NEW: congressmen Paul Gosar and Barry Moore are slated to speak alongside the leader of an Austrian radical right party founded by Nazi SS officers: https://t.co/xctSYIyVpP
— Michael Edison Hayden (@MichaelEHayden) May 3, 2023
Rightwingers praise free speech at CPAC Hungary – then eject Guardian journalist
— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) May 5, 2023
US Republicans and their European allies tore up news headlines and ejected a Guardian journalist from a conference of radical rightwing activists, on the same day that they highlighted the importance of free speech.
Speaking at the second annual meeting in Budapest of the US Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), Kari Lake, a failed Republican gubernatorial candidate, said that “truth-tellers and peacemakers” were being destroyed by “fake news”.
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, delivers the keynote speech in Budapest on Thursday.“It’s always opposite day in the media: if they’re telling what you’re doing is bad, it’s probably good,” said Lake before tearing up a sheaf of printed articles about the conference aimed at cementing radical rightwing ties across the Atlantic…
The CPAC audience also watched a recorded message from Donald Trump in which the former president said conservatives were “fighting against barbarians” and listed freedom of speech as one of the cardinal virtues of the far right…
Enmity towards the media has been a constant theme at CPAC’s Hungarian iteration. Last year the organizers refused entry to journalists from all US media outlets, including Vice, Vox, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and the Associated Press.
This year, most independent journalists were refused accreditation for the event, held in a country where the IPI has said media freedom “remains suffocated”…
I Was Banned From Entering CPAC Hungary’s ‘Woke Free Zone’ ?@ccaryl? ?@EdwardGLuce? ?@gideonrachman? ?@SCClemons? ?@mattduss? ?@DrDominicGreen? ?@sbg1? ?@ThePlumLineGS? https://t.co/rF7iNY4n17
— Jacob Heilbrunn (@JacobHeilbrunn) May 6, 2023
… I came to Hungary to witness the not new, yet still astonishing enmeshing of the populist-nationalist American right and its European counterpart, and I didn’t have to wait long. There was Orbán endorsing Donald Trump’s 2024 bid on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference taking place here. Some in the audience wore T-shirts depicting Orbán and Trump as “saviors of the world.”
Late Night Creepy-Crawlies Open Thread: CPAC Hungary (Again)Post + Comments (34)