RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Lingua Franca
Aired: 2026-04-15
Duration: 10:08


=== Viktor Orban's Weekend Jail (07:04) ===

[00:00:00]  First off, I don't know if you know this, but Viktor Orban put me into prison once.
[00:00:07]  Really?
[00:00:08]  I didn't know.
[00:00:10]  I was the first victim of Viktor Orban, you could say.
[00:00:15]  Now, it was only for a weekend, and I'm not complaining.
[00:00:19]  For what?
[00:00:20]  Well, for hosting a right wing identitarian event in Hungary.
[00:00:27]  And I guess I should say I was in jail, technically, not prison.
[00:00:30]  Not that that matters.
[00:00:31]  That I was true, I was not abused in prison or anything like that by the guards.
[00:00:35]  They were all very nice.
[00:00:37]  I actually have some funny stories to tell about this, but I'll just recount the story.
[00:00:42]  So it was back in 2014, and with Arctos Publishing, we decided to collaborate on an event in Budapest.
[00:00:54]  And it was, in many ways, inspired by Orban.
[00:00:59]  There was also a party, a bit of a dubious party, if I'm being honest.
[00:01:04]  Called Jobbik, that was sort of at the time Victor Orban's right wing opposition, although, as I said, they were a bit dubious.
[00:01:15]  But anyway, we were there.
[00:01:18]  Guests included myself, Jared Taylor, and Alexander Dugan.
[00:01:24]  And it was, it got on the front page of the paper and it was very, it made a splash.
[00:01:32]  And I remember.
[00:01:34]  Did you play Heil Hitler by Kanye West?
[00:01:38]  It had not been released yet.
[00:01:40]  Oh, of course.
[00:01:41]  And remember, this was pre Trump.
[00:01:44]  So a lot of everything was in a nascent fledgling stage at that point.
[00:01:53]  But the idea was that these.
[00:01:57]  There were multiple ideas.
[00:01:59]  It was like crazy Russians because Dugan was involved, crazy racist Americans, and they're all working together to destroy Hungary or something like this.
[00:02:10]  And Viktor Orban ordered the nixing of the conference, but he did this like a day or two days before.
[00:02:20]  So we just went anyway.
[00:02:22]  And we were being surveilled, and we all met up on a Friday before the event.
[00:02:27]  So the event.
[00:02:28]  Location got canceled and all that kind of stuff.
[00:02:31]  We met up at a bar, pub sort of place before the event, and we were obviously being surveilled because I'm not even exaggerating.
[00:02:42]  There were like 60 year old men with shaved heads and black leather trench coats, like just Hollywood casting for like communist or Kremlin enforcer or something, were outside of the pub.
[00:03:02]  They locked us in the pub and they were questioning everyone, asking for papers.
[00:03:07]  And I said, you know, I'm the organizer.
[00:03:10]  And to the credit of the Hungarians, they decided to decapitate the event and just arrest me.
[00:03:20]  And so I never, I guess I was never put on trial.
[00:03:25]  I was declared a national security threat.
[00:03:28]  So it was sort of done by diktat.
[00:03:33]  Thing to some degree.
[00:03:35]  I didn't sleep for about a day and a half and I was thrown into, you know, rooms and wasn't interrogated.
[00:03:44]  They never asked any questions.
[00:03:46]  But the police were sort of funny because I was being shuttled around different prisons and or jails.
[00:03:53]  I don't even know what was happening.
[00:03:55]  You never learn anything.
[00:03:56]  It is a bit Kafkaesque, if I'm being honest, like not knowing what they're doing with you.
[00:04:00]  They never asked me any questions.
[00:04:04]  It was pretty, pretty funny.
[00:04:06]  But At one point, the police officers learned who I was.
[00:04:11]  So I saw one of them on his phone, and then he started passing his phone around.
[00:04:18]  And I think they thought that I was someone else.
[00:04:20]  And then they're like, oh, you know, he is right wing extremist like this.
[00:04:24]  And so while they were driving me to the prison, there was a gypsy family on the side of the road.
[00:04:31]  The police were like, we run her over for you.
[00:04:34]  We run her over.
[00:04:39]  I was like, wow, this is something.
[00:04:45]  But they didn't.
[00:04:46]  It was a joke, of course.
[00:04:48]  But I was put in prison for the weekend.
[00:04:51]  And people who were coming to the event, they sort of met up and had lunch and tore it hungry.
[00:04:57]  So no one was really disappointed.
[00:05:00]  It was pretty wild.
[00:05:02]  And the prison was filled.
[00:05:04]  It was sort of like the last week of being in prison for people.
[00:05:09]  So everyone there.
[00:05:13]  They were like drug runners or something.
[00:05:15]  I don't know.
[00:05:16]  They all claimed innocence, which I had never been to prison before.
[00:05:19]  It is funny.
[00:05:19]  Everyone claims, like, oh, I'm totally innocent.
[00:05:22]  I don't know what they're talking about.
[00:05:24]  But they were bringing drugs in and they got caught at the border or whatever.
[00:05:28]  But everyone was ready to be released.
[00:05:30]  So there was no fights.
[00:05:32]  I didn't have to join a prison gang or anything like that.
[00:05:36]  I basically just hung out for a little while.
[00:05:39]  But I did get a little bit of a chance.
[00:05:40]  Maybe ethnostate in the Hungarian prison.
[00:05:44]  It's true.
[00:05:45]  There are a lot of activists who will get arrested.
[00:05:48]  And then again, they came and got me, and they're like, all right, you're going.
[00:05:54]  And I was like, all right.
[00:05:56]  And they took me to the airport and they gave me the, I guess it's called a perp march.
[00:06:05]  So I was there in a suit that I had been wearing in prisons.
[00:06:10]  So it was like dirty, you know, I had.
[00:06:14]  I'd probably showered or something, but I anyway, I was no doubt rough around the edges, you know, unkempt.
[00:06:22]  And I was, I had handcuffs and they marched me through the airport.
[00:06:28]  And that was something.
[00:06:30]  And I just want to say every single woman was just hot and bothered.
[00:06:39]  I mean, every woman was like, who is this like international drug dealer?
[00:06:47]  I got a lot of eye, like, it was interesting.
[00:06:54]  It looks impressive.
[00:06:55]  But they put me on a plane and then they just sent me to Paris, which is also kind of funny.
[00:07:01]  So they just, I was in Charles de Gaulle Airport in a few hours.

=== Building Pro-Russia Institutions (03:03) ===

[00:07:05]  And, you know, it's just a funny story.
[00:07:08]  Now, to bring it back again, amusing anecdote, but to try to bring some meaning here to this, I have a sort of theory that Viktor Orban's, the lesson that he learned from that.
[00:07:24]  Hilarious episode was if you can't beat them, join them, or something like that.
[00:07:30]  In the sense that there are all of these institutes that he has been founding in Hungary that are conservative institutes and actually have a strong whiff of Americanism.
[00:07:45]  And this includes apparently funding CPAC events in Budapest.
[00:07:50]  CPAC is a long time American political action.
[00:07:54]  I know, I know.
[00:07:55]  Yeah.
[00:07:56]  They go back to Reagan.
[00:07:58]  Oh, got to mute you there.
[00:08:00]  Okay.
[00:08:00]  They go back to Reagan and all that kind of stuff.
[00:08:03]  And so, the sort of irony of this episode is that Viktor Orban did what I was attempting to do and did it far better and far more intensely.
[00:08:18]  And I don't know.
[00:08:23]  That's my personal opinion.
[00:08:24]  What did you attempt to do?
[00:08:26]  We attempted to host a pan European conference.
[00:08:29]  Now, I was in a different ideological plane at that point.
[00:08:34]  And, you know, the inviting Alexander Dugan there is an expression of that.
[00:08:40]  I don't think I would do that, nor do I think Alexander Dugan would return my phone calls if I tried to do that.
[00:08:47]  But it was a different state back 12 years ago than I am now.
[00:08:58]  But it was an attempt to say that.
[00:09:02]  Hungary is the center of a European revival.
[00:09:06]  And it feels like Viktor Orban has done that and done it a hundred times better, or at least more politically effective.
[00:09:16]  He's done it differently than I would do it, no question about it.
[00:09:19]  But he's done it a hundred times more effectively than I was doing it.
[00:09:23]  Because Hungary became for Tucker Carlson, for CPAC, for JD Vance, for all of these characters like Rod Dreher.
[00:09:33]  The, what is it?
[00:09:35]  Is it the, it's not the Rhine.
[00:09:38]  There's another, what is that institute?
[00:09:42]  It's named after the Danube Institute, Donau Institute.
[00:09:47]  There's a number of institutions that he built that were basically about fostering pan European or transatlantic relations, but of a certain kind, of a populist right wing bent, and obviously of a, Pro Russia, Russia friendly bent.