The people who run CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference meetups that feature top Republican elected officials intermingling with the movement's most notorious conspiracy cranks—but I repeat myself—have been attempting to expand internationally with conferences in Brazil and Hungary in recent years. The premise has been to attach themselves, suction-eel style, to autocratic nationalists in other countries. Whether this is an earnest attempt to promote their hoax-dependent fascism abroad or just another very gaudy grift is debatable.
In either case, the American far right has been falling over itself with admiration for the emerging Hungarian autocracy, with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in particular promoting far-right nationalist Viktor Orban with a vigor that far eclipses his praise for any Republican here. CPAC Republicans are open in praising Hungary's autocratic descent as being the road America itself should travel, but have been slightly vaguer in explaining why. That is because the Hungarian fascist movement is Extremely F--king Nasty, full of the same bigotries and conspiracy theories that animate neo-Nazi movements here and actual damn Nazis where they still exist elsewhere.
It looks like CPAC head Matt Schlapp and Carlson feel that the time is right to drop the charade, though. Recent CPAC events in Budapest, Hungary, boasted a notorious Hungarian antisemite, one who has publicly declared Jews to be "stinking excrement," among their featured speakers. "Stinking excrement" is just one of the xenophobic and genocide-supporting rants that Hungarian television screamer Zsolt Bayer is known for. As reported by The Guardian, Bayer was a featured speaker at the allegedly conservative conference, holding forth as part of a speakers list that included Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Carlson, and others.
Bayer's views are not nuanced. It will come as no surprise that he is aggressively racist—it might be more eyebrow-raising to learn that he has particular contempt for Roma people in particular, resurrecting the genocidal conspiracy beliefs of Nazism. Even that, however, goes a long way towards explaining why Carlson, of all people, has chosen "gypsies" as one of his own baffling xenophobic targets. A 2017 Fox News segment entitled "GYPSIES: COMING TO AMERICA" and warning that the Roma "have little regard for law or public decency" remains one of the most batshit episodes of Tuckerism to be put on the network—but it seems that Carlson was already coordinating rhetoric with Europe's far-far-right even then.
That has been a pattern. Carlson and other Republican would-be strategists have been experimenting to find what human targets American conservatism can be most riled to panic over. It might be more surprising if Carlson and his writers were not looking to European fascist groups for a supply of new genocidal tropes.
The difference between Bayer and prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban himself is not very great, however. Orban is viciously xenophobic and, as the Guardian notes in their own piece, a spreader of Europe's home-grown antisemitic "great replacement" conspiracies. It is Orban who American sedition-backers have been trying to promote and butter up, and if that means licking the boots of open antisemites, then both Carlson and CPAC's organizers are game.
We previously speculated that CPAC's new international push could be a genuine attempt to promote fascist thinking abroad; that is probably the most charitable interpretation of their moves, even if it isn't the most likely one. Even before the Trump era, CPAC conferences were a dodgy blend between ultra-powerful Republican elected leaders and absolute conspiracy cranks. Panels warned about the omnipresent dangers of the United Nations, which were going to take away your golf courses, close down your town's roads to put in bike paths, and (I am not making this up) seize your children so that they could be reeducated according to "globalist" standards. Support for American democracy grew more and more tepid on the right after Barack Obama became president, a daily reminder of the tenuousness of the many generations’ worth of institutionalized racism that past "conservatives" had devoted themselves to.
Just as far-right militant groups sought to internationalize their movements during those days, CPAC conservatives found new appreciation for international autocrats like Vladimir Putin. They allowed their existential panic over what would happen to suit-and-tie white racism in a nation in which white conservatives held less power than before to lead them to an obvious conclusion: We need to scrub out whatever parts of democracy are allowing that to happen. The international leaders willing to rewrite the rules of elections so that they always came out on top became the standard-bearers for American conservatives now increasingly convinced that such rewrites were now of dire American importance, and here we are.
That's a interpretation of CPAC's new international fervor (and willingness to ally with open antisemitism) that presumes top conservatives like Schlapp are just so devoted to the now sedition-supporting autocracy-favoring fascist flavor of "conservative" that they can't help but want to spread their message elsewhere. The far more likely scenario is that this is just a huge malevolent grift on the part of Republican powerbrokers. As evidence of that I direct our court's attention to the following exhibits:
In short, a very large chunk of the top Republican party officials, strategists, and government officials have faced indictments of late for secretly working the levers of power available to them for their own personal profit. Being "important" in American politics has long been a way to make millions by going abroad to advise wealthy kleptocrats in other nations how they can best get what they want. Sometimes it's election advice. Sometimes it's access to United States government agencies or to lawmakers. Sometimes it's help crafting propaganda messages to justify authoritarian moves that may or may not be killing people in the streets. You know: Money.
Sure, it is possible that the American right is now having a raging erection in the direction of Hungarian would-be dictator Orban because they just happen to all hate immigrants, Jews, and the ever-shifty Roma. But it's more possible that top Republican strategists are being paid far more money than we know to promote Orban and Hungarian autocracy as The Natural Order of Things, and that promotion involves getting other top Republicans to trek all the way to Budapest to give a thin sheen of legitimacy to a bunch of well-heeled fascist monsters.
Do we really not think that's what's going on? Maybe it's not Schlapp taking the money. Maybe it's not Carlson who's cashing the big checks. But the modern history of pro-Trump Republicanism shows us that seemingly every f--king Republican functionary who's ever so much as been in spitting range of Donald Trump had a side job selling out democracy in exchange for truly petty amounts of cash.
There's zero chance that people in the top ranks of Republican politics are not collecting checks in order to boost Orban's autocratic ambitions, just as Manafort made piles of cash promoting the Russian oligarchy's ambitions in Ukraine. Zero chance. There is absolutely zero-point-zero percent chance that Schlapp sending the whole CPAC entourage to Budapest, Hungary, is something that he is doing out of his deep support for Hungarian autocracy, rather than because money.
Every American version of CPAC is, essentially, a meet-and-greet for ambitious young radicals. The event is a get-together in which a pale white audience of mostly young males wanders the halls, "networking," hobnobbing with others in the hopes of boosting their chances to work for a higher rung of Republican than they have yet been able to attract. They are overdressed, too slick for their ages, and each seems one hyper-racist rant away from getting their own flattering New York Times feature in which none of the racist bits are brought up but we learn that so-and-so rose through the ranks of his local Young Republican club by outing gay peers to their parents and videotaping the results.
What kind of conservatives make the trek to Budapest to hobnob with Europe's own home-grown reactionaries? The kind who have money, and want more money. Everybody's looking for a sponsor, after all, and American billionaire money isn't that easy to come by.
Welcome to fascism, the franchise. You provide the money; we'll provide the youthful and the ambitious, people more than willing to promote whatever message the propaganda machine has found to test best in order to boost your own power by stripping it from others. There's nothing complicated going on here.
Oh, by the way: I am specifically not saying that Carlson specifically might have agreed to host a segment bashing "gypsies" in exchange for a check from one of the Hungarian racists he's been so oddly promoting lately. That would be completely irresponsible of us and, after all, Carlson assuredly has plenty of money and would not cash such a check.
He just found himself having really, really strong opinions about gypsies and asked his team to put together a segment warning Americans that gypsies were coming to their towns to do crimes and poop in public places. As Fox News hosts sometimes do.