The Conservative Political Action Committee is meeting in Budapest, Hungary this week and it started off with a bang. It may not feature any of the usual folks dressed in tricorn hats and white wigs annually observed at CPAC's stateside gathering — and I don't think they have a gold Trump Idol on hand — but CPAC Hungary may have something even better: Hungarian president Viktor Orban.
He opened the conference with this powerful call to arms:
Conservatives in Europe and the United States must fight together to "reconquer" institutions in Washington and Brussels from liberals who threaten Western civilisation ahead of votes in 2024, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday.
"Progressive liberals, neo-Marxists dazed by the woke dream, people financed by George Soros and promoters of open societies ... want to annihilate the Western way of life that you and us love so much," Orban told the conference. "We must coordinate the movement of our troops as we face a big test, 2024 will be a decisive year," he said.
It's not entirely clear what Orban meant by "troops" but it's obvious that he believes their movement is global and that they must join forces to fight their common enemy. You'll note that while he normally rails against immigrants polluting their Great White culture, he is now equally focused on "progressive liberals, Neo-Marxists and promoters of open societies." Orban has declared a World Culture War and he is the leader who is showing the way forward.
The next step in curbing the Great Replacement is forced childbirth.
The last time we talked about Viktor Orban, when he hosted Fox News personality Tucker Carlson for a week of shows extolling the virtues of Hungary's white nationalism, it wasn't entirely clear if he would be able to retain his seat in the next election. There seemed to be a strong opposition against him and there was some hope that he would be vanquished. Sadly, Orban's policies of dominating the media and manipulating elections in his favor worked perfectly and he was "re-elected" in a landslide last month. He is now clearly feeling his oats.
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Orban took the oath of office just last Monday and gave a speech obviously geared to the American right. His message is one that you may have heard quite a bit about recently:
"Part of the picture of the decade of war facing us will be recurring waves of suicidal policy in the Western world. One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations,"
That's right, Orban is the world's most important proponent of the so-called great replacement theory, the motivating philosophy for the shooter who gunned down 13 people in Buffalo New York last weekend, 11 of whom were Black. That mass murderer would no doubt have been one of the "troops" Orban says must be coordinated for action in 2024. He just made his move too early.
But Orban wasn't reacting to that horrible event. He's been pushing the great replacement for many years. And he's turned it into policy which right-wingers across the globe are watching very carefully. Aside from attacks on democracy and a free press, his Christian Nationalist values translate into a crusade against LGBTQ citizens and immigrants, as well as a strong push to make women give birth to as many children as humanly possible. All of this is in service of preserving Hungary's cultural purity, which Orban believes is under assault from modern cultural forces.
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At the center of Orban's "great replacement" program is an obsession with birth rates. In a speech a few years back to the right-wing "World Congress of Families" (headed by Brian Brown, known for his crusade against marriage equality here in the U.S.), Orban laid out his vision:
Our homeland, our common homeland, Europe, is standing to lose in the population contest of the big civilizations. It's important to say that it's a national interest to restore natural reproduction. Not one interest among others — but the only one. It's a European interest too. It is the European interest."
This at least partly explains his antagonism to LGBTQ rights. Of course, he believes that it is a deviant lifestyle but when Orban says that "gender ideology" is a threat, it's largely because he believes that same-sex couples are "non-procreative" and therefore fail to advance the cause.
Abortion is the one issue in which the U.S. is about to become the global leader of the far-right white nationalist movement.
Meanwhile, Orban has instituted many policies encouraging Hungarian women to have many children but interestingly has not yet banned abortion, although they do make it as unpleasant as possible. That's one issue in which the U.S. is about to become the global leader of the far-right white nationalist movement. The next step in curbing the Great Replacement is forced childbirth.
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None other than CPAC's Chairman Matt Schlapp made it explicit in an interview with Vice from Budapest on Thursday:
"Roe v. Wade is being adjudicated at the Supreme Court right now, for people that believe that we somehow need to replace populations or bring in new workers, I think it is an appropriate first step to give the…enshrinement in law the right to life for our own unborn children," he said...
"If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you're killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved," Schlapp said. "You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you're worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don't we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live."
Asked again if he agreed with Orban's comments about European countries "committing suicide" by embracing immigration, Schlapp said: "I think Orban is skeptical of their solution, and I think in America we have a solution that could be right around the corner."
That's some good old American problem solving for you. The solution to the great replacement, then, is to simply force women to give birth against their will. Someone wrote a book about that a while ago. Everyone said it was a dystopian science fiction novel. It appears that it was actually a premonition.
