soros — but unlike other countries that choose to, in Carlson's words, "import new citizens from the rest of the world," the prime minister says Hungarians "would not like to leave this country to the migrants, we would like to leave it to our grandchildren." Carlson nods along with this, visiting a series of large Hungarian families as they beam at each other on playgrounds or buy new cars with government subsidies, before cutting to a black-and-white clip of a grim-faced Soros, saying that he's very concerned about the direction Hungary is headed. The unsubtle takeaway is that these amorphous questions of shifting populations and changing family structures is actually deliberate "demographic war," with Soros as general of the opposing army.

That's not an original idea either. It's the encapsulated narrative within or beneath the Great Replacement or white-genocide conspiracy theories, which hold that liberals — and specifically Jewish liberals — want to bring large numbers of immigrants and refugees into the U.S. or Europe to "replace" the white population there. That narrative has been the direct inspiration for numerous mass murder events, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, the mosque murders in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the assault on worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, where the killer blamed a Jewish group for aiding refugees.

In September Carlson finally introduced the term "the great replacement" to his audience — after hinting or gesturing at it for months — calling it a "policy" to "change the racial mix of the country" through "the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries."

In the documentary released this week, Carlson illustrates this premise with a series of images intended to land more powerfully than words: a back-and-forth contrast between scenes of white people strolling amid the old-world beauty of Budapest streets or boating on the Danube, and scenes of Black and brown people, almost exclusively in situations of violent chaos, surging against fences, fighting with cops or, at their most benign, crying on the street. Toward the end of the documentary, the video cuts rapidly and repeatedly between second-long shots of white couples on park benches and footage of a crowd of shirtless Black men, shouting in a foreign language and lunging at the camera.

The next shot is meant to come as a relief: Orbán, back at the interview table, saying that he hopes his administration's work will "be enough to convince the people that it's a reasonable decision to support us, and not give the country to George Soros."

Carlson's larger point appears to be that a similar decision, one with apocalyptic or civilization-scale consequences, faces Americans as well.

...AMY GOODMAN:Just days before the January 6th anniversary, Trump endorsed Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.He released a statement saying, “He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs,” etc. Talk about the significance of President Trump in the world and what 2024 could mean if he were to run again.

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: So, I’ve always seen Trump — of course, we focus on how he came to power to destroy American democracy. That was his goal. But his other agenda was detaching America from the democratic world order and inserting it into what I’ve been calling since 2017 “Axis 2.0,” this kind of far-right autocratic order. A lot of it’s funded by Putin.And Orbán has made Budapest a kind of hub of these far-right networks, which remind me of what I initially studied, was these fascist networks of this fascist internationalism in the 1930s.

Now, Trump really identifies with Orbán, because Orbán is somebody who was a centrist, and then he was voted out, and he spent some years getting back to power. And then he arranged things. He has this electoral autocracy, where you hold elections and then you fix them, so that he doesn’t have to leave, you know, in his mind.

And the GOP has embraced Hungary, and they really see Hungary’s present as America’s future. And so, Tucker Carlson, you know, had whole week of broadcasting there. And even Mike Pence, who’s not the most worldly person, trotted over to Budapest and talked about how he hoped that abortion rights would be taken away soon. So, Hungary is this model of white Christian supremacy, anti-trans, homophobic. It checks all the boxes of what the GOP is actually today.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we talk about him as a model and him modeling himself on autocrats around the world. But what about him as a model at home for people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor? You lay out, in a very chilling piece, this image of DeSantis surrounded by the people he wants to basically deputize as what his opponent in running for governor has talked about as his “secret police.”

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, Ron DeSantis is an example — so, when you have somebody like Trump who imposes this kind of authoritarian party discipline, the system populates with mini-Trumps. They used to be called mini-Duces and mini-Hitlers, and now we have these mini-Trumps. And so, what we’ve seen is, in places like Texas and Florida, states are becoming laboratories of autocracy.

And DeSantis is particularly disturbing, because, you know, he wants to have his own civilian National Guard. And many states have those, but I discovered, doing research, that he’s also establishing an office for, quote, “election integrity,” which is code speak for election fraud, where it’s going to have its own prosecutors and investigators. So, anybody who — if there’s like an election result in the state that DeSantis doesn’t like, he can have his goons go after them and accuse them of violating election law. And they’ve made what used to be misdemeanors into felonies, so these people could be put in jail. So this is an example of the kind of authoritarian system at the state level that DeSantis has planned.

AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I want to thank you for being with us, expert on the psychology of authoritarianism and fascism. She is the author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, and she publishes Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/romney/

~ tucker orban

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/global-christian-right/

an 12 21

an investigation by the media outletopenDemocracy revealed Friday that the dark money groups masterminding the far-right assault on reproductive freedoms in the U.S. have also spent at least $28 million in recent years on efforts to roll back the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people worldwide.

The new analysis shows that prominent anti-abortion groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), theFederalist Society, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family and Heartbeat International have "been involved in recent efforts to limit reproductive rights in Europe and Latin America."

The organizations form what openDemocracydescribes as "the 'dark money' global empire of the U.S. Christian right," which is exporting its legal strategy, army of lawyers, and resources overseas to forestall and reverse international progress on abortion access.

ADF, a far-right Christian legal advocacy group with ties to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has spent years laying the groundwork for the draconian Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a Supreme Court case that could imperil reproductive freedoms across the U.S.

But ADF's influence extends well beyond its home country. According to openDemocracy, the organization—whose global arm is called ADF International—spent $15.3 million between 2016 and 2019 on efforts to gut abortion rights overseas.

"The European offices of ACLJ and ADF have intervened in dozens of European court cases against sexual and reproductive rights," the outlet notes. "Last year, Poland's constitutional court voted to ban abortion in cases of fetal defects. [ACLJ] submitted arguments in favor of the new restrictions, condemned by the Council of Europe as a grave 'human rights violation.'"

"The European branch of ACLJ also intervened for the first time at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," openDemocracy observes. "The government of El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, was sued for the imprisonment and death of a woman who had experienced a miscarriage."

As for the Federalist Society—of which all six current right-wing Supreme Court justices are either current or former members—"Europe was the main destination of foreign spending," openDemocracyfinds.

"Europeans are too naive in thinking that achievements in women's rights and sexual and reproductive health are irreversible," said Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told the outlet. "The anti-choice movement does not only have a lot of money, they also have a plan and the determination. Europe should wake up, and it should wake up fast."

While under U.S. tax law the far-right groups have largely succeeded in keeping their funding sources hidden from the public, openDemocracy examined "financial information disclosed by grantmakers" showing that the National Christian Foundation (NCF) and Fidelity Charitable donated $93 million to the organizations between 2016 and 2020.

Feminist researcher Sonia Corrêa of Sexuality Policy Watch said openDemocracy's report "exposes once again the long-running organic connections between anti-abortion forces in the U.S. and Latin America."

Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, similarly argued that the findings "further demonstrate the growing trend of religious extremists forging cross-border alliances to advance... pseudo-legal arguments and engaging in formal legal processes aiming to unstitch the fabric of human rights protection."

In an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday, openDemocracy's Mary Fitzgerald argued that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Mississippi's abortion ban and undercuts Roe v. Wade, the nation will "join of a small cadre of increasingly authoritarian countries that have become more restrictive on abortion in recent years."

Fitzgerald went on to cite specific examples:

Poland's constitutional tribunal ruled on a retrograde abortion ban last year which effectively banned abortion in all cases apart from rape, incest or threat of life or health to the mother, after the ruling Law and Justice party packed the court.

Hungary's Viktor Orban is ramping up its talk on "family values," and a 2016 United Nations report criticized the country for obstructing abortion access.

Vladimir Putin's Russia has just joined the misleadingly titled Geneva Consensus Declaration: a document co-sponsored by the United States under the Trump administration with repressive governments including Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Mr. Orban's Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's Egypt, and signed by dozens more of the world's most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Uganda. (President Biden announced in January that the United States would withdraw.) The declaration's authors also claim that there is no international right to abortion.

"Later this month President Biden will host the Summit for Democracy, with a key focus on promoting human rights around the world," Fitzgerald noted. "But as U.S. courts continue to dismantle basic rights enjoyed in countless other modern democracies, the most pressing question must be: How can democracy do its job at home if only half the population is granted full human rights?"

yikes omg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/

Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history

no lx

Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021

Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.

Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:

Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.

Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.

For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.

The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.

Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)

For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:

RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.

Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.

For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.

Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.

The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:

... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."

Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"

These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.

White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.

As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."

Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.

It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.

Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.

In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:

In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...

[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.

Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":

This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.

Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.

For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.

Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.

To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.

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Consolidating power

In 2014, during an address to the nation, Orbán spoke of building “an illiberal state, a non-liberal state," in Hungary. While an illiberal state is an ambiguous concept, Orbán praised it as better able to protect Hungary's national interests and preserve its cohesion. Four years later, his tone had shifted: Hungary was now a “Christian democracy."

Such a shift is emblematic of Orbán's career, with its many ideological twists and turns. He has changed his tune on many major issues, from being a firm supporter of European integration to becoming a strong defender of national sovereignty. He has befriended Russian President Vladimir Putin since his return to power in 2010, despite his past anti-Russian stance.

And he renounced his past atheism during the 1990s – a decision that went hand in hand with his courting of religious and conservative voters. According to European politics scholar Charles Gati, “no European leader since Napoleon may have changed his spots more."

Far from consistently adhering to clear principles, Orbán, according to The Economist, over the years has instead been “dedicated to the accumulation and maintenance of power."

That ruthlessness grew after Orbán was voted out as prime minister in 2002. Deeply shocked by this turn of events, he vowed not to lose power againif he ever returned to office.

During the 2010 election campaign, Orbán declared that “we need to win only once, but need to win big" – an apparent warning that he would use any large electoral victory to strengthen his position, so not to have to relinquish power. Cynically claiming the mantle of Christian Democracy, according to Princeton scholar Jan-Werner Mueller, became a key tool of his strategy in the following decade to consolidate his grip on Hungarian politics.

Wedge issues at home

Like much of Europe, Hungary is somewhat secular. In the 2011 census, 45% of the population did not list any religious affiliation. Hungary's communist regime had certainly scorned and discouraged religion for many decades. After the 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe between the communist Eastern bloc and free market West, people did not flock to churches.

Nonetheless, when Orbán returned to power in 2010, he began to rely on religion to mobilize voters. For instance, he framed his harsh anti-immigration policies as a defense of Christianity.

As the Syrian civil war reached a crescendo in 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants fled the violence. Although most migrants to Europe were trying only to transit through Hungary, Orbán declared that Syrian migrants were trying to invade the country and change its culture and religion. Officials of Orbán's party, Fidesz, have echoed these claims over the years, suggesting Muslim refugees are trying to impose their culture and establish a caliphate on the continent.

For a country with a history of invasion that stretches from the sacking of cities by Mongols through the Nazi invasion in 1944 and Soviet occupation, the terminology raised fear and unease.

Orbán has also resurrected older anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews and leftists to consolidate his Christian credentials, such as sponsoring exhibits implicitly associating communists with Jews.It has also helped to cement an “us or them" narrative in which opponents of Orbán are “othered." To do this, Orbán chose billionaire philanthropist George Soros as his major foil.

Soros, who is Jewish, was born in Hungary. He went into hiding during the Holocaust and fled the country once communists took control. After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Soros donated millions of dollars to Hungary's fledgling civil society.

Yet he was easy to demonize for some Hungarians, not only because he was Jewish, but because he had spent most of his adult life outside the country. In the 2019 European Parliament elections, a government tax-funded campaign attacked Soros and then European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, accusing them of using migration plans to undermine Hungary's security.

The year before, during the 2018 Hungarian elections, Orbán used even more explicit anti-Semitic undertones to attack Soros: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward, but crafty; not honest, but base; not national, but international; does not believe in working, but speculates with money."

Deflecting criticisms, seeking allies

Orbán's use of Christianity also serves wider foreign policy goals.

The continued erosion of the rule of law in Hungary, including attacks against the free media and the independence of the judiciary, is a long-standing concern for the European Union.

But Orbán has, up to now, skillfully taken advantage of the EU's divisions and weaknesses to avoid any major consequences for his country's democratic backsliding. He has conveniently used Christianity as a shield to deflect and delegitimize the criticisms from Brussels.

Orbán also invokes Christianity to court allies, close and far. This has been the case with solidifying the alliance with Hungary's conservative neighbor Poland. Orbán, after all, understands the importance of close friends in the EU. Not only can they help to counter policies he objects to, but major rule of law sanctions in the EU require unanimity. Poland and Hungary can thus provide cover for each other.

Finally, Orbán has also made use of Christianity, highlighting Hungary's policies to help persecuted Christians, to build ties with key players beyond Europe. It is noteworthy that Orbán was the only EU leader to attend the inauguration of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2019. And the Hungarian government has gone out of its way to court religious conservatives and conservative nationalists in the United States.

Religious embrace

In many respects, Viktor Orbán's use of religion is no different from Ronald Reagan's embrace of Christian evangelicals in the late 1970s. Both leaders relied on religious imagery to build bigger voting coalitions.

[ pix RR Orbán is far from the first leader to use religion to increase his base.

Bettmann/Getty Images]

Every Republican candidate for president since has tried to appeal to evangelicals and invoked Christian values. And even ham-handed attempts such as those by President Donald Trump have done little to undermine such unions.

Such an embrace of religious groups is not in itself a problem. But calculated uses of religion to attack domestic and foreign opponents, or to weaken democratic checks and balances, is, we believe, a major concern. Orbán's Hungary provides a clear warning of how easily Christianity can be distorted and used to erode democracy.

Garret Martin, Senior Professorial Lecturer, Co-Director Transatlantic Policy Center, American University School of International Service and Carolyn Gallaher, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, American University School of International Service

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Conditions ripe for nationalism

Hungarians have a history of authoritarian domination, often by outsiders – Mongols, Ottomans, Russians, Hapsburgs, Fascists and, after World War II, communist rule under the Soviets.

Having lived recently in Hungary for seven years, I witnessed how the psychological legacy of externally imposed rule has hobbled the growth of civic participation, a precondition for democracy. In Budapest, the common spaces of apartment buildings are often run down, and volunteering for an international civic organization is frowned upon.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet domination, Hungarians went through two decades of democratic development, including a parliamentary system, a free media, an independent judiciary and growing civic participation.

But the global financial crisis of 2008 hit Hungary harder than other countries in the region, driving the economy down and unemployment up. It left many people feeling no better off than they had been during communism. Nationalism grew in the Hungarian countryside, where xenophobia thrived.

These were the preconditions for Viktor Orban’s sustained attack on Hungary’s weak democracy after coming to power in 2010.

Protesters walk past riot police officers during an anti-government march in central Budapest, Hungary, Dec. 21, 2018. AP/Marko Drobnjakovic]

Orban ascendant

Orban had earlier served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, steering the country toward membership in NATO and the European Union, but then moving far to the right after his defeat at the polls.

Orban’s biographer, Jozsef Debreczeni, explained this shift to The New York Times: “They say that power spoils good politicians. With Orban that wasn’t the case. It was the loss of power that did it.”

The former prime minister blamed his defeat on the media and democratic pluralism. He set out to make sure that when he came to power again he would never lose it.

In his 2010 campaign Orban fanned the flames of Hungarian discontent by attacking outsiders as oppressors, skillfully playing to Hungarians’ grievances about their history.

The European Union was his initial target. He depicted Brussels, the site of EU headquarters, as “the new Moscow,” and he smeared his opponents as stooges of foreign interests.

He anticipated the flow of migrants into Europe and made them a target by stimulating anti-Muslim sentiment and fears of terrorism long before the mass migration began in 2015.

Orban asserted that he was building a new model of governance, which he dubbed “illiberal democracy.” In reality, the mixture of voting and authoritarianism was an Orwellian hypocrisy in which the winner of an election, like Viktor Orban, could claim a mandate to undermine democratic institutions.

Undermining civil society

After his 2010 election, Orban set out to centralize power.

He took over the media through a combination of political and financial pressure, regulation, censorship and disinformation.

Then he went after the judiciary. He weakened the rule of law by stacking Hungary’s Constitutional Court with allies, limiting its jurisdiction and forcing the early retirement of judges.

His next target was civil society. He accused organizations that receive funding from abroad of “serving foreign interests,” and arranged for the investigation of groups critical of the government while also attacking intellectual freedom.

After an extended regulatory campaign, last month Orban forced one of Europe’s leading international graduate institutions, Central European University, to leave the country by refusing to allow it to continue awarding U.S.-accredited degrees in Hungary.

A rally for the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, Nov. 24, 2018. REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

From 2009 to 2016, I was the president of Central European University. The university was founded in 1991 by Central European democratic leaders Vaclav Havel, Bronislaw Geremek and Arpad Goncz and the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. Its mission was to help revive intellectual freedom and academic excellence in the region, and today it ranks among the top 100 universities in the world in international studies.

In campaigning for reelection last year, Orban made George Soros a target of his xenophobic rhetoric. Using lies with anti-Semitic overtones, he smeared the 88-year-old Soros as an instigator of Europe’s refugee crisis and a danger to “Hungary’s Christian civilization.” This was a particularly cynical attack, since Viktor Orban had been the beneficiary of a Soros scholarship to Oxford in 1988.

Civil society fights back

The Orban model of illiberal governance is deeply corrupt.

Illiberal regimes breed oligarchies that promote favoritism, steal from the public, eliminate competition and create incentives for talented people to emigrate.

Transparency International, a leading anti-corruption organization, ranks Hungary under Orban as the second-most corrupt country in Europe behind Bulgaria. Billions of euros of EU funding for Hungarian roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects have been flowing through contracts awarded to loyal allies of the Orban regime.

But corruption can stir up popular opposition.

In 2017, 250,000 people in Hungary protested the government’s effort to host the 2024 Olympics because of growing evidence of the regime’s corruption and the likelihood that lucrative Olympic contracts would benefit its oligarchs. The government eventually abandoned the bid.

Civil society can find ways of resisting illiberal governance, especially in the digital sphere. Autocratic regimes can control traditional media, but shutting down social media is more difficult.

That’s how 100,000 Hungarians were mobilized and took to the streets in 2014 when the Orban government announced that it would tax citizens for using the internet.

The government backed down. Today, courageous online reporting by Hungarian investigative journalists has provided and published damning evidence of the Orban regime’s corruption.

How great is the risk that the Orban model will spread?

The elections of illiberal leaders in Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe are clear danger signs. Viktor Orban’s hand has been strengthened in Hungary by the waning influence of Angela Merkel in Germany and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.

The European Union could take a stand against authoritarian governance in a member state, but it has so far failed to discipline the regime in Hungary that is destroying the democratic values on which the EU has been build.

In the end, internal opposition is perhaps the only way to challenge a ruler who claims that a democratic election is a mandate to dismantle the institutions of democracy.

It is too early to tell whether Hungary’s nascent protest movement will grow, but based on early manifestations this winter, democracy in Hungary may be showing some signs of life.

Whether it has staying power will depend on the movement’s capacity to unite a fragmented opposition and mount an effective campaign in the upcoming elections this spring for the European Parliament.

neo fascist bellweather:

http://hungarianfreepress.com/2018/10/13/anti-semitic-conspiracy-theories-from-hungary-have-now-arrived-in-the-us/

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/key-trump-adviser-has-disturbing-ties-anti-semitic-groups

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from Hungary have now arrived in the US

October 13, 2018 1:15 pm·

The US media was somewhat puzzled when the Orbán government chose George Soros as their favorite enemy and thousands of anti-Soros posters covered Budapest. Many in the US didn’t know much about the Hungarian-born New York billionaire and Holocaust survivor. Surreal pictures of Budapest streets and metro stations plastered with Soros posters, some scribbled with “Dirty Jew,” spread in the US media. Many wondered: What does this mean? Is this anti-Semitic?

Soros poster in Budapest with graffiti “Dirty Jew”.

Conspiracy theorists claimed that the anti-Soros campaign was NOT anti-Semitic, and produced “evidence” that Soros has collaborated with the Nazis in Hungary during World War II. Roseanne Barr, a Jewish TV actress spread this rumor and Hollywood immediately cancelled her contract. (Read Barr’s apologies to Soros here.)

Poster claiming that Holocaust survivor Soros was a Nazi collaborator during WWII.

During his presidential campaign Trump singled out “those who control the levers of power in Washington” and “global special interests.” Many thought that the cryptic language referred to then-Federal Reserve chief, Janet Yellen or to George Soros, both Jewish. Then on October 5, 2018 Trump tweeted that anti-Kavanaugh protests at the Capitol were “paid by Soros.” This was the first time he publicly mentioned Soros by name. More recently Trump has claimed that the paid protesters were angry “because they haven’t gotten their checks.”

Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, a friend of US Ambassador to Budapest David Cornstein, increased the rhetoric. The Catholic former New York City mayor and Trump confidant retweeted a message calling Soros the “anti-Christ.” He also suggested that Soros’s assets should be frozen.

Several universities have reported that anti-Semitic posters were distributed on their campuses showing pictures of Soros and US politicians who opposed the Kavanaugh nomination. Senior Democratic Senators Feinstein and Schumer, both Jewish, along with others appeared on the posters.

Neo-Nazi poster from a California University campus with Soros and Jewish American politicians opposing the Kavanaugh nomination.

Mainstream media outlets have started to denounce Trump’s anti-Soros outburst. (Read here.) Comedians mocked anti-Soros statements. (Watch Jimmy Kimmel here.) Jewish media connected the anti-Soros sentiment to Orbán emphasizing that Soros has been his favorite bogeyman in recent years in his native Hungary. “There Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has pegged Soros and his organization Open Society Foundations as symbols of intruding globalist forces. Orbán’s unabashed anti-Soros message and anti-democratic goals have been widely criticized by the EU, Human Rights Watch and others.” (Read the Cleveland Jewish News here.)

(During WWII teenager George Soros was saved by Elza Brandeisz. Read more by clicking here.)

György Lázár

Letter from Chancellor Carol Christ

To the Berkeley Campus Community,

I am writing following the discovery by some of our students of a disturbing, disgusting anti-Semitic poster. The image in question, almost certainly disseminated by those who espouse neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology has, according to reports, appeared on campuses across the country. This toxic material demands a response, though I regret that by doing so we provide adherents of this vile ideology with more of the attention they seek.

The image on the poster alleges that Jewish Americans, including prominent, elected representatives, are involved in “anti-white, anti-American, anti-freedom” conspiracies, and portrays opposition to a recent Supreme Court nominee as the latest example. This, of course, is a common, classic refrain perpetrated by those who see our Jewish friends, colleagues and fellow citizens as the root of all evil. There is little, if any difference between this demonizing rhetoric and that used by the Nazis in the lead up to, and during the course of the Holocaust.

In the wake of this incident I want to make clear that my administration and this campus community stand together in condemnation of this and all hateful ideologies. We abhor and condemn anti-Semitic words and deeds on this campus and beyond. UC Berkeley unequivocally supports the University of California Regents’ “Principles Against Intolerance,” which clearly condemn bias, hatred, prejudice and discrimination. We also adhere to and strongly support this specific statement in the Principles; “Anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination have no place in the University.”

Staff from Student Affairs have reached out to students who expressed concern about this poster on social media, and we urge community members who need support to seek help. The campus has several resources, including counseling services. For students needing help navigating these resources, please contact: deanofstudents@berkeley.edu or visit deanofstudents.berkeley.edu/well-being.

We urge anyone with information about the incident to come forward. The UCPD phone number is (510) 642-6760. For information and support on reporting hate crimes or hate-motivated acts: stophate.berkeley.edu

We cannot seal off our open campus from hatred and ignorance, but what we can and will do is come together and determine how we can best deter and confront not only this particular form of bias, but all manifestations of intolerance that violate our shared values and Principles of Community.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ

Chancellor