Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán got a rapturous reception during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, ...

But we have a different future in mind," Orbán said. "The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone. "It's not a bad start." To stop illegal migration, we actually built that wall." "We believe that illegal migration is necessary to protect our nation. And we, their sons, won the war.

The authoritarian prime minister of Hungary served up anti-LGBTQ+ and Christian right rhetoric at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

One of his advisers quit in protest and likened his remarks to Nazi ideology. He said Hungary is devoted to supporting families and protecting “an institution of marriage as a union of one man and one woman. He said the country stands up to its enemies, including George Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist who funds many progressive causes. In a recent address in Hungary, he said the nation is a mix of European peoples and does not endorse becoming “peoples of mixed race,” that is, mixed with non-Europeans. Hungary is standing up against the “incursion” of Muslims into Europe, he said at the time. His address at CPAC, being held in Dallas this weekend, dealt with those subjects and touched indirectly on his recent remarks saying Europeans should not become “people of mixed race.” He also said Hungary has “stopped the invasion of illegal migrants,” and he railed against “globalists,” progressives, and liberals.

The European Union's only autocrat came to CPAC Dallas and sold American conservatives on a vision of a Western civil war.

In the speech, he practically positioned his government as the European branch of the GOP — saying that “we should unite our forces” to “take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels.” They too see the left as an existential threat, and they’re excited to have a foreign leader who appears to have conquered it in his country. “No country can withstand what we’re going through right now and in our specific case, it turns out that a lot of the people coming are not ready to participate in a democracy,” as he put it in a July monologue. And in the past eight years, the prime minister has recognized the nefarious implications of the phrase and moved away from it (preferring the term “Christian democracy”). Orbán’s victory came through anti-democratic means — a fact that his American fans, like the prime minister himself, will vehemently deny. All along the way, these steps have been justified by reference to the allegedly existential threat to Hungarian Christian identity: a no-holds-barred politics animated by warnings of imminent national extinction by enemies both internal and external. Listen to the rhetoric of any leading Republican or conservative nowadays, and you’re likely to hear pretty much identical apocalyptic language about progressives, migrants, and gender. He has met with prominent conservatives in academia and the media, even offering state-funded fellowships in Budapest, and is quite familiar with the language and tropes of the American right. But even more ominous was his suggestion that “we cannot fight successfully by liberal means, because our opponents use liberal institutions, concepts, and language to disguise their Marxist and hegemonic plans.” And today’s progressives are planning to do the same,” he said. But we have a different kind of future in mind,” Orbán told the crowd. The Hungarian populist sees the potential in that connection.