#like it seems like such a great outlet & its not like a journal

[lankyledlights]

Can we bring back pen pals and u can just mail each other shit and write everything u truly feel without a veil

[wilwheaton]

DNC speakers painted a clear picture of Trump, his history as president, and his frightening agenda if he wins a second term. But fact-checkers clouded that image to Trump’s benefit. For example, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler challenged Hillary Clinton’s statement that Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators.” Trump himself said in 2018 about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: “We fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” Still, Kessler insists the truth of Clinton’s statement about love letters “is in the eye of the beholder.” Clinton’s actual point is that Trump openly admires and cozies up to dictators and autocrats — not a great trait for the leader of the free world. Kessler insists “there is no evidence” Trump personally sent love letters to Kim Jong Un, and while that’s true — he might have just received them and responded by praising Kim publicly — it’s beside the point. Whether Trump literally writes steamy notes to dictators isn’t relevant. The issue is that Trump’s a wannabe despot.

What's wrong with the fact-checkers?

This is why I argue that the Harris campaign has no reason to prioritize talking to a corporate press. These lazy writers who should give back their journalism degrees and the feckless editors they answer to absolutely know better, yet they continue to take Trump at his word while nitpicking every single thing that a Democrat says. It’s Calvinball.

Everyone under 50 knows that corporate media is a waste of time if you want to know the truth, and that’s a real shame because a functioning Democracy demands a strong, independent, fiercely aggressive and publicly accountable press that follows the truth, wherever it leads.

I hope that the current generation of independent journalists (the real ones, like Jessica Yellin, not the Incelfluencers who spew right wing talking points) continues to expose corporate news media as the unreliable propaganda it too often is.

When I hear folks at the Times, the Post, CNN and other corporate outlets complain about how they don’t get any respect from a campaign that is getting its message out without their misleading spin and editorializing, I love it for them, and wonder if they’ll look in the mirror long enough to actually do something to earn back the respect they seem utterly baffled they have lost.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Adam Kredo

Lawmakers like Budd, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have taken a great interest in the Palestine Chronicle and its nonprofit parent company, the People Media Project, since the Free Beacon first reported on Monday about its links to Iranian regime-controlled propaganda sites. The outlet’s editor in chief, Ramzy Baroud, wrote for two now-defunct websites that the U.S. government seized in 2020 for being part of a propaganda network controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). At least six of the outlet’s writers also wrote for these IRGC-controlled sites.

Following Aljamal’s death during an Israeli raid in Gaza to free the hostages, the Palestine Chronicle published a glowing obituary, claiming its writer was just an innocent civilian trying to perform journalism. As Budd and his colleagues note in their letter, however, Aljamal "previously served as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Labor in Gaza."

"While Aljamal may have played a journalist by day, the evidence clearly suggests he was, at a minimum, a Hamas collaborator, if not a full-time terror operative, responsible for keeping hostages captive," according to the letter, which is also backed by Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.), and Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

With questions now swirling about the Palestine Chronicle and its editor Baroud, the senators say a multi-pronged federal investigation is necessary to determine if the outlet and its parent company were "actively employing an individual with apparent ties to and support for Hamas." The Palestine Chronicle downplayed its ties to Aljamal in a Monday piece, saying Aljamal "was a freelance writer who contributed articles to the Palestine Chronicle on a voluntary basis, mostly since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza."

"It is possible that this tax-exempt media outlet had no knowledge of its correspondent’s Hamas affiliation; however, given the organization’s recent attempts to cover up evidence of its ties to Aljamal, this seems unlikely, making them complicit in supporting terrorist propaganda on their platform," the senators wrote.

The lawmakers also instructed the IRS to "prepare a report on the findings of this investigation for the [Senate] Finance Committee to review in the appropriate venue."

[uncanny-tranny]

i was wondering if you had any advice on dealing with dysphoria? mines been getting worse lately, especially chest, and i feel shitty about things i never even used to. like specifically my face shape and like general way it looks, i literally never used to get any dysphoria about it and now its like happening kinda often. i have no idea why its happening and like no masc makeup or anything is really working. so yeah any advice you have would be awesome.

I'm going to be honest, it's perfectly normal to have these sorts of things happen, even if there's no "reason" or nothing seems to work. I want to preface with that because it's really important to realize that sometimes this happens, and it isn't your fault.

The things that might work for you may look different than what I or others do, too, and that is completely fine. Do whatever you find most beneficial. I'm not an expert and I the things I suggest have worked for me and a few others, but that by no means means that you have to do them.

Here are a few things I have done:

Covering mirrors, especially before showers

On the topic of showers, being sure to have a barrier (e.g. washcloth, loofah) between your hands and your body soap

Wearing clothes that are the least dysphoria-heavy or clothing that fits in ways that don't trigger more negative emotions (I found baggier clothing helps me both dysphoria-wise and in general)

Making sure all your emotions about this go somewhere, like a journal. Basically, have a place for you to process everything you feel. I've got old journals filled with entries that are just rambling about how I felt about being pre-transition. It didn't solve the issue, but it did give me an outlet where I could articulate exactly what I felt, so I wasn't as confused or lost by emotions I couldn't process through.

Finding healthy ways that invest in yourself, physically and mentally. I've found that when I am kept occupied with things that make me feel fulfilled, I am able to process through those negative feelings. It doesn't mean you run away from them, and you can certainly still feel dysphoric as hell after, and that is okay, but it means that you fill your life with a variety of experiences.

Surround yourself with a variety of different people and bodies. This one really helped me out personally, just because seeing other people who look just like me was really eye-opening and made me realize that I'm not uniquely less masc or whatever else

Don't discount how you feel. Give yourself as much space as you need to understand where you're coming from, and let yourself feel everything you are able. It's okay to feel a variety of emotions. They are neutral at worst.

This one is best done after you feel a bit better, but I've found learning about my dysphoria triggers really helped me understand how I was feeling and why I got in a bad spot. It's helpful to know exactly what can make symptoms worse or less manageable.

I hope I didn't overwhelm you with these points. Dysphoria fucking sucks sometimes, and I just want to offer you the knowledge that you aren't alone in your experiences. I hope something here may make you think about what works for you specifically. There isn't a universal answer to how dysphoria works in others, and I just want you to know that if you find something wildly different that helps, that is okay. I just hope you are safe and okay. My best regards go to you, I wish you peace. If anybody else wants to share some of their own tips, that would be lovely, too, because having multiple different ideas is a great thing.

[ericdeggans]

Joining the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame: Fulfillment from a life of helping a community understand itself

Journalism always seemed like a realistic career goal for me, thanks to my dad, Chuck Deggans.

He had a regular column in several newspapers around my Gary, Indiana hometown when I was growing up, writing for Black-centered newspapers like Gary INFO and The Crusader, in addition to the dominant local daily, The Post-Tribune. His column was like a local version of Jet magazine’s happenings pages, with tidbits on all the stuff going on in Gary’s Black social scenes, complete with a few photos of beautiful women in bikinis or local notables.

That’s why I spent time talking about him and my mother, Carolyn Williams, when I was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. The honor, which has surprised and gratified me, was a direct reflection of both their influences.

My mom scrimped and saved to send me to private schools we could barely afford, giving me an education and experiences that broadened my horizons invaluably. And my dad showed me a career in journalism could bring a steady paycheck, community influence and great pride – knowing you were helping a community understand itself by telling its story, again and again, every day. Which was no small lesson for a Black kid raised in a tough neighborhood with few similar role models.

The Hall of Fame class this year includes some impressive names: Max Jones, editor of the Tribune-Star in Terre Haute; Bill Benner, a former sports reporter, writer and columnist at the Indianapolis Star; Sandra Chapman, reporter/investigative journalist formerly with WISH-TV and later WTHR-TV in Indianapolis; Francisco Figueroa (1896-1951), the printer, publisher and editorial contributor to Indiana's first Spanish language newspaper, El Amigo del Hogar; Wallace Terry, 1938-2003, journalist, documentarian and author who covered war and civil rights for a variety of national newspapers and magazines and Kathy Tretter, owner and publisher of the Spencer County Leader and the Ferdinand News.

Joining this group was a distinct honor – a major highlight in a journalism life which has included everything from hosting shows on NPR and CNN to interviewing Oprah Winfrey and Prince, writing a book that predicted a lot of the modern shape of media and forcing the TV industry to face much of its hypocrisies regarding race and equity.

These days, it’s easy to despair over the waning impact of journalism, as audiences increasingly align with outlets telling them what they want to hear and those in power find more insidious ways to undermine a truly independent press.

But the Hall of Fame ceremony was poignant reminder of value in the ceaseless, constant work of journalists from my home state and around the world – a lifetime-long challenge which could not be more rewarding or necessary in the current moment.

[itsyveinthesky]

The New York Times walks back flawed Gaza hospital coverage, but other media outlets remain silent

Still shocked how October 18th was one of the biggest journalistic failures in living memory by the likes of the NYT, WSJ, BBC, Reuters and others. Sources most people look to for truthful reporting that undergoes ardeous fact checking before publication.

Most news organizations seem eager to sweep last week’s negligent coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion under the rug, moving on from the low moment covering the Israel-Hamas war without admitting any mistakes.

While The New York Times and BBC — both of which faced enormous scrutiny for their coverage of the blast — have in recent days issued mea culpas, the rest of the press has remained mum, declining to explain to their audiences how they initially got an important story of such great magnitude so wrong.

On Monday, I contacted the major news organizations that amplified Hamas’ claims, which immediately assigned blame to Israel for the blast that it said had left hundreds dead. Those organizations included CNN, the Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and The Wall Street Journal.

Did these outlets stand by their initial reporting? Was there any regret repeating claims from the terrorist group? Since the explosion, one week ago Tuesday, Israel and the U.S. have assessed that the rocket originated in Gaza, not Israel. Additional analysis from independent forensic experts, including those contacted by CNN, have indicated that the available evidence from the blast was inconsistent with the damage one would expect to see from an Israeli strike.

But if there was even a morsel of contrition from news organizations that breathed considerable life into Hamas’ very different version of events, it hasn’t been shown. A spokesperson for The WSJ declined comment. Meanwhile, spokespeople for the AP and Al Jazeera ignored my inquiries.

Reuters, which initially reported that Israel had struck the hospital, citing a “civil defense official,” stood by how it covered the unfolding story, conceding no blunders in the process. A spokesperson told me that “it is standard practice for Reuters to publish statements and claims made by sources about news in the public interest, while simultaneously working to verify and seek information from every side.”

“We make it clear to our readers that these are ‘claims’ made by a source, rather than facts reported by Reuters,” the spokesperson for the wire service told me. “In the specific instance of the fast-breaking news about the attack on the hospital in Gaza, we added precise details and attribution to our stories as quickly as we could.”

CNN went even further. Not only did the outlet amplify Hamas’ claims on its platforms at the outset of the story, but its initial rolling online article definitively stated — with no attribution to any party — that Israel was responsible for the lethal explosion. The story was later edited, but the error was never acknowledged in a correction or editors’ note. While it is common for news outlets to update online stories as new information becomes available, when errors are made, standard practice is to acknowledge them in formal corrections. A CNN spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the online story when reached Monday.

In response to my larger inquiry on the network’s broader coverage, the CNN spokesperson pointed me to the forensic analysis it published over the weekend indicating the explosion was inconsistent with an Israeli strike. Like Reuters, CNN admitted no fault in its coverage of the blast.

Which makes what the BBC and The Times have done in recent days stand out. While the rest of the press has sought to move on from the journalistic fiasco, the British broadcaster and Gray Lady have charted a different course.

The BBC said in a statement posted online last week, “We accept that even in this fast-moving situation it was wrong to speculate in this way about the possible causes and we apologise for this, although he did not at any point report that it was an Israeli strike.”

And The Times published a lengthy editors’ note on Monday, confessing its early coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

“The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was,” The Times added.

Bill Grueskin, a renowned professor at Columbia Journalism School, told me Monday that he believes that each outlet that gave credence to Hamas’ version of events should put out similar notes explaining to their audiences precisely how things went awry behind the scenes. (I should note that Grueskin didn’t believe that The Times’ note went far enough, questioning, among other things, why it took almost a week to issue its mea culpa.)

“The notes should be signed; they should provide a more detailed understanding of how their newsroom managed to not just get it wrong at the first moment but why it took so long to scale back; and they should be more explicit about what they got wrong since most readers can’t be expected to recall all the details,” Grueskin said.

Indeed, one of the crucial differences between newsrooms and less reputable, unreliable sources of information is that newsrooms issue corrections and accept fault when it occurs. When news organizations err, it is expected that they own up to their mistakes.

Grueskin pointed out, however, that “newsrooms often find it easier to correct a misspelled middle name than a collapse in verification standards on a major, breaking-news story.”

“It’s easier to address a simple, common mistake than one that goes to the heart of how a news organization is built to handle breaking news in a contested environment,” Grueskin added.

That might be true. But it doesn’t mean that it should be acceptable.

Analysis by Oliver Darcy

Updated 12:32 PM EDT, Thu October 26, 2023

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/perils-of-the-high-ground/

Perils Of The High Ground

A month before leaving public life, I published a critique on the media.  At a retirement gathering soon after,  a reporter asked why I’d waited until leaving office to share my views. Previously, I’d written other papers –one on property taxes and the other on Grand Juries. The last appeared in December 1988. The Media: Who’s Watching the Watchers? I wrote the piece because I’d been looking into the viability of Press Councils, citizen groups set up to review people’s complaints about the media. Few of these organizations existed, largely because news outlets lobbied against them. Several academic studies did support the idea, however.  The reasons varied: The symbiotic relationship between the media and the power structure was too great Having wrapped itself in First Amendment claims, journalism had rendered the courts powerless against it. Its business interest competed with its public duty, leading to a temptation to manipulate the audience. Said one academic, “Democracy cannot survive if we are to be the targets of hidden persuaders.“ (News Media Locked in Established, Rigid Structure,” by Robert Shara, The Oregonian, Forum Section, October 31, 1988, B7.) *   Having felt the sting of editorial criticism while in office, I gave the inquisitive reporter an honest answer. “No politician is insane enough to take on the press as a public figure.” The reply drew laughs, even from the reporter. Times have changed, of course.  Fear of the press is diminished and the term “fake news” is part of the vernacular. The media has earned some of the criticism it receives.  More than one reporter has made up a story to advance a career.   Nonetheless, I concur with Thomas Jefferson that a flawed press is better than no press at all. To “err” is human and journalists make mistakes like the rest of us, though those I’ve known would never admit it.  Even so, their mandate to inform the public is vital to a democracy. NBC no doubt had the best intentions when it hired the former chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Ronna McDaniel as a contributor to its news roster.  Absent a Fairness doctrine, management’s decision to inject a conservative viewpoint into what many see as a liberal press was a bold one. The Fairness doctrine, a creation of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC,) was established in 1949.  It required broadcasters and the print media to air all sides of issues that were in the public interest. The policy worked for a time, but the advent of electronic media changed the landscape.  The near-monopoly news sources of the past became less worrisome when social platforms with commentators and bloggers mushroomed. Eventually, the FCC allowed the Fairness Doctrine to fade away.  As no good intention goes unpunished, NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel put the managers at odds with their brightest luminaries, including affiliate anchors. MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell excoriated the recruit. They accused her of lying and attempting to undermine the media’s legitimacy. Geraldo Rivera, a correspondent with NewsNation disagreed.  He called the objectors a cabal of aging hosts.   Rivera, who was born in 1943, is older than those he attacked, which gave his remark whimsy but no substance. Even so, his protest raised a question. What gave the dissenting journalists the right to claim the moral high ground? Admittedly, McDaneil’s case is moot. Cowed by their staff, NBC fired her. But was the decision fair? The debate seems to lie more with opinion than fact, something we humans exercise in abundance.  Other primates have norms that serve as social laws.  But human opinions are personal truths, usually impervious to information. How else could chauvinism exist over the centuries? In Politics, opinion holds sway over truth much of the time. It’s axiomatic that the appearance of impropriety is as bad as having done the deed.  In McDaniel’s case, whether she lied or unwittingly served as Donald Trump’s pawn probably can’t be established in a court of law–which is why, unlike her former boss, she was never charged with a crime.  Still, her NBC firing was a punishment and based on perception. In my opinion, McDaniel should have been allowed to strut her hour or two upon the public airwaves. Voters might have learned something. Or, maybe not which would also be telling. But a “cabal of journalists” shouldn’t decide what the public hears.    That’s my two cents worth, anyway, though I don’t expect anyone to live off the proceeds. For a gratuity, I’ll add one other personal truth. Never in my 87 years has my decision to take the high ground led anywhere but to a precipice.     *Anyone interested in the sources for these statements, let me know.  

[msclaritea]

Don’t cheer the spate of media layoffs: Newspapers are essential to our republic

By Social Links for Daniel McCarthy

Bad news for the media often feels like good news for conservatives.

So word that Vice and BuzzFeed are laying off hundreds of journalists, weeks after the complete collapse of the Messenger, won’t elicit much sympathy from the right.

Then again, it’s not just conservatives who disapprove of the news business today: Gallup last year found a paltry 32% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media.

The same survey found 29% had “not very much” trust in the media — and a record-setting 39% confessed they had “none at all.”

Last month, the Los Angeles Times announced reductions of its newsroom by more than 20%.

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has also been through rounds of buyouts and cutbacks.

But the troubles of traditional newspapers are often taken for granted.

A decade ago, online outlets like Vice and BuzzFeed were meant to be the future of media — new species adapted for the internet ecosystem.

First came “search engine optimization,” then gaming the algorithms that decide what content gets served to millions of Facebook and Twitter (now X) users.

BuzzFeed was notorious for “listicles,” which were addictively easy to share until Facebook became so saturated with BuzzFeed and Thought Catalog junk that Mark Zuckerberg’s platform decided to change the rules.

After all, how much clickbait could readers take?

Online media startups attracted investment by showing phenomenal growth, but it was like an athlete on steroids.

Entrepreneurial young journalists, well-connected with classmates and former colleagues at established outlets, garnered hype and headlines from their friends.

That sparked investor excitement, and with investors’ money, new sites could show a rapid explosion in traffic — since they were starting from nothing.

But how could they maintain investor-dazzling double-digit growth after the first spurt?

The social media on which the news sites depended faced the same problem.

The solution for Facebook, once new users started tapering off, was to get existing users to spend more time on the site, which meant no longer sending them to other sites, like news sources, through links.

Now Facebook and X make it nearly impossible to promote journalism on their sites — they want the eyeballs to stay on their own platforms.

YouTube and Facebook felt like the Wild West in those days, with neither copyright law nor political correctness putting a damper on what users could share.

Today politics isn’t the main reason social media suppress news, but it’s an aggravating factor, as the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith recently noted on X.

Smith pointed out that progressive campaigns to shame advertisers into abandoning Fox News, or X itself under Elon Musk’s ownership, encourage advertisers to avoid all political risk.

Budweiser’s humiliating losses after turning the transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney into a brand representative demonstrated how much it could hurt to alienate conservatives.

So why advertise with any politically charged news organizations?

If left-leaning sites like Vice and BuzzFeed are collateral damage in progressives’ war on right-of-center political expression, that may seem like just deserts, as well as a poignant irony.

But the wider lesson is that online media were never on a secure footing, dependent as they were not just on advertising — which is true for almost all media — but on the whims of Big Tech, which has its own growth worries.

Newspapers, by contrast, flourished as local institutions sustained by local retailers.

The emergence of online national and even global retail, however, has meant ad spending isn’t dictated by geography anymore.

Businesses can reach consumers directly or cast a wider net by buying a little exposure on large platforms like Google or Facebook.

Yet not only news but our very system of government is built on localism — on distinct cities, towns, states and congressional districts.

Newspapers served as their town halls, even more than physical town halls did.

The wipeout of hype-driven, placeless new media isn’t a cause for celebration, but it’s not a disaster for our republic.

The loss of local distinctiveness, on the other hand, is at the root of much of our polarization and deadlock today.

In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville argued “that the number of newspapers must diminish or increase amongst a democratic people, in proportion as its administration is more or less centralized.”246

Fewer newspapers means more centralized power — and more conflict over it.

Conservatives who don’t want that have reason to want newspapers to survive.

And newspapers that want to survive have to fight hard for local interests and values — including conservative ones.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

Twitter: @ToryAnarchist

Insert of the author of this crap. 👆

First off, none of it makes a damn bit of sense, especially the fact that this is an opinion piece in the CONSERVATIVE New York Post, written by a guber with the word, Anarchist, in his Twitter handle, it can't decide what to blame the layoffs for, and keep blaming all of this on Conservatives, when the Champagne Socialists pretty much alienated the whole country. Like, WTH. Beheaders, indeed.

[rogerharkness]

Mar 13 - I often joke that I survived Washington because I had low expectations, but last week’s hearing of the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee would have tested the lowest of my low expectations. The purpose of the subcommittee is to look into the politicization of US government agencies and its effect on our civil liberties. But last week’s inaugural hearing of the committee was not at all a good look for the Democrats, who brought nothing but insults for the witnesses.

Things got off on the wrong foot very quickly, as Democrat committee Members seemed less interested in what witnesses Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had to say than in attacking the messengers. Ranking Committee Member Stacey E. Plaskett, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, began by calling Taibbi a “so-called journalist” who poses a “direct threat” to people who disagree with the work he has done on the “Twitter Files.”

Taibbi, who to the likely dismay of the Democrats on the subcommittee is hardly a right-wing Republican, corrected Plaskett’s smear, pointing out to her that, "I'm not a so-called journalist. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books including four New York Times bestsellers." In addition, Taibbi pointed out that most of his journalism career was spent at Rolling Stone Magazine, which is hardly a conservative political outlet.

The Democrat decision to make this hearing a partisan political issue and attack the journalists who brought us the truth about secret US government censorship-by-proxy of Americans who hold views unacceptable to government elites is extremely unfortunate. The Democrat decision to attack honest liberals like Taibbi for bringing us the truth is baffling. Taibbi and Shellenberger and the other journalists involved in exposing government malfeasance in the Twitter Files have done a great service to all Americans concerned about the collusion between government and corporations to silence speech that the government does not like.

Matt Taibbi posted his statement to the subcommittee as another episode in the “Twitter Files” series and it may have been the most disturbing release to date. In this release Taibbi documented what he calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” This is the collusion not only between government and big tech to censor “wrong” views, but also those parts of the so-called “non-governmental” sector that are directly funded by government.

This “NGO” sector, it turns out, has been a key tool in the US government’s efforts to censor Americans who fail to toe the US government line on everything from Covid to Ukraine. The “non-government” organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, the Alliance for Securing Democracy and dozens more pose as simply good citizens concerned about disinformation while in fact they are mostly or completely funded by the US government to do the US government’s bidding.

Taibbi calls this the “absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations,” but there is another word for it: fascism. And that is where we are headed in the United States unless all of us – conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and progressives - wake up and fight for the restoration of the First Amendment. ~Ron Paul

[thepolymathexcuse]

the beginning: an introduction to the blog

Hi everyone!

I am Pong, and I am 26 years of age as of this writing. This blog is mainly created for two main reasons: first, as an outlet for my creative expression and secondly, to potentially serve others who may be affected by the various stuff I write about.

A little background about me: I graduated with an engineering degree three years ago. However, I found out that this is not really what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, so here goes another try at maintaining a blog.

I come from a small city in the Philippines and have lived here since I was a child. I've always felt like I did not belong here, and maybe one day, I might actually have the courage to leave and find myself someplace where I feel like I would fit. Or I might not.

I have the tendency to overshare so please bear with me, but it's mostly stemming from my fear of losing a voice. I feel like I'm a great talker, and God gave me this gift (although to some, it might be annoying hehe) so I might as well put it to good use.

As an Enneagram Type Seven, there is no singular thing that interests me. In fact, spontaneity and variety are the two main attributes that you'll find in my daily life. Many of the people I've worked with and even my friends have noticed that because of these numerous interests, I tend to be a bit scattered and out of focus. There is some truth to that, but I have this inner belief that everything in the world exists for us to experience, at least even once (or several times if we're blessed enough). It absolutely makes me ecstatic that we're surrounded by all this beauty to indulge ourselves with for the entirety of our lifetime.

One of my core values is seeking fun and I'm keen to chase things that stimulate the pleasure areas of my brain. As of now, this journey to becoming a polymath or a modern Renaissance person will be a fun journey to finally traverse. This journey is the origin of the blog's name "The Polymath Excuse" because it's basically just my excuse for fully immersing in life. I am currently on a healing season and this particular project of being a polymath seems to me the best way to rekindle the fire within me.

You have to keep this in mind: as a seeker of new experiences, my interests may (and will probably) change along the course of the journey, but I have one thing that I know is for certain: I will never get tired of writing.

Writing was my first love and continues to hold a dear place in my heart. It's the first hobby I've committed myself into since high school. From reading fantasy, dystopian, and young adult books back then, I've always dreamt of becoming an actual writer. I once even dreamt of winning the Palanca awards when I was in college. Quite the crazy ambition, right? Writing is part of literature, and I can mostly attribute my love for literature from my high school English teacher, Ma'am Cynthia, and the friends I surrounded myself with during my high school and college years. My writing goals have evolved from winning awards to just becoming an outlet for self-expression. I had maintained a literary blog when I was in college but that project had long reached its final breath. At present, I mostly write to share my thoughts and to keep a record of my life. It's always fun to go back and reminisce the past versions of ourselves, after all. I have, over the years, regularly kept a journal and a commonplace book to store my thoughts and knowledge I've acquired from various pieces of content. Now, I continue to record my life in several pieces of writing—from little notes of my daily musings to commonplace books that hold insights from my own self and from other people.

But writing and literature aren't my only interests. You can't even describe me an expert in the field. As emphasized in the previous statements, my interests continue to expand and now they span across multiple disciplines: from philosophy to the natural sciences, from mathematics to something as obscure as tarot reading, and from mythology to the many subfields of arts and humanities. Sometimes these interests may not be related with each other, but the first challenge of a polymath lies in finding the connection of almost anything.

Hopefully, through combining my love of writing and my fascination with all that life has to offer, I could craft meaningful articles that could serve two main purposes: firstly, for my future self to look back on the things that previously have interested me; and secondly, to hopefully inspire others to do the same. The second one might be a long shot, but the probability of sparking even the tiniest bit of interest about any random topic isn't equal to zero, so I guess it's worth a shot! There's the second challenge to a polymath: creating unique ideas interweaved from multiple niches.

My former idealistic self dreamt of changing the world and it's a noble purpose in and of itself, but maybe it's time I "dial down the scope" [1] to just trying to become a better version of myself one word at a time.

Basically, there is no noble reason for starting this blog. In fact, I might even consider it inherently selfish since it's a project that mostly benefits me in case no one ever sees the things I create. It might even prove the perception of other people about me: that I'm all over the place--because, surprise, surprise, the topics that will be contained in this blog will not be about a single, particular niche, but basically a hodgepodge of my varied interests.

It's just an excuse--an excuse to make my life worth living. It's that simple.

If I didn't reach the outcome of eventually becoming a polymath, at least the journey had been fun. I might abandon this project a few months (gosh I hope not) or a few years from now, but at least, it was a fun road to have taken.

I appreciate you for reading that scattered, all over the place introduction about this blog. May this blog fulfill its purpose both for me and to my future readers, and may all our dreams turn into reality, even if it's just one step at a time.

All the love, Pong

—

Note(s): [1] I encountered the phrase "dial down the scope" from Tiago Forte's book, Building a Second Brain. It means breaking down certain projects to a more manageable size so we can actually finish them. He adopted it from the idea of "scope" from software developers, which refers to the full set of features a software program might include. From the usage of this phrase, dialing down the scope means making my dream into a more attainable one.

[crossfoxbuns]

404, AI, and the Fall of Google

404 Media is a damn good website. This independent news outlet is fun by 4 very talented people and they cover tech news in a bold way, that larger organizations can't or won't do, and in a sustainable way in a world where newspapers are failing left, right, and center.

They recently made a move that seems weird and counter-intuitive: requiring your email address to read their articles going forward. They explain their reasoning in a recent post:

"We are unwilling to sit idly by and let AI endlessly scrape and repackage our work, or clueless media executives drive companies we have worked for into the ground, and are trying to strike a balance where we can monetize our work in a way that is not annoying and allows us to make enough revenue to continue to do the work we do. ...... We are unwilling to gamble our livelihoods or our company’s future on the idea that we can build a successful business model by focusing exclusively on collecting a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny every time someone clicks one of our articles."

DALL-E and other image-generating AI doesn't concern me. It's more in the faces of the general public, so it's going to get regulated and controlled, it's only a matter of time. Art has a certain feeling and humanity to it that AI can't understand or replicate anyway. And if you really need that extra specific stock photo for your project, there's responsible and ethical ways to use AI for that, thanks to the efforts of Getty Images and others.

The AI I'm concerned about most is plain old GPT and other text generators. They are so good at producing stuff that is just barely skimming on the pond of shit that it works for SEO reasons. Truth is optional. It's safe to assume now that in most web searches, there's more AI-generated garbage and accidental misinformation than actual true and useful information. AI articles scraping content from real news outlets as well as each other creates a massive game of telephone, where you never know what part of the chain you're reading.

Thanks to this, Google, Bing, Duck, Ecosia, it doesn't matter - search engines have become garbage.

Social media is a whole other cesspool of a different flavor, I covered that in other posts in the past.

As a creator

So as someone who would like to grow an audience online, things look real bleak. Granted, I don't know what I'd want to grow an audience for - just that a platform would be good to have. Most likely it'll be art/commission related or writing/story-telling related. Something creative. Whatever it is, it's something I specifically don't want AI getting its grubby little tendrils on.

I haven't got much of an audience, I can count the people who read this stuff on one hand (thank you, by the way! <3). But if I want that to grow, I need to think discoverability. And as I think these thoughts, things seem pretty familiar.

Back in the 90s, search engines existed, but they just weren't good yet. Social media didn't exist at all. It was all email, forums, blogrolls (ask your parents), and word of mouth. The internet wasn't so much the place where "everything happens" and more like the place where "you found your people." There was a little adventurous feeling whenever you discovered a new website, like an island in the ocean. Mostly it had nothing on it, or it was definitely "not my type" of island, but sometimes you struck gold and found a big island with a whole neighborhood of awesome people there, and those moments were what made (still make) the internet great.

Now, it's less like an ocean. It's more like a dense, heavily paved city, where every building is full of robots and the billboards are all fake news stories, and the very foundation the city is built on are SEO practices that Google themselves have no reason to make better. Instead of discovering islands, you find these little hole-in-the-wall delis and clubs and shops. They may be small, crowded on all sides by the robots, and the rent sucks, but they're genuine. They are real people running real businesses, and they're so hard to find nowadays.

As someone looking to carve out a space for themselves in a world like this, it's easy to feel like hiring the robots is the way to go. Cramming your site full of SEO crud and slapping your logo on every bit of merch imaginable. Making something, or having robots make something, hoping for a hundredth of a hundredth of a hundredth will give you a penny each.

No, 404 is making the right move here. The AI SEO spaghetti has filled the entire world. The ocean used to mean no-one is there, now it's just fake people. Discoverability has not changed. If anything, the strategies from the 90s seem to have only gotten better.

Abandon the search engine. They are useless for helping people find you. This lets your site load faster, be more direct. Your website is your home, invite people in and show them a good time. They will remember you and tell their friends. Keep a list of links: "These websites are good too!" Keep an email list. They're free to start - once you have enough of an audience where it costs something, you should be able to cover those costs.

As we rebuild an internet that works for US, we're carving out a network of tunnels beneath SEO City. We are the underground, the speakeasy, the secret club. Never mind all that meaningless noise up there on the surface.

Thanks for making it through this little soapbox rant of mine. As I post more of my creative stuff, expect to see some of it in the wild, but most of it behind a wall of some sort. Email, telegram channel, I dunno. Wherever it ends up, I'll see you real people there.

You brave little anarchists, you. <3

[workscounselingcenter]

The Impact of Exercise On Your Mental Health

When I think of the word exercise, I think of running 5 miles, benching heavy weights, or swimming 50 laps in a pool. In my opinion, all of those activities seem very daunting. However, finding an exercise routine that you enjoy can make a positive impact on your general well-being. While therapy and medication can be helpful in improving your mental health, exercise can be a great outlet for relieving stress and anxiety. Exercise offers numerous benefits beyond physical fitness, as it plays a vital role in improving mental health and fostering a positive outlook on life. In this blog post, we will explore the powerful impact of exercise on mental health and how incorporating physical activity into our daily routines can better our wellbeing.

My relationship with exercising has been very trial and error. It is hard to find that balance between doing it because it is good for the brain and feeling like it’s a chore. Considering there are so many outlets to relieve stress, such as journaling, meditating, and eating a good meal, I find it difficult to choose something that requires me to get sweaty over all of the other options. As of recently, I have started to discover versions of exercise that fit my lifestyle and I actually enjoy engaging in such activities. Before this discovery, I was attending a fitness class religiously and really enjoyed it. However, I have noticed recently it has been too hard on my body so I needed to change up my routine. There was no sense in doing a stress relieving activity if it is going to hurt me in the long run! Now I regularly swim in the morning and take my dog on walks, which does not make me feel like I need a 3 hour nap afterwards. For those that love intense workouts, that is awesome! Like I said, it’s all about finding the exercise that works best for you.

The most significant benefits of exercise on mental health is its ability to reduce stress levels and manage anxiety. Engaging in physical activities such as jogging, yoga, or swimming helps individuals divert their focus from anxious thoughts to the present moment, promoting mindfulness and relaxation. It feels really great to get outside, breathe in fresh air, and disconnect from the world for a bit. We live in a society where we are constantly consuming media and always on the go. We forget that it is crucial to slow our bodies and minds down every so often. We have to take care of ourselves in order to prevent things such as burnout, getting sick, and feeling over-stimulated. Exercise can also help with better sleep quality, which in turn will make us feel significantly better as we function throughout the day.

Finding an exercise routine that fits in your busy schedule can be difficult and stressful. The last thing we want is to add stress to your life when we are searching for a way to relieve stress. I would encourage you, reader, to find a way to incorporate exercise into your everyday activities. That way, it won’t seem like you are having to put much effort into finding a routine. If you have a dog, maybe you walk in the morning and evening for 3o minutes. If you have a lunch break, maybe you eat your lunch and then spend the last 15 minutes doing meditative yoga. If you work from home, the new thing has been getting a standing desk and a walk pad so that you don’t have to be sitting at your desk all day. There are so many little things you can incorporate and be intentional about as you go through your day. Exercise can really make a difference in your mental health.

Get the help you need.

[vargan]

Positive Psychology in Self-development

May 1, 2023

Recently, I read a website about Positive Psychology and at first glance, I take it as an odd name for a branch of psychology. It's a recent discovery and has an interesting perspective in the psychological field, rather than the much older fields. Okay, so what is positive psychology in the first place? I'll go into detail while connecting its concepts to self-improvement.

What is Positive Psychology?

Positive psychology, as mentioned earlier, is relatively new in psychology. It was introduced first by Martin Seligman, wanting to create a different viewpoint in psychology of making life worth living. Positive psychology gives importance to an individual's acknowledgment and development of self-trait, happiness, compassion and wellbeing (Ackerman, 2018). It doesn't replace the traditional perspective of preventing and reducing the negative feelings of people and being positive all time. In fact, based on what I read, some negative emotions can actually lead to meanings in our life, which in turn develop our wellbeing.

From the same article, Roy F. Baumeister's research expanded the thought that feeling positive emotions aren't enough to enjoy life. Sometimes, we have to weigh down our feelings and thoughts to acquire the balance for meaning and experiencing happiness. One of Baumeister's findings that struck within me is acquiring happiness isn't enough to live a desirable life - you have to reinforce it to get a sense of deeper meaning.

About PERMA Model

Seligman created this PERMA model, which defines the importance of the 5 components, namely Positive Emotions (P), Engagement (E), Positive Relationship (R), Meaning (M), and Accomplishment (A), in our wellbeing (Madeson, 2017). It's quite connected with positive psychology, since it deals with creating ways to improve wellbeing within the self.

Feeling happy, intrigued, thankful, loved, and other positive emotions are important in wellbeing. Building these emotions and maintaining it are important as well. From what I read, if I want to feel positive about myself, spending time with my family and friends, which I care for, is a good sign of building positive emotions within the self and the group. Doing hobbies that I enjoy would help as well.

To be engaged is to be focused on one thing while using your character strengths contributes to feelings of happiness. In a way, having this engaging feeling helps consolidate positive emotions within ourselves.

It may sound obvious, but being part of a supportive social group like your friends actually benefit self-development. They become your outlet in sharing recent experiences and achievements that make you feel you are proud of yourself.

Seligman did emphasize the importance of creating a purpose or meaning in living. Finding meaning and purpose may seem daunting, but based on what I read, some tips like exploring foreign things and spending time with who you care for would help.

Some people live because they want to achieve a certain goal, like a promise within themselves. Creating goals and achieving it gives a sense of pride within the self, but goals should be done that are capable within one's capacity.

Improving my Wellbeing

Positive psychology for me seems promising in my self-development. Knowing myself, I downplay myself all the time, to the point that I lose motivation to do things. Recently, I have started creating a journal of what I feel. It helped me assess my needs for a bit, and I would want to continue it.

Apart from writing a personal journal, creating a habit of thanking myself for who I am would seem great, in a way that I would have a positive view of myself. The problem is, how can I thank myself? Maybe reflecting at least 15 minutes per day would help me find something to be gratitude about.

To add on about myself, I am quite afraid of doing new things because of circumstances that it might not be perfect in the first place. It was my mindset that hinders me to explore new things like hobbies. If I become less harsh on myself about small mistakes I make, I can be more comfortable about being prone to mistakes, therefore spending more time in honing myself in new hobbies and skills.

Importantly, surrounding myself with a supportive group will help me a lot. Although I know for myself that I'm already a part of it, the best thing I can do is to strengthen that bond between me and my group.

Finally, what I think is the most important of all, is to create long-term goals and say self-positive things about myself. I believe it's important since it gives me a sense of purpose to enjoy life, as well as a form of motivation to understand more of myself.

WORD COUNT: 766

REFERENCES:

Ackerman, C. (2018, April 20). What Is Positive Psychology & Why Is It Important?. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-positive-psychology-definition/

Madeson, M. (2017, February 24). Seligman’s PERMA+ Model Explained: A Theory of Wellbeing. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/perma-model/#emotion

[ardn631-harrylowe]

Finding Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier was born on 1 February 1926 in New York. Even though she was born in New York her background consists of French and Austrian heritage, with her living between France and the US in her early life. She was unknown in her lifetime and was bought into the mainstream art world when her photos were discovered by chance at auction. This scenario posses the ethical question of whether her work should have ever been ‘published’ as it was kept secret and closely guarded by Vivian in her life time, meaning the intent for it to be seen was not there and it was in fact, never meant to be seen. It is hard to take a position on this as from a moral perspective, I would personally want my privacy to be respected but as a photographer it can seem kind of a shame that great photography doesn’t make it into the world. For me there is another more important question than this. This question is can the art be separated from the artist? With Vivians work already being published it can only ever be an opinion on the morals of its release. However with this release I believe it now begs the question of the art vs the artist as we try to interpret her work. Vivian as a person could at times be quite cold, rude and even did a few actions which many would look down upon. Overall it may be difficult to see Vivian as a good person and someone who you’d want to know or even look up to. This therefore asks us whether we can objectively view her art separately from the person she was or whether we have to take this into consideration. In my opinion Vivians art cannot be separated from who she was. This is because her photos were very much a personal ‘project’ and were never produced with an outward meaning for others. They were directly influenced by her day to day life events, as well as her own personality and world view. You could say that her life was her photography and her photography was her life. Unlike most photographers her art work was not a creative expression but more of a personal outlet, almost like a personal journal not intended to be seen by others but to help make sense of things to yourself. This means Vivian and her work an intrinsically linked and we must view it with all of her personal flaws in mind.

[tastydregs]

Sports Illustrated Lays Off Journalists After Announcing Pivot to AI Content

Outgoing Humans

Earlier this month, Arena Group, which owns magazines including Men's Journal and Sports Illustrated, announced that it'd start publishing AI-generated articles. Its CEO and chairman Ross Levinsohn, however, vowed that "AI will never replace journalism."

Sounds like that's not going so great. Continuing a years-long cutbacks campaign, Sports Illustrated has been hit with another round of devastating layoffs affecting over a dozen workers.

"Hello! I've been laid off from [SI]. Not great!" tweeted Chris Almeida, a former editor for the magazine.

"After seven and a half years of writing about the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB, LPGA, World Cup, Olympics and more, I, too, have been laid off by Sports Illustrated this morning," rejoined Alex Prewitt, a former senior writer.

According to an internal memo obtained by Awful Announcing, Arena Group has laid off a sizable 17 employees and created 12 openings to "reflect the new needs of the SI business." (Something tells us those "new needs" might involve accommodating the generative AI the parent company has been brandishing at Men's Journal.)

"Today is a day of change in our Sports business," the memo reads. "We are restructuring our Sports Illustrated group to reflect how consumers engage with us, and how we address the needs of our partners and audience."

Following Suit

It appears Sports Illustrated is following in the footsteps of CNET, a once-esteemed tech site that was caught secretively churning out error riddled AI-generated articles after rounds of quiet layoffs.

And on the accuracy front, Arena Group's AI-guided dreck isn't doing any better. Futurism, with the help of a medical expert, found that its very first AI article for Men's Journal, titled "What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone," contained at least 18 factual errors, despite the authoritative tone of its synthesized prose. Not what you'd want out of something that's supposed to be giving health advice to the site's vast readership.

In response, the article was hastily and extensively rewritten to account for the inaccuracies. Some still slipped through the cracks.

That didn't seem to bother Arena, though. A spokesperson from the group stated in a statement provided to Futurism that the company was "confident in the articles."

While Sports Illustrated itself is yet to make use of a generative AI for its stories — at least in a way that's disclosed to readers — it seems likely that it's only a matter of time before it's forced to. Arena, after all, has just laid down the hammer on the size of its staff, and with other outlets including Buzzfeed already blazing ahead with AI content, the industry at large looks teed up to be overrun with bots.

More on published AI content: BuzzFeed's AI Quizzes Seem Kind of Broken, Honestly

The post Sports Illustrated Lays Off Journalists After Announcing Pivot to AI Content appeared first on Futurism.

[mariacallous]

The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve—what, exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made great again—you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump, the Party’s de-facto standard-bearer, except that nobody seems to have a handle on what his policy goals are, not even Donald Trump. You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, but this would reveal less about what they’re for than about what they’re against: overeducated élites, apart from themselves and their allies; “wokeness,” whatever they’re taking that to mean at the moment; the overzealous wielding of government power, unless their side is doing the wielding. Besides, one person can tell you only so much. A more efficient way to gauge the current mood of the Party is to spend a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC.

On a Friday in February, I arrived at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort, in Orlando. It was a temperate afternoon, and the Party faithful were spending it indoors, in the air-conditioning. I walked into a rotunda with potted palm trees and chaotically patterned carpeting. Shabbat services were about to begin, and a minyan of young men, give or take, roamed around in MAGA-themed yarmulkes. The CPAC dress code was big-tent: pants suits, sweatsuits, bow ties, bolos—anything, pretty much, except for an N95. A merch kiosk near the entrance sold Nancy Pelosi toilet paper, gold-sequinned purses shaped like handguns, and Trump 2024 T-shirts in every size and color. Even the staircases were sponsored—one by Fox News and another by Gettr, a social-media platform founded by Trump-campaign alumni. If you aligned yourself with it at just the right vantage, you could parse Gettr’s slogan, “Making Social Media Fun Again!” Otherwise, it looked like red-white-and-blue gibberish.

Political rallies are for red-meat applause lines; think-tank conferences are for more measured policy discussions. The American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC, tries to have it both ways. On Saturday, I spent a while in the main ballroom, watching a panel called “Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” “Him” referred to Joe Biden, “the hair-sniffing dementia patient in the White House”; the first “her,” of course, was Hillary Clinton; the second was Kamala Harris, who was lambasted as both an “empty pants suit” and a wily “Cersei Lannister.” That afternoon, Trump arrived, hosted a V.I.P. gathering featuring a spread of Big Macs under heat lamps, and took the stage, giving a ninety-minute stump speech to an ecstatic crowd, all but confirming his intention to run for President again.

The policy discussions were mainly tucked away upstairs, in conference rooms with a tiny fraction of the foot traffic. One panel, on European populism, was called “More Brexits?” The moderator, an American named James Carafano, introduced the first speaker: Miklós Szánthó, the director of a Hungarian think tank called the Center for Fundamental Rights. (According to Átlátszó, an investigative-journalism outlet in Hungary, the Center for Fundamental Rights is secretly funded by the Hungarian government.) “He’s a real European,” Carafano, a foreign-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said. “I know that because I saw him in Europe!”

For decades, at conferences like CPAC, international exchanges were mostly assumed to flow in one direction: Americans exporting their largesse, and their ideology, to the rest of the world. At the first CPAC, in 1974, the keynote speaker, Governor Ronald Reagan, gave a rousing address about soldiers who had shed their “American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense of someone’s freedom.” In recent years, as the future of the Republican Party has seemed increasingly up for grabs, American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home.

Szánthó, a stout man with a smartly tailored suit and a waxed mustache, began by quibbling with the panel’s title. “There will be no so-called Huxit,” he said, despite his country’s disagreements with “the deep state of Brussels.” Szánthó lives in Hungary, but he spoke fluent Fox News-inflected English. “When it comes to border protection, when it comes to the Jewish-Christian heritage of the Continent and of the European Union, or when it comes to gender ideology,” he continued, the Hungarians, nearly alone among citizens of Western nations, “step up for conservative values.”

Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union, and one of the most fiercely nativist and traditionalist. Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country. Relative to other European nations, Hungary hadn’t experienced a big influx of migrants. (Out-migration is actually more common.) But the refugees, most of them from Syria or other parts of the Middle East, were an effective political scapegoat—one that Orbán continues to flog, along with academics, “globalists,” the Roma, and, more recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law, reportedly said, “We were watching the Hungarians.”

Experts have described Orbán as a new-school despot, a soft autocrat, an anocrat, and a reactionary populist. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton, has referred to him as “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.” Some prominent American conservatives want nothing to do with him; but more have taken his side, pointing to Hungary as a potential model for America’s future. That afternoon, on the CPAC main stage, Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, singled out Orbán for praise: “If you cannot protect your own borders, if you cannot protect your own sovereignty, none of the other rights can be protected. That’s what the Prime Minister of Hungary understands.” The house lights dimmed and a sort of political trailer played, set to melodramatic music. “For over a millennium, to be Hungarian meant to sail the rough seas of history,” a narrator intoned over a horror-movie-style montage: Mongol invaders, migrant caravans, a glowering George Soros, drag-queen story time.

The lights came up, and Szánthó walked to the lectern, waving stiffly. “Hungary has fought wars, suffered unthinkable oppression, to gain and regain our liberty,” he said. In the current war, he went on, the enemy was “woke totalitarianism,” personified by George Soros (he paused for boos); the hero was “one of the true champions of liberty, a man you know well, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” (a generous round of applause). He praised “President Trump” and tried to initiate a cheer of “Let’s go Brandon,” a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden” used by right-wing culture warriors who spend too much time on the Internet. He quoted the old chestnut “Hard times create strong men,” although, the way he said it, it sounded like “strongmen.” And he invited the audience to join him at the next CPAC conference, the first to be hosted on European soil: CPAC Hungary.

“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock.

Szánthó mentioned “Jewish-Christian heritage,” but there aren’t many practicing Jews left in Hungary. Orbán, in his speeches, often uses the phrase “Christian democracy,” which he portrays as under continual existential threat. Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,�� at least in part, as code for something else. “If we manage to uphold our country’s ethnic homogeneity and its cultural uniformity,” he said in 2017, “Hungary will be the kind of place that will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.” His constant theme is that only he can preserve Hungary for the (non-Muslim, ethnically Magyar) Hungarians—about as close as any European head of state will come to an explicit rejection of ethnic pluralism in favor of state-sanctioned white nationalism. For many of his American admirers, this seems to be a core element of his appeal. Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”

In recent years, Orbán or institutions affiliated with his government have hosted, among others, Mike Pence, the former Vice-President; new-media agitators including Steve Bannon, Dennis Prager, and Milo Yiannopoulos; and Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General, who told a Hungarian newspaper that, in the struggle to “return to our Christian roots based on reason and law, which have made Western civilization great . . . the Hungarians have a solid stand.” In his hilltop office with an imposing two-story library, Orbán has met with conservative figures including Patrick Deneen and Jordan Peterson. “If these people think the extreme left is hijacking American society in dangerous ways, then, yes, I agree,” the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan told me. “But to go from that to ‘Let’s embrace this authoritarian leader in this backwater European country, and maybe try out a version of that model with our own charismatic leader back home’—I mean, that leap is just weird, and frankly stupid.”

In Orlando, I followed the energy of the crowd to media row, where Sebastian Gorka, a bellicose conspiracy barker with a Vandyke beard, was doing a live broadcast of his radio show, “America First.” In the nineties and early two-thousands, Gorka was a Hungarian politician and government adviser; in 2017, he served as a counterterrorism adviser in the Trump Administration, focussing on “radical Islamist ideology.” (He did not have the credentials that most comparable appointees have held; he had, however, worn a medal from the Order of Vitéz, a Hungarian military society historically associated with the Nazis.) “What would you like to hear from tomorrow’s speech by the President?” he asked Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (He meant, of course, Trump, whom he generally referred to as “my former boss.”) Greene replied, “I want to hear him say that his entire policy, his entire agenda, is for our country, our country only, and the rest of the world can frankly go to hell.” Gorka, who was born in London to Hungarian parents, said, “I like that menu.” He dismissed Gaetz and Greene and introduced his next “big-ticket guest”: Kyle Rittenhouse. Later, I ran into Gorka, who was now wearing a tuxedo, and asked him for an interview. He declined. (To be specific, he shouted, “Go to hell, scumbag,” and “You’re smoking crack.”)

I saw him the next day in the V.I.P. lounge, near a spread that was both lavish and pedestrian: silver, scalloped carafes of coffee with Starbucks to-go cups; a tureen of lukewarm fettuccine Alfredo. (My press pass did not technically allow me access to the V.I.P. lounge, but CPAC, as it turned out, did not have very tight border security.) A graffiti-style portrait of Trump hugging and kissing an American flag, just auctioned off for more than twelve thousand dollars, was propped against a cardboard box and a pile of plastic wrap, waiting to be shipped to the lucky winner. J. D. Vance, a former anti-Trump venture capitalist who had rebranded himself as a pro-Trump salt-of-the-earth Senate candidate, chatted with Eric Bolling, a news anchor who left Fox News amid allegations of sexual harassment, which he denied, and was later hired by Newsmax. The pro-Brexit politician Nigel Farage waited in the buffet line next to Devin Nunes, a former member of Congress who now runs Trump’s struggling media company. Father Frank Pavone, a Catholic priest wearing his clerical collar, chatted with Todd Starnes, a pundit whose Fox News contract wasn’t renewed after he appeared to endorse the view that Democrats may worship Moloch, the Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. “The networking here is amazing!” Pavone said.

In the hallway, I shook hands with Szánthó and Schneider, the two lead organizers of CPAC Hungary, and told them that I planned to fly to Budapest to cover it. “You will be welcome,” Szánthó said. “Please just send an e-mail.” One of the speakers on the European-populism panel had been Raymond Ibrahim, an independent scholar from California who contributes to a variety of right-wing outlets, usually to argue that Islam is a global scourge. “The word ‘multiculturalism,’ it sounds nice, but what is exactly the culture?” he said during the panel. “Things like polygamy . . . or killing the apostate . . . these are the culture of Islam.” Ibrahim exchanged phone numbers with Gorka, and they later started texting, as Ibrahim told me, “mostly about Islam, and about how Hungary’s fighting back.” A few days after the conference, Gorka, on his show, interviewed the chairman of the A.C.U., who plugged CPAC Hungary. “It’s no longer about policies,” Gorka said, paraphrasing something another conservative leader had told him at CPAC. “Now, as a movement, we have to take back the Republic, and we have to take back our civilization.”

Igot to Budapest on May 16th, the day Viktor Orbán was sworn in for his fourth consecutive term as Prime Minister. “Congratulations to him,” a Hungarian journalist named Gábor Miklósi said. “What an achievement.” This was sarcasm—a dark, dense form of sarcasm, polished from years of use.

We were having a beer at a “ruin bar” in what is still known as the Jewish district, a neighborhood that the Nazis turned into a ghetto in 1944. (In the course of two months, with the collaboration of the Hungarian government, the Nazis deported nearly half a million Jews from this ghetto to Auschwitz; others were later lined up on the banks of the Danube and shot.) Miklósi—slightly stooped, perennially tired—is an editor at 444, one of the few independent news outlets left in Hungary. “He controls most of the national papers, most of the radio and TV stations, all the local papers in the countryside,” Miklósi said. “He doesn’t do it in obvious ways—he does it slowly, by putting his cronies in charge, or by subtly making life difficult for his critics. But eventually he gets what he wants.” The “he,” of course, was Orbán, who is, like all despots, his country’s default antecedent, the implied subject of virtually every sentence.

From the nineteen-fifties through the nineteen-eighties, during the period when Hungary was within the Soviet sphere of influence, Moscow allowed it a bit more latitude than other Eastern Bloc countries, a unique mixture of subjection and relative exemption that came to be known as Goulash Communism. As the Iron Curtain began to lift, Orbán emerged as a leader of the youth resistance, giving impassioned speeches against totalitarianism; in 1989, he went to Oxford to study political philosophy, on George Soros’s dime. During his first term as Prime Minister, starting in 1998, Orbán, who still identified as a liberal democrat, vowed to build up the country’s civic infrastructure. President Bill Clinton hosted him at the White House, extolling Orbán’s “youthful and vigorous and progressive leadership.” Then, in 2002, Orbán lost a reëlection campaign to a Socialist coalition and, according to the biographer József Debreczeni, resolved to return to power and change “the rules of the game” so that he would never lose again.

He enlisted Arthur Finkelstein, a political consultant from Brooklyn who had worked to elect Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Ronald Reagan, among others. “Try to polarize the election around that issue which cuts best in your direction, i.e., drugs, crime, race,” Finkelstein wrote in a 1970 memo to the Nixon White House. In 1996, Finkelstein put this principle to work on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu, a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel who was then about twenty points down in the polls, and who started alleging that his opponent, Shimon Peres, planned to divide Jerusalem. This was a lie, but it stuck, and Netanyahu won. In 2008, Netanyahu introduced Finkelstein to his friend Orbán; Finkelstein became so indispensable that Orbán reportedly came to refer to him, dotingly, as Finkie. One of Finkelstein’s protégés later told the Swiss journalist Hannes Grassegger, “Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler.” Orbán had been running against globalism, multiculturalism, bureaucracy in Brussels. These were abstractions. By 2013, Finkelstein had an epiphany: the face of the enemy should be George Soros.

After Orbán returned to power, his rhetoric grew more sharply nativist, laden with Islamophobic and anti-Semitic dog whistles: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money.” In 2018, several parties to the left of Orbán’s, and even a couple of neo-Fascist parties to his right, ran separate candidates for Prime Minister, splitting the opposition vote. “After that, the common narrative was that next time all we had to do was unite behind one opposition candidate, and we would definitely win,” Szilárd Pap, a left-wing writer, told me. “Well, we did unite the next time, and we lost even worse.” In Budapest, I met plenty of Hungarians who openly railed against their government. One was Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition candidate in the most recent election. Márki-Zay continues to accuse Orbán of corruption and mendacity, and he doesn’t seem worried that his sushi will be poisoned with polonium. The regime’s defenders see this relative freedom as evidence that all the talk of autocracy is reckless alarmism. Its critics see it as evidence of a cost-benefit decision: certain egregious breaches are not worth the trouble, at least for now.

“Orbán has managed to preserve the appearance of formal democracy, as long as you don’t look too closely,” Anna Grzymala-Busse, the director of the Europe Center at Stanford, told me. Since 2010, most of Hungary’s civic institutions—the courts, the universities, the systems for administering elections—have come to occupy a gray area. They haven’t been eradicated; instead, they’ve been patiently debilitated, delegitimatized, hollowed out. There are still judges who wear robes, but if Orbán finds their decisions too onerous he can appeal to friendlier courts. There are still a few independent universities, but the most prestigious one—Central European University, which was founded by Soros—has been pushed out of the country, and many of the public universities have been put under the control of oligarchs and other loyalists. There are still elections, yet international observers consider them “free but not fair”: radically gerrymandered, flush with undisclosed infusions of dark money. The system that Orbán has built during the past twelve years, a combination of freedom and subjugation not exactly like that of any other government in the world, could be called Goulash Authoritarianism. Scheppele contends that Orbán has pulled this off not by breaking laws but by ingeniously manipulating them, in what she calls a “constitutional coup.” She added, “He’s very smart and methodical. First, he changes the laws to give himself permission to do what he wants, and then he does it.”

On the day I arrived, Orbán delivered a forty-five-minute speech in a gilded neo-Gothic chamber of the Hungarian Parliament Building, warning that Europe was entering “an age of danger,” and that Hungary, “the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world,” was one of the only nations prepared to weather it. He predicted that, given the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and an incipient energy crisis, “migration toward rich countries will intensify with tectonic force.” If other Western nations continued to implement “waves of suicidal policy,” such as lax border control, the result would be “the great European population-replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations”—a clear reference to the racist talking point known as the great replacement theory. A few years ago, this idea was propounded most visibly by white-power extremists such as the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik (or, more recently, the shooter in Buffalo). It’s now routinely parroted by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, many leading Republican politicians, and, in Hungary, the head of state.

In 2010, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, above the threshold required to amend the constitution. Within a year, it had made a dozen amendments; when these didn’t provide enough latitude, it threw out that constitution and wrote another one. In 2022, Fidesz won a supermajority once again. I asked Miklósi whether the next four years of Orbán’s reign would be different from the last. “It always gets worse,” he said. This time, he wasn’t being sarcastic.

Of all the Anglophone Orbán apologists, surely the most genial, and arguably the most influential, is a British journalist named John O’Sullivan, who turned eighty in April. When William F. Buckley retired as the editor of National Review, in the eighties, O’Sullivan took over. During Margaret Thatcher’s third term as Prime Minister, he was one of her top advisers; after she left office, he helped her write her memoirs. “Mrs. T. would take us on these lovely trips to various places—a manor in the South of England, a villa in the Bahamas—and we would talk over breakfast about some episode in her life, and then we’d each go off and write,” he recalled. “It was great fun.”

O’Sullivan had invited me to lunch at an Italian bistro near his apartment in Budapest. (He still fancies himself a classical liberal, at least insofar as “I’m always up for a good chat, even one that may involve disagreement.”) He is known for knowing everyone, and he drops names with an equanimous smile, describing people on a spectrum from “a good friend” to “a friend” to “an ex-friend.” He wore a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London clothier once favored by Oscar Wilde. Even in this, O’Sullivan can’t help but out-conservative the conservatives: “I prefer the older patterns, I confess, most of which they’ve now discontinued.”

In 2008, O’Sullivan moved to Prague to help run Radio Free Europe; in 2013, two Hungarian friends, a “well-known modernist poet” and a “former teacher of Orbán’s,” hired him to start a conservative think tank. O’Sullivan and his wife, Melissa, have lived in Budapest ever since. “You really must meet Melissa,” he told me. “She’s an American—a proper American, from Alabama.” A friend of the couple’s told me, “Melissa is much more naturally Trumpy, in terms of her sympathies. John gets the Trump phenomenon intellectually, but he finds Trump too fickle and sort of gross.” Orbán—a family man and an articulate lawyer who purports to set aside one workday a week exclusively for reading—is more to O’Sullivan’s taste.

His think tank is called the Danube Institute. It is funded entirely by a foundation that is funded entirely by the Hungarian government. This foundation sponsors international conferences and three handsomely designed periodicals, all in English: European Conservative, Hungarian Review, and Hungarian Conservative. In 2015, O’Sullivan, dismayed by the anti-Orbán consensus among Western journalists and academics (“They all seem to be making the case for the prosecution, don’t they?”), put together an essay collection of his own in which he wrote that “the death of liberal democracy in Hungary has been greatly exaggerated.” After all, O’Sullivan and other apologists often argue, Orbán has a popular mandate. Rather than delegating gay rights, the handling of asylum claims, and other matters of domestic policy to international bodies—with their adherence to such abstractions as “the rule of law”—isn’t it arguably more democratic to simply put them to a vote?

Even as the Hungarian constitution has been dismantled, O’Sullivan, Pangloss of the post-Soviet bloc, has continued to insist that Orbán is still basically a liberal democrat, if you squint. The problem with this sanguine view is that it has been repeatedly refuted, even by Orbán. “The new state that we are building in Hungary is an illiberal state,” he declared in 2014. O’Sullivan told me that, as soon as he heard this, “the first thing I said to myself was ‘I’m sure that isn’t really what he meant.’ A few weeks later, when I saw him for lunch at the Prime Minister’s office, I told him straight out, ‘You’re going to regret saying that.’ And, actually, I don’t know that he has.” At times, Orbán seems to mean “illiberal” in the partisan sense, as in owning the libs; often, he seems to mean it more sweepingly, expressing skepticism about a wide range of individual liberties. It’s true, as the Orbánists like to point out, that Hungary is not the most repressive country in the world. China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea—all are, by many measures, less free. But then there are no major political factions trying to make the United States more like North Korea.

During his first few years in Budapest, O’Sullivan had trouble generating interest in the Hungarian model of conservatism. “I went wherever I could—the Anglosphere Society, in New York, Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Club, in Washington,” he said. “The usual response was a yawn, basically. Until Brexit, and then Trump—and then, suddenly, people were open to radically different ideas.” In 2020, the Danube Institute started hosting fellows—writers and scholars from abroad who were invited to Budapest for a few weeks or months, given a stipend and a comfortable apartment, and asked to work on articles or books that might help the cause. “We couldn’t predict exactly what would come of it,” O’Sullivan said. “You just put the billiard balls on the table, you know, and wait to see where they end up.”

The most dynamic billiard ball turned out to be Rod Dreher, a prolific American author who became a Danube Institute fellow in 2021. Dreher has long been a conservative and a Christian, but, within those traditions, he has experienced a number of mini-conversions. In a 2006 book, “Crunchy Cons,” Dreher, then a kind of hipster exile from the Deep South, posited that conservatives ought to wear some of their cultural markers more lightly—that Republicans can shop at farmers’ markets, too. In “The Benedict Option,” in 2017, he argued that conservative Christians had already lost so many decisive political battles (same-sex marriage, abortion) that they should arrange a “strategic withdrawal” from the public sphere, building localist communities rather than contesting for national power. After his Danube Institute fellowship, though, he retreated from his retreatism: actually, conservatives could win real power, and Hungary could show the way. “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” Dreher told me. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” By the time Orbán ran for reëlection earlier this year, Dreher had completed his transition from aspiring ascetic to partisan booster. “Mood here at Fidesz HQ is increasingly cheerful,” he tweeted on Election Night. “ ‘Lights out, libs!’ say Hungarian voters.”

One April day in 2021, while Dreher was strolling through Budapest, he texted Tucker Carlson. “We text all the time, whenever I see something he might want to mention on his show, or just something he might find interesting,” Dreher told me. Carlson knew what the Western media said about Orbán, but Dreher encouraged him to ignore it and come see for himself. “If somebody has all the right enemies, if the liberal establishment is obsessed with treating them as a hate object, then it’s natural for a right-populist like me or Tucker to react by going, Huh, maybe there’s something interesting there,” Dreher said. Carlson told Dreher that he had already thought about visiting, but that he’d been encountering some bureaucratic hurdles with the Hungarian Embassy. A few days later, Dreher met Balázs Orbán—not related to Viktor, but one of his closest advisers. (Many Hungarians I spoke to described him as a sort of Karl Rove figure.) “I tried to convince Balázs that Tucker was somebody who could be trusted,” Dreher recalled. He offered personal assurances that, on the big questions, Tucker and Orbán were in alignment. By the summer, the red tape had cleared. (Carlson declined to comment.)

On August 5th, Carlson anchored his show from a rooftop in central Budapest. Behind his left shoulder was an ornate stone façade, bathed in sunlight, and, beyond it, a bank of looming storm clouds. “Good evening and welcome to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight,’ ” he said. “Of the nearly two hundred different countries on the face of the earth, precisely one of them has an elected leader who publicly identifies as a Western-style conservative. His name is Viktor Orbán.” Carlson was spending the week in Budapest, delivering each day’s American headline news in his selectively apoplectic style. “Representative democracy—it’s been our system for nearly two hundred and fifty years,” he said in one night’s lead segment. “Apparently, it’s now over.” The ostensible cause of the death of American democracy was a temporary eviction moratorium enacted by the Centers for Disease Control. The next night, Carlson aired an obsequious one-on-one interview with Orbán—fifteen minutes without a single challenging question, and certainly no warnings about the potential death of Hungarian democracy.

Carlson’s work vacation got a lot of press. Dreher defended him (“Tucker in Budapest: Blowing People’s Minds”); Andrew Sullivan lambasted him (“The Price of Tucker Carlson’s Soul: Going Cheap for a Corrupt, Fashy Kleptocrat”). Online sleuths followed the money. The Hungarian Embassy in Washington has had contracts with Connie Mack IV, a Republican former representative from Florida, and David Reaboi, a bodybuilder and former Andrew Breitbart protégé who touts his skills in “national security & political warfare.” In 2019, the Embassy paid two hundred and thirteen thousand dollars to Policy Impact Communications, a D.C.-based P.R. firm staffed by well-connected lobbyists. One of its board members is Dick Carlson—the director of the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan, the Ambassador to the Seychelles under George H. W. Bush, and, as it happens, Tucker’s father.

By the standards of sponsored diplomacy, though, a six-figure contract is hardly unusual. (In 2018, the government of Saudi Arabia paid American lobbyists more than thirty-eight million dollars.) Normally, six figures might buy you a full-page ad in the Financial Times, say, or help your ambassador secure a speaking slot at an obscure thought-leader conference; it’s presumably not enough to get your head of state a long softball interview on one of the most popular shows on American TV. The payments surely don’t hurt, but it seems that Carlson, Dreher, and O’Sullivan are true believers, exuding the contrarian thrill of forbidden knowledge. When I was in Budapest, Dreher, seven time zones away and in the midst of a messy divorce, texted me assiduously, including before 5 A.M. his time, trying to steer my story. “I really do care about Hungary, and I want to help you do a good job,” he wrote. “God knows it’s not paradise, but it’s important to understand Hungary as it is.” That’s the sort of P.R. that money can’t buy.

In some ways, Orbán conducts himself like any other strongman. He built a big soccer stadium in his small home town, and he loves to go there to watch the games. In the mid-two-thousands, Lőrinc Mészáros, one of Orbán’s childhood friends, was a pipe fitter receiving welfare checks; shortly after Orbán returned to power, in 2010, Mészáros became the richest person in Hungary. This year, when Márki-Zay ran as the opposition candidate, he was given five minutes on TV to make his case to the voters, and the rest of the allotted time went to Orbán.

But, unlike Putin-style autocrats, Orbán is often keen to maintain plausible deniability. “He’ll use such obscure methods that it might take months to figure out what he’s done,” Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. In 2010, Orbán established a relatively small antiterror police unit. Bit by bit, in disparate clauses buried in unrelated laws, he increased its budget and removed checks on its power. “I was reading Article 61 of a bill on public waterworks, literally, and I came across a line that said, Oh, by the way, the antiterror unit now gets to collect personal information on all water-utility customers, which basically means everyone in the country, without notifying them,” Scheppele went on. She contends that the unit now functions, essentially, as Orbán’s secret police. “His claim is always ‘Everything I’m doing is legal’—well, of course it is, because you made it legal,” she said. The goal, as the scholar John Keane puts it in his book “The New Despotism,” is a kind of bureaucratic gaslighting: the ability to insist that what everyone knows is happening is not in fact happening.

I was experiencing a tiny microcosm of this while trying to register for CPAC Hungary. I had sent an e-mail, as instructed—then another, then another. Each time, I encountered a new bureaucratic hurdle: wait a week, call this phone number, try this link. The organizers maintained that the event would be open to the press. “We are fighting for everyone’s right to speak,” Balázs Orbán, who was scheduled to appear at the conference, said in a radio interview. A few days later, I met him at a café where jaunty, self-help-y aphorisms had been written on each table in sidewalk chalk. (“Take others’ opinions lightly—very lightly,” our table read.) I asked him about the government’s suppression of same-sex marriage and gay adoption. “If the state is pushing for the policy where the marriage is only between a man and a woman, and seventy per cent of the people want this, it’s not tyranny of the majority,” he said. The popularity is beside the point, I argued, if the policy is a violation of human rights. “According to my understanding, it’s not,” he said. When our conversation was done, he asked me to pose with him for a photo. I mentioned that I was having trouble getting into CPAC and asked if he would put in a good word with the organizers. His response, which I had to admit was quite clever, was that, as a government official, it would be improper for him to intervene.

Dreher assured me that there must be some innocent mixup. When I met O’Sullivan at his office, he agreed: “I’m sure it’s merely an oversight.” I told him that I had been in touch with journalists from the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vice, and a range of independent Hungarian publications, none of whom had heard back from the CPAC organizers. A few hours later, all our requests were formally denied, and Vice published a piece titled “CPAC Just Decided to Not Let Any US Journalists Inside.” In the American context, this sort of thing—for example, the Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano banning press from a campaign rally—is still rare enough to raise eyebrows. In Hungary, it has become so commonplace that some reporters didn’t even bother applying to CPAC. “They’ll be very polite, and then at the last minute they’ll tell you, ‘We’re so sorry, space constraints,’ ” another journalist told me. (When I sent an e-mail to the government’s International Communications Office, asking to fact-check the relevant claims in this piece, the official response read, in part, “We appreciate the possibility you offered us, however, we do not wish to participate in the validation process of leftist-liberal propaganda.”)

When I was about to leave O’Sullivan’s office, he asked whether he would see me again that night, at the CPAC welcome reception. At this point, I couldn’t tell whether I was being elaborately trolled. “I didn’t get an invitation, but I’d love to go if I can,” I said. “Where will it be?”

One of his staffers helpfully piped up: “Some hotel near the Elisabeth Bridge. The Paris something or other?”

On my way out, Googling frantically on my phone, I found a five-star hotel fitting this description: the Párizsi Udvar. I went back to my room (in a perfectly nice, decidedly not-five-star hotel) and grabbed a sports coat and a notebook. A few minutes later, I was standing outside the entrance to the Párizsi Udvar, not sure what to do next. “Event?” a white-gloved doorman asked. “Event? Event?” I nodded, and he ushered me inside.

The hotel’s courtyard, a former shopping arcade covered with a vast stained-glass dome, was one of the most opulent interiors I’ve ever seen. There were marble columns, floors of intricate Moorish tilework, and glass display cases stocked with jeroboams of fancy champagne. (In the 2011 film version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” an M.I.6 agent is double-crossed by a Hungarian general, shot, and captured by Soviet spies. The scene was filmed in the courtyard of the Párizsi Udvar.) About two hundred people were there, holding drinks and sampling Hungarian-American-fusion finger food. I ran into O’Sullivan (“Ah, good, you made it!”) and spotted Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, who was due to appear on a panel with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the Brazilian autocrat (and a scheduled speaker at the following American Conservative Union conference, CPAC Brazil). Candace Owens, the YouTube culture warrior and the author of “Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation,” leaned against the bar, visibly pregnant, as a crush of admirers lined up to shake her hand. (Her husband, George Farmer, the C.E.O. of the social network Parler, stood next to her, looking down at his phone.) I’d heard that, while Owens was in town, Viktor Orbán had requested a closed-door meeting with her and a few others in his book-lined office, to discuss culture and politics. Owens later confirmed, in a CPAC promotional video, that she’d met with Orbán for about two hours: “It was really amazing. He’s so on it.”

Miklós Szánthó appeared on a dais, holding a microphone, and quieted the crowd. “Why are we doing this?” he said. “We are doing this to make the liberals’ nightmare true.” He addressed the Americans in the room: “We do hope that you can learn from us the political mind-set how to be a successful conservative, as we also learn from you, and from Ronald Reagan. As he put it so many years ago, ‘We win, they lose.’ That is what the Hungarian right has done.”

Dan Schneider, the executive director of the A.C.U., told me that he was especially excited for CPAC Israel, coming up this July, in Tel Aviv. (I didn’t know it at the time, but another speaker in Budapest would be an old political ally of Orbán’s, Zsolt Bayer, a notorious Hungarian talk-show host who has used racist epithets for Black people, has referred to Roma people as “animals” who must be “stamped out,” and has argued that the widespread anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Hungary was “understandable.”) I also met Mark Krikorian, a severe immigration restrictionist whose American nonprofit, the Center for Immigration Studies, has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. “I can’t get a speaking gig at an American CPAC to save my life, but I fly four thousand miles over here and I’m welcomed with open arms,” Krikorian told me. I asked him if he was worried about being, as O’Sullivan had put it, “tarred with the brush of Orbánism.” “What are they gonna do, call me an ultra-hate group?” Krikorian said. “Fuck them!”

After an hour or so, Schneider pulled me aside. “I haven’t eaten dinner yet,” he said. “You wanna get out of here?” We strolled aimlessly, eventually stopping at an upscale bistro in a picturesque square. I ordered the venison goulash; Schneider picked something called the Hungarian Rhapsody. He kept his phone next to his water glass, occasionally tapping out a text. Though he never said so outright, it seemed clear that he had the personal cell numbers of several Republican senators, perhaps a Supreme Court Justice or two, and presumably at least one ex- and potentially future President.

“So what do you make of the Hungary thing, really?” he had asked me earlier. I tried to answer honestly but also diplomatically. “Clearly,” I began, “there are issues with the way Orbán wields state power.”

“Wields state power! ” Schneider said, spitting the words back in my face. “You make it sound so nefarious!” I brought up Hungary’s not entirely independent judiciary. “Oh, so he appoints judges he likes,” Schneider said, rolling his eyes. “Is that so different from what we do?” He meant to normalize Orbán’s behavior, but I couldn’t help interpreting it the other way around: the brazen opportunism of the Republican Party—for example, refusing to give a hearing to the opposition’s judicial nominees, then ramming through its own, in obvious violation of precedent and basic fairness—did seem undeniably Orbánesque. He called himself “a classical liberal,” adding, “You can’t secure individual liberty unless you secure national sovereignty first.” I made the obvious rejoinder that Orbán, for one, clearly does not consider himself a classical liberal. “Well, maybe I just haven’t read enough about it,” Schneider said.

At dinner, he was midsentence when a man approached us and, without a word, grabbed Schneider’s phone from the table and ran off. Before I could process what was happening, Schneider, a former track athlete, was already in pursuit. He slipped and fell, then got up and kept running, following the thief around a corner. By the time I caught up with them, Schneider had tackled the man and recovered his phone. We walked back to our table. “I think I broke a rib,” Schneider said. “And I definitely scuffed my shoes, which were not cheap.” The man followed a few yards behind us, shouting expletives, at one point even brandishing a brick. Eventually, the police came and took him away. “I’m so sorry,” our waiter told us, in English, when we were seated again, catching our breath. “Nothing like that ever happens here. I am sure that this man was not really a Hungarian.”

There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. “Orbán doesn’t need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” He acknowledged that the U.S. has safeguards that Hungary does not: the two-party system, which might forestall a slide into perennial single-party rule; the American Constitution, which is far more difficult to amend. Still, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today. “I’m sorry to tell you, I’m your worst nightmare,” Dessewffy said, with a wry smile. As worst nightmares went, I had to admit, it didn’t seem so bad at first glance. He was sitting in a placid garden, enjoying a lemonade, wearing cargo shorts. “This is maybe the strangest part,” he said. “Even my parents, who lived under Stalin, still drank lemonade, still went swimming in the lake on a hot day, still fell in love. In the nightmare scenario, you still have a life, even if you feel somewhat guilty about it.”

Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, tweeted last year, “Anybody serious about commenting on the state of US democracy should start reading more about Hungary.” In other words, not only can it happen here but, if you look at certain metrics, it’s already started happening. Republicans may not be able to rewrite the Constitution, but they can exploit existing loopholes, replace state election officials with Party loyalists, submit alternative slates of electors, and pack federal courts with sympathetic judges. Representation in Hungary has grown less proportional in recent years, thanks to gerrymandering and other tweaks to the electoral rules. In April, Fidesz got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three per cent of the districts. “At that level of malapportionment, you’d be hard pressed to find a good-faith political scientist who would call that country a true democracy,” Drutman told me. “The trends in the U.S. are going very quickly in the same direction. It’s completely possible that the Republican Party could control the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2025, despite losing the popular vote in every case. Is that a democracy?”

In 2018, Steve Bannon, after he was fired from the Trump Administration, went on a kind of European tour, giving paid talks and meeting with nationalist allies across the Continent. In May, he stopped in Budapest. One of his hosts there was the XXI Century Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Orbán administration. “I can tell, Viktor Orbán triggers ’em like Trump,” Bannon said onstage, flashing a rare smile. “He was Trump before Trump.” After his speech, he joined his hosts for a dinner cruise on the Danube. (The cruise was captured in unreleased footage from the documentary “The Brink.” Bannon’s spokesperson stopped responding to requests for comment.) On board, Bannon met Miklós Szánthó, sipping a beer and watching the sun set, who mentioned that he ran a “conservative, center-right think tank” that opposed “N.G.O.s financed by the Open Society network.”

“Oh, my God, Soros!” Bannon said. “You guys beat him up badly here.” Szánthó accepted the praise with a stoic grin. Bannon went on, “We love to take lessons from you guys in the U.S.”

In 2018, “Trump before Trump” was the highest compliment that Bannon could think to pay Orbán. In 2022, many on the American right are trying to anticipate what a Trump after Trump might look like. Orbán provides one potential answer. Even Trump’s putative allies will admit, in private, that he was a lazy, feckless leader. They wanted an Augustus; they got a Caligula. In theory, Trump was amenable to dismantling the administrative state, to pushing norms and institutions beyond their breaking points, even to reaping the benefits of a full autocratic breakthrough. But, instead of laying out long-term strategies to wrest control of key levers of power, he tweeted, and watched TV, and whined on the phone about how his tin-pot insurrection schemes weren’t coming to fruition. What would happen if the Republican Party were led by an American Orbán, someone with the patience to envision a semi-authoritarian future and the diligence and the ruthlessness to achieve it?

In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed” was admired by David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.” J. D. Vance has voiced admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism, against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”

In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs (civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself). “The central insight of twentieth-century conservatism is that you work within the liberal order—limited government, free movement of capital, all of that—even when it’s frustrating,” Andrew Sullivan said.“If you just give away the game and try to seize as much power as possible, then what you’re doing is no longer conservative, and, in my view, you’re making a grave, historic mistake.” Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”

On the morning after the reception, I arrived at the building where CPAC Hungary was being held—a glass-covered, humpbacked protuberance known as the Whale. Orbán was due to speak in thirty minutes. I walked up to an outdoor media-registration desk, where a Center for Fundamental Rights employee named Dóra confirmed that I would not be allowed to enter. “I have to get back to work now,” she said, although there was no one else in line. She called over a security guard, who stood in front of me, blocking my view of the entrance, and demanded that I go “outside.” I made the argument that we were already outside. Within five minutes, he was threatening to call the police. (The Center for Fundamental Rights later declined to comment on specific claims in this piece, writing, “Unfortunately there is a lot of fake news in the article.”)

I texted Rod Dreher, who seemed to think that his allies were making a tactical mistake: surely, antagonizing journalists would make the coverage worse. He and Melissa O’Sullivan scrambled to find attendees willing to pop out between sessions and talk to me. I spoke with a friend of Dreher’s, an urbane descendant of Hungarian aristocrats and a study in cultivated neutrality: “I am a businessperson, so I believe in the win-win-win, which means that no one is on the wrong side, ever, you see? No one is the Devil, even the Devil.” Later, I talked to another friend of Dreher’s, who, after chatting for a few minutes, said, “I’ve got one of these badges. Why don’t you put it on, try to walk in, and see what happens?”

It was calmer than I’d expected inside the Whale. CPAC Orlando had been a manic circus of lib-triggering commotion; CPAC Hungary was less flashy, more focussed. Young volunteers wearing business suits passed out policy papers printed on thick stock. “He’s made it in again!” John O’Sullivan said, smiling and clapping me on the shoulder. Schneider, who had spent much of our dinner disclaiming the most wild-eyed, conspiratorial members of his coalition, was now chatting with Jack Posobiec, who has made a career out of promoting election disinformation, child-groomer memes, and other bits of corrosive propaganda.

The speaker onstage was Gavin Wax, the twenty-seven-year-old president of the New York Young Republican Club. (For most of the twentieth century, the club endorsed liberal Republicans, but, after an internal coup in 2019, it endorsed both Trump and Orbán for reëlection.) There were about a hundred people in the audience, most of them listening to Wax through live translation on clunky plastic headsets. “Hungary has frequently become a target because it is a shining example of how easily the globalist agenda can be repelled,” Wax said. “We demand nothing short of an American Orbánism. We accept nothing less than total victory!” From the outside, the Whale had looked vast, airy, translucent. Inside the main hall, there were various camera setups and artificial-lighting rigs but not a crack of sunlight.

Tucker Carlson recorded a message from his home studio in Maine. “I can’t believe you’re in Budapest and I am not,” he said. “You know why you can tell it’s a wonderful country? Because the people who have turned our country into a much less good place are hysterical when you point it out.” Trump also sent a greeting by video: “Viktor Orbán, he’s a great leader, a great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result. I was very honored to have endorsed him. A little unusual endorsement, usually I’m looking at the fifty states, but here we went a little bit astray.” During his keynote address, Orbán said, “President Trump has undeniable merits, but nevertheless he was not reëlected in 2020.” Fidesz, by contrast, “did not resign ourselves to our minority status. We played to win.”

In 2002, when Orbán lost his first reëlection campaign, he left office, but neither he nor his followers ever really accepted the result. “The homeland cannot be in opposition,” he said—in other words, he was still the legitimate representative of the Hungarian people, and no election result could change that. Trump, of course, has been perseverating on a similar theme for the past year and a half, and he, too, has a cultural movement, a media ecosystem, and a political party that will echo it. At CPAC Orlando, most of the speakers ritually invoked the shibboleth that Trump had actually won the 2020 election, despite all evidence. Several attendees told me that, if the Republicans had any backbone, they would win back the House in 2022, amass as much power as possible at the state level, and then do whatever it took to deliver the Presidency back to the Party in 2024. A free but not fair election, captured partisan courts, the institutions of democracy limping along in hollowed-out form—these seemed like telltale signs of early-stage Goulash Authoritarianism. Now here the Americans were, studying at Orbán’s knee.

Trump may run in 2024, and he may win, fairly or unfairly. What worried me most, sitting in the belly of the Whale, was not the person of Donald Trump but a Republican Party that resembled Orbán’s party, Fidesz, more by the month—increasingly comfortable with naked power grabs, with treating all political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, with assuming that any checks on its dominance were mere inconveniences to be bypassed by any quasi-legalistic means. “There are many things that the Americans here want to learn from the Hungarians,” Balázs Orbán had told me. “We’re going to keep our heritage for ourselves, our Christian heritage, our ethnic heritage . . . that’s what I think they want to say but they can’t say, and so they point to someone who can say it. If they want us to play that role, we are fine with that.” After I got back to the U.S., I spoke to Dreher, who mentioned that he was thinking about moving from Louisiana to Budapest, where he had been offered a job with the Danube Institute. “I really like the Hungarian people, and I think it could be useful to build a network of Christians and intellectuals who are thinking about the future,” he said. “We in the West still have so much to learn.” ♦