Watching the drip, drip, drip of this totalitarian acid wearing away at the fabric of America is a horrendous experience. All it’s good for is helping us appreciate the fears and hopeless feelings that engulfed the European experience in the 1930s.
Will American wake up and engage with their remaining democratic systems, or will the white power structure, and their minions of fearful, instinct driven neanderthals, rather destroy everything, then share anything?
Tucker Carlson Has Seen the Future, and It Is Fascist
Orban’s Hungary is the road map for American authoritarianism.By Jonathan Chait, August 4, 2021, Intel
In 1919, the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens visited the nascent Soviet Union and declared, “I have seen the future and it works.” Tucker Carlson’s weeklong visit to Budapest, where he is using his Fox News show as an infomercial for Viktor Orban’s illiberal regime, is being conducted in much the same spirit. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now,” Carlson gushed to his viewers.
Of course, “democracy” is not a category description any small- d democrat would apply to Hungary, a state that has “dropped any pretense of respecting democratic institutions” under Orban, according to Freedom House, which no longer categorizes it as a democracy at all.
These are not mere details, and Carlson is not overlooking them.
He is laying down a marker in the highest profile way he can that Orban’s iron fist is the future the Republican Party should want.
The splashy imprimatur of a Fox News prime-time personality, who is probably the right’s most influential media figure, is an important milestone in the Republican Party’s long evolution into authoritarianism. …
This would have been unthinkable a few years back, now it’s to be expected as the Democratic Party fritters away the days as inept at messaging as ever.