The Guardian reports on the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that was just conducted in Hungary. Sometimes people complain that it’s inappropriate to compare anyone or any political movement to Adolf Hitler’s Nazis unless there’s a death toll in the millions. But exterminating human beings is the end game of Naziism, not the beginning point. By the time there is a rail schedule to the death camps, you’ve waited too long to confront the threat. What you need to do is learn to identify Nazi-like behavior while there is still time to prevent the demise of your representative form of government, and before they’ve seized power for themselves. If a political movement walks like the Nazis and talks like the Nazis, then it is probably going to end up causing world historical damage and trauma like the Nazis. And, in any case, no one wants to live under a Nazi regime even if it doesn’t count its victims in the millions.

A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.

Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.

This isn’t some simple oversight where someone forgot to thoroughly vet the conference speakers. The reason CPAC held a conference in Hungary at all is because this breed of American conservative deeply admires the fascist tendencies of the Hungarian government led by Viktor Orbán.

There is a very real chance that these lunatics will be part of a Congressional majority in the United States beginning next January. They’re already exercising their power in many states. There’s nothing more important than how these folks are treated between now and the November elections. Fascist insurrectionists are on pace to win at the ballot box just because people are annoyed about inflation and the Democrats’ inability to deliver on their promises. Before that happens, there has to be bold action to expose these people for what they are and the threat they represent. The Department of Justice has to get its butt moving, and the January 6 committee hearings need to breakthrough into the public’s consciousness.