The Viktor Orban Effect: Why U.S. Conservatives Love Hungary – The New York Times

Carlson s trip to Hungary was prompted, in part, by a text message from Rod Dreher, a conservative writer. Dreher, who spent the spring and summer there on a fellowship and helped Carlson secure the interview with Orban, understands, as the activist Christopher F. Rufo recently observed, that Carlson doesn t report the news for American conservatives; he creates it. Bringing Carlson to Budapest was meant to persuade Americans to pay attention to Orban s Hungary. The effort appeared to be successful: The following week, several Republican senators told Insider, an online news publication, that Carlson s broadcasts from Budapest had given them a favorable opinion of Orban. In September, Jeff Sessions, the former U.S. attorney general, went to Budapest for a panel discussion on immigration, and Mike Pence traveled there to address a meeting on family and demographic decline, with Orban in the audience. Next year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential annual gathering of conservatives in America, will be held in Budapest.

Dreher doesn t speak in Carlson s terms, and has sought to distance himself from Carlson s vigorous endorsement of the great replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats are replacing white Americans with nonwhite immigrants in order to increase their vote tallies. But Dreher believes, as do many in his circle of right-wing intellectuals, that high levels of immigration threaten the stability and cultural continuity of the nation. He frequently points to the French, to the anger and isolation in their immigrant-populated banlieues, and argues that immigrants have a responsibility to adopt their new country s culture and often decline to do so. He has even suggested that Orban s restrictions on immigration have kept the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Hungary to a minimum. (While the number of reported incidents is indeed low, Dreher s analysis belies Orban s tendency to play to both sides; he has forged a close relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu while demonizing the Jewish liberal benefactor George Soros with anti-Semitic dog whistles at home.) Dreher believes Orban was right to refuse to take in Syrian refugees in 2015. If you could wind back the clock 50 years, and show the French, the Belgian and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it, Dreher wrote in his influential blog for The American Conservative. The Hungarians are learning from their example.

via www.nytimes.com

All the Conservative Cool Kids are reading this interesting piece in the NYT magazine about Hungary, Catholics and the new Conservative movement in the US. Lots of thought bubbling up on the conservative/nationalist side of things; some of it gives me the heebie-jeebies, but other bits of it make sense to me. I want to get over to Hungary myself. I kinda sorta have some contacts there, but mostly I would get to see my son, who is in Ukraine and is not a Right Wing Nut like some think of his father.