OH NO, Ukraine Warring On Hungary, Says Absolutely Bullsh*t Desperate Viktor Orbán AI Slopaganda!
Seems like someone might finally lose his 'election.'
Anne Applebaum has a piece in the The Atlantic (archive link) and it is wild, man: “The First Post-Reality Political Campaign: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is waging cognitive warfare on a new scale.”
Boy howdy is he, and with the help of Russia since at least 2020 apparently, and by any means necessary. By propaganda-bots, with cameos from the Trump team, and in February some kind of an illegally obtained sex and drugs tape of opposition leader Péter Magyar. And now a batshit AI campaign!
All that from a guy who got started in politics as an anti-Soviet/Russia activist. John Oliver got a video clip of him back when:
How times and neck-lines change. Now Orbán and his Fidesz party have been in power since 2010, and Hungary is about to have its first Parliamentary elections since 2022 on April 12, (theoretically) giving citizens an opportunity to topple his power.
And Orbán’s party is losing by double digits in most polls. People are pissed at the corruption, inflation, and worsening public services. So, faced with no good news, Orbán’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, already on kissin’ terms with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, reportedly rang him up for extra-emergency help, and the Russians sent a team of propagandists to Budapest to help Orbán, as they’ve done before across Latin America. Some People Have Said they’ve even done that in the US too, people like Robert Swan Mueller III, and such.
So it’s all goulash on the wall. Trump flying monkeys JD Vance, Donny Junior, and L’il Marco have all pitched in to lend some aura and rizz to their old and now-unpopular pal.
Applebaum:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February to endorse Orbán, even seeming to offer financial support “if you face things that threaten the stability of your country.” Vice President J. D. Vance is set to visit Budapest, probably after Easter. President Trump himself appeared on video at the Budapest meeting last Saturday of CPAC, the formerly mainstream-conservative organization that now organizes pop-up rallies on behalf of the international radical right. In his message, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for Orbán.
A Washington Post investigation even revealed that the Russians proposed to stage a fake assassination of Orbán in order to build more sympathy for him, where have we heard that before?
And part of Russia’s (or somebody’s) contribution appears to be flooding the Internet with posts on Facebook and TikTok featuring a freaky AI campaign of extremely realistic deepfakes which don’t mention popular-as-a-Goulash-fart Orbán at all. Instead, the AI videos portray war and murder at the hands of … neighbor Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Who of course have never threatened Hungary one taint-hair! If anybody poses a threat to Hungary’s borders it would be Putin, after taking Ukraine and on his way to see an on-demand showing of Cats in Russian at the Vienna Opera House.
Watch clips of the spooky ads below:
How sad they all would be if Orbán lost his grip! Since his rise to power, Orbán became the Right’s prize show pig for making regime change sausage out of alternative-facts offal, and once in power, digging dictator-ly like a tick on a coonhound.
LONG AGO, AND OH SO FAR AWAY
To quote ourselves:
Once in the door [as Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010] Orbán began slow-braising the country in his paprika-scented fascist frog-pot, filling the judiciary with loyalists, firing disloyal civil servants, and taking over 90 percent of the media. He revamped school curricula to reflect “Hungarian values” and attacked “liberals” at universities, publishing weekly enemies lists of academic “mercenaries,” and encouraging students to submit the names of professors who espoused “unasked-for left-wing political opinions.” He built a gigantic barbed-wire fence between Hungary and Serbia, and complained that the European Union should pay for it. He got parliament to vote that he can rule by decree. He passed an anti-gay law that says gay people are the same as pedophiles. He shook down companies like the mafia.
No wonder Steve Bannon calls him “the most significant guy on the scene right now.” A scene that’s just like Studio 54, except with sloppy, sweaty, angry old men plotting to build mercenary training camps and imprison their enemies, to a soundtrack of unauthorized cover songs by Lara Trump and “Satisfaction” played on repeat.
Here Orbán is, still at it 16 years and however many sleepovers at Mar-a-Lago later, a right-wing darling. The Heritage Foundation’s top accused dog killer Kevin Roberts called the paprikash Orbán cooked up there not just “a model for modern statecraft, but the model.” A supermodel!
Now the US of A is getting its own Orbanization, a Roger Stoning, Taliban-style makeover. If you want to know what that’s going to look like pre-midterms and all hopped up on steroids, look northeast now.
Fast-forward with Applebaum:
Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the economy, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.
Will Russia succeed in keeping Hungary in the fold when the prolitaristy goes to vote for Parliament on April 12, in the first free elections Hungary has had since 1990? Or will he win and let Hungary and Russia keep on enclosing Ukraine in their NATO-hating, iron embrace?
We shall see!
[The Atlantic archive link / DW / MS NOW / Washington Post archive link]
Bonus,
Want to play your own propaganda game like a human AI?
MAD LIB!
Fill in the blanks, no peeking, then read your story.
Fun to play with yourself, or a friend.
[media platform]
[-ing verb]
[plural noun]
[cartoon character]
[-s verb]
[drug]
[-ed verb]
[noun you can find in the home]
[noun]
[plural noun]
[animal]
[adjective]
[body part]
[person you hate for no real reason]
[plural body part]
[adjective]
[adjective]
[action verb]
[-ing verb]
[color or pattern]
[piece of household furniture]
[currency unit]
[-ing verb]
[drug]
[-ing verb]
[verb]
[article of clothing],
[weapon]
[unit of time]
[any word]
[animal]
[-ing verb]
[thing Trump hates]
[verb]
[noun]
[plural noun]
[any word]
[-ing verb]
[noun]
[verbs]
NOW THE MAD LIB based on the true stories!
On the Hungarian government [media platform] accounts, you might find an AI-generated version of the opposition leader saying he’s fine with [-ing verb] the country’s [plural noun] over to foreigners, as long as he’s the one in charge of doing it. Or a [cartoon character] look-alike declaring that said leader “[-s verb] [drug] with me after he accidentally [-ed verb] on it and it fell onto his dirty [noun you can find in the home].”
What you will not find: anything about Hungary’s shrinking national [noun] due to its falling [plural noun] production. And voters see Orbán’s [animal]-like [adjective] face in public as often as he sees his own [body part]! Instead, all the propaganda is based around fear-mongering about Ukraine, Zelenskyy and [person you hate for no real reason], their [plural body part] distorted to look [adjective] and [adjective], imploring stuff like “DON’T LET THEM HAVE THE LAST [VERB].”
You might see an AI-generated version of Zelenskyy, [-ing verb] on a [color] [piece of household furniture], counting his [currency unit], [-ing verb] [drug], or [-ing verb] orders like [verb]! at Hungarian soldiers. Or violent videos that are entirely made up, like a little girl crying as her father in a Hungarian [article of clothing], is killed by a [weapon] in Ukraine, a thing that (obviously) never happened. But AI technology makes propaganda videos like that all seem realer every day.
And internally anyone who says [any word] about the lies or Orban’s corrupt-as-a-[animal] regime gets accused of [-ing verb] with Ukrainian intelligence.
And all against an enemy that does not actually exist any way! Kind of like Donald Trump and [thing Trump hates].
Meanwhile, Orbán has been running the country like a [verb]-and-carry. He’s been seizing the country’s [noun] infrastructure concerns, and even confiscating straight-up millions’ worth of Ukrainian [plural noun] that had been passing through the country and refusing to return it. His regime even hacked into the accounts of local journalists at Hungary’s Daily [any word], claiming the journalists had been involved with espionage and [-ing verb].
Sound familiar? The story is a [noun] that [-s verb] itself.
The End!
Just wondering how much American money is being poured into Orban's re-election campaign?
🎶𝑊𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑤𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑛'𝑡 𝑓𝑙𝑦 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑝𝑎𝑖𝑛
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑡 𝑢𝑠 𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒𝑠
𝑆𝑎𝑦 𝑤𝑒'𝑣𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑧𝑦
𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒'𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔🎶