He's handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire new class of pro-Orba'n businesspeople who are in the process of cementing control of the nation's economy, as those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been forced to sell, and often fled the country.
Virtually the entire nation's press is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to him, with talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily. Billboards and social media proclaim his patriotism. His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe to spread his rightwing message.
Last year he 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 Obama."
The world, and particularly the EU, have watched this 10-year juggernaut with increasing alarm, and even the EU's 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orba'n have backfired, increasing his two reelection margins as his handmaids in the media proclaim him a victim of the "European deep state" and "meddling foreigners," particularly George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for a young Orba'n to study in Britain).
While he blasts Soros and his own country's Jewish leaders with anti-Semitic tropes, he was feted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called him "a true friend of Israel." Orba'n replied, "A Hungarian patriot and a Jewish Israeli patriot will always find something in common."
Last summer, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump invited Orba'n to the White House for a state visit; Orba'n has been one of Trump's two primary sources of information about how Ukraine opposed or tried to "sabotage" him.
In a rally three months before his White House meeting, Orba'n said that countries that accept refugees are producing "mixed-race nations."
Orba'n is now ruthlessly using his own nation's diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having hired his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.
The American Republican Party in many ways followed Orban's example as it moved from being a legitimate political party to a fascist outlier on the world stage. This happened in four steps.
The first step was when a Republican majority on the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 and 1978 that if politicians or a political party wanted to take vast sums of money from individual billionaires or large corporations, that was no longer to be considered bribery or political corruption. Instead, the Court said, and doubled down on in 2010 with Citizens United, money is not money but is, in fact, "First Amendment protected free speech."
Back in the 1970s the Democratic party was so awash in cash from labor unions that they largely ignored the ruling, but the GOP jumped in with both feet and the ocean of money that flowed from that effort floated Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1981. It also led him to make common cause with a number of rightwing billionaires, who today essentially own the Republican Party.
In some ways, the network these billionaires have created is actually larger than the GOP. As Ken Vogel noted for Politico in 2016:
[Charles] Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That's about 3Â ½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO's analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up "- $889 million "- is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle.
Reagan put into his cabinet and as his heads of regulatory agencies former lobbyists and other corrupt officials, beginning the internal destruction of a US government that was once responsive to its average citizens.
The second step was in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich arrived in Washington DC and essentially proclaimed that power was the only thing that mattered in politics. He shut down and threatened to shut down the government repeatedly, impeached Bill Clinton for private, consensual extramarital sex, and established as a political principle for the Republican party that reality didn't matter as long as you could sell what you were doing to voters.
The best example of this was his so-called "Contract With America," which mostly boiled down to tax cuts for the very rich, destruction of labor unions and cutting benefits for low-income and working people, and deregulation of American corporations.
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