Right-wingers used to use coded language to signal bigoted views to their followers, since openly saying what they meant was seen as going too far and risk alienating the so-called moderates in their party who may still value accepted norms such as fidelity to truth and reality. That has changed. Republicans running for political office this year, taking their cue from Trump, seem to feel no hesitation in adopting extreme positions. Either they think that there are no moderates in the party anymore and that they have all shifted into full-blown MAGA acolytes or think that those voters have no choice to but to vote for them over their Democratic rival in the general election, even if they find the Republican candidates distasteful or even repugnant.
That old sense of the need for some restraint seems so quaint these days when Republicans feel little compunction about sharing a stage with flat-out racists, as can be seen at the latest gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) that is being held in Hungary. Why would a US political organization hold a major convention in a foreign country? That is because this is no ordinary foreign country. Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban is a hero to the US right because he is an authoritarian who openly espouses all the tropes of white nationalism that the Republican party and Fox News now espouse.
A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.
Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.
Bayer, a television talkshow host in Hungary, has been widely denounced for his racism. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he wrote on his blog: “Is this the future? Kissing the dirty boots of fucking [racist epithet] and smiling at them? Being happy about this? Because otherwise they’ll kill you or beat you up?”
In 2011, he used the phrase “stinking excrement” to refer generically to Jews in England, and in 2013 wrote: “a significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals.”
When he was awarded the Hungarian order of merit in 2016 by the country’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the star speaker on the first day of CPAC Hungary on Thursday, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum protested, saying it “reflects the longstanding refusal of the leadership of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party to distance itself from Bayer, in spite of Bayer’s repeated pattern of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, and anti-Roma incitement”.
…Orbán, like many American Republicans, has embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which involves promoting the belief that the white population is being deliberately reduced by leftist policies and diluted by immigration.
This openness is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, removing the mask reveals what the party actually stands for and may cause at least some people to recoil in disgust. On the other hand, having one of the two main political parties in the US and a major TV network promote such disgusting views may make those views more mainstream.
A thorough repudiation of these views in the general election will be a welcome step in repudiating this trend. One can only hope that that will happen in November.
Why would a US political organization hold a major convention in [Hungary]?
Because that tyrant Biden wouldn’t let them do it in Russia.
Meanwhile in Washington state we get candidates for office stating their party preference as ‘MAGA Republican’ or ‘Trump Republican’ because just plain ‘Republican’ doesn’t define them well enough. (There is also someone running as ‘JFK Republican’ whatever that is supposed to mean). Also someone running for the ‘America First (R)’ party. And 2 Republican Representatives are drawing many challengers motivated by said Representatives’ vote to impeach Trump over 1/6/2020.
I’d like to see a meeting of all the American Republican voters who would recoil in disgust from the, to them, novel idea that the Republican party might be racist. My guess is you could hold that meeting in a phone booth.
Sorry, I need to correct your usage of English there. You mean “WOULD be a welcome step”, as in “postive action on climate change WOULD be good”, “finding out that Alito’s opinion draft has been significantly altered before publication WOULD be a relief” and “universal healthcare free at the point of use like the UK’s NHS WOULD be a massive boost to the standard of living in the USA #shithole”.
Hope is all you have. Hope, and the knowledge that in any other election in history apart from the last one, the number of votes cast for Trump would have comfortably won both the popular vote and the electoral college. The MAGA/Trump/racist electorate is enormous, and the way I see it the only hope you have is that the right fragments self-destructively into factions in the way the left usually does.
Anyone who is disgusted by the ‘MAGA’ wing of hteir party but is still willing to call themselve Republican and to vote that way get none of my sympathy.
If someone is riding in a car, and looks around, and sees that everyone else in the car is wearing oversized footwear and red rubber noses, they just might be riding in the clown car. If, having realized that, they continue to ride in the clown car, they cannot claim to be surprised or upset when we call them a clown.
The “moderate” Republicans and Lincoln Project types spent decades building the monster and are upset that they lost control of it. They’re fine with racism, but just don’t be so open about it.