Chris Hayes Slams Tucker Carlson’s ‘Fawning Interview’ with Viktor Orbán, Says Conservatives Have Been ‘Humping the Leg of’ Authoritarians
All this week Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has hosted his show from Budapest, Hungary, where he interviewed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán famously delivered a speech in which he said his goal was to build “an illiberal new state based on national values,” and creating an illiberal state is exactly what he’s done in the years since. Throughout the week, Carlson has heaped praise on Orbán and suggested the Hungarian sociopolitical model is superior to that of the United States.
On Friday night, Chris Hayes said many conservatives have an affinity for the sort of illiberalism that reigns in Hungary today, alleging that conservatives have a “long history of humping the leg of various authoritarian governments.”
He played a clip of Fox News guest-host Ben Domenech, who this week suggested the United States is in seriously trouble and ominously asked his audience, “What are you willing to do?”
Hayes said, “The people on that channel… seem to think they’re being very clever when they don’t just come out and say, ‘You should commit violence against your political enemies.’ What exactly do you think the implication is there?”
“Meanwhile,” he said, turning to Carlson, “they’ve got another host attending a dinner, getting feted by a foreign leader.” The MSNBC host accused Carlson of “conducting an embarrassingly fawning interview with the prime minister of Hungary, who proudly calls his own country an illiberal democracy.”
Hayes played a clip of Carlson’s interview with Orbán, in which the Fox News host said, “I’ve noticed in the last few nights in Budapest, I’ve run into a number of Americans who have come here because they want to be around people who agree with them, who agree with you.”
Hayes’s offered a mocking response. “Ah yes. Hungary. The shining city on a hill that Americans are fleeing to, away from the bad old U.S., I guess?”
Later in the segment, Hayes spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wrote about Carlson’s trip to Hungary in her newsletter, stating, “Carlson is the perfect megaphone for that continuing effort and the perfect extremist for our time of developing electoral autocracy.”
At one point Hayes told Ben-Ghiat that American conservatives have a history of embracing certain authoritarian leaders:
“I find the Hungary sort of flirtation equal parts, you know, unnerving and pathetic. And I should note that, you know, American conservatives have a long time–a long history of humping the leg of various authoritarian governments. They loved Franco. They were very into the South African apartheid state for a while, defended them, were going down there for conferences. They were super into this. This isn’t that new. And yet the biggest voice in that universe saying, “Hey, look, this is the model,” strikes me as significant.
Watch above via MSNBC
