By Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi

Like the cynically corrupt Walter Duranty, the disgraced Anglo-American journalist of The New York Times in the 1920s and 1930s, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News Channel host and presently on Tucker Carlson Today at Elon Musk’s X, is a complete professional hoax as far as his perfidious as well as contemptible reportings about today’s Hungary are concerned.  Yet, while Duranty knew that he was intentionally misleading the American as well as the international public about the actual situation in Stalin’s Communist Paradise, Carlson’s motivation since 2019 has been mainly to cement his father’s position as the chief lobbyist for Viktor Orban’s Gangsterocracy.  Duranty was an amoral propagandist of Stalin’s tyrannical Soviet Union.  In the same vein, Carlson is an unscrupulous human megaphone for the Hungarian tyrant  Orban.  Thus, both Duranty and Carlson deserve Lenin’s derogatory epithet of “useful idiots.”

 Carlson who has long prided himself on uncompromising objectivity appears to be in an unprincipled free-fall when Orban’s illegitimate reign over Hungary is the object of his less than translucent investigation.  In this uncanny case of his journalistic demise the victim is the truth.  Moreover, he is a journalist who likes to think of himself as a model of unquestionable integrity.  Instead, he has become by the overwhelming majority of Hungarians a national laughing stock.  Finally, amid the rapidly mounting domestic and foreign political, economic, financial as well as personal crises, Orban and his accomplices have proved to be more the corrupt destroyers of the Hungarian nation than the saviors of the Western civilization.  Clearly, Orban and Carlson have formed an evil pact to cover up the globally destructive tyranny of the former by hatefully blaming every innocent bystander for all the abysmal failures but the real culprits.

Throughout Carlson’s misleadingly fake presentations from 2019 on, Orban has been depicted as a lifelong “street fighter” against the Kreml-imposed Socialism cum Communism in Hungary.  Falsely claiming that his hero was imprisoned, tortured and made a pariah by “the Russian supported police” of the Communist dictatorship of the pre-1990 era for “trying the liberate the country,”  Carlson has laid the foundation for a sham myth concerning Orban who, in reality, was an enthusiastic as well as privileged office holder in the Communist Youth League (Hungarian acronyms: KISZ).  Even more disconcerting, highly credible allegations about him and his wife Aniko Levai having been recruited by the infamous III/III department of the then Ministry of Interior as agents with their actual nom de guerre(s), have been splashed all over the numerous Orban related publications.   

Although the KGB agents that were assigned to the Hungarian Ministry of Interior routinely took all the secret and top secret documents to Moscow, reports left on the county levels’ archives attest to the Orban family’s devotion to the Communist dictatorship and Orban’s father’s uncompromising loyalty to the regime as a Communist Party Secretary of his workplace.  A dummy opposition student organization called Bibo College (in Hungarian:  Bibo Kollegium) was set up in the late 1980s by the son-in-law of the then Minister of Interior Istvan Horvath to channel growing popular discontent against the regime into controllable directions.  Participants in this college were almost all active members of the Communist Party (Hungarian acronyms:  MSZMP) or the Communist Youth Alliance.  Aniko Levai, Orban’s wife, was best friends with Horvath’s older daughter who, in turn, was married to Istvan Stumpf, the son-in-law of her father.  Out of this entangled mess was born Orban’s party the Alliance of Young Democrats.

Originally labeled as a “liberal” political party, FIDESZ has gone through countless dizzying epiphanies.  Suffice it to say that according to Orban, the party today represents a peculiarly Hungarian variety of “illiberal democracy.”  As a result, since 2010, Hungary has traversed the self-destructive road from trying to build a political system along the principles of Western democracies to performing a sharp UTurn back to the failed Soviet style one-party state.  Domestically, the Hungarian people have been ruled for over twelve years by an illegitimate government that has only maintained its majority by shameless vote-buying schemes among ethnic Hungarians living in the neighboring countries.  To add financial insult to this political injury, Orban controls the legislative as well as judicial branches of government through a degree of corruption that has been unknown in Hungarian history.  Consequently in this “illiberal democracy,” the Hungarian people living within the boundaries of Hungary proper are disenfranchised and ethnic Hungarians residing in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine enjoy all the benefits of Orban’s tyrannical regime.

Simultaneously, Orban’s Gangsterocracy has waged an unrelentingly ruthless campaign against the United States of America, NATO and the European Union, while having been full member of both organizations from 1999 and 2004 respectively.  These atrocious duplicity and disloyalty are paired with an aggressive pro-Russian as well as pro-Chinese propaganda, coupled with a primitive ideology that unites the praise of the Hungarian’s antediluvian homeland in the Gobi desert with Hungary’s mythically glorious future in the East as opposed to the West.

In light of these unquestionable realities, Carlson has been on a mission to convince the world that Orban and his Gangsterocracy are preferable to the loathsome republican form of American democracy.  Praising Orban by stating that it is a badge of honor to be hated by critics who disagree with the Hungarian tyrant, Carlson has been promoting a deeply corrupt and pro-Marxist monster with schizophrenic proclivity.  Such a legacy, however, is more a catastrophic capitulation to wordly corruption rather than fidelity to the guiding principles of basic journalistic ethics and unassailable intellectual objectivity.