Trump Will Never Tweet That He Has Decided To Institute Fascism Per Se

The regime is moving at break-neck speed to set its neo-fascist agenda in cement and change the country fundamentally. “Billboards. TV campaigns. Radio programs. The anti-immigrant government… uses different levers to influence public opinion… Even school textbooks… [T]he far-right leader’s message is now woven into the school curriculum.” The country’s Constitution has been re-written and the judiciary reshaped. The leader’s appointees or supporters dominate many artistic institutions and universities. A growing number of plays and exhibitions have had nationalist undertones. Religious groups and nongovernment organizations critical of [his party] have seen funding dry up. He has especially vilified pro-democracy organizations funded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist, George Soros… National opinion surveys are used to steer public opinion as much as collect it, while history is also up for grabs. The government has jousted with educators over textbooks while promoting a narrative of… victimhood and ethnocentrism.”

Steve Bannon: “He’s my hero… the most significant guy on the scene right now.” But “That scene, some say, is the unraveling of democracy… on the “threshold of autocracy.” Another supporter insists that “The government is using its democratic legitimacy not only to reform the state but to reform the society… This is common in democratic societies.”

The leader is doing what he can “to increase the life span of his governance.” And a vert well-connected “right-wing theorist has written widely that the duty of nongovernmental groups is to preserve national identity and uphold Christian values. Most tellingly, he argues that since an elected government represents the will of the people— and since civil society should strive to fulfill the people’s will— then civil society exists to carry out a ruling party’s manifesto, rather than to challenge it. “Obviously, civil society needs to help and support the government to follow through with its promises,” [he] said in an interview this month. “This is an incredibly important thing.”

But while tax dollars are channeled towards government supporters, the government has simultaneously squeezed alternative sources of funding for NGOs that oppose its ideas, especially human rights groups and arts groups, universities and churches.

Sounds like what the Trumpist Regime is headed for, but this was something I read in the NY Times when Roland was trying to persuade me to go back to Hungary with him. To close for comfort?

think tank called Veritas, has a more demonstrably political aim. Its main mission is to provide revisionist interpretations of 20th-century Hungarian history— including the reign of Miklos Horthy, the autocrat who led Hungary before and during the Second World War.

Soon after Veritas was founded in 2014, its director, Sandor Szakaly, gave a sense of what this revision might involve. He described the deportation of Jews under Horthy in 1941 as a mere “police action against aliens.”

This kind of revisionism has also crept into the national curriculum. High school graduates can now be tested on the new preamble to the Hungarian Constitution— a controversial text which implies that Hungarian nationality is exclusively Christian, even though Hungary has a substantial Jewish minority. Its wording also reduces the agency of Hungarian officials in the final year of the Second World War, during which time hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered.

To exert greater influence over churches and synagogues themselves, Fidesz has also stripped hundreds of religious institutions of their legal status, and scrapped their state funding.

And like Trump, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s elected fascist leader is a Putin puppet. Don’t recall Hungary’s rehabilitated national hero, Admiral Miklos Horthy? About a year ago were tried putting his legacy into the context of another Hungarian fascist and current day admirer of his (and Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Or watch this if you want to get a better idea of where Trump’s brand of neo-fascism is leading: