Didn't see this earlier. That doesn't sound good!
Tucker Carlson confirms he’s interviewing Vladimir Putin
Controversial ex-Fox News host is in Moscow to talk to the Russian leader.www.politico.eu
Undeniably shitty, but I doubt much will happen nonetheless. Carlson's post Fox career has become a slow drift into irrelevancy (he's been reduced to interviewing a man who refers to himself as Catturd, and even him interviewing Alex Jones was largely met with indifference). It'll piss people off for now, and then be forgotten shortly after.
Damn. Putin is taking strategy tips from the Israeli Defense Force.Ukraine war live: Kyiv children's hospital hit as Russian daytime strikes on Ukraine kill dozens
Two people have been killed at the Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital after an intense Russian barrage, officials say.www.bbc.com
Want to know what Republicans have in mind for America’s future? Just visit Hungary.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was meeting with President Biden this week to ask our help defending his democracy against the brutal, violent aggression of Russia, Republican lawmakers in DC were meeting behind closed doors at a Heritage Foundation event with representatives of Hungary’s strongman president Viktor Orbán. It got almost no press coverage at all, other than The Guardian.
Orbán has been cozying up to Putin for years and is now blocking EU aid to Ukraine on Putin’s behalf (the EU is meeting today about the crisis he’s provoking); his representatives were reportedly trying this week to get Republicans in Congress to join them so, together, they can hand Europe’s largest country over to Russia.
At the same time, Orbán himself was overseeing a new round of laws in Hungary criminalizing any sort of free press in that nation. Under the rubric of “defense of national sovereignty,” Orbán’s new law, as Barron’s reported Tuesday, “could be used to crack down on dissent against nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government.”
— Orbán has now gerrymandered Hungary so thoroughly that he’ll never lose an election.
— He’s shut down the free press, replacing it with a toady-type media landscape that would make Fox “News” blush.
— He attacks religious, gender, and racial minorities, bans books, oppresses women, and throws his opponents into jail or denies them the ability to make a living.
And Republicans are loving it. They appear to have adopted Orbán as their official role model; CPAC recently held a conference in Budapest, and Orbán was a featured speaker at CPAC and a private GOP event in Texas this year, as well as this week’s DC meeting.
When Orbán’s spoke at CPAC in Budapest last year, the Hungarian “soft fascism” strongman president told the audience, to a standing ovation:
Orbán’s Fidesz Party and the GOP in most Red States have become virtually indistinguishable, from cronies owning the media, to packing the courts, to rigging elections through purging voters and gerrymanders, to putting polluting businesses in charge of regulatory agencies.“Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”
Now both have their sights set on the American federal government.
Seriously, both.
Orbán is now inserting himself into American Republican politics in a big way: last August he gave a major speech to Republicans in Dallas. Orbán has become a personal role model for many American conservatives, particularly those in the GOP’s growing pro-Putin Caucus.
Steve Bannon celebrated Orbán as “Trump before Trump,” and Casey Michel on the NBC News siteThink noted:
“From targeting migrants to inflaming an ethnonationalist base, from attacking the press to whipping up nativist conspiracies, from ushering in unprecedented corruption to tearing down basic democratic protections, Trumpism is increasingly indistinguishable from Orbánism.”