A ‘Dictatorship’ of Deception

On the drive into Budapest from the airport, travelers can see billboards erected by the Hungarian political opposition, featuring a photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the slogan “God? Homeland? Pedophilia!” It’s a reference to the recent scandal involving a presidential pardon of a politically connected man who had been convicted of aiding in a pedophilia cover-up. The scandal cost the ruling Fidesz party its top two female politicians: President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga.

Associating the prime minister, who apparently did not know about the pardon until the media reported it, and who quickly called for resignations of these top allies, is a low blow. But that’s how it goes in Hungary. Fidesz is not above similar tactics. If you expect Magyar politics to be a tea party, you are going to be disappointed.

Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now? 

It hasn’t happened, because Hungary is vastly more respectful of free speech than many of the liberal democracies whose authoritarianism draws no condemnation, or even notice. 

In Finland, for example, the state is planning to put on trial for a third time Païvi Räsänen, a Finnish parliamentarian and former state minister, who was twice acquitted on the same hate crimes charges. What did she do wrong? In 2019, Räsänen, a Protestant grandmother, tweeted out a Bible verse critical of homosexuality. Plus, state prosecutors are going after her for a 2004 pamphlet she authored with a Finnish Lutheran bishop, explaining the Christian view of sexuality (that is, why homosexuality is considered sinful). 

Think about it: Finland, a liberal democracy, is putting a petite grandmother on trial for quoting the Bible on Twitter, and for writing a pamphlet with a bishop twenty years ago explaining traditional Christian sexual morals. 

This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. Has President Biden spoken out in defense of Païvi Räsänen? Have any European government leaders? Has the media called Finland an illiberal autocracy? Of course not. Authoritarianism, even dictatorial moves, are fine when carried out in service of left-wing policy goals.

Americans are very fortunate to have the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and expression. Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the free speech environment now has more in common with Hungary under Communist rule than Hungary under Viktor Orban.

In Ireland, the police have a unit whose policy it is to encourage the public not only to report all ‘hate crimes’—acts of bias that are illegal—but also ‘hate incidents.’ ‘What is that?’ you may ask. According to the government guideline:

Any Non-Crime Incident which is perceived by any person to, in whole or in part, be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on actual or perceived age, disability, race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender.

If someone merely believes they have seen or heard something non-criminal, but that might be connected, even tangentially, to prejudice, the Irish police want that person to contact them and file a report denouncing the other person as a bigot. The police will then have a record of that person’s record of what you might call a “thought non-crime.” How do you suppose that record will affect the accused’s employment prospects, for one? 

Nothing remotely this draconian and sinister governs speech in Hungary, at least not since the fall of Communism. But where are the critics of this totalitarian practice? Silent, of course.

In Scotland, coppers are reportedly planning to investigate comedians if someone files a complaint against them under the new speech regulatory law, which comes into effect next week. Under provisions in the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, police with a warrant may break down the door of your house, search it, and seize your laptop if they have reason to believe that you are in possession of a dangerously ‘hateful’ meme. 

After listing an extensive collection of protected classes and characteristics that one may not insult, under threat of prison and fines, the law states, without any apparent irony, “The common law offence of blasphemy is abolished.”

Right. You are free in Scotland to slander God, but if you speak ill of a bloke with a ladypenis, to the dungeons with you, heretic! 

Earlier this month in England, anti-immigration activist Sam Melia was sentenced to two years in prison. As this magazine’s Harrison Pitt wrote:

His offence? Making and distributing stickers with slogans like “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066” and “Stop mass immigration.” Other tags included “Reject white guilt,” “Stop anti-white rape gangs,” and “Love your nation.”

You might find that distasteful—I don’t—but how can it be criminal in a free society to say such things? Is Britain now unfree? Well, as Pitt pointed out, significantly, it’s not that the British state opposes free speech per se. It’s rather that “Britain has ceased to be free for a certain kind of person: namely, those of us whose ancestors built the country and who, owing to this heritage, have no other place in the world to call home.”

The examples are endless, and we didn’t even talk about Canada, but you get the point. Hungary, which supposedly groans under the burden of the Orban dictatorship, enjoys far more freedom of expression than countries whose media and whose leaders condemn it as repressive. You have to wonder why.

It’s because Western public discourse is substantially governed by the old Leninist principle of “Who, whom?” That is, the goodness or badness of a thing depends on who it helps, and whom it hurts. The guardians of what is now called “our democracy” are willing to accept all manner of surveillance, suppression of speech, jailing of offenders, and banning of discussion, if it advances progressive beliefs and goals. 

And if not? Well, then you are an evil fascist dictatorship that needs a Color Revolution to get right with the world. The British government has just jailed a man who, albeit among one or two antisemitic remarks which I condemn, called for stopping immigration and for police action against anti-white rape gangs, but to Western elites, it’s the Orban government that is barbaric for passing a law prohibiting teachers telling children that they might be transgender. 

None of this is new, exactly. From the time I started working as a journalist in the late 1980s, conservatives have always complained about liberal media bias. The idea was that the media, which was then, as now, dominated heavily by people of the Left, tried to live up to a professional obligation to fairness, and would be willing to adjust their reporting if shown examples of their own bias. That framework went out of date at least two decades ago.

Here are a couple of minor but telling examples from U.S. media this week. NBC News recently hired Ronna McDaniel, who ran the Republican National Committee under Donald Trump, as an on-air political commentator. NBC journalists are up in arms about it, with some prominent TV personalities publicly condemning their network for hiring a partisan Republican. 

But one of MSNBC’s sister network’s top hosts is Jen Psaki, who joined after leaving her post as Joe Biden’s first White House press secretary. Nicolle Wallace, who ran communications for the George W. Bush White House, moved leftward and is now a host on the same network. Over on rival network ABC, one of its top on-air journalists is George Stephanopoulos, who first came to prominence as a campaign strategist for Bill Clinton, then as a Clinton White House official. 

Meanwhile, the cover story of New York magazine this week is an exhaustive takedown of Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist who hosts one of the world’s most popular health podcasts—one that appeals heavily to men. According to the gossipy story, based on interviews with his ex-girlfriends, Huberman is a narcissist who sleeps around a lot.

Yet two months ago, the same magazine ran a cover story promising a guide to polyamory, which it celebrated as the next big, fun thing in sexual liberation. So, being sexually adventurous and non-monogamous is great … except when someone whom the Left weirdly codes as right-wing does it. 

Fair enough: there is little more tiresome than right-wing people pointing at left-wingers and calling out hypocrisy. The darker current behind these instances, though, is one that is destabilizing for liberal democracy. It is something that goes beyond mere hypocrisy. 

We have reached the stage where those who manage the media and other institutions simply do not accept as true facts that do not fit into their preferred narrative. This is how Finland, Ireland, Scotland, England, and other liberal democracies can pass laws that have more in common with authoritarian regimes, even totalitarian ones—yet escape condemnation from would-be defenders of liberal democracy. They likely don’t even see the problem.

In her 1951 classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said that a totalitarian state is one that seeks not only political control, but also to define and control people’s perception of reality. Moreover, she said that in a totalitarian society, “What convinces the masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.”

You can see this process at work on the Left within the media, which is the chief definer of reality beyond our personal circles. Again, this is not new. Around twenty years ago, when the United States was debating the gay marriage issue, the media made no attempt to give a fair accounting of the pros and cons. As one journalist colleague told me, to give attention to Christians and other social conservatives who opposed same-sex marriage would be the moral equivalent of giving equal treatment to the Ku Klux Klan during the black civil rights movement. 

In Texas, the state where we worked, more than half the population at the time opposed same-sex marriage. But in our newsroom, very few people opposed it, and those who did kept their mouths shut, for fear that they would be punished for bigotry. 

Again, so what? The liberal media lies? This is news? 

Yes, for this reason: in liberal democracies, faith in public institutions is collapsing, even as the global economic and national security situation grows more unstable. Surveying the political scene in pre-Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt noted a “terrifying negative solidarity” among a diverse number of people, who were united in their belief that all the people involved in public institutions were fools and knaves.

With European elections coming up, one hopes that European publics understand that the ruling classes in their countries—including media figures—are often misleading them into thinking the world is other than as it is. If they can convince people within their own countries and media environments that conservative Hungary is a dictatorship (and who will tell those people otherwise?), then these ruling classes stand to redirect criticism that ought to be aimed at them, for how they have governed. You can fool a lot of people, a lot of the time, by following a Leninist who/whom strategy—especially when you have near-hegemony over the information environment. 

It can’t last forever. Eventually, enough people will begin to see through “who/whom,” and start to focus on what the ruling class is doing, and not doing—and want to know why they have to live with the lies that support the liberal status quo. 

Then again, maybe not. Imagine that inside of their jail cells in Ireland and the UK, political prisoners convicted of hate speech inwardly rejoice that however miserable their own confinement, at least their democratic countries aren’t like terrible, horrible, no-good Hungary. In that case, these poor souls truly will have learned to love Big Brother.