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With Tucker Carlson broadcasting from Hungary, and legitimizing its neo-fascist leader Viktor Orbán, the right is full-on embracing their future. Jared and Nick analyze what this means, as well as discuss JD Vance's senate candidacy and the depths that Republicans will go to curry favor with the former president.
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I'm Jared Yates Sexton here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, I'm going to loosen up for the weekend.
All right.
And I'm not just going to open a beer.
Oh.
Oh yeah.
You're pouring it into a glass.
Why do you hate America, Jared?
Because today we have so much bullshit to talk about, Nick.
So to go ahead and give people a preview of what we have to deal with today, and actually I'm just gonna take a drink to steel myself.
My God, we got to talk about Tucker Carlson in Hungary.
We got to talk about... People have been writing, asking, Jared, when are you going to talk about J.D.
Vance on the Muckrake podcast?
And I have to tell you, my beloved listeners, today is the day that we are talking about J.D.
Vance on the Muckrake podcast.
We got to talk about... That senatorial candidate, J.D.
Vance.
Oh, God.
Oh, Nick, that just made my stomach hurt.
Oh.
God, what a disaster.
We're going to talk about terrible history on Fox News, because who else does terrible history like Fox News?
But again, we're going to give you a vantage point on all of this that other people are afraid to because, quite frankly, it's horrifying.
But Nick, we have to start with our good friend Tucker Swanson Carlson, the fourth Esquire bullshit.
We do.
Now you want me to start to retch, I suppose.
I have to tell you, man.
So for those who haven't had a chance to listen to our episode from Tuesday, we had already taped our episode.
We had already laid out some really, really good content for the good people at home.
And then I turned on Tucker Carlson tonight because I hate myself, Nick.
And so I was like, what's Tucker yelling about tonight, right?
What racist theory is he pushing?
And then immediately I'm like, oh no, he's in Hungary and he is singing the praises of Viktor Orban.
And I said to you, we have to add something into the show.
So we gave you a brief little idea, but Nick, it just went off the rails from there.
It did, it did.
Well, you know, just if you don't know, Hungary is as virantly, virantly, whatever that word is.
Virantly.
Yes, you know, opposed to immigration as, you know, he makes Stephen Miller look like the welcoming committee.
In fact, they were trying to, you know, give huge tax breaks to Hungarians to have more and more kids in an effort to keep their numbers up, I suppose is the point there.
So, it's a natural fit, you know.
I'm sure Tucker feels really at home eating Hungarian goulash and sprouting out, you know, replacement theory.
You know, when we talked about it, and we're going to get into the extent of the Hungarian crimes against their own people and what Orban has been able to do there, and the extent of why the Republican Party is obsessed with Hungary and Orban.
But when we tape that, And we try to put it on people's radars.
And here's the thing, Nick.
You've known me for a while now.
We've been broadcasting for a while now.
Am I ever a person who underestimates the depths that these people can go to?
Underestimate?
No.
No, that is not my gig, correct?
Correct.
Okay.
When I thought about how Tucker was going to broadcast from Hungary, Right.
And listen, I'm cynical.
I'm pessimistic.
I read the writing on the wall.
I tell you what I think is going to happen.
Unfortunately, it comes true some of the time.
In this case, I thought Tucker would like do some soft propaganda for Hungary.
Curious?
Yeah, I thought it would be... We've all seen these things, right?
Where it's like B-roll footage of Tucker walking around and showing some sights or whatever.
And saying, like, oh, there's some stuff to like here.
Maybe even Orban would come on the show, which, by the way, might be tonight, might be tomorrow.
Who knows?
But I expected that.
I expected it to be veiled praise, like a soft selling.
He has explicitly said to his audience, if you want to protect America, if you want to protect Western civilization, if you want to protect your families, You need to be ready to do what they have done in Hungary, which includes rigging elections, creating a one-party state, cracking down on individual rights, creating a giant kleptocracy, going after immigrants, going after LGBTQ people.
It has been an absolute hellscape in Hungary, and Tucker came out and explicitly said, this is what we need in America.
You know, I kind of feel like this is lobbying by Hungary, too, to influence lawmakers, right?
This is like them paying, you know, somehow Fox News to get on the program and get a whole bunch of, you know, propaganda spread across the country.
And perhaps it will yield.
I mean, you can only hope it won't because in the White House is someone who's on the opposite side.
But this is all, this is in a cynical way, a very good op for the Hungarian government.
Oh, it's it's I mean, it's worth its weight in gold.
I mean what this has actually done at this point and by the way, Nick, do you remember a few years back this started?
God, I want to say it had to have been 2014, 2015 into 2016.
You remember those weird days where like Fox News would show Barack Obama's approval rating among Republicans and then show it compared to their approval rating of Vladimir Putin?
Do you remember that?
Like when all of a sudden that started like being Weird.
And all of a sudden they were like, Vladimir Putin has a higher approval rating among Republicans than Barack Obama.
And all of a sudden, I don't know about you, but you're like, say what?
What's going on?
What's going on here?
Something strange is happening with the American right.
And now what we have seen Tucker do, and this isn't just by the way, this isn't new.
Tucker has praised Hungary and Orban for a very long time.
The far right has praised Orban.
We've seen Breitbart praise Orban.
We've seen all of them, and by the way, Steve Bannon has been at the front of all of this, telling anyone who will listen that Orban is a glimpse of the future and the future that the right should be going after.
So much so, by the way, that there's been a rift In the Republican Party in the right between what we would call neoconservatives or old Reaganites and now this bizarre illiberal fascistic faction.
What just happened over the past week and we still have a couple days left of this bullshit is an absolute PR coup.
For Hungary, Viktor Orban, and the possibility of an illiberal democracy or a fascistic attempt here in the United States of America, because that's really what was being transmitted over the past couple of days.
Well, this is definitely reminiscent of how Trump would recycle Russian propaganda.
But it wasn't as clear.
People were wondering if it was the case, and is he reading this stuff?
The answer is yes, he's reading everything.
Because, don't forget Jared, Trump uses the internet unlike other people do, as he would tell people.
The recycling of propaganda from Russia, and then this is from a totalitarian state, is not new, but it's the legitimizing of this now.
Literally, let's beam from that actual country is what we should have had in our bingo cards.
This is exactly what that natural progression is.
So now, once and for all, let's get a good prediction out here, because where does this go?
I mean, I think Putin is next, right?
Broadcasting live from Moscow.
I mean, that would not be surprising, and we've been told that Tucker wants that.
I mean, we might be watching the Tucker Carlson autocrat tour beginning here, you know what I mean?
Like, we might actually be watching, and this would be the most 21st century thing imaginable.
In the past, it used to be that Hitler and Mussolini would take a train over or see each other, you know what I mean?
Or they'd, like, get on a plane and greet each other at the airport.
Now it's not just happening.
They're not just connecting and communicating and building lines of trust and mutual interest.
They're broadcasting it.
You know what I mean?
Like, they're making it an 8 o'clock primetime show.
Like, we have to sit here while we get our faces rubbed in it.
Well, again, the future could very well be more and more of like we saw with Trump going to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, which is sort of like, you know, the same kind of thing in and of itself.
You could even argue that the photo op in front of the White House, when they cleared the square, Uh, was sort of another version of that as well.
And so, you know, if the Republicans get back into control, that would what I'd be able to expect would be these like spectacles of the grand leader kind of things happening, uh, as the norm.
And you would certainly see if Trump got back in the White House, there's no question he'd go to Russia and they'd do this whole thing with, uh, with Putin and legitimize that.
I mean, the next, the next thing would have to be like Iran, right?
He'd have to go to Iran and broadcast from there or something.
Well, I mean, these people would rather nuke Iran than broadcast from it.
But I think in this case, I think what we're probably looking at at this point is we're probably looking at Tucker opening up Hungary to what we would call mainstream Republican conservative thought.
Orbanism will now become one of the main conversations.
It used to be the kind of thing that when Steve Bannon, he would have like, I don't know, he would have an event and it would be called Our Heritage.
Right?
SOS culture war.
And the people who would be in there would be ghouls.
They would be people, I mean, it would, the kind of people who make Stephen Miller, you know, look like James Bond.
Like some really ghoulish, white, ethno-state assholes is who used to show up at these Steve Bannon things.
But unfortunately, most of them had money.
Right?
Most of them had influence and they had the ability to sort of talk about white culture and Western civilization, like alt-right-ish adjacent people, right?
And I'm talking about people who have connections with militias, separatist groups, international extremists, stuff like that.
Now, that has moved from Steve Bannon having these weird conversations and weird meetings To suddenly being on Fox News at 8pm on a Wednesday, right?
So all of a sudden, what you're probably going to see now...
Is you're going to start seeing a lot of conservative, right-wing, GOP think pieces, conversations, possibly even speeches, because this stuff, we've talked about this before, it starts on the edges and then it comes into the middle, right?
And so all of a sudden now what we're going to start hearing is we're going to start having conversations about whether or not elections are necessary.
And whether we should be living in a liberal democracy and whether rights are that important.
Look what they've done to the country, right?
So they're trying to fix elections.
They're trying to disenfranchise people.
If that doesn't work, Nick, well, we just don't believe in it because they don't.
Yeah.
And if that suddenly becomes normalized, you're going to see what's called the Overton window start to shift.
And people who don't understand this, like what you expect to be normal can change very, very quickly.
And this is a paradigm shift type moment right now.
Well, the irony is that what you're describing is also progressivism, where, you know, things like, let's say, look at gay marriage, for instance.
It took a long, long time, but we slowly moved on a path to where it became legal.
And we kind of assume that that will continue to happen as we get, you know, a liberal democracy continues to progress.
But it's the same fear that the right puts into their followers, is that, you know, you let them have this one thing, what's next, right?
And well, it's the same thing with the right.
What's next after he goes to Hungary and starts to normalize what Orban represents?
Clearly, I have no doubt, I mean, listen, there isn't, you already, you're not even predicting the future as far as elections go, because they've already put into laws - Complete voter restrictions, right?
They're on their way.
We had a guy on CNN actually said he was scared shitless and they didn't bleep it.
It was, let's see, Rick Hasen, who's the professor of law at, I just watched a little clip.
He's a law professor over here in Irvine, UC Irvine.
We say he's like, I study this for a living.
This is what I do as a professor.
And this is the beginning of what that looks like you just described.
Basically the end of democracy, the end of the majority rule, the end of people being able to have a say in how they want the country to go.
This isn't just, you know, this is scary stuff.
It is scary shitless because they're making it, they're manipulating the system to allow them to make it quote-unquote legal to do that.
Well, and again, this is one of those moments where I just want to pump the brakes and I want to remind people of something.
Like, I get that, like, this is... And by the way, I've been so pissed off, Nick, and I know that's shocking.
I've been so pissed off by how the media and politicians have met this.
The Democratic Party hasn't said anything about this.
They haven't said anything about it.
They haven't brought it up.
They haven't talked about it.
You know, this is a thing where you have an American journalist going over to Hungary and saying explicitly over the airwaves of one of the major networks, Maybe a liberal democracy needs to go away and maybe we need to embrace an authoritarian future.
That actually happened.
And so they haven't even brought it up because the Democratic Party is terrified to admit that things are as bad as they actually are, even though that's the only way that they can possibly win and affect change.
Our media has Just continually shoved their faces in the dirt and pretended this didn't happen.
I caught this tweet.
We don't talk much about Matt Iglesias on this show.
And that is because Matt Iglesias is not a serious person.
Matty.
Matty Iglesias is not a serious person.
He has been treated as a public intellectual.
He has been treated like he understands things.
In the same way, by the way, that Nate Silver has been treated like he understands shit.
And they don't understand anything.
The best that Matty Iglesias could offer about Tucker Carlson coming on the air and embracing authoritarianism was Matty Iglesias says, "I feel like we should talk more about how conservatives dream is to make America more like this much poorer rinky-dink little country in Central Europe." Because obviously the question is the GDP of the country and whether or not the markets should be able to do this or whether or not the economy should do this.
Because people like Matti Iglesias only think in dollars and cents and in terms of like how these things can move around and affect policy.
They are telling you what they believe.
They are telling you what they want.
They are telling you what their goals are.
And their goal is to establish an authoritarian, anti-democratic regime.
They want a one-party state.
By the way, what have they done in this state?
They took over education.
Tell me if that sounds familiar.
They went ahead and they pushed nationalistic history.
Tell me if that sounds familiar.
They wanted to go ahead and not have gay and queer people in schools.
They don't want them in public.
They don't want them on their airwaves.
They don't want them in popular culture.
What else can I say?
They built a southern border wall.
They went ahead and they restricted the ability to vote.
They restricted elections.
It is, like I wrote in my Daily Beast article, it is a dark mirror of what is going on in this country.
But people can't be bothered to listen.
They can't be bothered to see that these people... When we started this podcast, Nick, most of the stuff was dog whistles, wink, nods, and nudges, and all of that.
And we had to, like, Divine it and tell you what was actually happening underneath it.
There's not even subtext anymore.
This is all overt.
It's all out there in the open.
And like you keep saying, the mask has slipped, which is good that we can see it, but people still aren't paying attention to it.
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