The Hungarian Connection
'Victims of Communism' and 'American Orbánism'
PART 1: Mr. Smith Goes to Budapest
For years, the principal spokesperson for the “Victims of Communism” was a millennial from South Carolina, where “he grew up the son of a minister on a small farm outside Columbia and was home-schooled by his mother in his early years… [and] heard firsthand accounts of poverty, oppression, starvation, torture, and mass murder” from “Christian missionaries his parents hosted in their home.” At last year’s “National Conservatism” conference in Miami, he introduced Florida governor Ron DeSantis as “the future president of the United States.”
Marion Smith served as the executive director and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) from 2014-21. Under his leadership, annual contributions to the VOC skyrocketed from tens of thousands of dollars to several million, transforming a small organization into a force to be reckoned with. VOC co-founder Lee Edwards, “the longest-tenured member of the conservative movement” (according to Richard Viguerie), claims to have recruited Smith at the Heritage Foundation. “Marion knew all the players in Hungary,” Edwards recalled in his memoir.
Viktor Orbán, the far-right authoritarian leader of Hungary, is one of the biggest supporters of the VOC, and in particular its museum in Washington. In 2001, Orbán visited the White House and told George W. Bush that the U.S. capital needed an “International Museum on Communism.” For this, the VOC rewarded the Hungarian prime minister its Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom in 2002. Seven years later in Budapest, Marion Smith became the founding president of the Common Sense Society, and Lee Edwards met with Orbán, president of the “national-conservative” Fidesz party, a year before he returned to power. According to Edwards,
He wasted little time, saying (in English) that if he was elected, Hungary would make a significant donation to help make the goal of an international museum on communism a reality. As I recall, he mentioned the figure of $1 million. I was stunned. I had received no hint of what Viktor wanted to talk about. Here at long last was the money we needed to begin realizing our long-held dream. I stammered my thanks and promised we would be prudent in our use of the gift. He smiled, shook my hand, and was gone, leaving me to begin praying for a Fidesz victory.
My prayers were helped by the Socialists, who governed so poorly for eight years that in 2010 Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in the elections. Orbán was a man of his word. There followed nearly two years of negotiations over the terms of the grant, the rationalization of U.S. and Hungarian regulations and laws regarding grants, the requirement of regular progress reports, and the division of the grant into an initial gift of $200,000 followed by a second tranche of $800,000. Essential to the signing of the ten-page single-spaced agreement was Marion Smith, whom I had met at Heritage and had spotted as a strong candidate for executive director of VOC.
A decade later, Hungary donated another 10 million dollars to the “Victims of Communism” in Washington. Before Marion Smith became enamored with Budapest and Hungarian “national conservatism,” the future VOC leader married the daughter of István Stumpf, a justice on the Constitutional Court of Hungary (2010-2019). Twenty five years ago, Viktor Orbán appointed Stumpf as his chief of staff / deputy prime minister (1998-2002). In 2021, Orbán tasked Stumpf with “coordinating the transformation of Hungary’s higher education system.”
After completing various internships in Washington (Center for Strategic and International Studies, CNN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Enterprise Institute, in that order) and co-founding the Common Sense Society in Budapest, Anna Stumpf Smith Lacey “served in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry as U.S. Desk officer [2009-11] and subsequently as political attaché at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington [2011-2014].” After her husband took over VOC, the organization hired her as an “external relations consultant.”
Since 2016, Lacey has led the Washington-based Hungary Foundation as its executive director. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Orban’s government authorized the creation and funding” of this nonprofit group.
In late 2015, the Justice Department issued an advisory opinion that the foundation could be exempt from registering under FARA as long as its activities were limited to “bona fide religious, scholastic, academic or scientific pursuits or of the fine arts,” and it did not engage in lobbying or public relations… The foundation and Ms. Smith Lacey were soon engaging with U.S. officials and policy debates in ways that sometimes seemed to test the language in the Justice Department’s opinion…
[For example] she appeared at exclusive gatherings with U.S. officials overseeing Central Europe organized by recipients of foundation grants, including the Atlantic Council and the Center for European Policy Analysis, each of which had received more than $200,000 from the Hungary Foundation. At a panel hosted by the Atlantic Council in 2019, Ms. Smith Lacey pushed back against claims that democratic governance was eroding in Hungary and accused the United States and other Western countries of hypocrisy, asserting that they treated immigrants, Jews and Christians poorly. She linked Mr. Orban’s agenda to the American nationalism preached by Mr. Trump.
PART 2: ‘Common Sense Society’
“In less time than it takes to read aloud the three words of Common Sense Society (CSS) its entire philosophy is known,” quipped a British blogger months ago, writing about the international conservative network’s UK launch. “CSS harks back deliberately to nineteenth century divisions when European hordes controlled most of the world via force and robbed it blind.” We’re going to focus on the VOC-to-CSS pipeline, starting with the richest man in Florida.
Thomas Peterffy, subscribers will recall, is a Hungarian-born Republican mega-donor committed to Ron DeSantis in 2024 that has donated millions to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Largely because of Pettery’s “active and selfless support” of the establishment of a VOC museum in Washington, Orbán awarded him the Grand Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2017 for having “furthered the reputation of Hungary.”
Peterffy, a former VOC trustee (2015-19), has chaired the CSS since 2021. The Hungarian American billionaire introduced DeSantis at last year’s CSS conference and gala in Palm Beach, Florida as a “future president of the United States.” Peterffy lives a “few mansions down” from Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He admits that Trump is “extremely likely” to win the 2024 nomination, but is all in on DeSantis nevertheless. “Sooner or later, he’ll be our president.”
Later in 2022, Marion Smith more confidently introduced Ron DeSantis as “the future president,” and the CSS commissioned a “dissident Chinese composer” to write a “Freedom Overture” to be premiered by the Palm Beach Symphony this year. In early 2021, Smith left the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and returned to the Common Sense Society as its CEO, bringing Peterffy and several others with him.
The CSS senior manager of digital media performed similar duties for the “Victims of Communism.” CSS executive vice president David Talbot formerly served as the VOC’s director of development (2016-18) and chief of staff (2018-21). In 2019, Smith and Talbot led a VOC delegation to Lithuania to promote the museum project. CSS vice president of education Murray Bessette was the VOC director of academic programs.
Bessette and Smith are both former fellows at the Claremont Institute, which emerged as “the intellectual home of America’s Trumpist right.” Whereas Claremont’s president has declared their “mission…is to save Western civilization,” the CSS professes to be guided by principles rooted in a “close study of our inherited Western civilization.”
Travis LaCourter at least used to be the managing editor of the CSS blog “Paprika Politik.” He apparently followed Marion Smith to VOC and became Assistant to the Executive Director. The Claremont Institute named LaCourter as one of its “Publius Fellows” in 2014, three years after Smith. The founding editor of Hungarian Free Press did some digging after stumbling on Paprika Politik, and concluded,
the Common Sense Society’s goal is to essentially provide pro-Fidesz youth and conservative American university graduates with a platform to normalize and popularize the Orbán government in North America and in western Europe, funds to further their work and with an opportunity to peddle an often repeated myth in some western right-wing circles, namely: that there isn’t really anything amiss with Mr. Orbán’s regime. Fidesz is simply a victim of the same vindictive liberal and left-wing interests that wield power in the west as well.
Whereas VOC has always cheered the erasure of Soviet monuments in Eastern Europe, the CSS has defended Confederate monuments in the United States. Earlier this year, the CSS sponsored an event called “Uncancelling Richmond’s History” about Confederate statues taken down in the Virginian capital. Marion Smith delivered the opening remarks in Richmond, but the main speaker was Douglas Murray, a racist British friend of the CSS who is part of the right-wing “Intellectual Dark Web.” Orbán once posed with a Hungarian translation of Murray’s book, “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, and Islam.” According to journalist Murtaza Hussain,
The picture of Europe that Murray paints is nothing less than apocalyptic. Over 300 pages, he recounts a litany of crimes committed by immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, or people with European citizenship who happen to be minorities. Like far-right American publications that maintain running lists of crimes specifically committed by black people and Latino immigrants, Murray collapses all these cases together to give the impression of one gigantic, rolling crisis. Echoing President Donald Trump’s warnings about Latin American rapists flooding the United States from Mexico, Murray depicts a wave of migrants from Muslim-majority countries who are not simply fleeing violence in their homelands, but are on a mission to conquer, violate, and insult the people of Europe.
Speaking of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Jordan Peterson (who met Orbán in 2019) spoke for more than half an hour at the 2022 CSS event in Palm Beach, Florida, where he accepted its inaugural Sir Roger Scruton Prize. Scruton, “the greatest modern conservative thinker” according to Boris Johnson and “the patron saint of common sense” according to Marion Smith, died in 2020, but the woman he married is a member of the CSS “council of trustees” chaired by Thomas Peterffy.
In 2016, the CSS hosted an event (“Why Are We Unwilling to Defend Western Civilization?”) with Marion Smith and Roger Scruton in Budapest. Later that year Scruton lectured the “Victims of Communism” in DC. In 2019, Viktor Orbán awarded the right-wing British philosopher the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, Middle Cross for having “foreseen the threats of illegal migration and defended Hungary from unjust criticism.” Around that time, Scruton described Islamophobia as a “propaganda word” that “was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue which we are all worried about.” Also that year, Smith and Scruton spoke at the inaugural “National Conservatism” conference in London.
PART 3: ‘Inventing American Orbánism’
In recent years, Viktor Orbán has become “the American right’s favorite strongman,” and “a hero for the American right.” Two glaring examples are the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and FOX News host Tucker Carlson. Orbán spoke at CPAC events in Hungary and Texas last year. In August 2021, Tucker Carlson relocated his show to Budapest to emphasize the importance of Orbán’s Hungary for those who “care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions.” Carlson returned in January 2022 and released a propaganda film, “Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization.”
Then there’s Ron DeSantis. “Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary,” DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw allegedly once said about Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill. According to journalist Zack Beauchamp, “DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.”
Almost two years ago, in June 2021, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation (“championed” by VOC) “requiring that all Florida schools teach their students about the crimes of communist regimes.” He did so in the presence of VOC leader Andrew Bremberg, a former assistant to President Trump that directed his Domestic Policy Council. A year later, Florida became the fifth U.S. state to designate November 7 as “Victims of Communism Memorial Day.”
In 2022, over twenty years after Viktor Orbán told George W. Bush that Washington needed an “International Museum on Communism,” the VOC museum opened its doors almost within view of the White House. “VOC patriarch” Lee Edwards’ daughter is the founding director of the museum, and is married to the former executive director of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission. Earlier this year, DeSantis included her husband in his “test case to push right-wing politics into Florida’s colleges and universities.” By this time, Orbán had appointed Marion Smith’s father-in-law as the government commissioner in charge of a reform of Hungary’s higher education system.
“American Orbánism” has a name: “National Conservatism.” Rather, the GOP’s Orbán fan club has coalesced around the “NatCon” “movement,” which is actually a series of conferences organized by the Edward Burke Foundation, “a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.”
The Edward Burke Foundation held its first National Conservatism conference in London, which only had a dozen confirmed speakers, including Marion Smith, Roger Scruton, and Balázs Orbán, an unrelated advisor to the Hungarian prime minister. Weeks later, a significantly bigger conference (“NatCon 1”) convened in Washington, with keynote speeches by Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Peter Thiel, and Josh Hawley. In early 2020, Douglas Murray and Viktor Orbán himself spoke at another another NatCon event in Rome.
“NatCon 2” met the following year in Orlando, Florida, with keynotes by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. Marion Smith, as CEO of the Common Sense Society, chaired a breakout session on “Virtue, the Free Market, and the Nation.” Other first-time speakers included Christopher Rufo, an ideologue of DeSantis’ “war on woke” that was appointed to the New College of Florida board of trustees earlier this year.
After another conference in Brussels, “NatCon 3” returned to Florida last September. Marion Smith joined its organizing committee and introduced DeSantis as “the next president.” His speech was titled, “Florida is a Model for America.” Investigative reporter Kathryn Joyce (who has called National Conservatism a “serious plan for authoritarianism” in the U.S.) thought that DeSantis indeed “sounded a great deal like someone gearing up to declare his candidacy for larger office.” New Yorker columnist Jonathan Chait wrote that “at times, the gathering had the flavor of a party convention.”
And while every political conference has points of disagreement and speakers harping on their chosen hobbyhorse, this one was striking in its unified view of the world the participants face and the response they believe is necessary. Almost every speaker repeated a version of the following: The “woke” revolution has captured the commanding heights of American education, culture, and even large businesses, from which positions it is spreading and enforcing a noxious left-wing ideology. This poses an existential threat to conservatism, culturally and politically. Conservatives must therefore fight back by using state power to crush their enemies on the left — a notable break for a movement that, in the pre-Trump days, had at least pretended to stand against “big government.”
It was not so much that they had changed their policy goals or even their political strategy as that they had lost faith in the potential for normal politics to function. Every one of them demanded extraordinary measures — what Trump has called iron-fisted rule — as the only alternative to political extinction… Two models for the emerging right-wing state came up repeatedly. The first was the DeSantis governorship… The other model was Orbán’s Hungary…
A DeSantis spokesperson pointed to Orbán’s regime as an inspiration; an Orbán spokesperson pointed to DeSantis’s government as affirmation of the Hungarian leader’s actions. That Orbán and DeSantis are both colorless functionaries ought to drive home the fact that this movement is not, as its critics often jeer, a personality cult. Many of the conference members retain an affection for Trump, but they are not hung up on him personally so much as they are mobilized to wage war on his enemies. The appeal of semi-fascism in Hungary, and its incipient version in Florida, lies not in the men but in the systems they have built, which can be replicated.
Sponsoring institutions of NatCon 3 in Miami included CSS, the Claremont Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Hillsdale College’s Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C. (The latter’s dean is Matthew Spalding, the son-in-law of Lee Edwards who is part of DeSantis and Rufo’s effort to reinvent New College of Florida as the “Hillsdale of the South.”)
The “Victims of Communism” are not leading the so-called “Orbánization of America,” but they are in the passenger seat. Take for example the Edward Burke Foundation. Its vice president for external affairs, Anna Wellisz, has been a key organizer of the NatCon events. Wellisz, a lobbyist for the government of Poland, has written for Taki’s Magazine, out of which grew the far-right Proud Boys gang. (“I’m a proud Western chauvinist,” declare new members. For CSS, it goes without saying.)
Her name may ring a bell for subscribers. Anna Wellisz is the sister of Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, a member of the VOC Academic Council. Chodakiewicz, a Polish nationalist historian, served as “Trump’s Right-Wing Handler” when the US president visited Warsaw in 2017. He chairs the Polish studies department at the Institute of World Politics (IWP), an institutional ally of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Next week we will turn to the IWP in another crucial installment of “VOC Info.” If “The Hungarian Connection” made you wonder, “what about Sebastian Gorka?”—stay tuned…