It has been apparent for some time that the Republican Party has become a far-right party. The rise of Donald Trump, and the GOP’s continued embrace of him, served to prove this not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt. Since then, even more evidence has rolled in that the party of Lincoln is dead and a far-right party has taken its place.
The latest entry comes from the American Conservative Union (ACU), longtime hosts of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). One of the keynote speakers at next week's CPAC gathering in Dallas is Hungarian prime minister and dictator Viktor Orbán. Earlier this week, Orbán delivered a speech in neighboring Romania in which he thundered that any country where Europeans mix with non-Europeans was “a conglomeration of peoples,” not a real nation. He made clear that he wasn’t having this in Hungary, saying that he and others of like mind in Hungary and Romania “do not want to become mixed-race.”
Fellow Daily Kos Community Contributor Aldous J. Pennyfarthing covered this on Tuesday, but the response from ACU chairman Matt Schlapp is so morally bankrupt that it demands attention. In Schlapp’s view, he and his ACU compatriots think the best way to deal with such racist bile is to “listen to the man speak.”
Schlapp was at an America First Policy Institute summit in Washington, D.C., when Bloomberg News asked him about Orbán’s speech. His response has to be produced in full to be believed.
“Let's listen to the man speak,” Matt Schlapp, chair of CPAC, said in an interview at the America First Policy Institute summit in Washington. “We'll see what he says. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”
It’s not as if Schlapp wasn’t warned. Earlier this year, he saw fit to lend the CPAC name to a gathering in Budapest hosted by a man whose idea of “illiberal democracy” looks a lot like dictatorship. For instance, there is almost no independent press left in Hungary, and Orbán was elected to a fourth consecutive term in an environment that didn’t meet any standard of fairness.
At said conference, Orbán openly embraced the outrageously racist “Great Replacement” theory, arguing that the immigration rate in the West amounted to “suicide” for whites. That same gathering featured a speech by one of Orbán’s longtime friends, far-right, ultra-conservative journalist Zsolt Bayer. Apparently neither Orbán nor Schlapp minded that Bayer is a chest-beating racist and antisemite who in the past has called English Jews “stinking excrement,” claimed the Roma were “animals,” and threw the N-word at Black Lives Matter protesters.
The only appropriate response to this should have looked something like the resignation letter of Orban’s longtime adviser, Zsuzsanna Hegedus, who called Orbán’s speech “a purely Nazi diatribe” that would have been lapped up by “the most vile racists.” But apparently even that’s too much to ask of Schlapp.
As I write this, Orban is still on the list of speakers at CPAC Texas. Granted, CPAC’s standards were already a few inches above the floor. Consider some of the other speakers—Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sarah Palin, Lauren Boebert, Stephen Miller, Mary Miller, Jim Jordan, and many others from the basket of deplorables.
But if CPAC is still willing to allow Orbán into its fold after this, there’s no longer any doubt—Schlapp and the ACU is telling us exactly who they are, and we’d best believe them. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan was of the same mind last night, loudly wondering if the right is willing to tolerate this bilge.
I’d go further. If Schlapp and the ACU don’t have the guts to throw Orbán the hell out, maybe the hotel hosting the event, the Hilton Anatole, ought to throw CPAC the hell out. It’s the only acceptable way to deal with anyone who thinks that we should just let a chest-beating racist speak.