Prominent pro-government daily calls opposition leaders ’ordinary traitors’

The nationwide pro-government print daily defines accepting US financial help for political activities as ‘high treason’.

In his Magyar Nemzet editorial, Tamás Pilhál quotes US presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr as saying that journalists throughout the world are being constantly ‘stuffed with money’ by the CIA and USAID. (Kennedy Jr said in a Lex Fridman podcast in June that ‘The United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. It owns newspapers, it has journalists on it, thousands and thousands of journalists, on its payroll’.) He also refers to a statement by former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson on 1 September about alleged efforts by the CIA and the State Department to depose the Hungarian government during last year’s election. (Johnson told the Judging Freedom online show that it wasn’t even the CIA but the State Department who openly go after PM Orbán ‘because he is Christian, Conservative and because he opposes the uncontrolled inflow of migrants’.) Pilhál names the organisations headed by Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony and former opposition candidate for PM Péter Márki-Zay, who received funding from the United States as well as journalists and media outlets who have been beneficiaries of US grants. He condemns such grants for ’trampling Hungary’s sovereignty underfoot’ and brands the recipients as ‘ordinary traitors’.

Tags: Orbán, sovereignty, State Department, US