Make Hungary (and America) Boring Again: Marc Loustau on Why Orbán Lost and How to Defeat Trump

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Last month, on April 12, to be exact, there was a major election in Hungary in which Viktor Orbán was defeated. Many people believe it's not only enormously significant in Hungarian politics, but for America as well — and indeed for the world. We're lucky enough to have an American in Budapest. My guest today is Marc Loustau. He's a Harvard PhD, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University, George Soros's place that I think got pushed out of Budapest. Maybe things will change now that Orbán has himself been pushed out. Marc has an excellent Substack too. It's called At the Edges, and he is joining us, as you would expect, from his home in Budapest. Marc, how significant in your view in historical terms was the election last month?

00:01:30 Marc Loustau: Well, at least the first impressions we're getting here on the ground are that it has, I would say, great historical significance — not just for Hungary but for the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, and also globally. Thinking about the rise of authoritarianism and the role that Viktor Orbán's regime played in promoting a certain kind of authoritarian playbook around the world, and how many anti-democrats, many leaders who would dismantle democracy in their own countries, were looking to Orbán as a model and trying to copy his playbook. Now that he's fallen, both from grace and from power, it remains to be seen whether the playbook that seemed so spectacular and so infallible will actually work in the long term. So there's a lot of significance. There are a lot of messages to be read in the tea leaves going forward as we examine the results, examine exactly what happened to Orbán to cause him to lose. And as we see democracy being rebuilt here in Hungary, I think there's a lot of messages to learn and to absorb.

00:02:56 Andrew Keen: The new guy, Péter Magyar, is certainly more photogenic than Orbán. He claims that the Hungarian nation made history, although some of the stuff I've read about him suggests that he might, in some ways at least, not be that different from Orbán. Explain one thing, Marc. We were told that Orbán had rigged the system. We were told that he's the model for authoritarianism — or this illiberal authoritarianism that's become so fashionable that even JD Vance showed up in Budapest. I was there for his — I know, and I want to come to that in a minute. But if he's such a slick authoritarian, how did he end up losing this election? Does that suggest that some of the paranoia amongst progressives on the left was a little exaggerated?

00:03:50 Marc Loustau: I don't know if the paranoia was exaggerated. I think those of us who belong to the commentariat definitely wanted to raise alarm bells and ring those bells as loudly as possible. So if that can be taken to be paranoia-inducing, well, then it's for a good purpose, because we do actually need to be as careful and as dedicated to the cause of defending democracy as it's possible to be right now. At the same time, I think we have to unpack the details of exactly what Orbán did wrong that led to his downfall. A friend of mine said, in reference to the Hungarian election, that it's rare that there's poetic justice in life. But this is actually, I think, a moment of real poetic justice, because Orbán rigged the electoral system here to highly benefit the winner. So if you've got something like more than 55% of the vote, you get something like 70% of the representatives in the parliament. For the winner, you almost got 1.5 votes for every vote that the loser got. He did that because he thought he would never actually face the realistic possibility of losing. He always thought he'd get more than 50% of the vote. So as soon as somebody comes in and actually threatens Orbán's plan, he just couldn't imagine it. He couldn't picture that anybody would ever come along who could get more than 50% of the vote. And when that person did, well, he got more than 55% of the vote and a major two-thirds-plus majority in the parliament. So really, Orbán shot himself in the foot, and it's a beautiful moment of poetic justice.

00:05:46 Andrew Keen: I like how you put it — poetic justice about Viktor Orbán. That's probably the most poetic thing one can say about the guy. There's been a number of pieces since the election about corruption being uncovered within his regime, with a piece in Reuters recently about people linked to a top Orbán aide being blocked from sending funds abroad. To what extent — I mean, obviously Orbán's out of power. To what extent is the regime unraveling? What about all the associates in this regime of Orbán? All his — not so much his democratic supporters, but the operatives who benefited from this regime. How are they responding?

00:06:38 Marc Loustau: You can do a lot in sixteen years when you have a two-thirds majority in parliament for all of those sixteen years. And certainly Orbán had a lot of time. There was not a lot that was poetic about him toward the end of his time in office. But I think what you can always say is that he was a very savvy politician. So he really did implement a lot of what he wanted to do, which was to take over every single institution throughout the country from top to bottom. He placed his own loyalists, his own friends, friends of family members, and then friends of their family members, all throughout those institutions. In the end, that was part of his undoing — that kind of system, you bleed out the talent and you bleed out the smart people. What you end up getting is just a lot of pretty idiotic cronies running high-level government institutions. What you ended up getting was a government that was pretty damn ineffectual and pretty damn inept. That was another one of those moments of —

00:07:51 Andrew Keen: Right. So we have this — what you imply is a kind of cronyism. All these Orbán associates who were benefiting from this regime, probably a very corrupt regime. What has become of all these cronies? Have they all been voted out of office, or are they still — given, as you said, the history of Orbán over the last sixteen years was to put all his cronies in media and the economy and local government — are all these people still there?

00:08:24 Marc Loustau: They're absolutely still there. The incoming PM, Péter Magyar, has, pretty much in every post-election speech, said: cronies, get out. Either you quit now, or we're going to force you out. He's certainly made it clear what his plan is for government bureaucracy, but not only that — the educational system, the foreign policy establishments, all of that. He's made his plans really clear. But those people, they are career folks as well, in the sense that this is really probably the only kind of job they will ever really get, because they're not trained for much of anything else other than doing what Viktor Orbán wanted them to do. They don't have a lot of talent that will be rewarded on the market. They don't have much of a choice, and I bet a lot of them are going to stick around. So the most famous faces of Orbán's corrupt regime are absolutely heading out the door to Dubai, carrying their precious collections of hot rod cars with them. But it's the mid- to top-tier-level bureaucrats, who absolutely were loyal to Viktor Orbán and placed by him or his friends in government institutions — those folks, it's going to take a long time to weed out the internal opposition. There's a phrase for who these folks are and what they represent. They're called authoritarian cliques, or authoritarian cadre circles — sort of hidden little circles of opposition within the government, within government institutions. It's going to take a long time, I think, for the opposition government to be able to put the entire country back on its feet when it comes to providing fair and equal public services — all these basic things that we expect from a democratic government. It's going to take a long time.

00:10:38 Andrew Keen: You're not just a student of Hungary. You also researched a book on Romania. So you're all too familiar with the history of neighboring Central and East European states — of course with the fall of Ceaușescu, for example, in Romania, who was certainly an even uglier version of Orbán, both literally and figuratively. There was a great deal of bloodshed. He himself and, I think, his wife were executed in the main square. Should we at least celebrate the fact, Marc, that there hasn't been any violence yet, that Orbán has accepted the election? I think almost immediately afterwards, he rather gracefully accepted defeat. Should we commend — I don't know — Hungary, the system, liberalism, that there was no violence?

00:11:30 Marc Loustau: I come from the United States, so this has a certain personal resonance for me. In the weeks leading up to the election here in Hungary, everybody was whispering about the potential for violence — whether it would come from Orbán's government itself or from Russian operatives, who absolutely did do a false flag operation at the border between Serbia and Hungary. They did a lot —

00:12:02 Andrew Keen: You wrote an interesting piece about that in your At the Edges Substack.

00:12:06 Marc Loustau: Mhmm. So I think we were all extremely nervous here that there would be violence. I warned multiple times to multiple different media outlets about the potential for not necessarily nationwide violence, and probably not in Budapest, but certainly in local small towns and villages around the country. I warned about the potential for attempts at delegitimizing the votes by sporadic instances of rather spectacular violence. That didn't come to pass either. I think the reason for that is that political cultures are different depending on the country you're looking at. So authoritarianism might have a global playbook, but political cultures are particular to certain times and places. American political culture, historically and today, glorifies violence. That's why I think you saw on January 6 a riot, a violent attempt at overthrowing a democratic process of peaceful regime change. And that's why you didn't see something similar in Hungary, where there isn't that same kind of tradition of violent overthrowing of regimes. At least it's not heroized, and it's not glorified in the same way that it is in the United States with the American Revolution and so on and so forth.

00:13:31 Andrew Keen: I do want to take a short break in a second, and I want to talk specifically about the lessons of Orbán's defeat for Trump in the United States. But would it be fair to say — I mean, I'm certainly no fan of Orbán in any sense — would it be fair to say that he was a corrupt man, a rather cynical man, but did he really have blood on his hands? It wasn't as if the prisons were bulging with his opponents. What was the worst thing that Orbán did?

00:14:06 Marc Loustau: What I'd call the system here is bureaucratic authoritarianism, or sometimes I called it bureaucratic fascism. Certainly there was not the same kind of — although we use the term fascism, we don't use it in the same way as perhaps we would when it comes to identifying fascism in Germany or in Italy, where certainly there was blood on the streets and blood on the hands of the leaders when those regimes ended up falling. Here in Hungary, the violence was sort of delegated to the lawyers, to the tax authorities. The most feared police force in Hungary under Viktor Orbán was not the FBI or the equivalent of the FBI, or the military, or anything like that. It was the tax authorities. They were the people who carried out Viktor Orbán's dirty work. If they didn't like you, if they wanted you out of the political sphere and out of the public square, they just sued you to death. They didn't actually kill you. So, yeah, you're right. There isn't the same degree or the same type of blood on the hands of Viktor Orbán as we might say of leaders of past authoritarian systems.

00:15:26 Andrew Keen: And if we want to imagine this as some sort of premonition of what might happen in Putin's Russia — comparing — I mean, Orbán was sympathetic and quite close in his own way to Putin, but there aren't that many similarities between Orbán and Putin, are there really, when it comes to the criminality, the crimes, the blood on the hands of these two regimes?

00:15:52 Marc Loustau: Well, that's where I think the EU has had a significant limiting effect on what Orbán can do. There are certain red lines — for all our complaints about the EU and its fecklessness and its lack of actual authority to enforce democratic rule of law in member states, and so on — the EU does have certain red lines. One of those red lines is that you have to actually have elections. They don't necessarily need to be fair, but they do need to be somewhat free, and you actually have to have them. That isn't necessarily the case in Russia. And certainly blood on the streets is an absolute no-no. You can't be murdering your political opponents in public daylight in the same way.

00:16:41 Andrew Keen: That wouldn't do in Brussels, would it?

00:16:43 Marc Loustau: That would not do in Brussels, but it certainly has happened in Russia. So again, these are kind of red lines that Viktor Orbán knew he could never cross, because if he did, I'm sure he knew that the process for ejecting Hungary from the EU, or at least taking away its voting rights within the EU, would get a lot speedier. He knew if he crossed any of those red lines. That's a real difference between the kind of authoritarianism that we saw emerge within the EU and authoritarianism in Russia. At the same time, there is absolutely going on right now a lot of public conversation about some kind of truth-and-reconciliation process — to use sort of Christian language, because a lot of this conversation is actually happening within churches, a certain kind of public process of repentance and reconciliation, for the people whose lives were actually materially damaged by the politics that Viktor Orbán persecuted and prosecuted throughout his time in power. There were certainly people who tried to stand up publicly against some of his efforts to take over the education system, to demonize immigrants, especially to demonize the LGBTQ community. All of those efforts had public opposition, and some of those people had significant roles in churches and other institutions that Orbán went after. He went after them with the tax police. He went after them to take away their jobs and make certain they could never actually get work again in Hungary. He ruined a lot of lives. He didn't —

00:18:32 Andrew Keen: I'm not going to say it's a nice way of putting it, but that's a good summary. You're a former preacher yourself, Marc, so you understand the principle, at least, of peace and reconciliation. What's it been like for you? As I said, you're a Harvard PhD. You're an expert in the region. You've written a book about Hungarian Catholic intellectuals in contemporary Romania. What's it been like living in Budapest these last few years? Did you experience a sense of repression? Is it dramatically different, do you think — I know you've got family still in New York, and you're from New York. Is it that different from living in Trump's America?

00:19:16 Marc Loustau: In some ways, it's better. In some ways, it's worse. I think this goes back to this certain kind of political culture I was talking about earlier. The way Trump is implementing authoritarianism — Trump is, if anything, very American. He knows American culture intuitively, even if he can't really explain what he's doing. In America, the violence of the state is spectacular, and it's intended for public consumption, in various different media channels. He knows good TV, and he knows how to use the violence of the state to make good TV. That's a disturbing fact, but it's a real fact. In Hungary, there was never that kind of spectacular violence. In some ways, it made things on the surface at least feel a little bit safer and made the authoritarian system here a little bit less scary. But I certainly got my fair share of hate mail. And —

00:20:28 Andrew Keen: For journalism. But you've made a living. I know you're not just a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University — which has all been forced to relocate from Budapest, the main office, the main campus, from Budapest to Vienna. But you've also made your living as a journalist. So under Orbán, were you pretty free to publish whatever you wanted? Did you have to be careful? Did you self-censor?

00:20:58 Marc Loustau: As a foreign journalist working mostly for magazines that are not based in Hungary, I did not self-censor. But absolutely, Orbán took over more than 80% of the media outlets in the country and made certain they published pro-government propaganda throughout the entirety of his regime. So people who did make their lives and careers as journalists were forced out and forced to either find other work or take maximal pay cuts and basically work for free or for a pittance if they wanted to stay in Hungary and continue to publish in Hungarian. The other thing I will say is — I remember early on, one of the first pieces I wrote was about a rather prominent Hungarian pastor who is also one of Viktor Orbán's biggest critics and one of his biggest victims. This is Pastor Gábor Iványi, who was featured in the New York Times and was really an international figure and sort of the face of the people who suffered the most under the Orbán regime. Orbán just absolutely went after him and tried to ruin his life. So I tried to publish a piece about Iványi, and I called up some people who had glancing connections to him in his past, or belonged to the same church denomination as him. And I remember once I called up this one guy, and I said, "I'd like to talk about Pastor Iványi," and apropos of nothing, the man responded, "I have nothing against the government," and then just hung up. I didn't actually say I wanted to talk about the government, but it was almost as if he knew that perhaps somebody was listening.

00:22:46 Andrew Keen: And, Marc, one quick question — I want to take a break. What's it been like since the election? It's been a few weeks since April 12. Is it like the fall of the Wall? Are people singing in the streets, or is life pretty much in Budapest going on as normal?

00:23:06 Marc Loustau: There is absolutely a different atmosphere here. I was out at a beer garden last week enjoying some of the sunnier weather we've had in Budapest, and I could swear that people were laughing more loudly than usual. And I could swear that people in church are singing just a little bit more loudly as well. There's a brightness to the atmosphere here, and to grasp it in terms of what it felt like in the month or two before the election, you'd have to be here for a long time and notice the contrast. But man, those six months before the election — they were tense, and they were frightening. The level of political rhetoric, especially from the government, was so strident and so suffused with violent rhetoric and violent imagery that it just made the entire country feel on edge. So there's, I think, a nationwide sense of relief, a nationwide sense of freedom, a nationwide sense of relaxation, and anticipation about what comes next.

00:24:28 Andrew Keen: We're speaking with our man in Hungary — a man in Budapest — Marc Loustau, a Harvard PhD expert in Hungarian and Central European culture, politics, religion. He's a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University — George Soros's place that had to relocate to Vienna. I'm going to take a short break, and I want to talk specifically with Marc about the lessons of Orbán's defeat for Donald Trump and his people in the United States. So don't go away, anyone. We'll be back in two seconds. This is not a commercial break. That's because we don't have commercials on this show. I'm not going to waste your time trying to sell you inane products. However, I do have a pretty good deal for you. I'm writing a book about the United States. It's due out in 2028. And if you become a paid subscriber on my Keen On America Substack, you'll not only get very cool notes and photographs and videos from this project, but I'll also send you a personalized signed copy of the book when it comes out in 2028. So go to keenon.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. That's keenon.substack.com. And now back to our conversation. We are speaking with Marc Loustau, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. Marc's based in Budapest. Marc, since the defeat of Viktor Orbán on April 12, lots of pieces in the US press about what this means for Trump — whether there'll be, as one media pundit put it, a ripple effect. Is this a warning to Trump? I want to talk specifically about JD Vance's role in all of it in a second. But in a broad sense, should Trump — I mean, he's not the most globally minded of people. He seems a rather narcissistic character, more interested in himself than anywhere else. My guess is, before Orbán became familiar with him, he probably didn't even know where Hungary was. But should Trump be wary of what's happened?

00:27:07 Marc Loustau: I think he absolutely should be. He should be nervous. He should be concerned. One of the major lessons, I think, to come out of Hungary is that you can do everything possible to keep a people down and keep them paralyzed with fear, but there's a certain human spirit that no authoritarian will ever really be able to snuff out. No authoritarian will ever really be able to kill it. There's a sort of anecdote or story that people use all the time, and I think it's pretty global by now, of the frogs in the boiling pot of water — the boiling soup. Gradually, the water gets hotter and hotter, and the frogs get used to it, until eventually it boils and they die. That's the metaphor for how authoritarianism, when it proceeds relatively slowly, can kill the human spirit. But it looks like here in Hungary, that water never actually got all the way to boiling. We only sort of got half-boiled. We were half-boiled frogs in Hungary. So in the United States, what Donald Trump should be absolutely concerned about is that no matter how much he tries to make people afraid — the democracy-loving people of the United States afraid of him, and afraid, for instance, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ICE and all the other various sort of spectacular-violence groups he can send out to cities throughout the United States — no matter what he does, so long as people are still alive and still breathing, that human desire for freedom will still be there.

00:28:55 Andrew Keen: As I said, you've had a front-row seat. You attended one of the infamous JD Vance press conferences. You've written about it at your At the Edges Substack newsletter. JD Vance has always struck me as a clown without any of the political skills of Trump. What happened with Vance in Hungary? Why did he show up? He's the vice president of the United States. What do you make of it, and what actually happened? What did you witness?

00:29:32 Marc Loustau: Well, we've all seen JD Vance on TV and listened to him in various different media outlets, on podcasts and such. But to be in the presence of JD Vance, I can absolutely confirm that he has as much charisma as a wet mop. The man — a half-boiled frog —

00:29:47 Andrew Keen: Maybe, Marc, we should call him a half-boiled frog.

00:29:54 Marc Loustau: Whatever human spirit existed behind the man's eyes was killed a long time ago, and probably by Donald Trump himself. He took the air out of the room when he showed up for the speech. I was there on the floor. I was actually sitting in the crowd next to Orbán supporters, and JD Vance's speech left everybody completely stultified, is I think the best way to put it. He showed up, I think — and this is all speculation; I mean, who knows what goes on behind the curtains of the Trump administration — but probably because one of his great intellectual mentors, if we can go so far as to call these "intellectuals," is Rod Dreher.

00:30:50 Andrew Keen: Who's actually been on the show before. I found him a rather distasteful character.

00:30:56 Marc Loustau: Well, he set up shop here for multiple years — I think probably five years now — and ran international programs for Viktor Orbán. Dreher and JD Vance are very close. So I think it had everything to do with their personal relationship that got JD Vance to come here. But I will also say that it wasn't just JD Vance's real skill at clearing out the room that did damage to Viktor Orbán's campaign here. It was the fact that he came here barely less than a week before the actual election. Whoever was thinking about strategy for helping a close friend get re-elected here in Hungary — whoever was thinking about the strategy in the Trump administration — was clearly not a strategic thinker. Because if you want to help your friend out, do it several months in advance, when you can build on the momentum and run multiple ads every single day showing you and JD Vance hanging out and getting a drink of nice Hungarian red wine or something. But instead, you do it three days or four days before the election. It has absolutely no effect. At that point, we were all so inundated with strident government messaging that people had shut their ears already. We already had our fingers in our ears and our hands over our eyes, for the most part, in terms of all the crazy government messaging that had gone on. This happened after the Russian false-flag operation, where they left rucksacks full of explosives at the Serbian border.

00:32:37 Andrew Keen: Right. And of course he gave that infamous press conference on the runway beside his massive plane about Iran, which is another story. You mentioned Rod Dreher. I noted he was on the show a few years ago. What I heard him say was sort of some attempt to vindicate neo-fascist interwar Catholicism in Central Europe, but that's another story. Marc, does the defeat of Orbán represent the end of this — they're not neocons, these radical conservatives — radical conservative love affair with illiberalism? Rod Dreher, is he going to move back to the US? Are all these right-wing think tanks going to stop talking about Hungary?

00:33:30 Marc Loustau: I think the current government's agenda is to make Hungary boring again.

00:33:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you wrote wonderfully about it. It's a great way of putting it. Make Hungary boring again.

00:33:43 Marc Loustau: Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is state bureaucracy and rather stultifying speechifying. So I think that will be one of the beneficial turns for the Hungarian populace as well as Europe as a whole — you won't see the sort of brinkmanship and geopolitical risk-taking that we saw under Viktor Orbán, playing Russia off against Brussels off against Washington DC, and so on. We're not going to see that going on into the future. And if that takes an edge out of everyday life here in Hungary, I think many people will welcome that. It does not by any means signal the end of the far-right threat, the end of the neo-fascist threat, the end of authoritarianism globally. So long as Vladimir Putin is still alive, kicking, and breathing, I think he will try to undermine democracy wherever he gets a foothold in other countries. We need to be very vigilant — those of us who appreciate social and cultural and political and economic democracy, we need to be very vigilant against any kind of external interference that Vladimir Putin can mount to undermine stable democracies around the world.

00:35:20 Andrew Keen: Marc, there was another interesting piece in Politico suggesting that Orbán's defeat shows what Trump's opponents keep doing wrong. What lessons does Péter Magyar — who's a Hungarian nationalist, I guess; I'd be interested in your take on him and how different he is, perhaps, certainly in his nationalism, to Orbán — what lessons does the defeat of Orbán, and particularly the rise and success of Magyar, offer? What should it teach Trump's opponents — not just in 2026, but perhaps in 2028, when whoever runs for the Democrats probably won't be running against Trump (or I hope they won't be running against Trump), but they'll be running against Trumpism?

00:36:13 Marc Loustau: Absolutely. Running against Trumpism is the right way to put it. We might even hope that they are running against JD Vance, given his rather atrocious political skills, but that remains to be seen. The lesson that I think the United States and other global actors can take from Péter Magyar's victory is not necessarily to try to import a step-by-step recipe for defeating authoritarianism based on exactly what Magyar did, but rather to follow the broad strokes, to follow the overall impression that he gave, or the overall systemic approach to politics after authoritarianism. So one of the things he did is he cobbled together an extraordinarily diverse political coalition. And he didn't ever try to kick anybody out of it. He always gave various different signals at various steps along the way of his campaign to say that everybody should belong, and everybody can get behind me as a leader. He avoided stepping on any of the hot-button culture-war issues that Orbán tried to make him engage on. One of the smartest, and perhaps even — you could call it — sly moves that Magyar pulled during his campaign was that Orbán really wanted him to get involved in taking a stand on LGBTQ issues. That was one of Orbán's favorite landmines to leave in front of opposition politicians. So Orbán at one point banned the LGBTQ pride parade and festival in Budapest. This was last summer. He banned it so that he could try to force Péter Magyar to take a stand, perhaps even force him to show up at the parade. What did Péter Magyar do? He went on vacation to Greece. He wasn't even in the country.

00:38:36 Andrew Keen: Good excuse. Nice excuse to go to Greece. Would it be fair to say about Magyar that he came from within the Orbán movement? He was a disillusioned Orbán person. Does that suggest that perhaps the people most likely to defeat Trumpism in 2028 and onwards are disillusioned Trumpians?

00:39:02 Marc Loustau: That's going to be hard to say, because anybody who had any kind of glancing contact with the Trump administration — whether it's Trump 1 or Trump 2 — generally does not come out on the far side of it looking very good, either morally or politically. So disaffected Trumpians, if they had any kind of dealings with Donald Trump, they'll be pretty radioactive for the near future at least. And I certainly personally would hope, for the far future as well. That said, what Péter Magyar did — he did come out of Viktor Orbán's government. He was sort of a mid- to upper-level government bureaucrat, and he certainly got educated at some of the elite schools that fed into government institutions during the later years of Orbán's regime. What he did, though, was that at a moment of major moral crisis for Viktor Orbán and his government — when a huge scandal involving pardons for people who covered up sexual abuse at state-run orphanages blew up in front of Orbán — that's when Péter Magyar stood up and said, this is enough. It was that sense of outrage that allowed him to make this rather dramatic break from the government. It gave him a certain kind of moral authority as well as a political platform from which to criticize the government, and he sort of went on from there. Now the trouble is that Donald Trump is the most morally corrupt individual that America has ever put in the presidency. So it's going to be hard to stand up and say "enough is enough" to Donald Trump.

00:41:02 Andrew Keen: A lot of people have said it. The question is whether anyone actually listens.

00:41:07 Marc Loustau: The thing about what Péter Magyar did is that he stood up and said "enough is enough" when it came to the most disgusting and utterly vile violence against innocent children. That, I would hope, is a line of common decency that still exists in the United States. When there is government inaction, and the victims are innocent and completely powerless, somebody can stand up and say "enough is enough," and people will listen and rebel. I would hope that that kind of playbook, if we're looking for some kind of playbook, could be enacted in the US as well.

00:41:56 Andrew Keen: Well, we have to say enough is enough, Marc. Although certainly not trying to shut you up. Wonderful conversation. Our man in Budapest, Marc Loustau, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, has an excellent Substack, At the Edges. Anyone interested in Central and Eastern Europe, I'd strongly suggest they subscribe. Marc, thank you so much for really giving us a comprehensive view of what's happened historically, in these historic moments in Hungary, in April of 2026.