Comment DALLAS — It was a Trump rally with a Hungarian accent. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who has consolidated authoritarian rule with hard-right opposition to immigration and liberal democracy, addressed a crowd of thousands of American fans in Dallas on Thursday with a speech that could easily have been delivered by any Republican candidate in campaign trail this year. Orban presented the two countries as twin fronts in a fight against common enemies he described as globalists, progressives, communists and “fake news”. “The West is at war with itself,” Orban said. “Globalists can all go to hell. I came to Texas,” he added, tripping over a famous catchphrase attributed to Texas legend Davy Crockett. The speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) went ahead despite Orban’s latest controversy: a speech in which he railed against Europe becoming a “mixed race”, saying Europeans did not want to live with people from outside the continent. One of his close advisers resigned in protest, calling the speech “pure Nazi”. But Orban has found defenders among prominent American conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate Jay Dee Vance. On his way to Dallas, Orban stopped to visit Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.Y. In a statement, Trump called Orban his “friend” and said he appreciated his perspective. “Few people know that much about what’s going on in the world today,” Trump said. On Wednesday, Carlson defended Orban from negative media coverage of the speech. “So Viktor Orbán is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?” Carlson said. Carlson helped raise Orban’s profile in the US with a special broadcast from Budapest last year in which he praised Orban’s Hungary as a model for Americans. Orban did not address his “mixed race” remarks on Thursday. But he indirectly defended himself by saying, “Don’t worry, a Christian politician can’t be racist,” and by falsely portraying the Nazis as anti-Christian. He also accused enemies in the press and on the left of trying to silence him. “I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: far-right European racist, anti-Semitic strongman – Putin’s Trojan horse – gives speech at conservative conference,” Orban said. “They didn’t want me here and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us. They hate me and belittle me and my country just as they hate you and slander you.” Matt Schlapp, who heads the American Conservative Association which organizes CPAC, defended Orban’s invitation in the name of free speech. “Let’s hear the man speak,” Schlapp told Bloomberg News. “We’ll see what he says. And if people disagree with something he says, they should say so.” Some at the convention Thursday said they hoped so to hear Orbán clarify his remarks on race. “As a person who, I’m mixed race, I’m in a mixed race relationship, I’d like to see what he’s going to say about it, put something positive into it,” said Raven Harrison, a failed primary candidate. for Congress outside of Dallas. “I’m not willing to bad mouth him for it at this point.” Orban spoke to a half-filled enthusiastic ballroom, receiving applause and frequent bursts of applause and cheers. “Welcome to Texas!” shouted an attendee when he took the stage. When he described himself as “the leader of a country that is under siege by progressive liberals day in and day out,” someone in the audience responded, “YES!” His speech was full of pop culture references, quoting Clint Eastwood’s dialogue from “Unforgiven” and describing Hungary’s stance against underage LGBT content as “less drag queens and more Chuck Norris.” There was loud applause when Orbán described the surge of Syrian refugees into Europe in 2015 as an “invasion of illegal immigrants” and likened them to the armies of Genghis Khan. (Orbán did not say which nation the migrants fled from or the conflicts that led them abroad.) “To stop illegal immigration, we actually built this wall,” said Orban, who only briefly addressed the negative coverage of his CPAC appearance. The crowd booed when Orban singled out George Soros, a Hungarian-American investor who is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. The applause was even louder when Orbán spoke about traditional families and the fact that Hungarian women, after the birth of their fourth child, paid almost no taxes for the rest of their lives. “If you are not yet married, you should immediately find a Hungarian wife,” Orban said. Later, he read from the country’s updated constitution, as amended in 2011. “The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our children alone,” Orban said, smiling, as many in the crowd stood up and cheered. “Great. End of conversation.” He concluded by looking at the elections to be held in both the US and the European Union in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the ongoing battle for Western civilization,” Orban said. “Today we still hold neither. We need both. You have two years to prepare.” Orbán’s appearance in Dallas comes after a CPAC spinoff hosted in Hungary in May featured a videotaped speech by Trump in which he said he was “honored” to support Orbán’s recent re-election bid. In power since 2010, Orbán has come to dominate and reshape Hungary’s political system not through a Soviet-style police state but rather through constitutional changes and the weakening of civil society. He has alienated NATO allies by opposing punishment of Russian President Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine. Orban’s growing isolation in Europe has added urgency to his long-standing efforts to strengthen ties with the United States through the Republican Party. CPAC Hungary was a celebration of Orban’s policies, including the marginalization of the mainstream media. Several of the outlets that applied to cover the conference were denied credentials. Schlapp said that didn’t do much to change the coverage. “I went out and gave a press conference and they still called me a white nationalist,” Schlapp recalled. “I was, I don’t know if it’s any good, if that’s what their editors want to write.” In his own speech at Hungary’s CPAC, Orbán called his country “the laboratory in which we tested the antidote to progressive rule,” listing a dozen points for conservative success — from prioritizing economic growth to “exposure.”[ing] the intentions of your enemies.” This approach has clicked with American conservatives. Under Schlapp’s leadership, the American Conservative Association has organized more CPACs around the world and has also invited right-wing populists to address crowds in the United States. A year before voters in Britain voted to leave the European Union, Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage landed a high-profile speaking slot at CPAC. Three years later, the crowd heard the words of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a politician and niece of Marine Le Pen, the standard-bearer of France’s far-right party. After Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, Slap’s group began holding conferences in Brazil where politicians from the leading right-wing party discussed how to defeat a left that “denies family values.” Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a Republican candidate for the Senate in Ohio, told a conservative academic conference last year that the “childless left” was undermining America and pointed to Orban’s policy of generous tax breaks for parents who they have three or more children. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we really promote family formation?” After Orban’s party won this year’s election, One America News anchor Jack Posobiec celebrated on a podcast hosted by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. “It advocates nationalism. He supports the border,” Posobiec told Kirk. “He supports the sovereign national identity of his people and champions a new type of conservatism where it’s not about corporate tax cuts. [it’s] about taking the family unit and centering it’. Both Vance and Posobiec will speak at the conference on Friday.
