In today´s #vatniksoup REBREW, I´ll introduce a Hungarian lawyer and politician, Viktor Orbán (@PM_ViktorOrban). He´s best-known for turning Hungary into an authoritarian state, and for cooperating with other authoritarian regimes like the Kremlin, the CCP and Iran.
1/24
Orbán has been Hungary´s Prime Minister since 2010, and under his leadership the country has basically become the first nondemocracy in the EU. Orbán himself has described Hungary as an "illiberal state", and he´s used the Kremlin playbook to create it.
2/24
He created a nationwide right-wing media network and interfering with independent media has plummeted Hungary´s Press Freedom Index into 67th place, one of the worst in the EU. The state has also spied on Hungarian journalists by using the infamous Pegasus spyware.
3/24
After taking over the media, Orbán started working on the court system, firing anyone he saw as a threat. Later he reshaped the voting system to favor his party Fidesz, a process that´s often referred to as "gerrymandering", giving Fidesz supermajority in Parliament.
4/24
Some have suggested that Orbán´s closeness to Russia and Putin stems from his early days as a politician, when he allegedly received cash from Russian mafia boss Semyon Mogilevich. The incident was allegedly recorded and then passed over to Russian secret services.
5/24
Orban´s fans in the West see him as a Christian conservative who´s standing up to "woke" European bureaucrats. But when taking a closer look at his policies in the last 14 years, we quickly see that his government´s most consistent policy direction has been embracing China.
6/24
His (alleged) Christian conservatism has also made him a rock star of US conservative politics & he was recently interviewed by the infamous pro-Kremlin conspiracy theorist,@tuckercarlson. Orbán also hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference.
7/24
This year´s CPAC featured many prominent conservative speakers, including Orbán himself, Prime Minister of Georgia, PVV leader Geert Wilders, Jack "Agent Poso" Posobiec and Trump lackey @VivekGRamaswamy, who has incidentally named China as the biggest adversary of the US.
8/24
Usually, authoritarian states tend to become allies and do business together. Since 2009, Orbán has been very close with the Kremlin and Putin, but what people often forget is that he´s been doing close cooperation with the Chinese leadership at least since 2010.
9/24
Already back in 2011, Orbán was praising the CCP regime because it "was not dominated by that Western, liberal idea that fiddling with the books is the way to get the best economic indicators." After this, Chinese investments started pouring into Hungary.
10/24
By 2022, China had become the largest foreign investor in Hungary. For example, Huawei´s largest logistics center in Europe is located in Hungary, and China is financing the Hungary-Serbia railway, the Kaposvar solar power station, and the Debrecen battery factory.
11/24
Interestingly, the Trump administration banned Huawei & many of its subsidiaries from the US due to a trade war, espionage and other national security threats. Canadian authorities even arrested Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou at the request of the US in 2018.
12/24
While meeting Trump in the US in Mar 2024, Orbán also met with Heritage Foundation leadership and @VivekGRamaswamy. Ironically, Heritage (and Ramaswamy) calls Orbán´s closest ally, the CCP, "the most persistent and consequential threat facing the American people today".
13/24
For Hungary, the CCP is a great source of funding without any string, like advocating human rights, attached. But like with Russian energy imports, it also increases Hungary´s dependency on China. This cooperation and money flow can also create a "debt trap" for Hungary.
14/24
As they´ve done in many other countries, the CCP is also attempting to promote the Chinese culture within Hungary. Hungary hosts five CCP-funded language and cultural centers, known as "Confucius Institutes," and they´ve also attempted to build a...
15/24
..Shanghai Fudan University campus in Budapest. This sparked large protests, & the Budapest mayor even announced that the streets around the university would be renamed to commemorate human rights abuses by the CCP. The university was labeled as a "CCP influence operation."
16/24
Orbán has also invited the Chinese police to patrol in Hungary. Setting up Chinese police stations in the EU is of course alarming, not only because the CCP has a "well-documented history of harassing and intimidating overseas Chinese citizens and diaspora members".
17/24
And it appears that the CCP already has leverage on Hungary - In 2016, Hungary blocked an EU statement on China´s maritime claims in the South China Sea, and vetoed an EU statement condemning CCP´s security law in Hong Kong.
18/24
In Feb 2024, Hungary again blocked EU´s sanctions package against Russia. But according to diplomatic sources, the package wasn´t blocked because of Orbán´s friendship with Russia, but because the sanctions also targeted four Chinese companies.
19/24
For Orbán, all this seems to be a straightforward transaction: a source of money and influence as China’s leading partner in Europe. In the meantime, Chinese companies can build factories in the heart of Europe with little apparent oversight.
20/24
This deal has led to Hungary becoming the CCP’s most valuable ally in Europe, with economic ties evolving into common security interests. As Hungary is also a NATO member, this has raised concerns on issues such as intelligence sharing.
21/24
This is also the reason why the CCP leader Xi Jinping will be meeting Orbán during his Eurotrip. Due to dire economic conditions, Hungary is desperately seeking for a economic support, which the CCP can of course offer. Xi´s other official visits will be to France & Serbia.
22/24
To conclude, Orbán is a typical politician whose words & actions hardly meet. He´s good friends with the most anti-CCP organizations in the US,while at the same time he´s doing massive deals with China, making himself rich & his country more dependent on this foreign power.
23/24
This has led to a absurd situation, in which Orbán is considered a rock star in the US even though his political decisions and EU voting is undermining the American interests in the geopolitical arena.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes). He’s best-known for his white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic rhetoric, and for being the poster boy for the so-called incel movement.
1/17
Like so many from the white supremacist movement, Fuentes dropped out of university after his freshman year. He studied introductory international relations, which apparently made him a geopolitics expert. Nick was introduced to the white supremacist movement at an…
2/17
..early age - he took part in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia. In 2017, Fuentes launched his political talk show “America First”. Initially the show was aired on Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network, but it was dropped after the rally.
3/17
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a social media personality and TV presenter, Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn). She’s best-known for her far-right rhetorics, spreading conspiracy theories, and spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives on Dutch television.
1/24
Raisa studied philosophy of law at Leiden University. The faculty is best-known for one of its professors, Paul Cliteur. He’s a member of the pro-Kremlin party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), where he is one of the leading figures.Cliteur is also known for supervising the FvD…
2/24
…founder Thierry Baudet’s doctoral thesis, and can be considered a central figure in this Dutch “anti-establishment” movement. While studying at Leiden, Raise also met her best friend forever, Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.
1/22
Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…
2/22
…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials - including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort - interacted intimately with…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’m going to outline the current situation in the West’s information war against Russia & its allies. Currently,the West’s counter-disinformation measures are severely underfunded,making it difficult to combat Russian influence operations effectively.
1/17
Europe today is repeating the same mistake in information warfare that it made in conventional warfare: we are not dedicating enough resources to counter it. Just as Europe was unprepared to fully support Ukraine and prepare for kinetic warfare against Russia,...
2/17
...we have been neglecting information warfare. Next year, Russia is reportedly set to spend around 3 billion USD on its information operations domestically and abroad, with allies like the CCP, Iran, and North Korea likely following suit.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (@Heritage). Heritage is best-known for opposing military aid to Ukraine and for their political initiative called Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a Trump presidency.
1/23
Before we begin, I want to justify this soup that focuses heavily on US domestic politics. As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I see Donald Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s existence, and the reasoning for that can be found in this previous soup:
Heritage was founded in 1973, but it took a leading role in conservative politics during the Reagan presidency, whose policies were mostly taken from the foundation’s book series called Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of this series.