Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s agenda to reestablish Radio Free Europe in Hungary has struck a chord with the Washington Examiner.
Richard W. Carlson, a journalist and former US ambassador to the Seychelles, highlights that Kaptur cites Soros-funded oracles as her authority and says she sees “anti-democratic developments” in Hungary reviving nationalist “narratives that led to centuries of conflict on the continent.” She warns that it is a “time of rising authoritarianism.”
In this, Carlson states that Kaptur completely ignores the fact that in its most recent election, Oct. 13, the opposition party ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party in Budapest and in several other large-city mayoral elections, giving the world what Budapest’s new liberal mayor, Gergely Karacsony, calls, “a lesson in democracy.”
So, which is it Carlson asks? Is Hungary the fascist state that Soros, Kaptur, and other left-wing globalists are seeking to portray, or, as with the Trump administration presiding over America, is it an inconvenient reminder that most freedom-loving people trust governments that govern closest to home, rather than from Brussels or alongside New York’s East River? If those people at heart are patriotic and fond of constitutional nationalism, where faith, family, and moral order bring the progress of prosperity and security at home, if “totalitarianism” really is in their DNA, then hearts and minds, particularly of the young, must be changed. That won’t be easy.
Carlson writes that the recent mayoral elections will not affect Orbán, who remains wildly popular due to a strong economy, hefty wage increases, and secure immigration policies. These are the same conditions that worry Democrats looking at the 2020 elections in the United States.
Because of Carlson’s long experience with radio, he finds Kaptur’s campaign stupid and offensive. It is an effort to weaponize Radio Free Europe in much the same way other congressional Democrats are using impeachment proceedings to smear President Trump. These both are desperate attempts to delegitimize the will of the respective electorates and undermine free elections. The plan to manipulate Radio Free Europe is an affront to millions of people who suffered, sacrificed, and died beneath the yoke of Soviet Communism. For them, Radio Free Europe was a font of both information and hope for freedom denied by their own governments, a lifeline of liberty against the tyranny of Marxist totalitarianism.
To reestablish Radio Free Europe so it can be used as a bludgeon against a democratically elected government is an ugly irony that assaults the mind, he writes.
Carlson adds that American leftists dislike Hungarian patriotism, and they have come to loathe Orbán for his opposition to open borders and his rejection of left-wing ideas pushed by Kaptur and Soros and their fellow globalists in a steady propaganda war. In fact, it is more than propaganda.
Carlson writes that while Trump and Orbán are strong personalities focused on protecting America for Americans and Hungary for Hungarians, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West author R.R. Reno makes a compelling case that their brand of populism is “not nearly as dangerous to the West as the fanaticism of our leadership class, whose hyper-moralistic sense of mission—either us or Hitler!—prevents us from addressing our economic, demographic, cultural, and political problems.”
If left unchecked, Reno believes that the growth of these problems will stoke “further discontent and greater polarization,” to which our leadership class will “respond with amplified anti-fascist or anti-racist rhetoric.” In this way, he warns, it will be their conviction that “only they can save the West,” but that leaders like Kaptur, Soros, and their rich and powerful confederates “will shipwreck our nations.”
Read the full article here.
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