Rod Dreher argues that Hungary, under Viktor Orban, offers a blueprint for American conservatism by aggressively resisting the "virus" of wokeness, open borders, and NGO colonization. While Western media demonizes Orban as a fascist, Dreher describes him as a visionary who prioritized ethnic homogeneity and free speech, contrasting this with the incompetent, pro-Brussels Hungarian left led by Drasan. He urges Americans to visit Budapest's safe streets, noting that figures like Tucker Carlson changed their narratives after witnessing Hungary's success before being silenced by powerful interests opposed to learning from this model. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I see the political future of conservatism in America is being worked out here in Hungary.
In Budapest.
And that's fascinating to me.
I first came to Budapest around 2018 on a book tour, but also I came a year later to do research for my book, Live Not by Lies, which is about the message that people who survived communism in Europe, Soviet communism, the message they have for us in the West today about the new, softer totalitarianism that they see emerging.
And I thought it was really exaggerated when they first started telling me this about, I don't know, eight, nine years ago.
But the more I listened to them, I'm talking about America, these immigrants, the more I listened to them, the more I realized they were seeing something that was completely oblivious, that we Americans are oblivious to.
So I came to travel throughout the former Soviet bloc, Hungary, Poland, other countries, to talk to those who had stayed behind and were dissidents, to find out what do we need to know.
And they're so sensible in this part of the world, and they really know, to use a phrase, what time it is.
So I thought, you know what?
I want to live here and learn what I can from these people and try to bring the lessons that I've learned about politics and about culture and the fight we're in to try to make it better known to my own people back in America.
It's so interesting because the way the media permeates everything, even if you somehow intellectually know something's not true, I find sometimes you have to see it for yourself.
I told you, I just spent 15 minutes with him.
By chance, we walked over there and he was able to say hi.
Friendly, warm, and just immediately just wanted to tell me why he loves this country.
And in essence, to distill it down, he basically said, it's our country and we don't want to be told how to live.
And I thought, man, We could use a little of that.
I was at his speech at CPAC, both in Dallas last year and here in Hungary recently.
And his speech really does contain the things that we American conservatives need in order to revitalize conservatism here.
in our country. He was talking about how the virus, he calls it a virus, of wokeness, of
gender ideology, of open borders migration, all of it is designed to dissolve the nation
state and to dissolve peoples. If we are going to hold on to what makes us who we are, we
need to stand up against it, call it out for what it is, and don't be fooled by it.
The thing that Orban sees that so many American conservatives don't is that the left has colonized every institution of civil society.
When I talk to Hungarians about what's happened to our military, to the CIA, Big business.
And to every other institution, they really can't believe it.
Orban saw a long time ago that this was happening, and he knew that the only way traditional conservatives could stand up to what the NGOs, George Soros, and all the other wokesters and open borders people were doing was to use politics in an aggressive way.
We don't see that in our country.
Ron DeSantis is the only one in our country at the senior level of Republican leadership who seems to get that.
I mean, we were talking last night, you and I, about Israel and Hungary and their success stories.
One of the things that makes their politics play out the way they do is they have an underlying sense
of national unity.
I mean, here in Hungary, it is a homogeneous country, ethnically and culturally.
And that matters. I mean, of course there are really harsh political disputes here,
but ultimately they have this sense of this is where the tribe lives.
The Magyar tribe, we've been here for a thousand years, and we have to keep our country going.
The United States is a much more diverse place, and that's not, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just it is what it is.
And it's why you can't just pick up Orbanism and plug it into America.
But what we can do and what we have to do is unite our country, America, around the principles of the Constitution, you know, and not to be afraid to talk about the importance of free speech and things that are in the Bill of Rights that are under constant attack by the woke.
We can defend those things, but we also have to understand that using the standard methods of defense, which is what the Republican Party has been offering, ain't gonna work anymore.
Because things changed in the Great Awokening.
All of the institutions are lined up against us.
When you see what DeSantis is doing in Florida by going in, taking on woke capitalism with Disney, and trying to get DEI and wokeness out of the schools, that's pure Orban.
Yeah, I hesitate to speak too boldly because I don't speak Hungarian yet.
And so I miss a lot of the nuance in the local debates.
But generally speaking, the left in Hungary is run by a man named Drasan, who at the time of the fall of communism was a head of the Communist Youth League.
He's still the big guy in left-wing politics here.
And by the way, seven years after the fall of communism, this guy became one of the richest men in Hungary.
And so a lot of the people who remember communism, they're totally on Orban's side because he was a very brave student, anti-communist leader.
You can go on YouTube and find this video of a speech he gave in 1988 as communism was falling.
They were reburying a man who was a communist leader in 1956 at the time of the Soviet invasion, but he was a patriot and the Soviets hanged him.
Imran Najd was his name.
Orban, as a student leader, he's got a mullet and all that, he's totally 80s.
He gave this very brave speech in which he told the Soviets to get the hell out of their country.
This was a time when communism was still ruling this country and that became the basis for his later political career.
So the left today in Hungary is still run by this old-fashioned communist, but they've smoothed things out and now they're proper bureaucrats, meaning they want rule from Brussels, they want open borders, they want George Soros and all the whole package.
The lucky thing for this country is they're completely disorganized.
I was here last year, 2022, for the election, which Orban and his Fidesz party won overwhelmingly, a landslide, and they weren't supposed to win.
Living here in Hungary, knowing Hungarians, talking to ordinary Hungarians in the bar, in the coffee shop, the taxi, Many of them complained about this or that about Orban.
Anybody after 12 years in power is going to have that.
But in the end, it all came down to, but of course I'm going to vote for him.
Have you seen the left?
Because they're completely incompetent.
They had this guy who was there, a guy named Marky Zoy.
He was their standard bearer in 2022.
He gave this comment.
He said, we're the true diverse coalition.
We have communists and fascists in the coalition, which was true, but you're not supposed to say that.
There's no substitute for actually coming to Hungary and seeing for yourself.
When Americans come over, I tell them one of the first things you need to know is the international media and the Washington establishment treat Hungary the same way conservatives are treated in the United States.
You know, you're nothing but a bunch of bigots and backwards deplorables.
When you actually get here to Hungary, you see it ain't true.
It's not true at all.
And the more time you spend here, you realize how blessedly normal this country is.
Low crime.
They have dissent and they struggle here.
It's a normal country in that sense.
But it's also a stable country.
And one of the reasons, almost alone among European capitals, that Budapest is so safe is because Orban would not allow open migration.
I remember going to Paris in the summer of 2021.
I was here in Budapest on a fellowship.
I went to Paris on a book tour and everybody was afraid then because there was lots of Palestinian and Islamic radicalism going on, anti-semitic attacks.
People in Paris were all talking about Is this the start of a civil war?
And I realized, oh my God, Victor Orban was right.
If you allow open borders and you allow people who hate your society and who don't want to integrate to come in, this is what happens.
They're never going to get rid of that problem.
Come here to Hungary, learn how they do it, and go back to America with a sense of vision.
Tucker Carlson got this vision, Dave.
He came here in 2021, saw for himself how different this country was to the way it's presented in the American media, and he changed the narrative at the grassroots level about Hungary.
We saw what happened to Tucker.
There are a lot of powerful people in America who don't want Yeah, and I suspect we have not heard the last from Tucker.