Hungary is bearing the brunt of the anger of the “fever swamps of the liberal Twittersphere” after FNC’s Tucker Carlson announced he would be hosting his show from Budapest this week.
The Central European country is led by a popular national conservative-led government which has already earned the lasting ire of the left-liberal establishment in the European Union for refusing to implement the bloc’s mandatory migrant redistribution quotas, denouncing billionaire plutocrat George Soros as “one of the most corrupt people in the world” and calling out the European politicians and institutions which “serve” him, and implementing a generous system of tax breaks and financial support for parents to encourage family formation — explicitly as an alternative to mass immigration.
Most recently, the Hungarian parliament drove EU anger at the country to fever pitch by passing anti-paedophile legislation which included provisions banning the promotion of transgenderism and other LGBT content in schools, with the bloc’s unelected executive announcing legal action to try and overturn the new laws.
Against this hostile backdrop, American broadcaster Tucker Carlson — another folk devil for the liberal left — announced that he would be hosting his show Tucker Carlson Tonight from Hungary for a week, at the same time sharing a picture of himself with the country’s leader, former anti-communist dissident Viktor Orbán.
“I feel like we should all talk more about how conservatives’ dream is to make America more like this much poorer, rinky-dink little country in Central Europe,” commented Matthew Yglesias, one of a number of verified “blue checkmarks” to weigh in on Carlson’s visit on Twitter.
“Hungary’s GDP per capita is closer to Mexico than France, less than half of the United States. Like how much do you have to hate immigrants to envy this? Paprika’s not that great,” he seethed, adopting a position curiously at odds with his separate claim that President Trump’s alleged comments about “s***hole countries” stemmed from his being “a racist”.
“Orban’s Hungary is the only Axis power, that fought with the Nazi’s [sic] that is presently governed as a neo-fascist state rooted In blood and soil nationalism,” accused fellow blue check Steve Schmidt, rather more melodramatically.
“Tucker Carlson will return to America remade. No more pretending about what he is. The Bund is back. Different but back,” he added.
The Hungarian government, for its part, has adopted a relaxed posture towards the fact that, as State Secretary Zoltán Kovács puts it, “The fever swamps of the liberal Twittersphere are going completely cra-cra over a famous U.S. journalist visiting Hungary.”
Kovács also addressed some of the more fanciful allegations surrounding the visit, including the suggestion that Carlson was paid to interview the Hungarian prime minister.
“[W]hy on earth would we pay for an interview?” he said in a statement sent to Breitbart London.
“PM Orbán and gov’t get interview requests all the time. The suggestion that there was some quid pro quo is laughable,” he continued.
“Here’s an alternative headline: ‘Reporters who slam Tucker Carlson for being a conspiracist fabricate crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to explain TV personality’s visit to Hungary’.”