Over the past few years, Hungary––led by its nationalistic and authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán––has become a sort of mecca for the American far right, with conservative pundits embarking on pilgrimages to the Central European nation. Tucker Carlson has now joined his peers in traveling to Budapest in support of Orbán’s regime. “We’re in Budapest all this week for Tucker Carlson Tonight and a documentary for Tucker Carlson Originals,” the Fox News host tweeted on Monday. That night, Carlson teased his show’s coverage for the coming days. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now,” he said. The Hungarian prime minister also shared a photo of himself and Carlson posing next to each other with the caption, “Tucker Carlson Today,” which is the name of the news host’s online talk show on Fox Nation.
While in Budapest, Carlson is scheduled to address a far-right conference on Saturday organized by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), with a speech entitled “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” Talking Points Memo noted. Over the past couple of years, Orbán’s government has reportedly shelled out considerable sums of money in his effort to build up Hungary as a destination for the global right. In June, The New York Times reported that Orbán used $1.7 billion in government money and assets to fund MCC, an educational foundation dedicated to advancing Orbán’s brand of nationalism. Additionally, OpenSecrets investigative researcher Anna Massoglia reported this week that having Carlson interview Orbán on Fox News was part of a “foreign influence“ operation in which the Hungarian government paid a D.C.–based lobbying firm $265,000 in 2019.
Orbán, along with his ruling Fidesz party, has amassed this fawning support among the American right by making appeals to Christian nationalism. For instance, Hungary has a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and even passed a new law in June that, among other things, forbids educators from sharing materials, films, and advertisements portraying LGBTQ+ people with students 18 and under. While Orbán’s regime has promoted the bill as a way to safeguard children from sexual content, critics have accused the Hungarian government of using the law to lump in LGBTQ+ people with pedophiles. In December, the Hungarian government changed its constitution to define a family as a union where “the mother is a woman and the father is a man.” Orbán has spoken favorably about leading an “Illiberal” democracy, and, according to the Associated Press, he’s “hobbled the court system, rewritten the constitution, and given immense power to himself and his party.” Meanwhile, notes the AP, “the country’s media is largely now a factory producing pro-Orbán content.”
Hungary’s reactionary turn has clearly caught the attention of conservative pundits across the Atlantic. In July 2019, Carlson praised Orbán’s government for instituting anti-immigration policies to mitigate the declining birth rates of native-born Hungarians. “Instead of helping the native population to have more children, the Hungarian government, they say, should import a replacement population from the Third World,” Carlson said. “That’s the George Soros solution. But Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has a different idea. Instead of abandoning Hungary’s young people to the hard-edge libertarianism of Soros and the Clinton Foundation, Orbán has decided to affirmatively help Hungarian families grow.”
Rod Dreher, a senior editor for The American Conservative, is a fan of Orbán’s government and now lives in Hungary. “Orbán is not a saint, but a statesman and a politician. He is not a liberal secular globalist, but a conservative Christian nationalist,” wrote Dreher recently in defense of Orbán, while criticizing the U.S. media for “queering Kermit the Frog” and allowing “a pair of gay dads” to appear on Sesame Street. “I know you regular readers must be tired of me writing in defense of Orbán and Hungary, but dammit,” he added, “I have grown fond of this country, and I feel compelled to stand up for it when it is slandered.”
— Inside the Feverish Mind of Postpresidential Donald Trump
— Joe Manchin Ghosts Workers Whose Jobs His Daughter Helped Outsource
— Fauci Tells Anti-Vaxxers to Sit Down and STFU as COVID Cases Surge
— What If Jeff Bezos’s Big Space Adventure Saves Us All?
— Report: Trump Allegedly Implicated in Company Crimes
— Venture Capital’s Most Contentious Breakup Just Added a Messy New Chapter
— The 2022 Candidate Slate: Send In the Clowns!
— Of Course Trump Has Scammed Millions From His Supporters
— From the Archive: The Star-Crossed, Politicized, Complexified Romance of Jeff Bezos
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.