CPAC Hungary Should Be a Wake Up Call For All Americans Who Care About Freedom

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The Conservative Political Action Committee wrapped a two-day event in Hungary on Friday night, an event that should concern every American about the prospect of rising illiberalism within the conservative movement.

The fact that CPAC Hungary even took place should have been a major headline across the American media. Not only because Hungary is a country moving further and further away from democracy and backsliding toward authoritarianism, but because the event included video messages from the two leading figures in the Republican Party: Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.

Not to mention the fact that CPAC Hungary took place in the shadow of Orban-ally Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

If Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow decided to address a gathering of left-leaning Americans in Cuba, which of course they never would, the event would undoubtedly dominate the news for weeks.

While Fox News did not mention the event once, it did get airtime on MSNBC and CNN with hosts like Brian Stelter, Jim Acosta, and Nicolle Wallace lamenting the conservative activists’ embrace of Viktor Orban and warning that the American right plans to adopt the authoritarian leader’s policies as a blueprint for establishing one-party rule in the U.S.

“Many non-Hungarian reporters wanted to cover this conference but outlets like Vice, AP, Vox, and Rolling Stone were turned away. Some outlets like CBS were able to attend, but there was an interesting blockade of the media at CPAC Hungary,” Stelter noted on his Sunday show.

Orban, who gave the keynote address at CPAC Hungary on Thursday, has stifled freedom of the press during his twelve years in power. Orban won reelection to a fourth consecutive term in April, making him the longest-serving leader in the EU, and the candidate he defeated, who was supported by every opposition party in the country complained during the campaign he was allowed only 5 minutes on public television to state his case against Orban.

Orban spoke openly about the importance of controlling the media while addressing CPAC and encouraged the Americans and right-wing European leaders in attendance to follow his path.

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” Orban told his audience. “We have to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find allies in one another and coordinate the movements of our troops,” he added.

Orban’s comments, coupled with his domestic crackdown on critics should serve as a warning for every American that CPAC is moving away from the First Amendment and has little use for public debate or freedom of the press.

Orban went on to praise Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has previously broadcast his show from Budapest, and who introduced Orban with a short 38-second video message to the conference.

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend, Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there,” Orban added. “His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or as you say 24/7.”

Those comments were among some of Orban’s more tame from the week.

Orban took his oath of office a few days before addressing the conference and echoed the controversial replacement theory linked to deadly mass shooting across the U.S. – from El Paso to Pittsburg to most-recently Buffalo. Orban claimed that liberal Europeans are pushing a “suicide attempt” by implementing “the great European population replacement program.”

Orban went on to say that the left is working to “replace the missing European Christian children with migrants.”

“Echoing another popular theme on the American right, he argued that another form of cultural suicide was ‘gender madness’, a reference to the spread of LGBTQ+ rights in the west,” reported the Guardian last week.

Attacking the LGBTQ+ community in Hungary has been a key ingredient of Orban’s rise to power and his Christian nationalist policies.

Freedom House which has downgraded Hungary under Orban’s rule from a “free” democracy to “partly free” notes that Orban has “passed anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are critical of the ruling party.”

Freedom House explains further the details of Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ policies, which bear a striking resemblance to recent legislation passed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in Florida:

A June [2021] law banned the discussion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, the media, advertising, and other public places. The legislation, which conflates pedophilia with homosexuality and expressions of gender identity, was challenged by a European Commission infringement procedure in July.

“The government also initiated a referendum on further limiting LGBT+ representation in education, scheduled for 2022,” the organization notes, previewing the next step of Orban’s program to expel LGBTQ teachers from the education system.

Orban has further consolidated power in Hungary through a complex system of doling out favors and government funds to party loyalists and he has “appointed loyalists to formerly independent institutions such as the media regulator and extended his influence over the courts, media, education and cultural spheres at home while nurturing close ties with Russia and China abroad,” explained Bloomberg’s Zoltan Simon and Marton Kasnyik.

With his fourth term secured, Orban is now embarked on a “program to override the checks and balances of liberal democracy and take complete control of a country,” Simon and Kasnyik add. Orban, like Putin and many authoritarian leaders before him, is now likely to stay in office indefinitely and will use illiberal means to both enforce his view of Christian nationalism and to stay in power at all costs.

The idea that the conservative movement, which was once underpinned by an absolutist belief in law and order, upholding the Constitution, limited government, and individual freedoms, would now embrace a leader like Orban is both shocking and a deeply profound realignment within American politics.

Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union which puts on CPAC, told Steve Bannon back in February something that becomes more and more clear each time CPAC gets together, “We are no longer conservatives.”

While CPAC Hungary also made headlines for hosting a rabid anti-Semite, other prominent right-wing European leaders addressed the conference including the former head of the U.K.’s Independence Party, Nigel Farage, Herbert Kickl, head of the Austrian Freedom Party, and Santiago Abascal, the President of Spain’s Vox party.

For its next stop, CPAC is headed to Brazil in mid-June, where the group will cozy up to another rising authoritarian: Jair Bolsonaro.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.