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While my colleagues and I were exploring, during the past 2 years, the essence of fascistic and populist states of mind, the global political map has persistently transformed and become increasingly divisive, illiberal, autocratic, and nationalistic. The impact of the illiberal and fascistic trends has increased at a dizzying pace culminating with the shocking unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This invasion signaled that Putin has moved from being an authoritarian leader to being a totalitarian-like leader (Kolesnikov, 2022). Soon after the world was discovering the atrocities that Russians soldiers have inflicted on civilian Ukrainians in Bucha, the alarming findings of the January 6 Congressional Committee were becoming public, revealing details of a fascistic style attempted coup aiming to subvert a fair democratic election.
These days we can only join with amazement the question that Robert Prince posed in his contribution to this issue. “What’s going on here?” Prince asked. Joining him, I wonder how can we understand the fact that Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s ultra-right-wing prime minister, an autocrat who unilaterally changed the Hungarian constitution, has become the darling of the American Republican Party? How can we comprehend that Orbán was invited to be a key speaker at the America’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in August 2022, days after he made outrageous racist declarations. Among the racist statements was his insistence that “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race” (Garamvolgyi & Walker, 2022; Walker & Garamvolgyi, 2022). Later in this speech Orbán added that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle were “no longer nations.” Orbán, who was recently elected for a fourth term in an election that was viewed by many observers as fraudulent, was already a star speaker at an extraordinary session of CPAC that was convened in Hungary in April 2022. The conferenc