In the spring of 2021, on my first fellowship at the Danube Institute in Budapest, I arranged a meeting with a leading anti-Orbán dissident. My goal was to find out what the Fidesz government’s opponents disliked about it. My interlocutor, a university professor, recited a list of complaints. Among them: Hungary does not allow same-sex marriage and same-sex couples to adopt children. The professor, a liberal, said he believes strongly in gay rights. “But I’m not sure what I think about the transgender issue.”
At the end of our talk, the professor concluded, “Despite all that, I can say anything I want in my classroom, and no one from the government will bother me.”
I told him that the same is true in the United States, my country. But, I said, there are more than a few universities where the thing you said when we first started talking—that you didn’t know what you thought about transgenderism—would cause some students to claim that they were harmed by your hesitation. They might go to the university administration and file a formal complaint. You would be investigated for bigotry, and if you were found guilty, you would probably be fired, and never work again in academia.
“So,” I said, “who is more free: you as a liberal professor in Orbán’s Hungary, or your counterpart in Biden’s America?”
The man seemed shocked. He had no idea the free speech situation was so bad on some U.S. college campuses. It’s hard to blame him. If his main source of information was the mainstream media, both American and European, he would not have been told the truth.
A few months later, the Hungarian parliament passed into law restrictions on literature and other content promoting LGBT material to children and minors. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the time that the purpose of the law is to empower parents to decide when and whether to expose their children to this information.
European elites exploded with rage. Thirteen EU leaders signed a letter in response, affirming their commitment to advancing LGBT rights. Mark Rutte, then the Dutch prime minister, went the farthest, howling that Hungary “has no business being in the European Union anymore.”
Think about that: Mark Rutte, the incoming secretary general of NATO, believes that a country that restricts information about queer sexuality and transgenderism for its children is a country that has no place in Europe. And nobody in Western Europe bats an eyelash at this.
Fast-forward to August 2024. Sporadic race riots popped up across Britain as white working-class Britons expressed outrage over migrant crime and the fact that the UK government does little or nothing to stop wave after wave of asylum seekers from entering the country. The Labour government of Keir Starmer responds to the violence in part by cracking down on free speech.
As Frank Haviland detailed in The European Conservative, stories of ordinary Britons arrested and even given harsh jail terms for things they said on social media are now common. And, as Haviland showed, the enforcement is selective, aimed at whites and non-Muslims; the Starmer government gives racial minorities and followers of the Prophet far more leeway. ‘Two-tier’ policing also shows up in policing speech.
The situation is so dire in the United Kingdom that former MP and Tory official Lord David Frost declares that Britain is no longer a free country. Lord Frost points out that the country’s speech laws grant despotic powers to the state—powers that the Labour prime minister is now exercising remorselessly.
One practical problem of all this, he says, is that it has now become impossible to debate with honesty the very real crises Britain faces over mass migration and crime. How can any society deal with its serious problems if merely talking about the problems in a way the authorities dislike can land someone in prison?
“We prided ourselves on being a free country in which we could speak freely. We simply cannot say that now,” writes Lord Frost. “We are, in fact, all vulnerable. Say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and any of us might find the police at our door.”
He’s not exaggerating. This is happening in a liberal democracy—indeed, in the very country where liberal democracy was invented. And yet, not a peep of protest has been heard from European leaders—and it is certainly not because of Brexit, either.
The reason is obvious: most European leaders almost certainly see no problem with the Starmer government’s moves, and surely plan to do the same thing to their own people if faced with a similar situation. In her January address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ursula von der Leyen identified “disinformation” as the greatest challenge facing Europe and its business leaders. Not mass migration, not faltering economies, not the war in Ukraine—but rather, disinformation.
Why? Because, said von der Leyen, you can’t effectively tackle problems in such an environment. She would say that, wouldn’t she? Free people who have the liberty to dissent from the official stories promulgated by the ruling class are more difficult to govern. It is harder to tell them what to do, and expect them to obey.
“There will always be attempts to put us off track,” said von der Leyen. “For example, with disinformation and misinformation. And nowhere has there been more of that than on the issue of Ukraine.”
Indeed. In 2022, saboteurs blew up the Nord Stream pipeline bringing Russian natural gas to Europe, thus striking a massive blow against the European economy. At the time of the explosion, Russia supplied 46 percent of Europe’s natural gas; today, that number is a mere 16 percent. Back then, the European Commission president herself thundered that discovery of deliberate disruption would bring about “the strongest possible response” from European governments.
Well. Last week, the Wall Street Journal, citing multiple senior Ukrainian sources, as well as Western intelligence and police sources, reported that Ukrainian agents blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Volodymr Zelensky reportedly knew about the operation in advance, and, under CIA pressure, ordered the Ukrainian team to stand down—to no avail.
Von der Leyen has been at the forefront of campaigning across Europe for supporting Ukraine. In 2023, she gave a major speech calling for Ukraine’s admission to the European Union. Now that it is all but certain that Ukraine itself blew up this critical piece of Europe’s economic infrastructure, how can von der Leyen and the rest of the ruling class maintain their unshakably pro-Ukraine position?
In that same Davos speech, von der Leyen countered what she called “disinformation” about the Russia-Ukraine war. She said that Russia had failed militarily, economically, and diplomatically, concluding that “all of this tells us that Ukraine can prevail in this war.”
Oh? Who is disinforming whom, Madame? At summer’s end, it is clear that Ukraine cannot prevail in this war—despite its current counter-offensive in Russia. But it was even clear to many at the time of von der Leyen’s Davos talk. Foreign policy analyst Anatol Lieven observed back then that:
For Ukrainians to stand a chance, military history suggests that they would need a 3-to-2 advantage in manpower and considerably more firepower. Ukraine enjoyed these advantages in the first year of the war, but they now lie with Russia, and it is very difficult to see how Ukraine can recover them.
Good luck with getting “considerably more firepower.” Western arms manufacturing capacity, having slowed considerably since the end of the Cold War, now cannot keep up with Ukraine’s needs—or even its own. How was this a Russian loss?
Economically, Russia is booming. As the BBC reported earlier this summer, the Russian economy, despite being hit by a barrage of punishing Western sanctions, is thriving. The IMF predicts that Russia’s economy will grow 3.2% this year—more than any of the advanced Western economies. What’s more, the loss of Western markets compelled the Russians to find new ones for their products elsewhere. Europe and the United States took its best economic shots at Russia—and missed.
The accession of Finland to NATO was certainly a diplomatic and foreign policy blow to Russia, which shares a long border with that country. But the West’s response to the Ukraine war has also driven Russia much closer to China, which the United States has long seen as its chief rival. It is hard to see how strengthening the alliance of two nuclear superpowers hostile to America is, on balance, a diplomatic loss for Russia. Maybe the view looks different from Brussels.
At least these points are arguable, and should have been argued about from the beginning. In 2022, when Russia invaded, it fell to Viktor Orbán to voice skepticism about NATO’s role in this war. He said from the start that Ukraine couldn’t hope to prevail, and that all parties should be working toward a ceasefire. For that, Orbán has been consistently vilified by the Western establishment as Putin’s lapdog.
A year ago, Orbán warned that Ukraine’s fall counteroffensive would fail. He was right about that. Few people in the U.S. and Europe wanted to listen to Orbán, though, because they had accepted the ruling class’s framing that the only reason the Hungarian leader said the things he did about Ukraine was because he was a Russian stooge. Negative opinions about NATO’s proxy war, whether voiced by Orbán or other dissenters, were routinely dismissed, even shouted down, as Russian disinformation.
But the dissenters were right—or at least far more correct than their opponents claimed. In fact, as this grim war grinds on, Viktor Orbán appears to have been vindicated. The firewall European and American institutional leaders, including in the media, erected to prevent critical discussion of war strategy made it all but impossible to view the Russia-Ukraine conflict realistically, and, in turn, to make informed policy decisions.
This is precisely what Lord Frost warns about in Britain, with regard to that country’s urgent problems with crime and mass migration. Not only is an open discussion of these issues socially marginalized as unwelcome by elites, but now the speech laws actually might make criminals of British subjects who simply object to what is happening to their country.
This doesn’t happen in Hungary. True, Hungary restricts speech aimed at children and minors, as most countries do, recognizing that children are in a special category. But Hungarians don’t go to jail for social media memes, or for criticizing the government, or for sending “grossly offensive” messages privately (as the UK’s 2003 Communications Act outlaws). Then again, Hungary doesn’t have migrant crime, two-tier policing, or race riots because of uncontrolled migration permitted by the authorities. Great Britain does, and many continental European countries, which have the same problems, may face the same civil unrest in the near future.
No wonder European Commissioner Thierry Breton send a chilling warning to Elon Musk over information appearing on X. Musk’s social media network is one of the few places Britons can get information about the race riots that conflicts with the official line. Breton must fear how, in the case of migrant-related rioting in Europe, X could falsify the official story mandarins like him want people to believe. If these elites—including media elites—can demonize Elon Musk and Viktor Orbán, they can avoid accountability for their own failures—including their failures to tell the truth to European peoples.
If Lord Frost is right, and the UK is no longer a free country because of the government’s despotic crackdown on free speech, especially speech critical of the special treatment given to migrants and Muslims, then the free people of Hungary would be happy to offer them refuge. In a pub last week, I drank beer with a conservative Englishman who is considering making the move. He marveled at all the Brits and Western Europeans he sees in Budapest now, escaping the migration and crime crises in their own countries—and the inability to talk about these things back home without being socially censured, or even sanctioned by criminal law.
“I’m surprised a journalist hasn’t covered this yet,” said a second Englishmen in our party. I’m not. The unstated premise of all Western media coverage of Hungary is: Viktor Orbán cannot ever be right. Of course Hungary is not more free than Great Britain. Don’t be daft. Read about it in The Guardian. Now, you lot sit down, shut up and think before you post—or else!
What Does It Mean To Be a Free Country?
In the spring of 2021, on my first fellowship at the Danube Institute in Budapest, I arranged a meeting with a leading anti-Orbán dissident. My goal was to find out what the Fidesz government’s opponents disliked about it. My interlocutor, a university professor, recited a list of complaints. Among them: Hungary does not allow same-sex marriage and same-sex couples to adopt children. The professor, a liberal, said he believes strongly in gay rights. “But I’m not sure what I think about the transgender issue.”
At the end of our talk, the professor concluded, “Despite all that, I can say anything I want in my classroom, and no one from the government will bother me.”
I told him that the same is true in the United States, my country. But, I said, there are more than a few universities where the thing you said when we first started talking—that you didn’t know what you thought about transgenderism—would cause some students to claim that they were harmed by your hesitation. They might go to the university administration and file a formal complaint. You would be investigated for bigotry, and if you were found guilty, you would probably be fired, and never work again in academia.
“So,” I said, “who is more free: you as a liberal professor in Orbán’s Hungary, or your counterpart in Biden’s America?”
The man seemed shocked. He had no idea the free speech situation was so bad on some U.S. college campuses. It’s hard to blame him. If his main source of information was the mainstream media, both American and European, he would not have been told the truth.
A few months later, the Hungarian parliament passed into law restrictions on literature and other content promoting LGBT material to children and minors. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the time that the purpose of the law is to empower parents to decide when and whether to expose their children to this information.
European elites exploded with rage. Thirteen EU leaders signed a letter in response, affirming their commitment to advancing LGBT rights. Mark Rutte, then the Dutch prime minister, went the farthest, howling that Hungary “has no business being in the European Union anymore.”
Think about that: Mark Rutte, the incoming secretary general of NATO, believes that a country that restricts information about queer sexuality and transgenderism for its children is a country that has no place in Europe. And nobody in Western Europe bats an eyelash at this.
Fast-forward to August 2024. Sporadic race riots popped up across Britain as white working-class Britons expressed outrage over migrant crime and the fact that the UK government does little or nothing to stop wave after wave of asylum seekers from entering the country. The Labour government of Keir Starmer responds to the violence in part by cracking down on free speech.
As Frank Haviland detailed in The European Conservative, stories of ordinary Britons arrested and even given harsh jail terms for things they said on social media are now common. And, as Haviland showed, the enforcement is selective, aimed at whites and non-Muslims; the Starmer government gives racial minorities and followers of the Prophet far more leeway. ‘Two-tier’ policing also shows up in policing speech.
The situation is so dire in the United Kingdom that former MP and Tory official Lord David Frost declares that Britain is no longer a free country. Lord Frost points out that the country’s speech laws grant despotic powers to the state—powers that the Labour prime minister is now exercising remorselessly.
One practical problem of all this, he says, is that it has now become impossible to debate with honesty the very real crises Britain faces over mass migration and crime. How can any society deal with its serious problems if merely talking about the problems in a way the authorities dislike can land someone in prison?
“We prided ourselves on being a free country in which we could speak freely. We simply cannot say that now,” writes Lord Frost. “We are, in fact, all vulnerable. Say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and any of us might find the police at our door.”
He’s not exaggerating. This is happening in a liberal democracy—indeed, in the very country where liberal democracy was invented. And yet, not a peep of protest has been heard from European leaders—and it is certainly not because of Brexit, either.
The reason is obvious: most European leaders almost certainly see no problem with the Starmer government’s moves, and surely plan to do the same thing to their own people if faced with a similar situation. In her January address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ursula von der Leyen identified “disinformation” as the greatest challenge facing Europe and its business leaders. Not mass migration, not faltering economies, not the war in Ukraine—but rather, disinformation.
Why? Because, said von der Leyen, you can’t effectively tackle problems in such an environment. She would say that, wouldn’t she? Free people who have the liberty to dissent from the official stories promulgated by the ruling class are more difficult to govern. It is harder to tell them what to do, and expect them to obey.
“There will always be attempts to put us off track,” said von der Leyen. “For example, with disinformation and misinformation. And nowhere has there been more of that than on the issue of Ukraine.”
Indeed. In 2022, saboteurs blew up the Nord Stream pipeline bringing Russian natural gas to Europe, thus striking a massive blow against the European economy. At the time of the explosion, Russia supplied 46 percent of Europe’s natural gas; today, that number is a mere 16 percent. Back then, the European Commission president herself thundered that discovery of deliberate disruption would bring about “the strongest possible response” from European governments.
Well. Last week, the Wall Street Journal, citing multiple senior Ukrainian sources, as well as Western intelligence and police sources, reported that Ukrainian agents blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Volodymr Zelensky reportedly knew about the operation in advance, and, under CIA pressure, ordered the Ukrainian team to stand down—to no avail.
Von der Leyen has been at the forefront of campaigning across Europe for supporting Ukraine. In 2023, she gave a major speech calling for Ukraine’s admission to the European Union. Now that it is all but certain that Ukraine itself blew up this critical piece of Europe’s economic infrastructure, how can von der Leyen and the rest of the ruling class maintain their unshakably pro-Ukraine position?
In that same Davos speech, von der Leyen countered what she called “disinformation” about the Russia-Ukraine war. She said that Russia had failed militarily, economically, and diplomatically, concluding that “all of this tells us that Ukraine can prevail in this war.”
Oh? Who is disinforming whom, Madame? At summer’s end, it is clear that Ukraine cannot prevail in this war—despite its current counter-offensive in Russia. But it was even clear to many at the time of von der Leyen’s Davos talk. Foreign policy analyst Anatol Lieven observed back then that:
Good luck with getting “considerably more firepower.” Western arms manufacturing capacity, having slowed considerably since the end of the Cold War, now cannot keep up with Ukraine’s needs—or even its own. How was this a Russian loss?
Economically, Russia is booming. As the BBC reported earlier this summer, the Russian economy, despite being hit by a barrage of punishing Western sanctions, is thriving. The IMF predicts that Russia’s economy will grow 3.2% this year—more than any of the advanced Western economies. What’s more, the loss of Western markets compelled the Russians to find new ones for their products elsewhere. Europe and the United States took its best economic shots at Russia—and missed.
The accession of Finland to NATO was certainly a diplomatic and foreign policy blow to Russia, which shares a long border with that country. But the West’s response to the Ukraine war has also driven Russia much closer to China, which the United States has long seen as its chief rival. It is hard to see how strengthening the alliance of two nuclear superpowers hostile to America is, on balance, a diplomatic loss for Russia. Maybe the view looks different from Brussels.
At least these points are arguable, and should have been argued about from the beginning. In 2022, when Russia invaded, it fell to Viktor Orbán to voice skepticism about NATO’s role in this war. He said from the start that Ukraine couldn’t hope to prevail, and that all parties should be working toward a ceasefire. For that, Orbán has been consistently vilified by the Western establishment as Putin’s lapdog.
A year ago, Orbán warned that Ukraine’s fall counteroffensive would fail. He was right about that. Few people in the U.S. and Europe wanted to listen to Orbán, though, because they had accepted the ruling class’s framing that the only reason the Hungarian leader said the things he did about Ukraine was because he was a Russian stooge. Negative opinions about NATO’s proxy war, whether voiced by Orbán or other dissenters, were routinely dismissed, even shouted down, as Russian disinformation.
But the dissenters were right—or at least far more correct than their opponents claimed. In fact, as this grim war grinds on, Viktor Orbán appears to have been vindicated. The firewall European and American institutional leaders, including in the media, erected to prevent critical discussion of war strategy made it all but impossible to view the Russia-Ukraine conflict realistically, and, in turn, to make informed policy decisions.
This is precisely what Lord Frost warns about in Britain, with regard to that country’s urgent problems with crime and mass migration. Not only is an open discussion of these issues socially marginalized as unwelcome by elites, but now the speech laws actually might make criminals of British subjects who simply object to what is happening to their country.
This doesn’t happen in Hungary. True, Hungary restricts speech aimed at children and minors, as most countries do, recognizing that children are in a special category. But Hungarians don’t go to jail for social media memes, or for criticizing the government, or for sending “grossly offensive” messages privately (as the UK’s 2003 Communications Act outlaws). Then again, Hungary doesn’t have migrant crime, two-tier policing, or race riots because of uncontrolled migration permitted by the authorities. Great Britain does, and many continental European countries, which have the same problems, may face the same civil unrest in the near future.
No wonder European Commissioner Thierry Breton send a chilling warning to Elon Musk over information appearing on X. Musk’s social media network is one of the few places Britons can get information about the race riots that conflicts with the official line. Breton must fear how, in the case of migrant-related rioting in Europe, X could falsify the official story mandarins like him want people to believe. If these elites—including media elites—can demonize Elon Musk and Viktor Orbán, they can avoid accountability for their own failures—including their failures to tell the truth to European peoples.
If Lord Frost is right, and the UK is no longer a free country because of the government’s despotic crackdown on free speech, especially speech critical of the special treatment given to migrants and Muslims, then the free people of Hungary would be happy to offer them refuge. In a pub last week, I drank beer with a conservative Englishman who is considering making the move. He marveled at all the Brits and Western Europeans he sees in Budapest now, escaping the migration and crime crises in their own countries—and the inability to talk about these things back home without being socially censured, or even sanctioned by criminal law.
“I’m surprised a journalist hasn’t covered this yet,” said a second Englishmen in our party. I’m not. The unstated premise of all Western media coverage of Hungary is: Viktor Orbán cannot ever be right. Of course Hungary is not more free than Great Britain. Don’t be daft. Read about it in The Guardian. Now, you lot sit down, shut up and think before you post—or else!
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