Very few people outside Hungary speak Hungarian, so practically all of the day-to-day news from that country passes us by. But an interesting scandal has been developing there over the last few months, which arguably merits wider attention.
As you may remember, Hungary held an election earlier this year, which was won decisively by Viktor Orbán’s Fidez Party. Their main opposition was the Everybody’s Hungary Movement, led by Péter Márki-Zay.
Several organisations criticised the elections on the grounds that the incumbent, Viktor Orbán, used elements of the state apparatus to promote his own party. For example, the OSCE described the elections as “well-run” and “competitive”, while noting that they were “marred by the pervasive overlapping of government and ruling coalition’s messaging”.
However, the scandal to which I referred actually concerns the opposition.
In a podcast discussion in August, opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay stated that his movement had recently received money “from America”, which was used to pay some of the campaign bills from the recent elections. The money, he explained, had come through an organisation called Action for Democracy, which was set up in February.
These comments sparked controversy, since Hungarian electoral law prohibits parties from receiving money from abroad. In Hungary, funding for election campaigns is provided to each party through the state budget. Donations from private citizens are also allowed; though above a certain amount, the donor’s name must be made public.
When pressed for comment, Action for Democracy told Hungarian media they did not give any campaign funding, and only supported the opposition movement “as a civic organisation”. Yet critics were not persuaded by this defence. As one noted:
The Hungarian leader of the organization, Dávid Korányi, previously admitted that the Hungarian election inspired the establishment of the organization, and in relation to their operation, he emphasized that “we are trying to strengthen democratic forces in the elections of battleground states, including Hungary.” In other words, in March, the AFD was defined by its executive as an organization specifically focused on elections.
On the other hand, the opposition movement explicitly describes itself as a “movement”, rather than a political party, so the relevant prohibition against foreign funding may not apply. In any case, an investigation was launched owing to the apparent irregularities.
Although that investigation is ongoing, some initial findings have been declassified by the Hungarian parliament. Investigators discovered that the opposition movement received a much larger sum of money than initially believed – 1.8 billion forints (about $4.5 million) – and that some of it arrived before the elections took place.
Although the declassified documents comprise only part of the investigators’ report, they hint at the possibility of U.S. government involvement. Included among them is the following diagram, indicating the various individuals and organisations that are linked to Action for Democracy:
On the right-hand side is the National Endowment for Democracy – an organisation funded by the U.S. government and about which one of its former presidents said, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. Little additional information is included in the declassified documents, aside from the following statement:
In 2014, the management of NED assessed that the Hungarian domestic political situation had become so worrying that an intensive thinking process began about resuming their activities in Hungary. If organization decides to re-appear in Hungary, does not wish to open an office in Hungary, rather, it is looking for Hungarian partners through whom it can implement its goals.
It’s therefore unclear whether the National Endowment for Democracy was involved in funding the opposition movement, or whether any claims to the effect are mere speculation.
Also of interest is Action for Democracy itself. As shown in the diagram above, the organisation’s advisory council includes several prominent liberal interventionists like Anne Applebaum and Francis Fukyama, as well as the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Wesley Clark.
On the “Where do we help” section of its website, Action for Democracy lists five “key battlegrounds”, which all happen to be countries with nationalist/populist governments.
Based on the make-up of its advisory council, and the list of five countries on which it claims to focus, one could be forgiven for thinking Action for Democracy is less concerned with promoting democracy than with opposing national conservatism. Indeed, both “diversity” and “inclusion” are featured among the organisation’s “values and beliefs”.
Whether Action for Democracy has any goals beyond the ideological remains to be seen. According to this Hungarian documentary, which has an obvious pro-Fidez slant, the organisation may represent certain business interests that would benefit from a change of government in Budapest (such as U.S. LNG companies). However, the evidence provided is weak.
This scandal may fizzle out into nothing: an anti-conservative organisation in one country donated money to an anti-conservative organisation in another, and did so through the proper legal channels. On the other hand, it may prove to be America’s latest attempt to remove a government of which it disapproves – and in a NATO member state, no less.
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I dislike your headline “The Real….”.
“Yet another real….”
would read a lot better.
Thank you Chris for your time putting this informative item together. Every piece of pushback against the madness is important.
Accurate satellite data measuring sea ice extent was gathered throughout the 1970’s as it was critical for managing the nuclear deterrent. It clearly shows that the ice extent reached a peak in 1979 – the year, strangely enough that records used for climate propaganda begin. Including this data would show there has been nothing remotely unusual going on with Arctic sea ice extent.
Raise this point and you’re met with handwaving and muttering about incompatible datasets. Funny how this hasn’t stopped alarmist academics stitching together datasets from ocean buoys and ship intakes, or tree rings and thermometers (Mike’s ‘Nature’ trick), or satellite Microwave Sounding Units and surface thermometers, or weather balloons and computer models.
Something with mentioning here: The definition of ice age is a time during which permanent surface ice sheets exist. Consequently, we’re currently living in an ice age that’s possibly receding.
Additional fun fact: One of the reason why people believe in antrophogenic climate change is that – according to some mathematical models of ice ages – the current interglacial period (the holocene) should have ended already. Ie, weren’t it for terrible influence humans have on the climate, we’d all be again hunting mammoths on glaciers by now.
Obviously, the idea that these models could be wrong never crossed anybody’s mind.
The earth has been in an ice age for at least 2 million years, we just happen to be in a relatively short lived interglacial period and what most people call an ice age is a glacial period. Taking a long term view (thousands of years) we seem to be heading into the next glacial period all be it with ups and downs along the way. The paleoclimate record shows various warm periods over at least the last 4,000 years e.g. Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period etc. Our current warm period is simply the latest in a long succession of warm and cool periods, however it appears that each warm period is slightly less warm than the previous one, so the temperature trend over the last 5-6,000 years is slightly downwards.
“He adds that satellite images and recordings going back to 1993 show sea levels rising at a mere 1.2 inches per decade, and this is not significantly different to typical rises recorded since the mid-1800s.”
Chris, interesting but 1.2 inches between now & 2100 is about 27cm which earlier in the article you state was “false & easily disproven”, which is it?
Assuming the 1,2 inches per decade is correct, it would be 23.37cm by 2100, ie, 3.36cm less than 27cm. That should count as disproven.
We have tide information from e.g. Newlyn, going back several hundred years, showing little growth in sea levels. 1993 is just the blink of an eye. There are far too many conclusions being drawn from data that doesn’t cover anything like a truly representative period of time.
Climate has nothing to do with the ‘Climate Emergency’. It is just a convenient group of stuff you can’t measure and which never seems to happen where I live, used as a tool to make us feel guilty for our lives of affluence and abundance.
Once we are both anxious and guilty, as many are, then it becomes easy to sell us any old snake oil of wholesale societal change to some romanticised version of 12th century feudalism. A world where, for no particular reason, other that it is the ideology of the WEF and the Club of Rome and others, our economies and societies have to be completely trashed in order that they can be replaced with something ‘better’.
Unfortunately, the ‘something better’ sounds considerably worse to me, yet our governments plough on implementing this treason, without reference to the citizens or gaining their approval. Just ‘here’s the next step’, necessary because of the crisis we just caused. These people are dangerously insane.
Feudalism is still a Marxist term referring to an economic system where the primary means of production is land and not capital but where land is no longer worked by slaves but either by free labourers for a wage or by serfs bound to it. Whatever the usual shady entities are suspected to be really about, it’s certainly not going to be that.
The Climate Change propaganda originates with the UN and is their chosen method of forcing down the living standards of affluent western countries and transferring taxpayers’ money to the 2nd and 3rd world.
It’s a form of “levelling down” on a global scale – with a Global Elite running everything. A Global Animal Farm.
Any National Leader who doesn’t support the Climate Change propaganda will never be allowed to join the Global Elite Club and (if possible) will be removed from Office.
Quote “the jab wasn’t a vaccine, it was an intelligence test” and the same applies to climate change and EV vehicles.
Would like to see this headlined on all msm.
We’ll know we’re winning when stories such as this make it into the MSM.