Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic: “Tucker Carlson is spending a week in Budapest in order to annoy Americans and everybody else who believes in the ideals of America: the rule of law, a free press, free elections, the conviction that democracy is preferable to autocracy. Showing how much he despises the United States, its Constitution, and its heritage, the Fox News host is celebrating the achievements of a petty Central European autocrat, Viktor Orbán. He seems to believe that by paying homage to Hungary’s assault on democratic institutions, he will make people angry at home, just as his host does. The good thing about Orbán, Carlson told a dinner party in Budapest, is that ‘you’re truly hated by all the right people.’ And yes, ‘all the right people’ includes everyone who still has some faith in the American dream. Carlson is not the first Western commentator to indulge in this particular form of self-loathing international tourism. Just as Hungary now sponsors English-language think tanks designed to promote Orbán’s illiberal ideas, so did the Soviet Union once create phony ‘institutes for peace’ designed to promote Soviet Communism.”

“The aggrieved Americans who now find their way to Orbán or Vladimir Putin also dislike their own country, albeit for different reasons. They cannot abide its racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press. Those who dream of a white-tribalist alternative – one that also puts pressure on gay people and uses anti-Semitic tropes in its propaganda – believe they have found this nirvana at dinners and think-tank events in Budapest. In reality they, like Shaw, have found a Potemkin village: a ‘Christian’ country where, as in Russia, only a minority go to church; a ‘Western’ country that expelled an American university and tried to get a Chinese one to build a satellite campus instead.”