As a part of its ongoing and relentless attempt to smear Hungary as an authoritarian state, mainstream Western press outlets, well-known for their inequitable and deceitful coverage, have been lying about Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s weeklong trip to the country.
Throughout this week, Tucker Carlson – one of the most influential figures on the American right – will be broadcasting his top-rated prime-time show on Fox News from Hungary, where on Saturday he’s slated to deliver a speech at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Festival in Esztergom, a small town outside of the capital city of Budapest.
In a boldfaced attempt to smear both Carlson and Hungary, a slew of mainstream media outlets in the West have labeled the youth festival, which features speakers spanning the entirety of Hungary’s political spectrum and covers topics on academics, culture, music, and personal growth, as a “far-right conference”.
Carlson’s admiration for Hungary, its national conservative government, and Viktor Orbán has been a serious source of vexation for Western liberals for some time now. In 2019, liberal journalists wrote a series of angry hit pieces on the Fox News anchor after he praised Orbán’s pro-family policies, which financially incentivize married couples to have children. In the same television segment, Carlson also slammed unelected, neoliberal bureaucrats in Brussels and leftist professionals working Washington D.C.-based think-tanks who advocate for “replacement migration”.
“Instead of helping the native population have more children, the Hungarian government, they say, should import a replacement population from the Third World. That’s the George Soros solution. But Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has a different idea. Instead of abandoning Hungary’s young people to the hard-edge libertarianism of Soros and the Clinton Foundation, Orban has decided to affirmatively help Hungarian families grow.”
“Orban’s government is giving young women $35,000 low-interest loans when they get married for the first time,” Carlson continued. “If these women have three children with their husbands, the loans are forgiven completely. If they have a fourth child, they’re exempt from income tax the rest of their lives.”
In addition to having a great deal of live music which will feature a plethora of popular Hungarian bands and singers, the festival, which is sponsored by the conservative think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium, has a wide array of stage discussions on topics of public interest and public affairs, electronic dance music DJs, interactive exhibitions, and live coverage of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Apart from Carlson’s speech, which is titled “The world according to Tucker Carlson”, several of the discussions – which the media claim are “far-right” in nature – include topics such as:
“Successful woman in the world of film architecture and gastronomy”; “The role of literature in preserving native language and culture”; “Nationalism versus supranationalism”; “AI and human nature”; “Budapest Hollywood – The future of the Hungarian film industry”; “Is the ground getting hotter under our feet? Global challenges of climate change”; and “The truth about modern architecture”.
Rod Dreher – a best-selling author from Louisiana, devout Orthodox Christian, senior editor at The American Conservative, and contributor at The European Conservative – and Dennis Prager, a prominent Jewish-American conservative talk radio host, are also scheduled to participate in political discussions at the three-day event.
While Dreher’s discussion is titled “Culture War and the Attack on Truth: Science, Media, Academia, and other Battlefronts”, Prager will discuss today’s media landscape and free speech.
The anti-Hungarian international press failed to mention that Peter Kreko, a Hungarian economist, political psychologist, political scientist, and professor who’s perhaps best known for being one of the country’s preeminent critics of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, will share the stage with Dreher, as the pair are expected to engage in a contentious discussion about the pressing issues of the day.
The fact that Kreko will be given such a platform runs contrary to the slanderous narrative incessantly put forward by propaganda outlets of the West like CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and others, which assert that Hungary is ruled by a far-right authoritarian leader who suffocates free speech and crushes dissenting voices.
And while the international left-wing press chooses to focus its lens on the imagined deterioration of Hungarian democracy, it wilfully ignores an increasingly homogenous ideological media landscape and toxic political climate in the US and the wider Western world, which has reached the point where moderate conservatives like Dreher or Prager are usually barred from speaking at universities or other public venues – and if they are somehow permitted to speak – security details are required to protect them from violent leftists, who’re supported by a sympathetic press and activist journalists.
The international press, in its most recent attempt to blacken Hungary’s international reputation, has propagated the falsehood that the recently passed “Child Protection Act”, which stiffens penalties of convicted pedophiles and gives the families the exclusive right to educate their kids on sexual matters, unfairly targets the LGBT community.
The fact nearly 80 percent of Hungarian MPs (157 of 199) voted in favor of the new law has been conveniently and uniformly ignored by western media outlets which have reported on the topic, since it renders the reasoning behind their narrative that Hungary is a de-facto authoritarian state unsound and illogical. The only parties that refused to support the law – and which did so by abstaining from the vote – were the disgraced Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), the Green Party (LMP), the Democratic Coalition (DK) – a left-wing EU federalist party.
As per usual, the European Union has acted in accordance with the false narrative presented by the international press. Days after the law was adopted and the media’s anti-Hungarian smear campaign began, the European Commission, the union’s executive branch, initiated infringement proceedings against Hungary.
As Remix News previously reported, only 13 EU member states – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Spain, Sweden, and Latvia – signed off on a resolution that condemned Hungary’s new law.
“[The law] represents a flagrant form of discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression and hence deserves to be condemned. Inclusion, human dignity, and equality are core values of our European Union, and we cannot compromise on these principles,” the resolution states.
Responding to the European Commission’s actions and President Von der Leyens provocative words, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said: “The recently adopted Hungarian bill protects the rights of children, guarantees the rights of parents and does not apply to the rights of persons over 18 years of age-related to sexual orientation, so it does not contain any discriminatory elements.”
“The statement by the president of the European Commission is shameful because it is based on untrue allegations,” Orbán added.
Title image: Twitter – @TuckerCarlson
