Tucker Carlson will deliver a speech, appropriately titled “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” this coming Saturday at MCC Feszt, a far-right conference in Budapest that is backed by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.
A person familiar with the matter confirmed to The Daily Beast on Monday evening that Carlson will speak at the event.
The news of Carlson’s appearance follows an apparent meeting between the Fox News star and Orban, as a friendly photo posted to the leader’s Facebook page revealed on Monday that Carlson had hosted Orban on his online show for Fox Nation.
ADVERTISEMENT
Carlson appeared on his show from Budapest on Monday evening and announced his show would be broadcast from the Hungarian capital all week.
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Orban granted $1.7 billion—or about one percent of Hungary’s GDP—to Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC, with the aim of training a new generation of conservative elite across Europe.
According to Open Secrets investigative researcher Anna Massoglia, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000 in 2019, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s Fox News show.
In turn, Carlson has publicly praised Orban’s government on Fox News, including in July of that year, when he lauded the prime minister’s anti-immigration policies in the face of declining birth rates.
“Instead of helping the native population to have more children, the Hungarian government, they say, should import a replacement population from the Third World,” Carlson said at the time of the “neoliberals who run” the European Union. “That’s the George Soros solution. But Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has a different idea. Instead of abandoning Hungary’s young people to the hard-edge libertarianism of Soros and the Clinton Foundation, Orban has decided to affirmatively help Hungarian families grow.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Fox News and Tucker Carlson for comment and will update this story accordingly.
—Lachlan Cartwright contributed reporting.
