Can we get them to keep him?
We’ll likely have to pay a very large reverse ransom.
Why couldn’t he go to Russia? Too obvious?
“Fans of Carlson’s top-rated prime time show on Fox News learned Monday that he would be broadcasting all week from Budapest, where he would also be delivering a speech next weekend at MCC Feszt — a conference sponsored by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a think tank recently granted $1.7 billion (about 1 percent of Hungary’s GDP) by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in order to help foster the kind of nationalistic conservatism favored by his government. That includes kicking Central European University out of the country, banning the academic study of gender from colleges, allowing the ruling Fidesz Party to gobble up 90 percent of media in the country, and demonizing George Soros for cultural trends the prime minister’s supporters dislike.”
So, in the absence of a time machine, and inability to go back to 1930s Germany, Fucker Carlson settles for 2021 Hungary. You take what you can get, I guess.
at least they’re openly embracing fascism now rather than using dog whistles.
ms be that’ll drive away young people.
Quashing the press? Extreme gerrymandering? Stacking the courts? The American right has found a new darling, one who says openly that his country will remain a white one and is willing to kill democracy to make it so.
“Tucker, show me on this doll where the non-white person hurt you.”
It’s a dangerous turn, though. It’s using a major national news outlet to normalize ethno-nationalist illiberalism. I can see this becoming a thing. Tucker Carlson seems personally invested in this idea.
If he thinks Hungary is so wonderful and is embarrassed to be American, why doesn’t he just stay there?
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, a fairly important guy in conservative thought, also thinks Orban is the total shiz.
A host of rightie Twitter somehow believes that Hungary’s aversion to diversity, suppression of the press and persecution of minorities make it a country the US should be emulating.
We apparently haven’t hit bottom yet.
Assholes of the world, unite!
Assuming there is a bottom to be hit.
Eww, all them butts stuck together.
Why is he in Budapest now? Because he couldn’t get tickets to the MyPillow Symposium this week.
I did see some news-feed ramblings of his about how the architecture is so much nicer in Hungary than in the US, and that (specifically) Mies van der Rohe’s buildings in the US are so soul-sucking but here in Budapest the buildings are so much more – something. (Probably because they are so much older, perhaps?) It was a fox website, and I can’t find it again. (DuckDuckGo_com refuses to pull up fox at all, it seems.)
For the record, Mies was born in Germany and designed some of his IMHO soul-sucking buildings there (Bauhaus and early Modernism, developing modern materials and construction) before moving to the US in 1938. Okay, some of his early work was nice, but they were high-end residences.
Mies van der Rohe? There are certainly a few examples of that in Budapest but in general, it’s mostly post-war Soviet brutalist concrete nightmare.
Expressing yet more admiration for autocratic regimes is in character for Tucker but a bit odd to go there.
Right wingers in social media are curiously using the Orban visit to bolster their argument that “diversity does not make a nation better,” which is a minority belief here. I don’t know why they want to debate that because that horse has long since left the barn. The challenge is managing a free democracy with diverse cultures.
Yeah, and that’s an another odd one with the architecture stuff.
There really are a lot of examples of gorgeous architecture in Budapest - not as a single coherent plan but as the accumulation of examples across literally millennia of different cultural influences. The city is much richer culturally for having so many diverse influences.
I think the aggressive re-assertion of this execrable belief makes it easier for them to generate support for policies that actively discriminate against the horse, including denying it the right to vote, incarcerating it at an eye-poppingly disproportionate rate, passing it over for employment, poisoning its municipal drinking water supply, having law enforcement unjustly kill it, &etc.
So they create the issue on which they want to run (supply), and then take great pains to gin up its demand.
He was commenting (to be polite) on Mies in America. I don’t think Mies did any buildings in Hungary. Maybe other architects took the Bauhaus style there, but yeah, more a Soviet style I would think, though Budapest has much older architecture.
Found his speech (do a search for “tucker-carlson-hungary-speech”):
… architecture in Hungary is much different than the “dehumanizing” glass and steel of the United States, which he described as essentially demeaning to those who work and live in it. Contemporary U.S. structure are built for personnel and occupational capacity, which removes the importance of the individual:
“Dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don’t matter, that they are less significant than the larger whole, that they are not distinct souls, that they are not unique, that they are not created by God, that they are merely putty in the hands of some larger force that they must obey,” Carlson said.
“Mies van der Rohe architecture was designed to send that message not to uplift, but to oppress. And it is very noticeable and this is never noted in the United States, which unfortunately over time has had its aesthetic sense dulled. We’ve been told it’s not important,” he said …
He also wished the US had more walls with bullet holes:
He pointed to bullet holes still lodged in the Gothic buildings – something few places in the U.S. outside of towns like Gettysburg, Pa., or Franklin, Tenn., – can lay claim to.
To the American observer, Carlson said, seeing buildings wracked with wartime damage prove “a very useful reminder” to those who don’t collectively have memories or fears of things going bad in that way in one’s daily life.
“I wish I lived in a city full of bullet holes in the building because every morning you look at them and you think to yourself, it could be really bad because it’s been really bad. There’s a lot at stake,” he said, adding that the permanently damaged buildings remind Hungarians to “make wise, sober, long term decisions or else you could wind up with more bullet holes.”
Finally, he commented on how well the citizens speak English:
“Every Hungarian I have met, every from the driver to the waiter to the border guard had better English than our own president,” he said.
Though he doesn’t say which president, the one I think is president or the one he thinks is president.