Why is an American Conservative Conference Happening in Hungary?

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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. What would you do on the week that a racist teenager killed 10 people in Buffalo on the grounds of the great replacement conspiracy theory? The paranoid falsehood that there's a plot to replace white Christians in the West with people of color, Muslims, and Jews. Well, if you're a supporter of CPAC, The Conservative Political Action Conference, you might spend a few days after Buffalo going to a foreign country, where an authoritarian leader espouses replacement theory as a head of state, right? Obviously.

In fact, CPAC is holding a big event right now, scheduled before the Buffalo massacre to be sure, but undeterred in spite of it, in the nation of Hungary, where the leader who fits that bill is President Victor Orbán. You know who likes him?

President Donald Trump: Victor Orbán has done a tremendous job in so many different ways. Highly respected all over Europe. Probably like me a little bit controversial, but that's okay.

Brian: Donald Trump himself is not at CPAC, but that's the kind of thing Trump has said about Orbán in the past. We pulled that clip from Mara Liasson's NPR piece on this topic yesterday, maybe you heard it. Mara will join us in just a minute to explain further. She also included this clip of Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, who is speaking at the conference, and [unintelligible 00:01:39] Orbán, a supporter of Schlapp's interest in imposing his religious beliefs on government policy. As he says, Orbán is doing in Hungary.

Matt Schlapp: He has embraced their Christian heritage, and if Christian societies want to have their values reflected in government, that's a good thing.

Brian: He said the quiet part out loud there, didn't he? Yes, he does want his religion reflected in government policy. Orbán just gave the keynote address at CPAC in Budapest a short time ago. He said things similar to this quote of him from a speech on Monday. In which he referred to a "suicide attempt" by other Western leaders, "the great European population replacement program to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants."

That quote from Victor Orbán to whom American conservatives are flocking. Trump's white House chief of staff, Mark Meadows is a speaker at the conference, conservative columnist Rod Dreher quoted in Mara's NPR piece on this yesterday, "Herald's Orbán attempts to use stay power to crack down on people with trans or non-binary gender identity."

Rod Dreher: We are living right now through an ongoing societal catastrophe with gender confusion and transgenderism. Victor Orbán wants to save his nation from this ideological toxin, and does not hesitate to use the power of the state to do so, even if it might violate the spirit of liberalism.

Brian: Use the power of the state to do so. Listeners, if you've never given much

thought to Victor Orbán before, here's how central Rod Dreher, that conservative columnist, who appears in the New York Post and elsewhere thinks he is.

Rod: Right now, the political leader of the Conservative resistance in the West is the Prime Minister of a small central European countries that most Americans never even think about.

Brian: The Conservative Political Action Conference has taking place today in the orbit of Orbán. With that, we welcome NPR's Mara Liasson back to the show. We always appreciate when you give us some time Mara, thanks for coming on today.

Mara: Thanks for having me. Although I wouldn't have described all the things in my story the way you did, but go ahead.

Brian: Do you want to take issue with anything or leave this to be more of a--

Mara: No, I don't want to get it. I don't think that their Matt Schlapp didn't say they wanted to impose religion. Okay. Let's go.

Brian: Okay. He suggested it to my ear, but you don't have to say that as a reporter.

Mara: Okay. Also, to connect the CPAC meeting with the Buffalo shooting, I think is wrong.

Brian: Well, they were undeterred from holding it on the grounds of the Buffalo shooting, despite the great replacement theory, being central to Orbán. Would that be accurate enough to say?

Mara: Wait on the grounds of the-- they were going to Buffalo? Wait, I'm confused.

Brian: No. One of the main reasons they're going to Budapest is that Orbán is a proponent of great replacement theory.

Mara: Okay.

Brian: True? That's all.

Mara: Yes. That's something that they subscribe to. What does that have to do-- I don't want to argue about that.

Brian: No, I'm saying that--

Mara: The Buffalo Shooting and the CPAC meeting are not directly connected because the CPAC meeting was going to be held in Budapest for many, many months, if not years.

Brian: Right. All I said was that they were undeterred by the Buffalo shooting being done in the name of this philosophy that they're going to celebrate, but how did the Prime Minister, well, whose idea was it to hold an America first conference--?

Mara: Well, I don't know exactly who started it, but CPAC is filled with people who

admire Victor Orbán, and what he's been able to do in Hungary. He has been criticized as you mentioned as a white ethnonationalist authoritarian, but he also is a hero to the conservative base, and a lot of them see Orbán's Hungary as an anti-woke paradise. He has cracked down on Muslim immigration. He has curtailed LGBT rights, and those are things that they admire, and they're frank admirers of him.

He's also, one of the things I wrote about in the story is, at the same time that he's using many of the same culture war issues that Trump has used and that the modern Republican Party has embraced, the culture war is on the surface, but right below the surface, there are moves by Orbán to curtail basic democratic rights. There's no longer an independent judiciary. Most of the press is under the control of Orbán loyalists and every single democracy measuring organization in the world has said that Hungary is no longer a democracy.

Brian: We played a clip yesterday from one of your reports on NPR on this yesterday, that really stopped me short in this era when we think almost nothing can surprise us that much anymore. I'm just going to read back this transcript, you said, "There are more and more conservatives who say as Peter Thiel, one of the biggest donors now in the Republican Party, said democracy and freedom are not compatible."

Mara: Well, there's a big debate going on about whether basic democratic rights checks and balances, freedom of the press, tolerance of diverse backgrounds, and opinions are compatible with conservative ideology. That's why you see so many conservatives enamored of authoritarian leaders around the world. Donald Trump was the leader in this. CPAC has been to Brazil where Bolsonaro is a Trump-style leader, but that's definitely a tendency, a trend in the modern Republican Party, and certainly among the conservative base, the kind of people who go to CPAC.

Brian: Listeners, if you consider yourself conservative, are you good with what the American Conservative Union and the American Conservative Political Action committee and Political Conference are doing here, and who their hero, and main global champion has become? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you consider yourself conservative or having conservative views, would you say democracy and freedom are not compatible as seems to be a growing sentiment? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer with NPR's Mara Liasson. Can you take us a little more into that, on the freedom side?

Mara: Well, that was something that Peter Thiel said or wrote many years ago, but there is a debate about how much of classic liberalism. By that, I mean, small L liberalism. A tolerance for diversity and acceptance just on a basic level. Acceptance of elections that you lose, and of independent parts of government, the justice system, freedom of the press. Those are things that are being questioned, and I think that's-- we're going to have a big debate all over the world about this, which is the better deliverer. Joe Biden talks about this all the time that autocracy say that they're better at delivering basic and fulfilling basic needs of their populations because they're more efficient, until COVID at least China certainly put itself forward as one of those.

He said one of the things that he was trying to do in his administration is to prove that democracies can still deliver. They're not so paralyzed in gridlock that they can't deliver basic functions and things that people need. Now, he's been challenged with that. The baby formula crisis right now is a challenge to him, so is COVID, and so is getting vaccines into arms, but this is a big, big debate that we're having worldwide.

Brian: Do you know how Orbán is using the power of government to combat what non-binary or transgenederlism--

Mara: I don't know the details about the anti-LGBT laws that he's passed, but there's no doubt that he has presented himself as an opponent of what he calls gender ideology.

Brian: American conservatives, descendents of Ronald Reagan, who fought Soviet communism on the grounds that it wanted to spread totalitarianism, not democracy are now soft on this kind of authoritarianism, as you're describing it, or even embracing it. That's quite a change.

Mara: Yes, there's no doubt about that. Pardon.

Brian: That's quite a change historically.

Mara: Yes. The Republican Party has been changing over time and it's not Ronald Reagan's party anymore. The one thing that is still surprising is that there is bipartisan consensus on helping Ukraine and pushing back against Putin's invasion of that country. Certainly in the Senate Republicans have stood with Democrats in sending arms and money to Ukraine. In the House, however, which is much closer to the Republican base, every time a Ukraine Aid Bill comes up, there are a few more Republican House members who vote against it, but for the most part that's been holding.

Yes, there's been a rethinking of authoritarian leaders. The Republican Party used to be almost reflexively against them, but Donald Trump really changed that. I think even post-Trump, you're seeing that same flirtation or love affair with authoritarian leaders on the part of the conservative base. Not because they're authoritarian necessarily, but because they're espousing the kinds of, "Christian values and other policies," anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-international organization that conservatives want to see enacted.

Brian: They make accommodations for authoritarianism if that's what they feel is necessary to get their policies into practice. Is that what you're saying?

Mara: Yes. I think that's the way to look at it.

Brian: Dave in Newark, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in Dave. Hi.

Dave: How are you doing? Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'm calling because I want to push back on what your guest is saying because we could take Twitter, for example. She's talking about authoritarian leaders and stuff like that when it's the Democratic Party who always does that. You can take Twitter, they've been

silencing conservative speech, Republican voters for, I don't know, since it started. I just don't agree with nothing that she's saying and that's why I think the Democratic Party is going to lose this year. Thank you.

Brian: Well, Mara is just doing analysis.

Mara: Well, Twitter is a private company. Now, if the government was doing that, if the government ran some big social media company and only allowed certain views to be posted, that would be bad, but Twitter is a private company.

Brian: Dave, let me stay with you for a second and turn around the what aboutism comment. Let's say that Democrats are doing everything you say that they're doing. What about this authoritarian lien in the conservative movement? How much does that bother you?

Dave: I don't see that at all. Just because the conservative, and Republican, we talk a lot about church and religion and other stuff, it doesn't mean that they're authoritarian. Take Trump, for example, you got to say he's the biggest authoritarian president we've ever had or whatever. Any time [unintelligible 00:13:41] Biden or the Democratic Party has done recently that he didn't want to help Ukraine more than the Democratic Party ever did.

Brian: Dave, let me ask you one more follow-up. If the US started imposing practices under Trump or anybody else, like is being described that Orbán is doing in Hungary in pursuit of policies that I think you agree with but if they do it in a way that limits the power of the courts as a check and balance, that limits the freedom of speech of the press, things like that, would you be okay with that in this country?

Dave: [unintelligible 00:14:23] I think it's happening now with George Soros [unintelligible 00:14:25] Democratic chasing [unintelligible 00:14:32]

Brian: If the conservatives did it?

Dave: Everything the Democrats say the Republicans are doing that's exactly what they're doing when they say the Republicans are doing. Man, it's just annoying that you guys keep saying all these stuff that the Republicans authoritative and all that [unintelligible 00:14:57] Democrats do it.,

Brian: Dave, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. Mara that's actually fairly typical of a lot of the conversation that goes on some of the media conversation, things like that, where people point out what's going on in a place like Hungary as a model for parts of the American right and people say, "Oh, but George Soros."

Mara: Well, George Soros is one of Viktor Orbán Don's biggest foils. George Soros, of course, is Jewish, and he's a billionaire, and he's supported a lot of open society and even a university in Hungary. That's definitely one of the talking points. George Soros doesn't run American democracy. As far as the caller's suggestion that somehow Donald Trump did more to help Ukraine than any other president, he was actually impeached for trying to force Ukraine to open an investigation into one of his

political opponents and held up military aid to Ukraine to get them to do it.

Brian: Gary in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gary.

Gary: Oh, hi. Two points quickly. One is that this replacement theory was espoused by many cable news hosts who are liberal. Dan Bongino played a clip after clip after clip-

Brian: Who are liberals, you're saying?

Gary: -joyfully talking about replacing whites with people of color immigrants massively. The other point I want to make is that when conservatives talk about democracy, and they criticize it, they're doing in the same vein as the framers who saw it as majoritarianism, which destroys individual liberties. You're misconstruing what conservatives are getting at with that.

Brian: Talk about-- Go ahead, Mara.

Mara: This a really interesting debate about majoritarianism because there's no doubt that the founders developed a system that would protect the minority party's rights. They didn't want just raw majoritarianism. That's why we have the Senate. That's later on why we developed the filibuster. There's a big debate now about whether rights for the minority party has morphed into something more like minority rule. People don't want raw majoritarianism, but they want-

Gary: Who? Who's saying that?

Mara: Who's saying that what?

Gary: I don't know any fellow conservatives, I never heard of a conservatives espousing or touting autocrats. I don't know where it's coming from.

Brian: They're touting Viktor Orbán, aren't they?

Mara: There are a lot of conservatives who really like Viktor Orbán-

Brian: And Putin.

Mara: -and also Vladimir Putin. In terms of the majoritarianism there's-

Gary: Who?

Brian: Well, Gary, they're there right now in Budapest.

Mara: Brian just played a bunch of clips of people.

Brian: Mark Meadows is there. Tucker Carlson is speaking at that conference.

Mara: Talking about how there's a lot to learn from Viktor Orbán.

Gary: They like his immigration policy and I'll tell you why.

Brian: Go ahead.

Gary: Because if you have a massive immigration of one culture and talking about Muslims in their case. They're talking about an ideology and a religion that is insurrectionist in its policy, with respect to our Constitution. Look what happened in Orlando. They--

Brian: I'm sorry. T hat is just false. I'm not going to let it go by as a statement that Islam as a religion is insurrectionist. There are radical Islamists out there and wings of movements. We know some of who they are that are like that and there are Christian radicals. To say that Islam is that it's just not fair, Gary. I'm not going to let you say it and just let you keep going on that. On your notion that conservatives don't support these authoritarian leaders we see what's going on in Budapest and there was that Peter Thiel or Thiel, I never know whether you pronounce the H or not, where he said democracy and freedom are maybe not compatible. Is that a concern that you have as a conservative?

Gary: I'm still on? Okay. Number one, most, virtually all Muslim majority countries have a death penalty for apostasy.

Brian: I don't think that's true. Wait, you're talking on those grounds you're going to see Muslims can't immigrate into the United States even if it's true?

Gary: I'm saying that mainstream Islam supports Sharia law and Sharia law is unambiguously insurrectionist to our constitution because it's against freedom of conscience. It's that simple. If you read Andrew McCarthy, who's very moderate on this, but very accurate because he studied it, he shows that mainstream Islam is radical. The radical-- you're talking about--

Brian: It's just not true. We have all these Muslims in this country. People are not walking around trying to stage insurrections in this country. We see who the insurrectionists were in this country, by the way on January 6th, but Gary, I'm going to leave it there. One other correction to Gary, he said great replacement theory is true as evidenced by the liberal talk show host Dan Bongino citing it. Dan Bongino is a conservative talk show host right, Mara?

Mara: Yes, but I think what he said is that he played a lot of examples of liberals who talked about how white Americans would be "replaced by brown-skinned immigrants." I think this whole argument about great replacement theory gets complicated. Some of it is just a reaction to plain old demographics. This country is on its way to being majority-minority. That's going to happen regardless of any other policy that's passed in the United States. We could stop immigration right now, completely, totally, from everywhere and we would still become a majority-minority country by 2040, or something like that.

Now, that has been in the past the great genius of America. We take people from all over the world. We're not a creedal country or a country whose identity is based in blood and soil, but our identity is based on our values and our ideas, and all these different people from different backgrounds, and different races and ethnicities come

to America and they become Americans. They're not replacing anybody, but there's no doubt that on the left, there was this sense that, "Oh, demography is destiny."

As America becomes a majority-minority country, those minorities are going to, previous minorities, are going to be automatically Democratic voters. Well, that turned out not to be true. There's a huge competition right now for Hispanic voters. That just isn't the case. That, I think, is what conservatives point to where they say, "Oh, liberals talked about the great replacement."

Brian: How would you describe the extent, if you can, as a national political reporter of the conservative movement in this country or the Republican Party, including Republican elected officials, who feel good about CPAC taking place in Hungary and celebrating Viktor Orbán?

Mara: Well, I don't know if celebrating Viktor Orbán is some kind of litmus test inside the Republican Party, but there's no doubt that activist groups on the left and right go abroad, historically, to meet with like-minded people, party's, leaders. Now, the difference between leftists going to Scandinavia in the past to study how social democrats create a functioning welfare state versus conservatives going to Hungary to see how Viktor Orbán, a nationalist conservative government, accomplishes its goals.

They're not exactly equivalent, because one is a democracy and one has now been called by all these various agencies who measure this, not a democracy. I don't think that Viktor Orbán himself is this huge litmus test. I just think that there is a growing openness, attraction, whatever you want to call it, among the Republican conservative base to conservative leaders around the world who happen to also be authoritarians and are using authoritarianism to enact their agendas.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Andre in Manhattan, who's originally from Hungary. He says-- Hi, Andre, you're on WNYC.

Andre: Hi. I wanted to say that one of the reasons that Orbán is Orbán is that Hungary has never faced its history, its past. It was a very close ally of the Nazis in World War II and a great "contributor" to the destruction that the Holocaust brought. Then when communism crumbled they never faced their past either because the Germans dealt with [unintelligible 00:25:01] the Czechs, the Slovaks. Everybody had some kind of reckoning. In Hungary that never happened.

I was in Hungary recently and I've seen posters with George Soros's picture that are clearly antisemitic posters, both in the text and in the way they retouched his face. This is a dog whistle for antisemitic Hungarians. I'm not saying they all are but those who are. Anyway, that much about Viktor Orbán, not to mention that he also benefited from a scholarship that was given by the Soros Foundation.

Brian: I didn't know that fact. You described a little bit of why he's popular in Hungary. What's your take as somebody with a foot in both of these countries as to why he's popular on the American right?

Andre: Well, as Mara pointed out, there is no guarantee that immigrants will become

believers in democracy, with a small d, of course. I was very lucky that I didn't turn automatically Republican and conservative when I came here because I came here as a refugee from communism. I think they like Orbán because he's not as notorious as Duterte or Bolsonaro because that would probably create an outrage if they held their conference there.

Brian: Oh, I think [crosstalk].

Mara: They have been to Brazil.

Brian: Yes, they did in Brazil, as well, but go ahead.

Andre: Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't catch that. Anyway, it's a nice place to visit.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Good to have a little humor injected into this. We have a few minutes left here. Do you know, by any chance, Mara, if any of these kinds of things came up in connection with the Pennsylvania Republican primaries this week, among the candidates who might win? Does Dr. Oz [crosstalk]?

Mara: Oh, I don't know even if Orbán in Hungary came up on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, I don't know that.

Brian Lehrer: These notions that democracy might not be compatible with freedom or the great replacement theory.

Mara: No. That's not the kind of conversation you're going to have on the campaign trail. As a matter of fact, most voters aren't motivated by their thoughts about democracy and whether checks and balances are being eroded. They're more interested in inflation and whether they can find baby formula and whether the government is delivering for them. This is not the level at which a political campaign conversation takes place.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any latest, by the way, on the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary results?

Mara: No, but it sounds like they're in recount territory. Oz and McCormack are separated by less than 0.5% so that's an automatic recount. What I'm really interested in, in Pennsylvania, of course, is to see if Oz accepts that there has to be a recount or does he declare victory as, I think, Donald Trump would like him to do. In other words, does Oz just pull the same Trump playbook in Pennsylvania as Trump tried to do in 2020? To say, "Don't count any votes after election night. The outstanding votes are mail-in ballots. I'm the winner and we should stop counting the votes otherwise, it's a steal." That's what I'm waiting [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: That would be a statement. He doesn't have the power to enforce that because there is a law.

Mara: No, no, no. It would just be a statement. That's right.

Brian: The law in Pennsylvania, am I correct? If it's within a half a percentage point?

Mara: Correct, 0.5%, yes.

Brian: Then there's an automatic recount.

Mara: Correct.

Brian: Interesting. That gubernatorial nominee, Mastriano, on the Republican side, he was there on January 6. Correct?

Mara: Yes, He was there on January 6. He's a Trump-identified election denier. Pennsylvania is an interesting state because the governor actually chooses the Secretary of State. In other states like Georgia, there's an election for Secretary of State. Of course, Secretary of State is the position that certifies elections. If the Republican wins the governor's race in Pennsylvania he will choose the Secretary of State and that person will decide pretty much who gets Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes in 2024.

Brian: NPR political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Mara, we always appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Mara: Thank you.

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