‘We’ve looked at other things involving Hungary that have been done through the State Department, like the change in the visa programme, which seemed like it was perhaps punitive. So we tried to get some records from the State Department about that. We filed a lawsuit. But we haven’t been looking at the EU-Hungary relationship. That’s something that is out of the scope of our usual tools, lawsuits and public records requests.’
An in-depth interview with Enkő Gorondi, founder and headmaster of the Aprókfalva Montessori Preschool and learning pod, a unique Hungarian daily educational institution in Piscataway, New Jersey; and her daughter, who, as a teacher, scout leader and folk dance teacher is also an active member of the local Hungarian community.
‘If you’re not a sovereign nation, then you’re just a land mass where people can come, they can live, they can work, they can seek refuge regardless of what the laws actually are…You see that now you have Venezuelan gangs who have taken over American communities that didn’t have a single presence in the United States just a few years ago. This has all happened in the last couple of years under the Biden-Harris policies. ‘
An in-depth interview with Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Programme scholars Ágnes and István Vámosi, who undertook the responsibility of teaching Hungarian folk dance in Los Angeles for two years with their little son, Pityke in tow.
Professor Puskás is a highly accomplished researcher, engineer and university professor living in the United States, who is still active in her field of chemical engineering. She has not only excelled professionally, but has also been an active member of the Hungarian Diaspora in America.
The case of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was undoubtedly one of the biggest scandals of the summer, dominating headlines in major media outlets for weeks. Hungarian Conservative sat down with former Olympian Zsuzsa Csisztu to examine the controversial athlete’s rise and its impact on women’s sports from the perspective of a female athlete.
An in-depth interview with pianist and choir director Zsuzsánna Balla, who has lived in the United States for more than twenty years, and yet she and her family have preserved and continue to foster their Hungarian heritage, and are active and enthusiastic members of the Hungarian American community.
An in-depth interview with Erika and József Megyeri, former and current presidents of the Hungarian Communion of Friends, about their families’ emigration to the U.S., their involvement in the life of the local Hungarian community as teenagers, and how and why they decided to play a leading role in community building.
‘The current Embassy has been very active in supporting the retention of the culture and also in organizing community events and film screenings, and joining us in National Day celebrations.’
An in-depth interview with Eva Kazella, a prominent member of the Hungarian American community, about the deportation of her family from Communist Slovakia, the vicissitudes before starting a new life in the United States, her family, and the vibrant community life of Hungarian Americans.
‘We have to create a cultural environment where wokeness is marginalized as the lunacy that it is,’ Russian-British satirist Konstantin Kisin stated in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘If we try to rewrite history, we’re going to get a wrong idea of why things went wrong and why things happened the way they happened,’ former Bild editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann remarked in an interview with Hungarian Conservative. In the discussion, Diekmann delved into the dangers of cancel culture, the state of media freedom in the Western world, and the importance of Viktor Orbán’s peace mission.
‘Hungary’s leaders feel that it is their responsibility to preserve and protect the security and prosperity of the Hungarian nation. And that, surprisingly, is an unusual perspective everywhere else within Western Europe.’
‘What has been going on at Columbia, how the professors are treating Jewish students, how they wouldn’t give you a letter of reference if you were a Zionist, all this has been normalized to the extent that it led to the recent encampments. So, when you normalize the narrative against Jews and Zionists so much that it is engrained in people that it’s okay to hate them, and there are no consequences, that’s when we end up seeing what happened a couple of months ago at the Ivy League colleges in America.’
‘I think being in the conservative world, you’re used to the media fabricating things. So, it’s nice to see with my own eyes, and to hear from the people that live here. Obviously,Hungary is viewed favourably by the right wing. I know Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán have met several times, Tucker Carlson has been here. So, in the circles I run in, people have great things to say about Hungary.’
‘At the moment, there seem to be many priorities, ranging from transgender issues to the fight against climate change. However, the focus on making the European Union a competitive, attractive place to do business and fostering the best or most innovation in the world is lacking,’ former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘The problem we’re having today is I think we’re becoming a culture that’s increasingly obsessive about the factual, technical detail, and we’re losing that sense of the whole into which it fits. And the whole isn’t about facts. It’s about interpretation of facts. That isn’t a fault, but a feature, of being human,’ says Calum T M Nicholson, Director of MCC’s Climate Institute.
‘After all these years, I’m in a phase where I really enjoy my work…I also feel that I’m well known in the local community and that many people come to see me, so my work is a success every day. If only two out of twenty patients thank me for changing their lives because, for example, they can work or because their migraines have stopped, that’s a very good feeling for me. I am also on good terms with my colleagues. My secretaries have learned how to make Hungarian espresso, for example, and when I go to the office, they wait for me with it.’
‘The Nixon coalition that really springboarded him as such a popular President—people really forget how popular of a President he was—that was the same sort of coalition that carried Reagan, it’s the same sort of coalition that is now going to carry Trump. It’s a working-class, America First coalition, it crosses socio-economic divides, it crosses racial lines, it crosses ethnic lines, it’s a very strong and growing emerging populous majority. And I think we are going to see the fruits of that this cycle,’ Gavin Wax told Hungarian Conservative.
‘Especially after the assassination attempt, there will be some sympathy for Trump. The images as he was raising his fist, with the American flag in the background, in defiance of critical violence, with blood on his face—that’s a very strong image that could be burnt into the minds of the American people. And since right now, we are living in the world of images, unfortunately, and not in the world of words, that might be a very, very potent weapon in the hands of Republicans demonstrating that Trump is up to his task, as opposed to Biden, who is frail mentally and physically as well.’
‘This new coalition (between the EPP, S&D, and Renew) wants to ignore what has been decided by free and sovereign nations that have grown tired of the policies imposed by Brussels. The interests of the voters are being systematically trampled on in a scandalous way,’ Vox MEP Hermann Terstch told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
‘It took Hungary 14 years to achieve decisive changes in cultural education. Similarly, we will need time to create a substantial cultural and political movement to bring about meaningful legal changes.’
‘Within the current regime, human rights are too profitable and entrenched for many influential entities to support significant reforms,’ Jonathan Price, Research Associate at Oxford University highlighted in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
According to Portuguese writer, political scientist and university professor Jaime Nogueira Pinto right-wing parties like CHEGA, called populists by the mainstream media, are successful with voters across Europe because traditional parties do not pay enough attention to the issues that are actually important to voters.
‘The protection of human life, the protection of the family, or the protection of the sort of education that characterized Europe are basic values that we should definitely stick to because otherwise we are not Europeans,’ Professor Ferenc Hörcher, Director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at Ludovika University of Public Service told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
‘Family policy will remain of utmost importance to us, as part of our overarching priority of demography during our presidency. It is clear that all of our societies are being reshaped by the challenges of demographic change. The Hungarian Presidency intends to examine demography from the perspective of competitiveness in a holistic way by including it in the agenda of almost all council formations,’ State Secretary responsible for families at the Ministry of Culture and Innovation Ágnes Hornung told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
The staging of the musical version of one of the most popular young adult fiction works ever written in Hungarian, titled Be Faithful Unto Death, was a major undertaking and a dream come true for the initiator of the project, Bernadett Csizmadia. The show was performed on the 50th anniversary celebration of the Széchenyi Hungarian School and Kindergarten of New Brunswick, NJ.
Lili Balogh and István Dániel Molnár of the Angyalföld Vadrózsa Dance Ensemble came to the United States as Kőrösi Csoma Program scholars to teach Hungarian folk dancing in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We spoke with the young Hungarian couple, now engaged to each other, about their motivation, their goals and their US experiences.
Commenting on the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling against Hungary, Professor Allan opined that the Court’s ‘interpretive approach to reading the underlying legal materials is living constitutionalism on steroids.’ He added: ‘If it were an American court or a Canadian court doing it, I’d say they’re making it up at the point of application, they’re just making the law up. When that starts happening it’s very difficult to know how to deal with it.’
Luca Mórocz, who came to the U.S. in 2017 as a Hungarian American Coalition (HAC) intern and has worked as a foreign exchange diplomat at the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs assigned to the U.S. State Department’s Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, is currently living and studying in Washington, D.C., organizing various HAC events and a leadership training program. In the interview she talks about her experience in the US, her professional career, and shares her thoughts regarding the challenges of youth engagement Hungarian organizations in the United States face while introducing her new project, the HYPE Network.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.