Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Orba'n's speeches this week raise the question: Is he teaching the American GOP through his example, or is the GOP teaching him through their "replacement theory" & new laws banning books
Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orba'n has figured out the "secret sauce" to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they're in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy.
In two speeches this week, Orba'n laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American "Great Replacement Theory," trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation's media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in "gender madness."
Orba'n'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. Orba'n is now inserting himself into American Republican politics in a big way.
Steve Bannon celebrated Orba'n as "Trump before Trump," and Casey Michel on the NBC News siteThink 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 Orba'nism."
In August of 1989, 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 Orba'n, a rising politician who would soon be a member of Parliament. To an explosion of enthusiastic cheers, Orba'n 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.
For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it's a corrupt neofascist oligarchy.
In the few short years after he was elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orba'n, 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 rule.
Republicans now want to do the same here, which will also promote the end of democracy around the rest of the world.
Orba'n took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional "conservative" political party like the GOP, with the themes of restoring "Christian purity" and "making Hungary great again." His rallies regularly draw tens of thousands.
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