1. I’ve spent a lot of time in authoritarian countries, interviewing dissidents, opposition leaders, torture victims, journalists who were beaten. And it’s infuriating that people like Tucker Carlson are cosplaying like apparatchiks for autocrats before jetting back to the US.
2. People on the Trumpian right who claim to idolize autocrats from Orban to Putin wouldn’t last even a few weeks in those regimes. Heck, they can’t even handle the “oppression” of a cloth mask for 20 minutes a day. Try living under genuinely inescapable oppression.
3. But they know they won’t have to. Instead, people like Carlson can put Orban up on a pedestal and then just fly back to their glitzy life in the US. Hungarians don’t have that option. And they don’t have a democracy any longer either because of Orban.
4. I can’t convey in a tweet what it’s like to speak to someone who was tortured or beaten to obtain the freedoms we take for granted, but I know this: Tucker Carlson doesn’t have one millionth of the courage or bravery of those who actually experience and fight real oppression.
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