NYT Opinion: Tucker Carlson Has a New Hero (Victor Orban)

[DBoon]

Tucker Carlson is only the latest — and most famous — American conservative to find inspiration in the autocratic government of Hungary under Viktor Orban. The Fox News personality is hosting his show, one of the most popular on cable news, from the capital, Budapest, and on Saturday will deliver a speech, advertised as “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” to a conference of far-right activists.

To critics, Orban’s Hungary is corrupt, repressive and authoritarian, a place where democracy is little more than window dressing and the state exists to plunder the public on behalf of a tiny ruling elite. To Carlson, it’s a model for the United States, a showcase for anti-immigrant policies and reactionary cultural politics.
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Carlson is not alone. “Orban’s fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative and the New York Post,” Zack Beauchamp wrote in a piece for Vox last year.

Orban’s American admirers include the political philosopher Patrick Deneen; J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who is now running for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio; and Rod Dreher, a popular conservative blogger and author.

“Which is the only power capable of standing up to Woke Capitalists, as well as these illiberal leftists in academia, media, sports, cultural institutions, and other places? The state,” Dreher wrote on Wednesday. “This is why American conservatives ought to be beating a path to Hungary.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/tucker-carlson-viktor-orban.html

[Hortensis]

1. Amusingly, religious right blogger Rod Drehrer is calling the enemy

more to be dreaded than a fascist dictatorship and the inevitable persecution, widespread poverty and decline, and death that comes with that: "woke capitalists!"

“Which is the only power capable of standing up to Woke Capitalists, as well as these illiberal leftists in academia, media, sports, cultural institutions, and other places? This is why American conservatives ought to be beating a path to Hungary.”

Translation: "We have to seize absolute power because we can't reliably win elections, even by stealing them."

Just a reminder that the nations "rescued" from evil capitalism by RW fascist and LW socialist revolutions in the 1920s-50s all failed, but only after after national collapse, or close to, deaths in the millions, and uncountable suffering.

The power that so far has always saved us and the blessings we inherited is OUR OWN. Big surprise when there are 300 million of us.

[Grasswire2]

2. Does this article mention Carlson's father's ties to Orban???

Shame on NYT if it does not.

SHAME.

[DinahMoeHum]

3. Methinks Carlson is jacking off at the prospect. . .

. . .at being named something akin to Minister of Propaganda in a future fascist USA.

Hint, hint, Bowtie Boy, better read up on what happened to William Joyce, a British propagandist for the Nazis who was nicknamed "Lord Haw Haw".

At the end of World War 2, the British rewarded him for his services with an "Alcatraz Ascot" necktie.

Just sayin'

[11 Bravo]

5. Curiously, Tucker Carlson's Russian name is Ivan Yakonoff.

[Jim__]

4. In August 2019, Harpers had a long article on Viktor Orban and the Hungarian right.

The full article is probably behind a paywall, if not, you can read it here. Orban and the Hungarian right claim that the the Magyars are a warlike people descended from Attila and the Huns.

A short excerpt, it is describing an annual Hungarian event, the Great Kurultáj:

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From the start, the Franks, on foot and few in number, looked uneasy. Their swords and shields were distressingly flimsy, like toys. Prince Luitpold, their ostensible commander, didn’t seem to be around. When the Hungarians entered the field of battle on fleet-looking steeds, wearing far shinier helmets and brandishing what appeared to be actual swords, they made short work of the badly overmatched invaders. The crowd cheered—and with good reason. According to the Kurultáj’s website, the Battle of Pozsony is the subject of a generations-­long cover-­up, the battle “they” don’t want you to know about. Why, the site asks, is this most important military engagement not taught in schools? Why do students dwell instead on the routs at Merseburg and Lechfeld, which finally put an end to the Magyar menace hanging over Europe? (“Magyar” is the historical name by which Hungarians still refer to themselves.) Surely, it is all part of a socialist plot to make Hungarians feel like a guilty people, plagued by defeat, the post goes on, asked again and again by everyone from the Austrians to the Soviets to the European Union to “dare to be small.”

This is the key to the political message behind the Kurultáj: that the truth of the Hungarian past has been suppressed, obscuring the Hungarian people’s origins as a nomadic race of pagan warriors, born for conquest but forced into submission by treacherous neighbors, liberal ideologues, even Christianity itself. Given its nationalist orientation, it’s no surprise that the Kurultáj was established in close association with Jobbik, Hungary’s one­time ultra-nationalist political party. (It has since slightly tempered its message.) Today, the festival’s patron is Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which now occupies the rightmost spot on the political spectrum. Fidesz gives the event around a million euros a year, which is the reason admission is free and why, in the absolute middle of nowhere, it takes an hour of waiting in traffic to get in.

Fidesz’s sponsorship is also why László Kövér, the speaker of Parliament, was addressing festival attendees in the conference tent shortly after I arrived. He began by welcoming the “heirs and worshippers of Attila and Árpád’s people,” the latter name invoking the chieftain who formed Hungary’s first royal dynasty, and in a few short minutes laid out his own version of the conspiracy preventing Hungarians from knowing their true past. Once upon a time, he explained, the Huns broke their enemies with their ferocious mounted archers. Today, the enemies of the homeland employ a more insidious strategy: they attack the mind. They falsify history and sow confusion about people’s “gender, family, religious, and national identities” until they don’t know who they are or where they are from. But Kövér knows. Hungarians are “the westernmost Eastern people.” Their real roots are on the battlefield, on the steppes, with the nomads. With Attila the Hun.

Almost every country in Europe has a moment in its deep past that serves as its symbolic origin. These speculative beginnings are usually placed in the age of barbarians, where documentation is conveniently sparse. Along these lines, France has Clovis the Frank and “our ancestors the Gauls,” while the Germans celebrate Arminius, who beat back the Roman legions in the Teutoburg woods. Across the Atlantic, even the United States once flirted with the idea of Dark Age roots. Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to place Hengist and Horsa, the two ur-­Saxons who launched the post-­Roman conquest of Britain, on the Great Seal of the United States, arguing that they exemplified the “political principles and form of government we have assumed.”

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