Dinesh D'Souza and Balazs Orban confront a perceived crisis threatening Western civilization, attributing it to progressive left and radical Islam forces attacking individualism, family, church, community, and patriotism. While Orban prioritizes Hungary's national interests over global salvation and advocates dismantling EU bureaucracy, D'Souza champions Donald Trump's pioneer spirit against Europe's bureaucratic decline. They distinguish Russia's interest-driven actions from Iran's revolutionary zeal seeking America's destruction, concluding that the West must rally against these converging ideological threats to preserve its core ideals. [Automatically generated summary]
But let's just move on because we are joined by an American political commentator and documentary filmmaker who consistently presents political debates to the public in the form of narratives, not merely making claims, but building stories.
And here at SIPAC, Hungary, the political director and campaign manager of the Hungarian Prime Minister is also present.
So please welcome Dinesh D'Souza and Balazs Orban.
Hello everybody.
Hello everybody.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza and I am an author and a scholar and a filmmaker in the United States.
And I want to begin a conversation by saying a few words about what is happening in America, but also to try to describe this crisis that we are dealing with in its broadest terms.
If we think historically, Western civilization has dominated the world for the past 500 years.
Prior to that, there was a sort of rivalry of multiple civilizations.
You had the Indian civilization, the Chinese civilization, the civilization of the Americas, Islamic civilization.
And Western civilization was, quite honestly, a bit of a relative backwater compared to some of these other civilizations.
But this began to change starting around the year 1500.
And what has happened since then is the leadership of the West has shifted.
So the 16th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 17th century to the Spanish, the 18th century to the French, the 19th century to the British, and in the 20th century, the United States of America became the frontline representative and defender of the West.
There is currently, in my view, a massive effort to undo these 500 years of history, to ultimately overturn Western superiority and to structure the world in a different way.
What is particularly strange is that this attack on the West is not merely coming from the outside, but it is also being promoted from the inside.
In other words, some of the deadliest enemies of Western civilization are inside Western civilization.
And in fact, the progressive left is the vanguard and the enabler of the campaign to bring down the West and to end the era of Western historical superiority.
Now in the United States, we have this phrase, make America great again.
And I want to reflect on that for a moment as to what that actually means.
And then I want to ask Palasz to comment about what does it mean for Hungary, what does it mean for Europe?
Make America Great Again is a reference to the ideals that shaped America, particularly the ideals of the American Constitution.
But if you were to try to put this in a very concrete way, my mind flashes back to when Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency in 1980.
He said, I'm running for to protect five things.
He said, first, I'm running to defend the idea of the individual.
And if we think about it, the idea of the individual, of individuality, is a Western invention.
The idea that each of our lives has a unique significance and a unique destiny.
This is a Western idea.
So number one is the idea of the individual.
Number two, the idea of the nuclear or traditional family.
Number three, the church.
Number four, the local community, the neighborhood and civic life at the local level.
And number five, the country, which is to say patriotism, which is to say the nation.
So conservatism, when we use the phrase conservatism, what are we trying to conserve?
We are trying to conserve those five things.
Who is against those things?
Well, the two most aggressive forces against those things are number one, radical Islam, and number two, the progressive left.
Now, what's interesting about these two groups is that they have completely different endpoints.
They don't inhabit each other's worlds very comfortably.
But even though their final destination is very different, their intermediate enemy is the same.
They are united in a hatred of the principles of the West.
They are united in a hatred of the individual, the family, the church, the local community, and the idea of patriotism and nationalism.
If the radical Muslims hate these things, the progressive left hates them just as much, if not more.
And so, in my view, this is what there is, there's been a coordinated global left for a long time, very well organized, very much in touch with each other across the world.
There's only emerging now for the first time that I see it a global right.
We're only seeing offshoots of it, but it is developing.
And what I'd like to explore with you, if I may, is how do you see the role of Europe in general, but specifically Hungary, in fighting this global struggle?
Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It's a privilege to be here.
Yes, you have to know that we Hungarians are, I would say, we are quite a special species because we do not want to save the world, we just want to protect Hungary as it is and as it was, and as it should remain and should be in the future.
This is our ultimate goal.
So we Hungarian politicians on the patriotic side, we think that our first and foremost responsibility is to defend the interests of our people.
And I'm also leading an educational and a talent management institution and I try to convince the very talented, very Bright students that they should understand the world, they should explore the world, but they should focus on the domestic issues.
If they learn biology, they should help to save the domestic species, animals, or creatures, because no one else would do that.
If all the Hungarians are focusing on the universalist things, focusing on things which are happening outside the continent, outside different sides of different parts of the world, then who will focus on things which are actually matters for those people who are living here.
So, I think this mindset is very much relevant and very much important for the patriotic forces everywhere, especially here in Hungary and Europe.
We need political leadership which takes responsibility in line with the need and the interest of those people who are electing them.
Because we cannot rely on the liberals, because the liberals follow very different principles, as you were saying.
They have universalist beliefs, which turned out to be devastating beliefs.
They say it's about freedom, but it turns out it's about letting invaders in.
And so it's a lie.
It's something which is actually not benefiting the people of the Western nations, but actually undermining their future.
So what we realized is that if we don't stick together, we nationalist patriotic political forces in the West, then sooner or later the liberals will overtake us and destroy each and every nation.
And then we are in trouble.
So then we started to open up a little bit, still focusing on our domestic issues, but opening up a little bit and trying to find partners and friends.
And this is why we are extremely grateful to have you and all the European and American people from everywhere to come to visit in Hungary, discuss things, sticking together and trying to create a movement which can make us very proud.
So my question for you would be: what's going on in the United States?
Because we need in the United States an American leadership which is saving actually the great people of the United States.
And I hope we will have and we will that leadership will remain in Hungary, which is which is the first and foremost important goal is to save the great people of Hungary.
What's going on in the United States is that by some strange turn of providence, the United States has produced a leader in Trump.
I think it's fair to say that when God made Donald Trump, he threw away the mold.
By that I mean this is a very unique character who is now at the helm in the United States, unlike any other president.
In almost every way, the power of Trump, I think, is that he represents something in the American spirit, which is a pioneer spirit.
It is a spirit that distrusts bureaucratic obfuscation.
You know, if a normal American president goes to a meeting, they come out with the usual boilerplate.
Like, we had an interesting meeting, we made significant progress, we expressed our concerns, blah, This is not Trump.
You know, Trump will come out of meeting with Kim Jong-un and he will say, you know, that guy is really short.
You know, and Trump will say something like, I was tempted to put my glass on his head.
And he wanted to know why I call him Rocket Man.
Now, what I'm getting at is the sophisticated people will laugh and they will go, look at Trump, he's such an idiot.
But what Trump is doing, which is very important, I think, is he is putting you in the room.
He is showing you, I'm going to take you behind the curtain, I'm going to show you how these things actually function face to face.
Now, from the vantage point of the United States, Europe appears to have lost its nerve.
Looking at Europe generically, it seems to have lost its fighting spirit.
It is not the Europe of Walter Raleigh.
It's not the Europe of Winston Churchill anymore.
It's almost like when I visited Venice some years ago, they were telling me that when the Venetians were surpassed by the Spanish in building ships, they invented carnival.
Carnival is a way of saying that we are finished, we're never coming up again, let's have a party.
We are in decline and we have to get used to it.
So to me, the importance of Hungary is you've got this little outpost in Europe with a great history.
And I hope I see it in Orban and I see it in the Hungarian people.
The importance of the Hungarian election for me is it is an attempt to show that in Europe, the continent is not finished.
In Europe, these core principles of the individual, the family, the community, the country are still important.
If you're willing to fight for them, there are probably going to be some people in Denmark and the Netherlands and France.
And I don't know, France is maybe too far gone, but you might be able to help revive Europe because right now Europe is breathing down your neck.
I'm thinking here of the bureaucracy of the EU.
And hopefully you can find some allies in the United States and elsewhere to help you in this EU attempt to squash out your movement and dissolve you into this progressive European bureaucracy, which would be the death of Hungary and the death of Europe.
Don't worry, Dinesh, we have a plan.
We are going to win the elections.
Then we are going to restore Central European patriotic cooperation.
And then we will demolish the Brussels and bureaucrats and take over Brussels and restore Europe of nations.
That's our goal.
Quite simple.
We will have a couple more time to cheat.
Yes.
No, that would be good.
Let's conclude very briefly with a word about Ukraine.
If you have a word to say about it, I'll maybe then wrap it up.
Well, it's not an easy situation.
We have to be very honest.
It was mentioned in the previous discussions as well.
They have their goals, we have our goals.
The problem is that what Ukraine wants, it goes against the interest of Hungary.
It's so simple.
They want something from us which is not good for our people.
So, we are Hungarian politicians, so we don't want to support, the Hungarian people do not want to support the war.
They do not want to be in the same union with Ukraine, and they want to use cheap energy.
That's so simple.
So yes, that's a black and white question.
Either their interest will succeed, or our interests will be protected.
So what we are preparing for is we are going to, we are not looking for any kind of confrontation, but we have to be able to protect our interests because that's our duty.
Global Threats Beyond Ukraine00:02:01
Looking at it from the U.S. point of view, there's a very important difference between Russia and, say, Iran.
The Russia, Putin, is somebody who is aggressively defending the Russian interests, as he should, but he is not threatening the world with a revolutionary ideology anchored in martyrdom that seeks ultimately and in fact proclaims death to America, death to the West,
that is attacking us not merely ideologically, but also with a certain type of religious zeal.
One of the striking things about Islam to me today is it has not lost the force of its original revelation.
It's almost as if it has the same fire today that it had in the seventh century.
Christianity, on the other hand, is not.
So I think that the reason that Iran poses a threat and the United States is dealing with it along with Israel is because this is something that is a menace not just to Irani and the Iranian people, but also to the region.
The Iranians are active in Venezuela.
They're active in Mexico and South America.
The threat ultimately is reaching us in a way that the Russia-Ukraine war is not.
And so I think in foreign policy you have to make a distinction between countries that are pursuing their own national interests, this is to be expected, and revolutionary ideologies that would, if they could, not let any of us sleep peacefully at night.
And with that, thank you for joining me, Balashan.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
goodbye.
Revolutionary Ideologies vs Interests00:00:57
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