Holy shit.
Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC
Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209035/hungary-prime-minister-victor-orban-paying-cpac
This month will mark the third year of CPAC Hungary. This international CPAC was born out of a partnership with the Center for Fundamental Rights who continues to host CPAC Hungary in beautiful Budapest. As the only CPAC conference in Europe, CPAC Hungary has been a uniting force for European conservatives and will certainly be no different this year. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is set to deliver the keynote speech for the third year in a row and will be joined by President of the Dutc
I'm gleefully awaiting the sudden realization amongst the general public that these organizations are all one big circle-jerk of grifting.
(Admittedly, I keep my glee in a pickle jar because otherwise it'll escape over the long years.)
@cstross There's this sense in which the point of taking over governments for the global right-wing conspiracy is to fund taking over other governments.
Looting a sovereign entity is, after all, about the most profitable thing you can do in one-lifetime time frames.
@darkling Pretty much, yes.
Only with greater scope; private equity firms don't have the ability of a sovereign to make things legal.
(You can view everything since 1500 as a process of enclosure and not be hugely wrong in terms of economic history. Which is a detached way of saying "farming human lifespan".)
@graydon @darkling @cstross I might place it a little earlier than that. When society moves from broadly equal tribes under a king towards feudalism this is the start of a money economy.
It is also the start of trickle-up economics. Rentals start at the bottom and finish up at the top.
And we still have a slightly different form of trickle-up economics about 1000 years later.
@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.
Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.
@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen.
One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I.
@peterbrown The second thing is that by the time of the protracted struggle over who has the biggest world empire/colonial holdings/external cash inflow with the French, the UK is far enough into maritime norms that their oligarchs will accept that the choice between Napoleon guillotining them all and sharing some power socially ought to come down on relaxing the utility of incumbency.
Combine that with the institutions created to supply the navy and industrialization.
@peterbrown Industrialization includes enclosure; private property was already extending, agriculturally, to a whole lot of things that had been historically common, but now it's coal seams and iron ore and so on. Extractive norms get added to the mix. ("I have the right to nigh-all the profit from extraction based on a philosophical abstraction"; this is a more or less linear progression from pirate->colony->mineral rights.)
@peterbrown From 1860 for about the next century there's a hiccup, because from 1860 or so power rests on rifle regiments (and after 1914, industrial mobilization) and you have to get the majority of the male population to believe they're in on it; thus the Century of the Common Man, universal suffrage, and so on.
This ALSO involves the maximum territorial expansion of territory under colonial (=purely extractive) administration, because rifle regiments are North Atlantic.
@peterbrown From there you get the VLSI Oops, the resulting gold rush, displaced incumbents (or at least incumbents with rivals), and the semblance of innovation. The problem is the only actual innovation was to create a global panopticon, and suddenly the administrative possibilities, stuck on quill-pen-and-ledger for millennia, change. Which means the kind of state you can have changes, and the whole progression has been toward extraction.
@peterbrown All wealth arises from work and if you want to be really rich you have to capture the work of others, which means the whole progression of the norms of enclosure (which are functionally a selection pressure; the better you are at this, the greater your relative success, and that includes "my culture colonizes effectively so children born to it eat better") is about "how much of this person's life span can I structurally compel them to use for my purposes?"
@peterbrown It's not precisely slavery; or at least, it doesn't have the chattel aspects. It's just really hard to do anything but the stuff that surrenders your lifespan to another's purposes, because the penalties for non-compliance are death by exposure or starvation.
And this really gets going as an identifiable, post-aristocractic-autocracy stultification thing, with the Pirate Kingdom of Elizabeth I and just kept rolling on selective advantage thereafter.
@peterbrown Pre-feudalism we could have the Divine Augustus or Sargon of Akkad! lots of direct taxes before the feudal period.
The thing I'd consider unusual about feudal taxes would be a combination of hierarchy-by-public-oaths (effectively contracts) and the change from a gift culture setup (the king gives you stuff, including land tenure, for service) and the creation of permanent land tenure by Christianity. (Can't give a temporary gift to an eternal god.)
@peterbrown I think that's more bookland/charter land (=permanent tenure for entities smaller than a sovereign, aka it's not a gift economy where the king rewards service but it all resets when anyone involved dies) rather than feudalism as such; feudalism works pretty well, and arguably better, pre-bookland.
And, yes, growth of wealth because this is the invention of private property. It's enclosure zero, the idea that land is a thing you can own. (As distinct from hold.)
@graydon @cstross This fits nicely with @anneapplebaum's thesis in Autocracy Inc. All these autocrats form a network of mutual assistance.
Some nodes, like Putin, are more important to the network, I guess. Orban was mostly a satellite?
⬆️ @cstross
>> #Hungary’s New Leader Reveals #ViktorOrbán Was Paying #CPAC.
>> #Magyar noted that his government will … no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.
Surely #Orban was just a conduit but the money into CPAC actually flowed from #Russia.
Wish #Biden's DOJ had not scattered #Mueller evidence to the wind and had followed through with investigating #Trump's money trail to #Russia. What a dereliction of duty!
@cstross Hey remember this story: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mccarthy-trump-putin-pays_n_591cc97ce4b03b485cae64c2
It really does come back to this schmuck half the time, huh?
Orban functioned as a conduit for Putin's foreign threat funding for years.
Petrostate despots and oil oligarchs fund a lot of fascism globally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/russia-election-interference.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
Republicans & the Epstein Class cannot resist fossil fuel public corruption.
https://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600
Alternatively, you get a nation where public corruption is so extreme that the budget for tires ended up in an oligarch's Swiss bank account or laundered via a Trump golf course.
Then your "3 day invasion" turns into a 10 year boondoggle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64664944
Trump's billionaires are war profiteering at a scale that even Putin's oligarchs are astonished.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/19/poland-seizes-boeing-aircraft-parts-headed-for-russia-a89121
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Today was Tax Day for Americans, while billionaires paid little into public coffers.
Despots the world over admire the fleecing of US taxpayers & wish they had wealthy, complacent, & willing sheep like that.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/15/tax-day-united-states-unequal-taxation
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/tax-day-irs-filing/686805/
https://www.ms.now/opinion/income-tax-brackets-income-inequality-april-15
U.S. Billionaires Are Worth 31% More Since Trump Was Reelected This Tax Day 2026, after a year of fiscal policies enacted by President Trump and his Republican Congress that reward the wealthy, America’s 974 billionaires are flying high while workers and families struggle to afford the basics. In just the 16 months since Trump was …
I'm fairly gobsmacked by the number of people who profess surprise that Orbán was funding CPAC. Did you know of his ties to Heritage and Project 2025? One of the most telling, tho, was he funded Rufo and the racist Trump tried to install at State, Jeremy Carl. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/contracts-between-hungarian-nonprofit-and-christopher-rufo-others-raise-foreign-agent/
@fgbjr @cstross Would the Reform take her, though? Taking into account that her campaign slogans/punchlines would be something along the lines of "I WILL CUT YOU, SALAD!!"
I might be using an incorrect grocery term for a leafy vegetable, a refrigerated specimen of which had outlasted Truss in her shooting-star-like career as a Prime Minister of the UK. English is obviously not my first language.
@cstross @fgbjr A good strategy, although there is one wrinkle in this storyline (do not tell Liz about it!). V.V.Putin was totally devoted to Germany, and Germanosphere. I doubt he knows even the basic conversational English.
On the other hand, all this East Germany, BRD business of the balding little man could have been one big ruse, and he might be secretly very language-proficient, and a huge UK-nerd (or a general British Isles nerd).
#ReformUKLtd won't touch #LizTruss with a barge pole.
#NigelFarage has already gone out of his way to avoid being photographed with her at events that they have both attended.
And this despite Truss having money to pay. She has a well-financed social media operation and is touring the U.S.A. claiming that she will spearhead an English version of MAGA.
Reform U.K. Ltd has nonetheless clearly drawn the line at letting her in.
@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.
They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
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