Ahead of Orban’s CPAC Speech, Tucker Carlson Rips into CNN For Nazi Comparison but Ignores Orban’s Own Adviser Made it First
Fox News’ top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, ripped into CNN on Wednesday night over a segment in which Fareed Zakaria compared Viktor Orban’s Hungary to pre-Nazi Germany. But there was just one problem with the criticism: Carlson left out some key context.
“Orban explained that as Hungary’s leader he has embraced strong families, national sovereignty, the principles upon which all thriving countries are based,” Carlson began, noting his travels to the country and past interviews with Orban, Hungary’s longtime autocratic leader.
“Saying that out loud has made him the most hated leader in the world far more than, say, Xi of China, who runs a fascist ethno state,” Carlson continued.
“On CNN on Sunday, plagiarist Fareed Zakaria once again tried to smear Hungary and Viktor Orban in the laziest possible terms. He argued that Viktor Orban’s Hungary is on its way to becoming Nazi Germany,” Carlson added, before playing a clip from CNN.
In the clip, Zakaria notes that Orban is speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s event in Texas this week and said, “I wonder if Orban will give a version of his latest major speech in a spa town in Romania last weekend, he warned that Europe was in danger of becoming a mixed-race world, a trend he said Hungary had always resisted.”
The clip then jumps to Zakaria saying, “There is a gruesome history surrounding rhetoric like Orban’s in his own country. It is what led in the 1930s to the passage of some of the harshest laws against Jews. The reviled minority at the time mostly copied from the Nuremberg laws in Germany.”
“It’s almost unbelievable that they aired something like that. So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders,” Carlson chimed back in.
The only issue here is that Carlson omitted a key piece of context, which dominated the headlines in the last week and surely was a central reason CNN aired the segment it did: One of Orban’s own longtime advisers quit in protest over the speech, which she loudly condemned as a “pure Nazi text.”
“I don’t know how you didn’t notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” wrote Zsuzsa Hegedus, who the BBC notes “has known the nationalist Mr. Orban for 20 years” and is part of his inner circle.
Orban’s speech was widely condemned and The International Auschwitz Committee said his words were “grist to the mill to all racist and far-right forces in Europe.”
Carlson continued his segment, ignoring the contents of Orban’s speech, and interviewed Orban’s political director Balaz Orban.
“We are under constant heavy pressure from the globalist elites. They think that if somebody is speaking against mass migration that he or she should be racist or anti-Semite or whatever. It’s crazy,” Balaz Orban told Carlson, adding:
But this is our policy based on common sense. People are, our people are very proud. As you mentioned, we are a 1,000 years old nation. We are in the middle of Europe. But culturally, we are an island. We are very proud of our history, our Judeo-Christian heritage, and we want to preserve it in that way. And to do so, you have to be able to protect your borders. It’s so simple.
Carlson, who earlier in the segment praised Hungary by saying the country is “basically America 2005. I mean, it’s a very moderate place with a more balanced, freer press than we have,” quickly agreed and apologized on behalf of CNN.
“It’s shocking to me that CNN aired something like that. I only apologize on behalf of American media,” Carlson told Balaz Orban.
Viktor Orban was reelected in April to a historic fourth consecutive term in an election many critics claimed was undemocratic and in which the opposition candidate, who was backed by all the other parties, claimed he was only allowed 5 minutes on public television to campaign.
