If you have been worrying about the white supremacy now openly-displayed within Republican Party ranks, you’re not alone. Last week the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a research group that keeps an eye on America’s far right, issued a report, Breaching the Mainstream, listing 875 legislators (almost all Republicans) with ties to nationalist groups or ones promoting conspiracy theories. Don’t feel smug, Bay Staters — you’ll find a number of Massachusetts Republicans among them.
Unfortunately, the news just keeps getting worse.
Last week Republicans took one of their conservative political conferences to Hungary — possibly the most anti-democratic Western nation of all — and literally rubbed elbows with European fascists — while only days before in Buffalo, New York a white supremacist tried to launch a race war by slaughtering Black people as they went about their grocery shopping.
On May 19-20, Hungary’s Center for Fundamental Rights hosted the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. After prayers, of course, Hungary’s antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban and American white supremacist commentator Tucker Carlson joined the organizers in opening the event, which was off-limits to U.S. reporters.
Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Alliance, began life in 1988 as Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Young Democrats), a liberal center-left organization that rejected Hungary’s ruling Communist government. Its members were quickly joined by Hungary’s far right. In 1994 an unlikely mix of centrists and far-right elements led Fidesz to adopt “liberal-conservativism,” driving real liberals out of the party. Within less than a decade Fidesz became a nationalist, then a hyper-nationalist, then an authoritarian party riddled with neo-fascists, antisemites, and open racists. Orban has been Hungary’s president for four terms now.
Orban set about stomping on all vestiges of the liberal order. He did everything possible to smear fellow Hungarian George Soros as both a “globalist” and a Jew, and to drive Soros’s liberal philanthropies out of Hungary. So normalized is antisemitism now within Fidesz that Day Two of the conference featured a close friend of Orban’s, Hungarian writer Zsolt Bayer, who has calls Jews “stinking excrement” and the Roma “unfit for coexistence.” Bayer has also not been shy in voicing his contempt for Black people.
After coffee the program proceeded with: former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, fired from CNN for his homophobic, racist, and pro-colonial comments; former Member of British Parliament Nigel Farage, an endorser of neo-Nazi parties in France, Austria, and Germany; Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s president, member of parliament, curiously present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th; and Ben Ferguson, who broadcasts racist, homophobic, and nationalist bile from a home studio.
Quite the group to set the tone.
For the last 45 years the CPAC conference has shaped the direction that American conservatism takes. CPAC was the launchpad for Reagan-style politics after Watergate and CPAC still defines the path of the American Republican Party. It is significant, then, that CPAC now promotes Hungary — a state no longer a democracy and one with less freedom than even Brazil — as the Republican Party’s model for America’s future.
After lunch, the program turned to “Western Civilization under Attack.” The themes were indistinguishable from those of the Buffalo, NY shooter, who in a long manifesto had written that he feared low white birth rates, the “replacement” and “genocide” of white people by inferior Blacks, and the invasion of America by foreign migrants. Amid the shooter’s Great Replacement worries, he leveled accusations of Jewish and globalist cultural contamination and fears of the erosion of white Christian values. George Soros was mentioned.
CPAC speakers in their “under Attack” session were: Balazs Orban, a long-time friend of the American far-right; Francesco Giubilei, writer and head of far-right think tank Nazione Futura, which is close to far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy); Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group created by white supremacist John Tanton; Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-British sociologist who rants about “woke” identity politics; and Valerie Huber, an American anti-abortion and pro-abstinence zealot. Their topics were stopping abortion, promoting Christian values (over corrupt, “woke” globalists) and preventing invasions of migrants. It goes without saying that many of the speakers were antisemites. And, of course George Soros was mentioned.
Long before the Buffalo shooter invoked the Great Replacement theory, Viktor Orban enunciated it at his fourth inauguration: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations — migrants.”
At the Budapest conference Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union which produces CPAC each year, not only connected Orban’s views on “replacement” with the shooter’s but explained why ending abortion rights was such an important goal of white nationalists: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved. […] You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”
In a segment called “In God We Trust” the conference pushed white Christian Nationalism masquerading as self-determination. Cynically, or perhaps strategically, CPAC chose an Israeli speaker, Eugene Kontorovich, who shills for a number of right-wing think tanks including the Hoover Institute, to defend Christian Nationalism for all the same reasons he supports Zionism: national self-determination. By Kontorovich’s logic, if 51% of a nation’s citizens are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, everyone else must be forced to live according to the majority’s belief system.
“Culture Wars in the Media” was up next, featuring, among others: David Reaboi of the Claremont Institute; Matthew Tyrmand from Project Veritas (permanently suspended by Twitter) who is also involved in the “paleoconservative” journal Chronicles magazine; and George Farmer, CEO of Parler (whose app was suspended by Apple and Google) and husband of moon-landing and COVID denier Candace Owens. Hungarian news anchor Balazs Nemeth, who shares Orban’s views of the Ukraine as Hungary’s enemy, discussed fake news in the globalist media.
The following morning’s theme was “The Father is a Man, the Mother is a Woman.” Candace Owens was introduced as “the favorite influencer of Donald Trump.” Antisemite Zsolt Bayer did his thing. Péter Törcsi, who wrote “the Gay lobby has society firmly in its clutches,” also spoke. Birgit Kelle, the author of Gender Gaga, discussed the topics of her book: the ills of hiring quotas for women, liberal relaxations of binary concepts of gender, toilets for trans teens, and liberals whose goal is “the destruction of the family.” Gregor Puppinck, a lawyer who has written numerous attacks on George Soros as well as disputations of democratic rights, particularly abortion as a right, led with abortion. Andrea Földi-Kovács, who survived Orban’s purge of liberal Hungarian TV anchors, frequently slams abortion in her pieces.
Ending the program was Gladen Pappin, who has written that “deracinated, gnostic deformations of Christianity […] can’t sustain a true cultural Christianity, precisely because both the ‘Christianity’ and the culture it engenders are immaterial, disembodied, individualistic — which is to say, perfectly suited to liberal order.”
Forget sissified liberal Christianity; what’s really needed is a muscular, authoritarian-approved version of Christianity stuffed down everybody’s throat — but, of course, for their own good: “It is time for American conservatives to grasp what their European counterparts already know. The deep wellsprings of Christian culture offer a permanent source upon which good government can draw, so that, as the psalmist sings, ‘we may know thy way upon earth: thy salvation in all nations.'”
In fact, American conservatives ought to know what European liberals already know — that fascism hasn’t been particularly good for Europe.
After coffee the theme turned to “Conservative Revival” with talks by: Mark Meadows, Trump’s disgraced Chief of Staff; Rojo Edwards, an American-born Chilean fascist; Spanish fascists Jorge Buxade and Santiago Abascal, from the Vox party; and an authoritarian roundtable.
After lunch the theme was “Homeland, Security.” Maria Schmidt, historian and former Orban advisor, frequently writes about the dangers of socialism. Next up was David Azerrad, who worries too much about changing demographics and who teaches at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college that fights “Critical Race Theory.” As one might expect, Azerrad was not received well when he delivered a speech entitled “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria” at Saint Vincent College. Then there was Chris Farrell, director of Judicial Watch and a member of the Muslim-bashing Gatestone Institute. He was followed by John Fund, an anti-immigration zealot who claims that undocumented immigrants risk everything to vote illegally. James Wharton, a member of the British Conservative Party and the House of Lords, finished up the session by unctuously praising Orban.
Finishing up the day was “CPACS All Around the World.” The CPAC conference in Hungary was the American Conservative Union’s first stop in a series of international conferences that include Brazil (June 10-11), Mexico (September 2-3), Australia (October 1-2), Japan (December), and South Korea (TBA). Several speakers talked about plans and opportunities in these countries.
The American far right has long had a white Christian nationalist “internationale” in mind. Steve Bannon may be the poster boy for such efforts, having spent the last several years wooing European fascists like France’s Rassemblement National, the Italian far-right, promoting and creating curriculum for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in an Italian monastery, networking with German neo-Nazis, hanging out with the Bolsonaros and other Boys from Brazil — so ardent and so persistent that even Austrian neo-Nazis spurned him. But CPAC’s international conferences, organized by what are now mainstream Republicans, may gain better traction.
Ending the conference were speeches by Laszlo Kover, speaker of the Hungarian national assembly; Jordan Bardella, president of France’s Rassemblement National; Polish nationalist Patryk Jaki, who created legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust; retired German academic Werner Patzelt, whose book on the neo-Nazi group PEGIDA showed a bit too much admiration and argued for Germany’s mainstream conservative party, the CDU, to accommodate the far-right; and Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA, a “Pizzagate” conspiracy nut with innumerable white supremacist connections.
Although the CPAC conference was closed to most U.S. journalists, the full CPAC Hungary program can be found here and online there is an assortment of video clips of the conference.
Hannah Arendt, in her masterful “Origins of Totalitarianism” described perfectly the function of organizations like CPAC: “The world at large […] usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”
This is the future of the Republican Party. And if the GOP gains power in the Fall this could also be the dark future of the United States.
Update May 24, 2022 – Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has neutered the Hungarian Constitution to permit him to rule by decree.
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