April 14, 2022 (1w ago)
Hungary held an election last week, and the result was not close. Viktor Orban’s conservative populist Fidesz party cruised to victory with 54% of the vote — beating a coalition of opposition parties by twenty points — and once again winning a supermajority in the Hungarian parliament.
To the delight of actual Americans, the Globalist American Empire is devastated.
https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/st...30232273195009
If Hungary really votes overwhelmingly against democracy and for corruption I cannot see why it should be accepted in the EU. Kick it out!Quote Tweet4:25 PM · Apr 3, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
EUobserver @euobs · Apr 3
#Hungary's nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán, Russian president Vladimir Putin's closest EU ally, was set to secure another supermajority in parliament in Sunday's general election against a united opposition https://euobserver.com/democracy/154644
https://twitter.com/BobbyMcDonagh1/s...71676979982344It’s not hard to figure out what is going on here. There is nothing “extreme” or “anti-democratic” about Orban’s government. Hungary has invaded nobody and threatens nobody. Unlike America, it is not holding any political prisoners in third-world torture gulags. Its positions on immigration and gay rights are indistinguishable from those held by many countries right now, or those held by the U.S. all of 25 years ago.
EU now has no choice but to find a way of suspending Hungary’s EU membership. 🇭🇺 Gov not just pro-Putin but anti-democratic
1:47 AM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
Hungary’s only crime is supposedly “voting against democracy.” This bizarre formulation reveals far more about the Globalist American Empire than it does about Hungary, though. Every one of the Globalist American Empire’s complaints about Hungary’s “dying” democracy is fake. For our corrupt ruling class, “liberal democracy” is a fake gloss thinly disguising a demand for total political submission.
In reality, Hungary is far more of a democracy than the United States and has been for decades. That is partly why Hungary’s government is so hated.
To see how fake all of our Regime’s complaints are, one only has to contrast Hungary’s supposedly “illiberal” election with those held in the West in the past few years. Shortly after the election, the Wall Street Journal breezily explained the Hungarian scandal to its allegedly sophisticated readership (emphasis ours):
Beyond Ukraine, the legitimacy of Mr. Orban’s victory itself hung in the balance Sunday, with election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe saying they would discuss their findings Monday. The intergovernmental security group took the rare step of dispatching 316 observers on Sunday; it found the last election, in 2018, free but not fair, citing restricted media freedoms and state funding for Mr. Orban’s ruling party.Using a majority in parliament to change election laws? How horrible! Hasn’t Hungary learned that the proper way to change election laws is to circumvent the legislature and use unaccountable courts and election boards to do the dirty work? As Mollie Hemingway wrote regarding the Democratic tactic of “sue and settle” that was utilized to great effect in the state of Georgia in 2020:
In Brussels, the EU has been weighing whether to cut funding for Hungary. European lawmakers have argued that Mr. Orban has used his majority in parliament to rewrite election laws, redraw voting districts, and permit mail-in ballots without identity verification from communities that favor him.
Democrats use various strategies to implement changes to voting laws in order to limit election integrity or make it more difficult for election overseers and observers to detect election fraud. One of the approaches is termed “sue and settle.”In the U.S., Joe Biden’s “victory” hinged on unprecedented mail-in voting with no ID requirement, no secure chain of custody, and no signature verification. But in 2020, the Globalist American Empire’s need to make Hungary a pariah changes everything. Now, mail-in voting and Voter ID is horrible, anti-democratic, and maybe even fascist.
Perkins Coie, the law firm that also ordered what became the Russia collusion hoax against Trump in 2016, runs an extremely well-funded and highly coordinated operation to alter how U.S. elections are run. The firm will sue states and get them to make agreements that alter their voting practices.
Marc Elias, well known for his role in the Russia collusion hoax and other Democrat operations, runs the campaign to change voting laws and practices to favor Democrats. Perkins Coie billed the Democrat Party at least $27 million for its efforts to radically change voting laws ahead of the 2020 election, more than double what they charged Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee for similar work in 2016. Elias was sanctioned in federal court just yesterday for some shenanigans related to a Texas election integrity case.
In March, Raffensperger voluntarily agreed to a settlement in federal court with various Democrat groups, which had sued the state over its rules for absentee voting. The end result was a dramatic alteration in how Georgia conducted the 2020 election.
Republicans were not party to the agreement, despite their huge interest in the case. The agreement explicitly states that neither Raffensperger nor the Democratic groups who sued him take a position on whether the laws and procedures being changed were constitutional or not.
Democrats’ high-powered attorneys introduced several significant changes, such as the opportunity to “cure” ballots. That means that when an absentee ballot comes in with problems that would typically lead it to be trashed, the voter is instead given a chance to “cure” or correct the ballot. It also said Democrats would offer training and guidance on signature verification to county registrars and absentee ballot clerks.
Most importantly, the settlement got rid of any meaningful signature match. The law had previously required signatures to match the signature on file with the Georgia voter registration database. But the settlement allowed the signature to match any signature on file, including the one on the absentee ballot application. That meant a fraudulently obtained ballot would easily have a signature match and no way to detect fraud.
[The Federalist]
In a piece frantically titled, “Hungary Opposition Decries Mail-In Ballots as Burnt Stash Found”, Bloomberg media treats a much smaller scope of mail-in voting, following established laws rather than hastily-made pandemic rules, as delegitimizing Hungary’s election. Hungary’s left-wing opposition demanded far more than greater election safeguards — they actually called for the total invalidation of all mail-in votes.
Unsurprisingly, the band of charlatans at the Washington Post concocted a still more dishonest framing of Orban’s victory:
Hungary’s electoral playing field is heavily tilted against the opposition. In 2010, Orban amended the Constitution to cut the size of the parliament in about half, after which he gerrymandered the entire country. The districts, drawn with no input from the opposition, spread Fidesz voters across many small districts in rural areas while concentrating opposition voters in much larger districts in the cities, thus giving them fewer chances to win.Fittingly, the Post titled its piece, “In Hungary, Orban wins again — because he has rigged the system.” No, really.
After this redistricting, in 2014, Orban’s party won 45 percent of the vote — but 91 percent of the districts (under Hungary’s electoral system, 106 of the seats are awarded through single-member districts, while the other 93 are awarded through a nationwide electoral list). Similarly, in 2018, Fidesz won 48 percent of the vote and 86 percent of the districts. On election night 2022, with 98 percent of the vote counted, Orban won 53 percent of the vote but 83 percent of the districts. The absentee voters are divided between liberal expats who oppose Orban and conservative Hungarians in neighboring countries who are likely to support him in larger numbers.
President Donald Trump decries a rigged system? Orange Man Bad Fascist Destroying Our Democracy Values.
The Washington Post declaring the Hungarian election rigged? That’s good, heroic, and saving our democracy values.
No intelligent person should expect anything resembling logical, cogent, fair, analysis from the regime eunuchs at The Washington Post. And yet, it is useful to periodically remind ourselves directly just how fake, how stupid, and how duplicitous our media is. So let’s dive into WaPo’s trash heap of an article for a moment and address the piece line by line.
1. “In 2010, Orban amended the Constitution to cut the size of the parliament in about half…”
Yes, he did. And as well he should have. Prior to 2010, Hungary’s parliament had a whopping 386 seats (just fifty-nine less than the U.S. House) for a country with only ten million people. All of those MPs drew salaries, as did thousands of local mayors and other officials. One of Fidesz’s 2010 promises was to cut spending by culling paid government posts, and cutting the number of MPs so it mirrors nations like Belgium, Austria, and Ireland. Of course, by cutting the number of parliamentarians, Fidesz actually eliminated more than a hundred paid low-effort jobs for its own party apparatchiks. No wonder progressives find this act so confusing!
2. “… after which he gerrymandered the entire country.”
First of all, Hungary is automatically harder to gerrymander than any of the major Anglosphere countries. In the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia, every member of the lower house is elected from a single-member constituency on a first-past-the-post system. In Hungary, only half of the parliament is even elected from districts at all. The other half are elected in a proportional representation system, where party’s are awarded seats based on their percent of the overall vote. The threshold to get seats is five percent, identical to the support needed in Germany, Poland, Romania, Scotland, and the West’s own darling, Ukraine. If Orban had wanted maximum gerrymandering, he could have used his parliamentary supermajority to create a purely first-past-the-post system. But he did not.
And what about the gerrymandering itself? In 2018, The New York Times wrote about the alleged rigging of Hungarian democracy, and highlighted this district in Budapest as one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the entire country.
What, precisely, makes this district so unfair? Well, per the Times, it’s one of “few” constituencies in a large European city to cross a major waterway (though both sides of the river are still in Budapest).
For comparison, here are some districts that were drawn up in the U.S. House of Representatives in the past decade. In Chicago, the famous “earmuffs” 4th district connects two Hispanic neighborhoods separated by a black neighborhood.
Immediately next to the 4th is Illinois’ 7th district, designed to create a majority-black district.
Currently, Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s 2nd District seat in Texas swoops around Houston’s outer suburbs before snaking in for a bite of the city center.
But top prize goes to Maryland, which graced the world with this unholy abomination:
But hey, Fidesz had a district cross a river.
3. “The districts, drawn with no input from the opposition, spread Fidesz voters across many small districts in rural areas while concentrating opposition voters in much larger districts in the cities”
In reality, the districts created by Fidesz were far less warped than the districts they replaced. In the 2010 election, which was the last under the old system, the largest electoral district in Hungary had nearly three times as many eligible voters as the smallest. Under Fidesz’s reform, districts should vary no more than 15% from the average, with revisions required by the constitution if population shifts cause districts to vary by more than 20%.
4. “After this redistricting, in 2014, Orban’s party won 45 percent of the vote — but 91 percent of the districts … Similarly, in 2018, Fidesz won 48 percent of the vote and 86 percent of the districts. On election night 2022, with 98 percent of the vote counted, Orban won 53 percent of the vote but 83 percent of the districts.”
This section is primarily a lie by omission. How could Orban get “only” 53 percent of the vote yet such a dominant share of seats? Well, perhaps it has something to do with winning the popular vote by twenty points.
The biggest reason for Orban’s electoral advantage has nothing to do with gerrymandering, but rather the same political forces that increasingly hobble the left in America. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 despite a popular vote win because, while she totally dominated in California, New York, and the D.C. area, she lost by smaller but clear-cut margins in the rest of the country. Similarly, in Hungary, left-wing and globalist sentiment is overwhelmingly concentrated in the capital city of Budapest, so while the opposition won sixteen out of 18 seats there, often by healthy margins, they lost a staggering 86/88 seats in the country’s hinterland.
This isn’t complicated. If Republicans won the popular vote in this fall’s midterms by 20 points, as Fidesz did, they would also win 70% or more of the seats. And in individual U.S. states, that’s exactly what happens. In the 2020 presidential election, Indiana voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 17 points, but the state house is 71% Republican and the state senate is nearly 80% Republican.
By the way, you’ll never hear the Washington Post or any other major outlet call Canada “autocratic” or a failing democracy. Yet in that country’s most recent election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party lost the popular vote to the Conservatives, and got just 32% support overall, yet remained by far the largest party in parliament with 47% of seats compared to the Conservatives’ 35%.
5. “Beyond rule-rigging, Orban so dominates the broadcast and print media landscape that the opposition could hardly get its message out.”
This lie, brought up in so many different articles savaging Orban’s Hungary, may be the most enraging.
The Regime media casts Hungary’s ten million citizens as though they are mentally retarded children easily manipulated by a biased media. So, how bad is this alleged bias? One Hungarian journalist told The Guardian that he wouldn’t call Joe Biden the “president-elect” until he was actually certified by Congress as the president-elect! Other reporters whine that in Hungary, some journalists (though not all) voluntarily take pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine positions with regards to the ongoing war. Bafflingly, The Guardian cites this as proof Hungary’s press is stifled.
In the Guardian’s anti-Orban hit piece, their source claims that within pro-Fidesz outlets, coverage runs about 9:1 in favor of Orban. Maybe it does. But if true this is still substantially more balanced than the American press. In the U.S., newspapers backed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a 14:1 ratio. A 2017 Pew study found that news coverage of Trump’s early presidency was 12 times as likely to be negative as positive, and that’s with Fox News in the mix. Not only that, if Hungarians are fed up with their local news, they can easily go online for alternatives. America’s de facto online censorship essentially shut down President Trump himself. Hungary has no remotely comparable system of Internet censorship. Even Freedom House, a U.S. government-backed NGO whose purpose is to promote Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, has to grudgingly admit that Hungarian internet is freer than in South Korea, Mexico, or that darling of the Western establishment, Ukraine.
Oh, the press in Hungary favors Orban? Big deal. In the United States, tech and press colluded to suppress an entirely true story about Hunter Biden. Twitter prevented the story from being shared, including in private messages. Even a year and a half later, after conceding that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true, America’s ruling class still defends and even celebrates the decision to hide the story from the wider public.
https://twitter.com/ThinkerChicago/s...39490356228098In the clip above, disgraced regime journo Anne Applebaum celebrates mass censorship at a University of Chicago conference on “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” Democracy is predicated on the notion that the public can evaluate information themselves and reach rational conclusions, yet this conference hinged upon the exact opposite premise. Guests like Barack Obama explained that the public cannot evaluate information, and instead must have its access to information micromanaged to avoid “disinformation.” Disinformation that, as conference attendee Adam Kinzinger made clear, includes the concept of FBI involvement in January 6:
WATCH The Atlantic’s @anneapplebaum
refuse to answer @RealDSchmidt's🔥🔥 question about Hunter Biden’s laptop during @UChicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference!
Embedded video
5:53 PM · Apr 6, 2022·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/ThinkerChicago/s...37966829805569The conference, held just days after Orban’s election win, perfectly illustrates the contrast between Hungary and the Globalist American Empire.
. @AdamKinzinger denies FBI complicity in Jan. 6 capitol riot as DOJ reels from accusations of entrapment in Michigan, D.C.
Embedded video
6:38 PM · Apr 9, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
For Applebaum and the rest of America’s eroding ruling class, there is no tension at all between condemning “disinformation” and actively deceiving the public, and no contradiction between “democracy” and stunts like using the 25th Amendment to negate an election (as Applebaum advocated in 2018).
Within America’s ruling institutions, “democracy” is just shorthand for “countries that submit to the Globalist American Empire.” What GAE wants is “democracy,” and what it does not want is “authoritarianism.” Information it dislikes is “disinformation” regardless of its veracity.
Under the old definition of democracy, the one where citizens decide how their country is run via elections, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is far more of a democracy than the United States or any of its satellites are. This is true on a far more basic level than simply how it conducts elections. In the United States, voters can clearly favor secure borders, no foreign wars, and an end to transgender insanity in their schools and anti-white racism in their workplaces, yet no matter how many times they vote that way, their desires will not be met. Judges will strike down even the most obviously constitutional laws, then invent new ones in their place. Bureaucrats will go rogue and disobey direct orders from superiors. In America, enacting meaningful change without the pre-approval of the nation’s elite class is nearly impossible.
In Hungary, the opposite is true. In Hungary, the public is allowed to vote for and actually receive a real border, traditional gender roles, and a national identity. They are allowed to vote to not be dragged into a new cold or even hot war with Russia. They are allowed to choose not to buy into a globalist consensus chosen by a foreign elite they will never be allowed to be a part of. They are allowed to vote to “Stop Soros.” They are allowed to choose to be a real country, not a satellite of a foreign empire. And if they were ever so foolish as to change their minds, they really could elect a different party and join the Globalist American Empire.
That is the reason why Washington and Brussels want to crush Hungary: Not because it is undemocratic, but because it is too democratic. Simply by being a real democracy and choosing another path, Hungary’s existence exposes and humiliates the Globalist American Empire. As Revolver pointed out earlier this year in a piece entitled, “Justin Trudeau Crosses The Rubicon And Reveals The End Stage Of Fake ‘Liberal Democracy'”:
The Globalist American Empire was low on legitimacy a year ago. Today, it is scraping the bottom of the barrel. It cannot win wars. It cannot prevent crime; in fact, it encourages it. It cannot keep shelves stocked or even consistently keep the lights on. It nakedly dispenses with bedrock American rights like freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and equality under the law. It makes a mockery of the “democracy” it claims the sole right to represent. It shuts down your bank account while shrieking of “racism,” “homophobia,” and “fascism.”The empire that survives on hypocrisy must make sure that its failure is not too obvious. And so, already emboldened by their George Floyd-style cancellation of Russia and its citizens, the Globalist American Empire is now gearing up to make Hungary a pariah state as well. Already, the European Union is plotting to cut off billions of dollars in EU funding for the country. As the Washington Post’s editorial board commented after the vote: “Hungarians are entitled to elect the government they want, but they should know their choice carries consequences.” We couldn’t have said it more clearly ourselves.
And now,;p it fears being called out.
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