Orban Turns to Dust
What a world, what a world
The sight of Vice President J. D. Vance campaigning for authoritarian Viktor Orban in Hungary days before the national elections was not lost on European leaders. Hapless Vance whose charisma+political gifts roughly approximates that of Trump toady, sniveling Stephen Miller, seems to have cost the strongman a few percentage points in the final hours of the campaign. Our Man in Budapest was indirectly shilling for Putin of whom Orban was a great favorite+key ally. But after 16 years, Hungarians had had enough of former liberal turned tyrant Orban as he was swept to the dustbin of history.
Immediately, the new government of Prime Minister Peter Magyar, leader of the center-right party Tisza, the binding glue of a center-right coalition, supported a substantial European Union (EU) $106 billion loan package to Ukraine for industrial+defense spending. About $10 billion is earmarked for drone procurement. Orban had opposed providing important funding for Ukraine in their war against Putin’s Russia.
Orban swung far to the right in his successful 2010 campaign, under the political guidance of reclusive American consultant Arthur Finkelstein. The Hungarian Socialist Party (which largely endorsed Tisza candidates in the parliamentary elections to form a popular front against Orban) had seen a collapse of political support because of the global recession’s cascading economy. According to the BBC, Finkelstein, an advisor to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bibi Netanyahu, designed a messaging blitz that focused on George Soros as the source of Hungary’s economic+political crises. This year, Orban updated the message — now it was the leader of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky who was harming Hungary by demanding $$ from the EU to fight Putin.
The late Finkelstein always told his clients that “it’s good to have an enemy” — he told me that over a cup of coffee+a bagel 25 years ago as some free advice. Well, no problem on the enemy front — plenty to go around these days. And this is a tried+true recipe; Nixon, his long ago client, had an entire Enemies’ List! That shrewdly predatory leader of the Silent Majority (how did he hear them exactly?) directed the IRS, Trump-style, to audit those Democrats, business leaders, actors, peace activists+nuns and priests who had hurt the frail Nixonian ego. He heard you Arthur (RIP)!
So did the last Finkelstein client. Orban’s 2 enemies, Soros+Zelensky, did no harm to Hungary but were great targets because they were Jews. Orban, like Nixon, Trump+Putin (did Arthur advise him too? There are rumors!) knew how to stir up tribal hatreds. His overt bigotry against Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants (Orban: “Hungarians don’t want to become a people of mixed races”) and all the Others was an essential strategic device for campaigning and governance.
It’s common knowledge that Orbanesque strong mannishness served as a model for Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump 2.0 (Donnie claims he never read it, which is almost certainly true since he can barely read the teleprompter anymore without sputtering into his signature WEAVE of confusion). Orban took over the Hungarian media and made most of it regime-friendly. He painstakingly rigged the courts to hurt his enemies+insulate himself from legal repercussions. After his 2010 victory, Orban created a National Judicial Office. His appointed Chair was given the power to hire+fire all of Hungary’s judges. Older judges hostile to the regime were removed. Young, regime-friendly judges were promoted by the Chair. Key enforcement and investigative appointive positions like the Prosecutor General and the State Audit Office were given extended terms; for these 2 positions, the agency head was given a 12-year appointment. Political opponents were railroaded by the Orbanized judiciary.
Other corrupt Orbanian moves had more than a whiff of Trumpism about them. In February, 2024, a list of several dozen people pardoned by Orban ally Hungarian President Katalin Novak was made public. One of the pardoned convicts was a politically connected former deputy director of a state-run children’s home near Budapest. He had been convicted of covering up the sexual abuse of minors who resided in the home. When the pardon became public, mass demonstrations occurred throughout Hungary. This led to the resignations of Novak+Judit Varga, Orban’s Justice Minister and former spouse of Peter Magyar.
Magyar promptly resigned as head of a state-owned bank, left Fidesz, joined the Tisza party and announced his candidacy against Orban. So much for Orban/Fidesz’s defining political narrative that only they could protect Hungary’s children.
There are other MAGA-traits that characterized Orban’s party apparatus. There’s plenty of crony capitalism to go around. According to the Cato Institute, by 2023, just 12 businessmen politically close to Orban received nearly 25% of the value of EU-funded contracts through closed, non-competitive bids. That didn’t stop Orban from griping about the EU’s stifling bureaucracy.
Fidesz redrew election districts in 2014 and 2018 to gerrymander their opponents out of office with the full support of the tyrant’s handpicked judges. At one point, Fidesz had a 2/3 majority in Parliament but received less than 50% of the vote. Orban also extended voting rights to Hungarians who lived abroad but would be a secure vote for his regime.
In the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, Hungary is ranked 80th out of 143 countries, far below any other EU country. In the category Constraints on Government Power, it was 123d out of 143, below Niger+El Salvador.
One of Magyar’s first pronouncements after defeating Orban was that the new administration was going to cut government ties+funding to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). The MCC is an Hungarian residential college which had been used by the Orban regime to funnel $$ into right-wing operations around the globe. One of those operations, cited directly by Magyar, is CPAC, aka the Conservative Political Action Conference. This is a nerve center of MAGA political pageantry — it was here in 2025 where untidy Epstein penpal Steve Bannon+the allegedly ketamine-enhanced Elon Musk both gave an admittedly spastic arm push that some have categorized as a Nazi salute. Musk also staggered about the stage struggling to hang on to a bejeweled chainsaw which became an instant Muskian meme, barmy Elon shearing the American Dream.
Orban also spoke at CPAC a few years earlier in 2022 to a more than half empty convention hall. The authoritarian butterball was full of bluster as he raged on about mixed race this, mixed race that, large white families good, gay+trans bad.
His Truculence clenched his chubby fists after a stream of mouth-breathing invective. His yellowish gills tightened as the smallish crowd egged him on. “The globalists can go to hell,” he enthused.
It turns out that Orban was a great CPAC benefactor. Magyar denounced both the MCC, Orban’s collegiate money laundering front and CPAC. He told CNN, “I believe the state should never have financed either of these entities in the first place. Mixing party finance with government spending…is a criminal offense.” Magyar’s government has begun an investigation of the MCC-CPAC financial connection. Here at home, Rep. Mike Levin (D-California) has called on Trump suck-up+malicious prosecutor Todd Blanche to investigate CPAC funding from Orban’s fascist networks.
MCC was a useful tool for the former dictator/illiberal statist. Paunchy Viktor gave MCC 10% of the funds from the state-run oil company MOL. MOL refines oil, 93% of which comes from Russia. That 10% vig, amounting to just under $2 billion with an annual investment income of $100 million, has been spread throughout Europe to far-right cranks of many stripes+nationalities. Russian oil funds foot the bill for all of this reactionary hodgepodge.
Throughout 2024-25, another MCC front, MCC Brussels, organized rallies and conferences of climate deniers in the home city of the EU to “challenge the EU” consensus on global warming. The conference materials called the EU net zero goals “stupid propaganda.” Gas shills blasted the RePowerEU plan which has funded solar investments and energy efficiency plans as a “degrowth” policy. Pretty thin gruel/ agitprop considering this $$ flowed from Vladdy’s high flying Gazprom+Rosneft nest egg.
But there was more.
According to DeSmog, MCC Brussels helped organize farmer protests across Europe, in some cases successfully rolling back parts of the EU green agenda in both renewables expansion and curbing pesticide use. A spox for the Farmers Defence Force (FDF), a group affiliated with MCC Brussels+Orban, claimed that the EU environmental policy committees were “deliberately exterminating farmers and food production.” The MCC Brussels website called on farmers to organize a series of rallies to protest the “EU’s overzealous green policies.” In late 2025-early 2026, some of the protests turned ugly. Farmers blocked highways with their tractors, threw eggs and manure at police and set a ring of fires near the European Parliament in protest of pesticide bans and nitrogen emissions restrictions.
MCC has forked over more than half a million pounds to the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) in the U.K. The Foundation is named after a crank who wrote smokers rights op eds/manifestoes while on the payroll of something called the Japan Tobacco International. Even the Wall Street Journal pulled the plug on old Scruton when it discovered he was a paid tobacco shill. But Roger persisted. He was welcome at Oxford (or greased the right palms) to give asinine lectures on how “Christian” society is the only strong shield against barbarism. He didn’t say “white Christian” but he knows that you know that I know what Roger S means.
In 2014, in a lecture in Hungary at the invitation of PM Orban, “an old friend”, Scruton took a swipe at their mutual obsession: “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish and form parts of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” In the same lecture Scruton prattled on about how the nation-state is a Christian “construct” which is why Pakistan or really any Islamic state “are often failures as nations.” They don’t make them like they used to.
Nowadays, anti-abortion kook James Orr sits on the RSLF board. Orr is close buds with J.D. Vance+chain-smoking, gin swilling (Taste of Brexit!) immigrant-bashing Brit far-right icon Nigel Farage. With Orr advising, the RSLF still pounds out propaganda against choice+climate activists+has hosted women-shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-vote advocate Peter Thiel for a lecture on the “Diversity Myth.” At Oxford no less.
Thiel, remember, is the emblematic tech/spook with government intel contracts up the kazoo from various countries. His company, Palantir, gets oodles of $$ essentially to collect data globally on an unsuspecting citizenry. Thiel had a warm, oligarch-buddy pen pal relationship (really email pal) with Jeffrey Epstein. This was at the same time that Thiel invested in a newish product, the ever shifting blob of mercury now called J. D. Vance, the white-guy Scrutonian construct which is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thiel Inc.
Vance~Orban~CPAC~Scruton/Orr~Thiel~Vance. Well, maybe they still do make them like they used to.