Newt's WorldFor over one thousand years the people of Hungary have fought against oppression and survived to embrace their freedom and national identity. Hungary’s decades-long fight against communism and fascism is a stark warning to the West’s love of progressivism. And Hungary’s vibrant, freedom-loving democracy in the heart of Europe is an example for America. Newt’s guest is Dr. Shea Bradley-Farrell, author of “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda.” Dr. Bradley-Farrell is the President of Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education in Washington, D.C.
On this episode of news World. For over a thousand years, the people of Hungary have fought against oppression and survived to wholeheartedly embrace their freedom and their national identity. Hungary's decades long fight against communism and fascism is a stark warning to the West. Love of progressivism and its vibrant, freedom loving democracy in the heart of Europe is an example from America. All of this is detailed by doctor Shay Bradley Ferrell in her new book, Last Warning to the West, Hungary's triumph over Communism and the Woke Agenda. Here to discuss her new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guests, doctor Shay Bradley Farrell. She has president of Counterpoint Institute for Policy Research and Education in Washington, d C. She has a foreign policy and national security expert with experience in international development. Previously, doctor Shay worked alongside senior Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Mike Pompeo and Senior Advisor Ivanka Trump One a variety of issues while serving as vice president of international affairs for a DC public policy organization. Shay, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts World.
Mister speaker. It's certainly an honor and a privilege to be with you today. Thank you.
So I'm fascinated. Tell us what you saw your first time visiting Hungary back in twenty nineteen.
Well, I will tell you. As I drove into the city from the airport, I was greeted mainly with communist erab buildings, and I got a little down because I have traveled all over the world in my job and I enjoyed beautiful architecture, and this was depressing. It was row biro buildings, just you know, like I said, Soviet era, very depressing. And when I got into the city of Budapest, I was greeted with Gothic architecture, Baroque architecture, beautiful historical designs. And that kind of describes the journey of the book that I wrote, of Hungary in its darkest days of communist oppression to its modern era today, where it has pulled itself out of all of this and become a very prosperous society. And the last thing I'll say on that, though, is last year when I was doing the research for this book, or actually early this year, one of the things that I kept hearing over and over again from Hungarians, was that the rhetoric coming out of the United States reminded them of their Soviet era.
No, it's very sobrin Chlischen and I visited a couple of years ago, and I always remember we visited the former Secret Police headquarters, which included the jail in the basement where they tortured people and is now a public museum. And I have to say, one of the most impressive statues I've ever seen is the statue of the Magyars on their horses looking down into the Danube as they arrived from Central Asia. I found Budapest to be just an astonishing city, which I recommend to people all the time. Is a place to go and you're in a different world and have a real sense of history, and the Danube is so beautiful it is.
And mister speaker, can I say too, that museum that you spoke about, it's called the House of Terror because the Nazis, as you know, occupied it with the Aerocross Party in nineteen forty four, and then the Soviets came in and occupied with the Secret Police, as you said, and it is one of the fundamental reasons I wrote this book, because the oppression of the Hungarian people emanates from the building and don't forget it.
Well, and of course the rebellion in nineteen fifty six of the Hungarians was a remarkable moment of courage and desperation, crushed by the Soviet Union by sheer force. Tell me a little bit about from your perspective, Hungary's relationship with both Europe and the United States.
Well, you know, under the Trump administration, Hungary had a fantastic relationship with the United States. Ambassador David Cornstein was a great friend to the Hungarians from the United States. But we have drifted into this very antagonistic relationship with them on the part of the US. The Biden administration has not invited them to their Democracy Summit that they hold here in Washington, d c. And the ambassador that we sent to them, and his very confirmation hearing called them a backsliding authoritarian dictatorship. His name is David Pressman. If you look at any of his social media, you'll see him relating Prime Minister Victor orbon to Putin, and you'll think that he's not there to represent the American people. He's actually there to represent the LGBT community because this is an issue he won't let go of.
Well, it tells you, frankly about the Biden administration that they are more hostile to Hungary than they are to either Iran or the Russians, or for that matter, a number of other authority in places including China. But for some reason, and I really want to get your thoughts about this. One of the key reasons I think that this book's so important. Why do you think the left, both in the US and in Brussels in the European Union, why do you think that they are so deeply committed to this kind of anti orbon behavior.
There's three main reasons, and that is gender, migration and war. The EU is pushing the transgender ideology into hunger. They have insisted that Hungary adopt a curriculum that teaches transgender ideology to their children. Genter identity ideology and Hungary got together, had a referendum and they said, without any doubt, no, we don't want that. So they adopted amendments to their child protection law to keep this sort of teaching away from their children and shield the children. The EU's very angry about that. The Biden administration is very angry about that. The second thing is illegal immigration. The EU constantly is pushing Hungry and countries of the EU to take more and more immigrants in. And Hungary tried to do their part during the Arab uprisings. They took in hundreds of thousands, until in twenty fifteen they had to put a stop to it. They declared a state of emergency and said we can't do this anymore, and began to erect dwalls around their borders. And the second thing is the war in Ukraine. There are people again under a referendum said no to sanctions because the energy sanctions that we have put against Putin that has put Europe in a crisis. Energy crisis has also would have done the same thing to Hungary, would have crushed their economy. You know, even their infrastructure for energy is Soviet era. They're trying to diversify away from reliance on Russia. But like all of Europe, it can't happen overnight. So those are the three main reasons. And I would like to point out, as you began saying, you know, Hungary is our ally, they're a NATO ally, they're a member of the European Union, and yet we're treating them like we would treat an adversary.
For one thing, that the Hungarian erection of fences, which I think at the time involves Syrian refugees, actually worked. I mean, when people talk about our southern border and say, well, fences never worked, if they visited Hungry, they would find out that they do work, which of course makes them even matter.
And you know what, all the issue of Ukraine and immigration, I would just like to point out, my husband and I spent hours in the Ukrainian refugee center in Hungary. Hungary has allowed three point five million Ukrainian refugees to come in. They took care of them, they took care of their children, gave them tickets to wherever they wanted to go, resettled the ones that wanted to stay in Hungry. But they've done their best to help the situation. So they're not against people coming in, they're against people coming in illegally and to the point where they cannot even bear it with their infrastructure.
Hungry's not a very big country in that sense.
No, it is ten million people, small country right there in the heart of Europe.
If I remember correctly, Soro spent a great deal of resources trying to undermine and defeat or Orban's reaction was to make Soros the central figure of his reelection campaign. Can you describe that whole? I mean, I don't understand sorrows anyway, because he so much hates the West, he really does.
You know, he's Hungarian, but he hates Hungary, I really believe. But he pours billions of dollars in to actually countries all over the world pushing his social and his political agenda. Even in the United States, mister speaker, we see things like the Corporate Equality Index was put up by organizations funded by him, like the Human Rights Campaign. This corporate equality index is what turned target in Nike, And honestly, even Fox News has a transgender transition program for their employees. So all these corporations have bowed to this corporate equality index, and it's a Soorros backed index. I could create an index too and try to get people stand for it. But anyway, the point is they're well funded and it's changing the fabric of our society. Orbon one Orbon likes opposition. I believe he was a freedom fighter at the end of the Soviet era, and helped push the Soviets out, so they're winning. But Soros is definitely an antagonist.
My impression was talking to some people who'd worked with Orbon that he successfully made Soros a central issue in his reelection and that the people of Hungary overwhelmingly chose Orban over Soros in terms of the future they wanted. Was that your sense of things, Yes.
He is not loved there. That is also my sense. A majority of people do not love Soros in that country.
We were struck. Listen and I I think We're with Orbon twice at Catholic legislative meetings in Rome, and I would just struggle. He was a very practical, common sense person who wanted to get things done, but who was also very firm in his religious and philosophical beliefs. But it's really surprised me how much the left in general and the Biden administration in particular have sort of gone out of their way to smear him with things that are just not true.
It's absolutely amazing. And that's how I start the book out is at last Morning to the West. How did such a small country, you know, insignificant in the scheme of things become this great player on the world stage, you know. Orbon spoke at Seapack in Texas last year. He is hated by the left. He's maligned in the leftist media, but it's because he's dug his heels in. And that's why I think think that they are a great example to the United States on how to fight progressivism because they've already done it under communism and they're doing it successfully against the EU. And I agree with you. I have had the pleasure of meeting with him twice and one time being able to sit down for almost an hour and talk to him. He actually wanted to be an academic before he got into the political side of things. He was one of the founders of the Fetez party that is in power right now. But he's a very thoughtful person. He actually asks questions and listens to the answers from someone like me, because he gathers information and analyzes it, I believe to come up with the best solutions. And he is staunchly pro Hungarian. In other words, Hungry first is what he puts in his foreign policy, just like I wish Joe Biden would do America first.
When Trump originally talked about America first, he gave a speech in Warsaw on which he made very clear he expects every country to favor their interests and wasn't about America first over everybody else, but he expected every country to be that way. I would also notice, I think this is one of the things that people in Brussels, at the European Union and people in Washington resist understanding or believing, and that is a great deal. Of the boldest things that Orbon has done actually involved referendums where the people of Hungary, by overwhelming majorities, favored policies that are pro family, pro children, and dramatically more conservative than the elites want to believe in. Doesn't it strike you that in a way he's sort of the forerunner of what we're now seeing happen in Greece, in Portugal and Italy, to something sent in France and Germany, certainly in Holland recently and in Finland, that there's a movement against the elites and against this globalist agenda that's happening across all of Europe.
That is absolutely correct. Italy, they now have a conservative president. Argentina just elected Javier Mile, an economist, pro life actually and he wants to push the socialists out. So I think we're seeing it all over the world, and Orbon and Trump were really some of the leaders of the modern populist movement or instigators. Perhaps I should say we're seeing the rise of the Vox Party in Spain. They are not in control, of course, but they have quite a majority with them. But I think that you're absolutely right. In fact, I write about this in the book, mister speaker. The referendums on all three of the issues, on child protection from the transgender madness, the war in Ukraine, the sanctions against Russia, and on illegal immigration, they did referendums on all of them, and the people and the vast majority of Hungarians said no. One of the things that struck me on one of my trips to Hungary recently were posters that were put up all over the place that said ninety seven percent say no to sanctions. So that is a lot of the point of my book is that the sovereignty of countries is important, and the EU is trampling on that sovereignty. The Biden administration is trampling on their sovereignty. And actually that speech that you mentioned, it's in the very last part of my book that Trump gave about the sovereignty of people, about how people's cultures and their own way of life is very important and we should protect and preserve that.
Partly, you have a real contest now between the popular will and these elites, and that all over the world the elites are out of touch with people and want to impose on people a set of values which they in fact reject.
That is exactly right. You know, the EU is as an example. The EU is set up really to be an economic alliance. And what we have the elites of the European Commission and Parliament doing right now is they have set out a series of amendments to the Treaty on the European Union that have increasingly taken away decision making power from the member states and put it in their own hands. That is something that Hungary is standing against. I see similar things going on in the US that look like communism to me. With the way that the Biden administration, for example, handled COVID, you know, using a crisis to take more control for the government. They certainly did that, vaccine mandates, you know, masks, all of these rules that really contradicted each other, depending where you were. You had to do this, you didn't have to do that. In my opinion, the indictments of Trump are like the Soviet show trials. Whether or not he's guilty, we put him up on public display, in a legal battle and on trial to make him look like he's guilty. That's what the Soviets did inside the Soviet satellites and inside Moscow.
The emergence of a modern democratic Hungary was a long and difficult process. Could you take us back to the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire and right after World War One the level of turmoil that Hungary went through.
Yes, that's an excellent question, and you, being a historian, please fill in any gaps that I leave out. You know, at the end of World War One we have Woodrow Wilson in his right to self determination that he puts out there on the world stage. The problem with Hungary is that, you know, they did not get to benefit from that, as in my belief the Suffragists did not in the United States, the Irish did not. But anyway, in nineteen twenty the Treaty of t As you know, the world was deciding what to do with the countries that lost the war. The Treaty of Triannon in nineteen twenty divided Hungary to the point that it really weakened them, and I believe that it was a bad move for us for the United States. Hungary lost two thirds of their territory, they lost more than half of their population, so they became very weak and very vulnerable. They were a country, they were democratic, although they were a dual monarchy with the Habsburgs, and go back into that history, but we'll stay away from that for a while. But you know, you fast forward to World War two at the Yalta conference with FDR with Stalin, with Churchill. During that time, they had the Atlantic Charter where they said the countries that had been Nazi occupied, we were going to give them democracy, we were going to help them build democracy, we were going to make sure that they got to do fair elections. And what happened. Russia, the Soviet Union immediately took over countries like Hungary, and although Stalin agreed to it, he had no intention of allowing free and fair elections in Hungary or allowing democracy, and he didn't. And what was terribly ironic, I thought in doing this, and I have a chapter on this called in quotes, liberating Central Europe was at in nineteen thirty nine, and the secret Hitler Stalin Pact that had happened between Russia and Germany was that they were going to divide up Eastern Europe between themselves, and nobody knew about this pack until the Nuremberg Trial. But what was very ironic is we actually ended up giving the Soviet Union exactly what they put in this Hitler Stalin pact. You know, they were one of the instigators of the war in the first place. Terribly ironic and terribly sad to me.
So after this long and painful history, there's a magic moment on October twenty second, nineteen fifty six, when Hungarian university students put together a sixteen point set of demands and stood up against the Soviet Union's control of the country. At that point, the Soviets decided that they had to crush the Hungarians in order to not have their entire Eastern European Empire disintegrate, and they sent in a huge number of forces. I remember it at the time there's a sense of the heroism of the people of Hungary. There were one hundred and fifty thousand Soviet troops twenty five hundred tanks. You know, the people Hungry stood up to them until they were just physically broken by the sheer weight of the Soviet Union. And I think it always created for the rest of us a sense of the heroic commitment to freedom that was at the core of the Hungarian uprising. And I have a hunch that in some ways our band represents a continuation of that tradition of a Hungarian centered independence and a Hungarian centered commitment to freedom. And that may be part of why if you're the European Union bureaucracy and your goal is to have everybody cal tau to Brussels, he just drives you crazy because he clearly stands firmly for Hungary, not for the European Union.
That I think, sir, that you hit the nail on the head. In fact, one of the questions I asked people that I interviewed for the book was what does Hungarian national identity mean to you, because obviously it's very very important to them. And a young law student said to me, fighting for our sovereignty is our identity. And what he meant was, you know, if you go back eleven hundred years when King Eashtavahan established Hungary as a Western Christian nation. Since then, the Hungarians have had to fight for their sovereignty off and on. The Ottoman Turks came in in the twelve hundreds, then the Hapsburgs, the Austrians. There was overlap there and then we see different things going on with the Austrian Hungarian Empire that they've constantly had to fight for their freedom, and the nineteen fifty six revolution, as you said, kind of fast forwarding there. You know, it wasn't soldiers that took up their arms to fight these Soviets. It was students. It was people who were tired and just wanted their freedom. They cut the communist symbol out of the Hungarian flag that have been put there by the Communists, and they were initially successful. They drove the Soviets out, and then I think, probably because of international pressure of embarrassment, the Soviets came back in and stam and killed them. But there were many, many heroes that came out of it. In fact, I spoke to one historian there who said that he thought that their revolution at that time was very similar to our own revolution in America.
I think there was that identity by Hungarians with America, with George Washington, with a sense of freedom. You know, one of the things that's fascinating about Orbon, who I think is really underestimated by the elites both in Europe and the US, is that he actually has sort of a twelve point plan that he's very clear about and that he's very consistent with, and which has given them a pretty solid majority among the Hungarian people. Can you sort of describe for us the Orban approach?
Yeah, I love this twelve point plan because it's common sense, and I think conservatives can adopt many of the points on it, if not all, because it puts us back on the offense instead of being on the defense all the time. I mean, they're common sense things that, in my view, we don't do enough. One of them is build institutions that promote conservative values. You know, That's what I've done at Counterpoint Institute that I think is very important. Another one is come together and support each other. I don't know what your personal experience is, but I tell you a lot of times I've seen in the conservative movement a lot of I guess, fragmentation and people not supporting each other. To the degree we should. We've got the establishment people that are trying to you know, destroy, honestly, the MAGA crowd instead of coming together, mister speaker, quite honestly, just like the Left does, because their roots and Marxism is to come together, strategize and support each other. They have great strategy, you know, we were talking about that with Soros. They have great funding, great strategy, and they set themselves on a mission and they are able to do it. Another one he says is play by your own rules, And what he meant by that was, you know, stand strong and what you believe, and don't be bowled over because you're afraid of all the pushback that you're getting. Stand strong. And that's what they do. In fact, I call them cheerful warriors, because even in the face of the EU opposition, in the face of having a US ambassador there that is a constant embarrassment to them, they're very cheerful about it, but very firm to saying no to the woke agenda.
So from your standpoint, if you could take more bands principles in apply them in the US, do you think they would work here?
I do? I mean the ones I just described to you. Yes. In fact, I have been an advocate for saying to other conservatives and other groups, let's come together. We're not going to agree on everything, but let's come together. Let's support each other. He has another one, which is have your own media. Well, we are doing that. They have done it so much better. And you'll hear the argument in the leftist media that their media is owned by the government. It's not true. It's private media. What happened is more conservatives started actually funding more conservative media, so they have now it's about a fifty to fifty split on leftists and conservative media. We need to do the same things. We see that happening in America with growing conservative media. And I appreciate you know what you're doing on your show very much, but we need more of it. So it's just another example of the things that we can do to further our cause.
I was really struck that your book, for anybody who wants to look at an example of a successful, effective, popular based conservatism, that year book, Last Morning to the West, which is now available on Amazon and it bookstores everywhere, really is a guidebook to what is possible. And we know it's possible because we know it's actually happening, and of course you know about it because of the work you're doing for the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, and so I think that this is really terrific. And Sha, I want to thank you for joining me, and I think people will find really worthwhile to follow your work to see how you're translating and bringing into America really breakthrough ideas and break through principles. And I want to thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much as well for getting the message out. And you know I should mention this. I have the greatest endorsements possible. Carrie Lake wrote the ford for my book. Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, General Michael Flynn, and Representative Paul Gosar all have endorsed it with review blurbs on the back cover. So I couldn't be more blessed. And I appreciate your time, sir today, thank you for getting the word out. And the other thing I wanted to tell you is the Hungarians love Reagan. They have a statue of Reagan that I've had my picture with many times. But they looked to the United States at that time under Reagan, envying our freedom and now they're looking at us and thinking what happened? And that's the point of Last Morning to the West.
In a sense, it's weird that you can look back from Budapest and ask why are we now drifting down the road that they work so hard to get out of.
You just summarized the book right there, sir, and if anybody wants more information on it, please just sign up at Counterpoint Institute dot org for our news lige and we'll send that to you. But thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you to my guest doctor Shay Bradley Ferrell. You can get a link to buy her new book, Last Warning to the West on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now listeners of Newtsworld consigner for my three free weekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is Newtsworld
