Episode Details

Yesterday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addressed a crowd of thousands of American admirers in Dallas, Texas, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Orban described Hungary and America as “twin fronts” in a struggle against globalists, progressives, communists, and “fake news.”

To fully comprehend Orban’s influence on the Trump Republican Party, you need to understand the Orban has stripped Hungary of its democratic institutions and demonized immigrants. But that’s not all. He has also embraced a form of eugenics, in which he claims that the future of the West is threatened by the “racial mixing” of white Christian Europeans with others.

On July 23, Orban put it bluntly in a speech at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp:

The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. …

[We] do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and – if I am not mistaken – this is why, in still older times – the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.

Today the situation is that Islamic civilization, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realized – precisely because of the traditions of Belgrade/Nándorfehérvár – that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe. This is why Poitiers has been replayed; now the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West.

Orban’s words and phrases were familiar to anyone who lived through the Nazi holocaust. After the speech, one of Orban’s closest advisers resigned, calling it “pure Nazi.”

Prominent American Republicans have rushed to Orban’s defense. On Wednesday, when Orban stopped off at Trump’s (Saudi-sponsored) golf tournament on the way to the CPAC conference, Trump called him a “friend,” adding “few people know as much about what is going on in the world today.” That evening, Tucker Carlson smirked on his Fox television show, “So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?” (Last year, Carlson did a special broadcast from Budapest during which he praised Orban’s Hungary as a model for America.) And, of course, Orban gave yesterday’s keynote at CPAC.

Eugenics was popular at the turn of the last century. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton — supposedly as a method to improve the human race — it called for arranging reproduction within the human population to increase characteristics regarded as desirable and minimize the undesirable. After the adoption of eugenics by the Nazis to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups, eugenics was discredited as unscientific and racially motivated.

But eugenics has been reborn under another guise — that of white Christian nationalism. It is now presented as the scourge of “racial mixing” between white Christians of European descent, and others.

It is a small leap from the invasions of Europe by Turks and Arabs centuries ago to the present generation of immigrants swarming over borders and “invading” white Christian nations.

In Republican primary races this year, few issues have come up more frequently in TV ads than immigration — all featuring the word “invasion.” It’s pure Orban.

"We're gonna end this invasion," says Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona,