Billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who single-handedly bankrolled JD Vance to the U.S. Senate and five minutes later propelled the Ohioan into the office of Vice President, placed his biggest techno-authoritarian bet on his protégé.
Last week, Vance tried to come through for his Silicon Valley sugar daddy.
In a stunning moment of betrayal of democracy, Vance traveled to Budapest to boost the flagging re-election campaign of a Hungarian despot over his pro-democracy opponent.
Hold that mind-blowing thought for a nanosecond; the sitting veep of the world’s oldest continuous democracy stood with the ruthless head of a tyrannical white Christian nationalist regime and suggested America’s “values” aligned with Viktor Orban.
To be clear, the wildly corrupt prime minister of Hungary (and Putin ally) has systemically dismantled democratic checks and balances in his country, taken control of almost all media and universities, weakened judicial independence, rigged election rules to favor his ruling party and undercut the opposition, suppressed dissent, rescinded civil rights, and oppressed state “enemies” which are typically people of color, immigrants, women, the disabled, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
This is the gem Vance praised and posed with in pictures five days before Hungarians were set to vote for an authoritarian, renowned for 16 years of corruption, or a center-right, socially conservative member of the European Parliament who offered change focused on domestic problems. (Peter Magyar, 45, who had been leading throughout the race, won overwhelmingly Sunday).
Vance backed the loser with the full weight of the Trump-Vance administration.
He gave a ringing endorsement of the Kremlin puppet and even parroted Russian propaganda about Ukraine “interfering” in Hungary’s election (while Russia wages unrelenting war against Ukraine) and also blasted the European Union for election meddling in the supreme irony noted by everyone but Vance.
“All that we’re saying is that Viktor Orban, he does a good job,” said the awkward 41-year-old who hailed the “moral cooperation” between Orban’s repressive reign and the United States.
In his final exhortation to a Budapest crowd, Vance lionized Orban as a champion of democracy, freedom, truth, and “the God of our fathers.”
He had to bring in religion to whitewash an ironfisted authoritarian who, in fact, destroyed democratic institutions, crushed individual rights, muzzled a free press, and used Christianity as a political tool to consolidate power, justify anti-LGBTQ+ laws and attract far-right, Christianity-as-culture allies globally.
Count among them true believers in the MAGA New Right movement, its architect Peter Thiel, and his ambitious acolyte from a suburb of Cincinnati plotting presidential glory.
The latest iteration of the New Right coalition in the U.S., inspired by Thiel — when he isn’t amassing personal information on all Americans with Palantir’s AI-powered super-database embedded in the federal government — made Orban its pseudo intellectual and spiritual godfather.
The Hungarian strongman had replaced a liberal democracy — a system of government that upholds the rule of law, protects equality and ensures that every individual has a voice — with an illiberal democracy that ignores constitutional limits on absolute power (sound familiar?) and deprives its citizens of basic rights and freedoms.
He did what Thiel’s New Right disciples only dream of doing.
Orban engineered a working model of patriarchal orthodoxy that merged Christian nationalist ideology with state governance.
He became a hero to MAGA’s white supremacy/neo-Nazi factions when he railed against Europe becoming a “mixed-race” society and received a rapturous welcome by American audiences at Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC) when he portrayed western civilization as being under siege from godless progressives, illegal immigrants, same-sex marriage and, of course, Hungarian billionaire/philanthropist George Soros, the universal right-wing bogeyman.
Orban was feted as a star by MAGA New Right zealots, including Vance, who envision a homogenous, ultra-nationalist, post-democratic rule in America that promotes Christian and ethno-nationalism and a nostalgia for old gender norms.
Orban’s Hungary was a laboratory for how to eradicate democracy without a messy coup.
His government steadily chipped away political rights and civil liberties through legalistic manipulation of institutions and “executive aggrandizement” to strengthen its grip on power.
Orban deployed stealth authoritarianism to erase multiculturalism and individual rights in favor of state power that could be used punitively to enforce a specific moral order and cripple resistance.
This is the kind of dystopian society — untainted by large-scale migration of non-white people who could make the population with shared descent and ancestry a minority — that JD Vance endorsed with the fervor of a crusader for autocratic “domination and imposition.”
The veep saw Orban’s transformation of Hungary from a secular, pluralistic society into an “anti-woke” nation centered on cultural homogeneity as the new European and American future.
He stood with the Putin-aligned prime minister — who degraded a once prosperous country into one of Europe’s poorest, a state stripped of personal and economic freedoms and corrupted by unrestrained executive power and crony capitalism — and urged its oppressed populace to vote for more abuse.
Hungarian voters ignored Vance’s laughable assertions that Orban had “kept your country strong and kept your country good and you don’t have problems with all of the problems that so many other countries have…because they let their countries be invaded.”
Tens of thousands of citizens poured into the streets of Budapest in a massive show of support following the opposition leader’s landslide victory over Orban.
Vance embraced a Russian-backed authoritarian in the name of America.
He betrayed our values.
The shame is all his.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.
